I remember distinctly my best friend at university, a long time ago, who had been taught by her father that men and women could never really be friends, because one of them would always fall for the other. She found this persuasive, and I always argued against it, because I believed that it was not at all necessary and inescapable, but that genuine friendships were possible.
The same question underlines or occasions Aimee Byrd's book, "Why can't we be friends?", which takes as its target a combination of the Billy Graham rule and the Harry Burns principle. The former was the rule of Billy Graham to basically never be alone with a woman, even in public, in order to protect his ministry from real or accused impropriety. The latter, refers to Harry from the film When Harry Met Sally, and the view that sex always gets in the way between the sexes. And for Harry Burns, the pursuit of sex is all that matters, and so women are instrumentalised: they exist primarily for the purpose of sex, or they are irrelevant to him.
Byrd articulates a take-down of this view that I think is compelling - if we really accept the premise of this view, then men reduce women to sexual objects, and a man should obtain one of them as his wife, and then have nothing to do with any others because they can only be temptations. At its heart that view is a denial of human dignity, and a gross form of misogyny.
Byrd's counter-claim is that the primary matrix for understanding how men and women ought to relate in the church is as siblings, and when we do that, "we remove the possibility of sex", and so too we live in a way "that doesn't reduce [each other] to sex alone".
The way that evangelical and conservative (I don't think those two are synonymous) subcultures tend to think about male-female relationships is that they are reductively configured as "this person is a possible temptation to sexual impurity", which is indeed reductionistic, as it perpetuates a deficient anthropology that we've inherited from outside the church, instead of a more robust and complex account of what it means to be human, including what it means to be sexual beings without sex always being an option.
Byrd also takes aim at purity culture, and the way we discuss purity.
If we merely react to culture without a proper theology of purity, we rip purity out of its context of Christian holiness and the local church’s disciple-making commission and inadvertently market it as an ideological commodity couched in the psychological language of today’s secular world.
Byrd, Aimee. Why Can't We Be Friends? : Avoidance Is Not Purity (p. 64).
One of the consequences of this is that purity itself becomes a form of fixation - we grant too much weight to sex so that it distorts the ability to relate in a way that doesn't sexualise each other, and so we also distort, catastrophically, our views of singleness, and (unwittingly, though sometimes intentionally) a view that the purpose and goal of purity is heterosexual marriage, and the reward of purity is personal fulfilment as a human being in one sexual and romantic relationship.
At this point, I can hear a certain kind of response waiting in the wings, and it's that Byrd and this kind of thinking doesn't take purity seriously enough, that it's cavalier about sexual sin. I don't think that's true - Byrd is at pains to make clear that in no way does her argument take sexual sin lightly. I think that an analogy is in order, and that's "Law and Order" or “Tough on Crime” political posturing. So here's the thing - when political parties campaign on L&O and it becomes an election issue, they almost always have to embrace a position of being tougher on crime than the opposition, and that means "more policing, tougher penalties, stricter enforcement". It's a terrible distortion in politics for two reasons: (1) the Right almost always wins on this issue, because conservative politics in western democracies is more willing to subject citizens (and non-citizens even more so) to violence at the hand of the state, but (2) the research I'm aware of shows that most of these politically-drive policies such as zero-tolerance do not work, and have instead more detrimental social impacts, so that if at all possible they often get wound back behind the scenes.
I think the same is true of attempts in the church to maintain purity by basically imposing some kind of absolute avoidance of all engagement between the sexes - its the wrong solution to the wrong problem which doesn't prevent the things it’s supposed to, and instead creates more significant distortions of our relationships with each other.
We're going to leave Byrd for a moment to consider this broader question of anthropology and sexuality from a different angle. Jackie Hill Perry writes in her book, Gay Girl Good God, about the "heterosexual gospel":
God isn’t calling gay people to be straight.
You’d think He was by listening to the ways Christians try to encourage same-sex-attracted people within, or outside, their local churches. They dangle the possibility of heterosexual marriage above their heads, point to it like it’s heaven on a string, something to grab and get whole with. And though it’s usually well-meaning, it’s very dangerous. Why? Because it puts more emphasis on marriage as the goal of the Christian life than knowing Jesus. Just as God’s aim in my salvation was not mainly the removal of my same-sex desires, in sanctification, it is not always His aim that marriage or experiencing an attraction for the opposite sex will be involved.
I agree with JHP insofar as I think it's an unspoken reality in church cultures (let me qualify that by saying that in some church cultures it's very much a spoken and taught reality) that there is a privileging of heterosexual marriage as not merely normative, but the goal and the prize. This works itself out incredibly detrimentally: it tells people who are same-sex attracted that getting saved means becoming heterosexual; it tells people who are single that (i) their status is secondary, (ii) a failure, (iii) temporary, (iv) probably their fault (all of these are lies); it tells people that the reward for moral obedience in sexuality is (i) sexual pleasure itself in marriage, (ii) the personal fulfilment of a lifelong romantic partner (both of these are also lies).
