God said it, I believe it, and that's all there is to it
That was a bumper sticker I used to see occasionally. I haven't encountered it for a while, though. Too bad.
The following struck me as a very sound theological argument for compulsory nudity:
All this raises the question, Does clothing matter any more? It is a question which cuts right to the very structure of creation and the fact that we are embodied and born in God's created order without any clothes on. Admittedly, that is a rather restrictive categorization. It runs against modern stylistic trends and medical theory. According to the prevailing academic opinion, there is a continuum running from naked to fully clothed. So we end up with newly invented categories such as partially-clothed and scantily-clothed. The fact is, when a culture gives itself over to something this fundamentally in rejection of the created order, what results is an entirely new order which brings mass disorder. That is exactly where we find ourselves in today's culture. We see it pervasively in the images of clothes men and women which constitute mass media.
Well, actually I doctored it a bit. I took this paragraph from a rant against gays and lesbians by Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY: The Cultural Momentum of the Homosexual MovementChristian Post 01/06/06, and substituted words about clothing in strategic places. Here's the original:
All this raises the question, Does gender matter any more? It is a question which cuts right to the very structure of creation and the fact that we are embodied and gendered in God's created order as male and female. Admittedly, that is a rather restrictive categorization. It runs against modern physiological and therapeutic theory. According to the prevailing academic opinion, there is a continuum running from male to female and from heterosexuality to homosexuality. So we end up with newly invented categories such as the transgendered and transsexuals. The fact is, when a culture gives itself over to something this fundamentally in rejection of the created order, what results is an entirely new order which brings mass disorder. That is exactly where we find ourselves in today's culture. We see it pervasively in the images which constitute mass media.
Because it reminds me of something a lot of people probably miss about the Christian Right fear and hostility directed toward gays. (Mohler's article seems especially focused on gay men and the particular danger of such temptation to wholesome Christian white boys.)
It's certainly true that the Christian Right polemics against gays and lesbians are meant to stigmatize them and promote discrimination of various kinds against them. But the anti-gay rants like Mohler's also let them make arguments like the one I just quoted, which could be used to argue against almost any kind of sexual activity, gay or otherwise. I mean, we aren't born kissing, are we? Or holding hands?
And in fact, Christian fundamentalists often promote a very restrictive notion of what acceptable sexual activity is, sometimes absurdly so. Many oppose the use of birth control, even - and that's still the official position of the Catholic Church, of course. Little boy babies aren't born wearing condoms, now are they?
The rest of Mohler's rant is both dull and outrageous at the same time, something of a creative accomplishment in itself. Which is not the same as saying it's outrageously dull. I would say it's only ordinarily dull.
But that's part of the Christian Right schtick, to make bigoted and/or radical ideas sound bland and boringly mundane. The boring part they often succeed on.
And that's probably one of the reasons that liberal writers are often less informed than one might expect about Christian Right causes: this stuff is often just boring to read or watch. It only gets more exciting and interesting if, say, a leading Christian Rightist makes some whack-job claim about Israel, or if some anti-gay male church official gets busted soliciting sex from an undercover male cop. Just to take hypothetical examples.
