MISCmedia for 1/5/01
This Is My Body...

ANY POP-CULTURE GENRE that's washed up, or at least on the decline, can be given a new life, or at least an afterlife.

All you have to do is revamp it for a born-again Christian audience.

It's been done with hippie folk music, soft rock, and even hardcore punk rock. It's been done with thriller and romance novels. It's been done with form-follows-function modern architecture. It's been done with superhero comics and action video games.

How you do it: Take a genre (such as those above) with by-now cliched rules and formulae. Slap on a devotional, evangelistic, or crusading-for-the-faith message (doesn't matter how trite). Make sure the protagonists are (or claim to be) morally forthright. Wrap it up in sanctimony and sell it thru Christian niche-market outlets (specialty bookstores, websites, catalogs, magazine ads, etc.)

There's one genre out there that hasn't yet been Christianized, at least on any visible scale; yet is clearly ripe for it. It's got an established schtick and an established audience, but has gotten completely ritualized, commercialized, artless, non-entertaining, and otherwise meaningless.

I speak, of course, of pornography.

But the ol' American puritan hypocrisy thang's prevented much experimentation with Christianizing porn; at least as far as I've been able to find.

A simple web search of the word "Christian" with "porn," "erotica," or "sex" will get you a lot of angry anti-porn preachers, many prayer-based programs for overcoming "sex addiction," and a few over-the-top parody pages (some apparently created by disgruntled ex-Christians).

But no actual Christian porn, verbal or visual.

The closest you get are a few pages that provide potential ideological justifications for Christian porn. Some of these are by members of the Christian-swingers and liberated-Christians sub-subcultures, such as Rebecca Brook's recent essay "Body and Soul: Confessions of a Kinky Churchgoer." "God is a caring top," Brook writes, "not a rapist." Brook, like other members of these subgroups, believes there should be no contradiction between exploring one's spiritual potential and exploring one's sensual potential.

Similar thoughts are promoted on the "Christian Sex" pages of Poppy Dixon's Adult Christianity site. That's the same semisatirical site that's got The XXX-Rated Bible, the "good parts" chapter-and-verse listing that could indeed be the original Christian porn.

So what might real, commercial, non-parody, Christian porn be like?

It could build on the sensual traditions of medieval mystery plays, the ecstatic traditions of holy-roller evangelists and speaking in tongues, sensual Catholic imagery, pro-sex interpretations of Scripture, the works of pro-sex artists and writers with spiritual inclinations, and Christianity's historic ability to absorb pieces of other spiritual traditions (including, and why not, Tantra and sacred prostitution and "pagan" mating rituals).

This genre would not be "anti-family," or contradict Jesus's real teachings, by any means. There's much that the preadolescent can learn about body self-esteem and living a life of connection with one's surrounding world; and there's plenty the adolescent needs to learn about dealing with raging hormones in the context of respecting oneself and others.

MONDAY: Some more thought on what what this new sub-sub-genre might be like.

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