Do not promise things the Scriptures do not promise, because when people don't get them, they feel either betrayed by God or betrayed by you, and both are bad, but the former is faith-destroying. Instead, we need to work on a more robust anthropology that includes a "thicker" account of sexuality. Let me make some observations in that direction and then circle back to this. In the Genesis 2 account, God creates Adam first, Eve second, which means that Adam exists as a sexual being before there exists a sexual partner. When we reduce sexuality to sexual activity, or else insist that what it means to be male and female finds its expression in fathering children, or giving birth to them, the logical (and false) conclusion is that only a sexually active man is truly expressing masculinity, and only a mother is truly a woman. By that logic, we're back to reducing women to child-bearers, and we've got a version of Jesus that is less than fully male, less than fully human. Jesus, like Adam, is a sexual human being without sexual activity.
So, singleness must be seen as a noble estate, not a temporary prelude to marriage. Two, we need to reject the idea that everything works out fine for married people - we know it doesn't. Thirdly, we need to sever the connection between sexuality, sexual expression, and sexual identity.
To take us forward from Genesis 2, when we think about that cryptic verse, Matthew 22:30, "For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.", what are we exactly to imagine? I think this verse raises so many difficult questions, but in the same way that Paul uses marriage as an example in Rom 7:1-4, as no longer binding after death, I think we can at least conclude this much - marriage is a temporal estate that binds two persons for life, and as an institution does not exist in the New Creation. I don't know nor presume to suggest whether sexual activity exists in the New Creation, but I do think we will be sexual beings, because who we are is male and female.
This separating what it means to exist as a human being who is male or female, from grounding our identity ultimately in sexual expression, orientation, or partnering, gives and grants a freedom to our anthropology that ought to liberate us from the above lies. And yet we also live in a culture in which the dominant narratives are: (1) that true life fulfilment comes from finding a romantic partner for the rest of your life (the gospel of a large bulk of our cinematic fictions); (2) that denial of sexual impulses is denial of your ultimate self, and so an inauthentic and wrong existence; (3) that all close relationships are melodies "in the key of sexual activity".
What do I mean by this last point? One of the things I think we have lost is a register of thinking, talking, and understanding close friendships that aren't sexualised. Let me tackle this sideways - I remember a friend, not a Christian, who expressed their surprise on a trip to a certain European country that "everywhere" was a zone in which picking-up or hitting on people sexually was normalised. They found this strange, coming from Australia, where such behaviour tends to be circumscribed to certain contexts, nightclubs, bars, etc.. I'm going to term this the question of whether "sex is on the table" - that is, in any particular relationship or context, is sex an option?
In our broader culture, because (almost) the only way we have of talking about close affections is in terms of romantic and therefore sexual attraction, and because the almost only question of sexual morality is consent, sex is almost always an option. This is also true regardless of sexual orientation. And this distorts our ability to read friendships. I think this is one of the reasons why it's so difficult for contemporary people to read the the relationship of Jonathan and David as not homosexual love. We have no categories to hear
"I grieve over you, my brother Jonathan!
You were very dear to me.
Your love was more special to me than the love of women. " (2 Sam 1:26)
in a way that doesn't wonder, suspect, or project that they were lovers. It's why the close friendship of Frodo and Sam in Tolkien is subject to endless ridicule - what sort of strong and deep bond can men have, if not gay love? It's why the one and last place that men are allowed to form deep bonds of love is war, and we (thankfully) live in an age that has killed the romanticism of war.
In this area, what we do need is an account of friendship, especially spiritual friendship, that is rich, robust, and concerned with purity not as mere avoidance, but a God-directed pursuit of holiness in which the question of sex never arises. If we created the 'space' in which we could truly create a culture that both (a) took sex away as an option, outside its proper context, and (b) developed the sanctified imaginative possibility of deep friendships that weren't characterised by sexual activity, then we create the possibility of relating to each other as truly human. This is, I think, what Byrd is driving at as well, and she uses the controlling motif of siblings, both because the Scriptures speak of believers as brothers and sisters in Christ, and because siblingship is a definition relationship which (i) doesn't erase our maleness or femaleness, but (ii) doesn't find the expression of sexual givenness, in sexual activity.
It would be remiss of me as a sometime early-church-historian to point to some ways this worked out in that period. The unmarriedness of Jesus and both the value and the possibility of virginity in the New Testament created a new possibility in the social world of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd centuries. Men and women could choose not to get married, and not to raise a family. The expression of that was typically temporary or permanent vows of virginity, and let’s be honest an unhealthy elevation of virginity over marriage was created, but this was a new thing. It was socially weird, it was transgressive, and it violated most of the social and ethical norms of the cultures of the time. Christianity created an estate that allowed people to live out their lives without the demand to procreate, and in doing so created the conditions that allowed us to think of people as not reducible to their sexual function.
That’s what’s missing from conservative purity culture. It does reduce people to their sexual function, and fears it, and so is driven to reduce human beings to their sin and their capacity to tempt or be tempted. Our view of people ought to be so radically different, not to deny their capacity for tempting and temptation (the doctrine of depravity ought to teach us never to be surprised at human capacity for evil), but to view our fellow human beings as so much more than this, and to so orient our lives towards God that we regard those around us as they are - image-bearers of profound dignity and worth, brothers and sisters in a sacred family, co-heirs with Christ, co-strivers in this life, co-victors in the next. This is the condition that makes godly friendships possible.