The Christian community is one of the religious spaces that places heavy emphasis on women’s sexual purity. It is out of the Christian Community that society has seen the purity movement, the purity ring, and similar sorts. This movement that heavily demands and expects women’s sexual purity in Christian circles exists parallel to the narrative that men have an indiscriminate need for sex. As such, heterosexual men who have had multiple sexual partners in their lifetime, see no injustice in desiring that their spouse be a virgin. This practice is prevalent in African culture where many heterosexual men emphasize the desire to only marry a virgin woman. As such, men who have spent their lives touting their sexual escapades and exploits evidenced by the number of their female ‘conquests,’ the number of marriages and the fact that they have children, have the temerity to discriminate against women who have had previous sexual relationships whether through or outside marriage.
In this season of remembering the Incarnation, which is when God the Son on became human through a human mother, and precisely a human virgin mother, we must also confront this idea of the sexuality of women and its implication for the Christian faith and religion.
This is because one of the markers by which defenders of the Christian faith emphasize the divinity of Yeshua is the miracle of his birth by a virgin woman, aka the immaculate conception. A woman who had never had sexual intercourse birthed this man Yeshua. This made him special and unlike any other human that ever existed. How much was the fact that his mother was a virgin, that is a sexually pure woman, give credence to Yeshua’s divinity?
What does it matter to Yeshua’s claims to divinity that his mother was a pregnant virgin? What would it have mattered if he’d been birthed by a non-virgin woman? Would his divinity have been questioned, rejected or less credible? If yes, then we are looking at a situation where salvation of humanity depends on women’s sexuality.
A heavy theological implication is raised by the immaculate conception and the Virgin birth giving credence to Yeshua’s divinity, as this inadvertently poses the responsibility for human redemption on women’s sexuality. An even more severe complication of this position is that which we currently see in society: women do not and are not allowed to own their sexuality. Women are expected to be sexually pure regardless of the state of their male partners and counterparts. Such expectation supports the theory that the world needs women’s sexuality in order to be redeemed.
However, such a dependence also breeds the question of how women can be expected to maintain sexual purity in a culture and within a religious community that argues for the uncontrollable sexual desires of its men?
Men can explore and exploit their sexuality and still be accepted and deemed worthy spiritually but women can’t even acknowledge their own sexuality and be seen as ‘saved.’ To do so would contaminate women and make them unfit spiritually. The latter is the narrative that is upheld in society, and especially in the religious community of Christianity.
Women do not own their sexuality. Instead men tell women how to order their sexuality. Man also tell women what to do with their sexuality. What is problematic about this is that the things that men tell women to do with their sexuality are in no way definitive of what it means to have pure sexuality.
For example although the Virgin Mary gave birth to a son as a virgin, she also went on to become the mother of other children through sexual intercourse with her husband Joseph.
Now although we don’t talk too much about Mother Mary in non-Roman Catholic traditions of the Christian religion, I think it is important to talk about whether Mary ceases to be important in the life of her other children and only important in the life of Yeshua whom she birth as a Virgin.
Was Mary important only as the mother of Yeshua or was she also the mother of the non-divine mortals whom she conceived through sexual intercourse? Did the fact that Mary birth other mortals through sexual intercourse mean that she and those children ceased to be good enough for YHWH’s story? If not, why doesn’t the church speak about Mary and her other children? If Jews are important to Christianity whether or not they accept Yeshua as their Messiah, why can’t the entire motherhood of Mary be part of the Christian story? Why does it have to be only the immaculate conception in which we talk about Mary’s motherhood? Why bifurcate Mary’s motherhood in this way?
All these are questions that I would like to invite the Christian community to reflect upon as we engage the celebration of the birth and the coming of God the Son to earth as a human through the virgin woman, Mary.
–Oghene’tega
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