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THE EROTIC CHURCHES
After the last orthodox Episcopal priest in our area retired, when the eunuchs and their priestesses were finally in complete control, we returned to the Evangelicals whence we came. During our years away, however, these churches had been undergoing their own changes. In the morning service on the day in which I write this we were treated to one of them. A handsome young woman, attractively dressed, stood before the church with an 8-inch microphone, the head of which she held gently to her lips while she tastefully writhed and cooed a song in which she, with closed eyes and gently beckoning gestures, begged Jesus to come fill her.

Her song had a different effect on me than I suspect she thought it might. It did, perhaps, bring me closer to Jesus, but by bringing me closer to the sinfulness of my own heart, the kind of heart that would be excited to lust by a pretty woman begging to be filled, and that would be instructed by its conscience to avert the eyes until she was done with her performance. It also made me wonder if her husband, sitting calmly by while she went through her show, was doing his duty by her, since she seemed to have a good surplus of the sort of womanly energy that husbands like to see. These, I admit, are not particularly sanctified thoughts, but I rather doubt that I was alone, and as I write am in no humor to pretend otherwise.

The song was not un-Evangelical, not foreign the tradition. It was the “In the Garden” tryst of the old hymnbooks carried into the next phase of intimacy and excitement. Jesus has been walking and talking with revivalists and telling them they are his own for many years now, and it is not surprising that, given his romantic propensities, they should be expecting him to move to the next phase of the courtship ritual. Many of Evangelicalism’s “beloved old hymns” are things that no man who is paying attention can sing, either because he isn’t a woman or a homosexual, or because he refuses to lie to God about the aroused state of his mind or resolve. These “old” hymns are largely the product of a nineteenth and early-twentieth century feminization of American culture and its religion (see Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture), of an era that has borne most of its fruit in last hundred or so years when religion in the west has become regarded by most men, and not without reason, as the domain of rampant emotion—of women, children, and of weak, unmanly men....