Sexuality

Most religious traditions have been profoundly ambiguous about sexuality. At times, sexual acts are regarded as having almost a sacred quality, as the ancient Hindu temple architecture at Khajuraho illustrates. At other times, it is regarded as inherently sinful, as the Apostle Paul seems to imply and the early Christian bishop, Augustine, affirms. Codes of modesty (tzniut) in Orthodox Judaism are meant to diminish sexual desire. In Muslim mosques, women pray at the back of the room so that men will not be sexually distracted from the sight of women bending over in prostration during the prayers.

Though the subject of religion and sexuality is a topic different from that of gender roles and how they are treated within religious traditions, notions about sexuality can affect attitudes toward gender. Although there is no scriptural basis in any religious tradition for one gender being spiritually superior to the other, customs have developed within religious communities that at times have regarded women's sexuality as something to be controlled. In some African communities, this notion has become the basis for adopting practices of female genital mutilation (so-called female circumcision). It can also be a reason for enforcing codes of modesty more strictly among women than men. In Islam, for instance, the guidance given in the Qur'an for people to dress modestly is sometimes applied more strictly to women than to men and taken to extremes in the Wahhabi branch of Islam in Saudi Arabia, where women are fully covered in black cloth except for small portals for their eyes.

This entry will explore religious practices and ideas regarding sexuality in different traditions and in various parts of the world. These practices and ideas are global in two senses of the word. The phenomenon of sexuality is universal, and every religious tradition deals with it—though often in contradictory ways. Sexuality can also be global, in the sense that practices and ideas in one part of the globe can spread to other areas, often from one tradition to the other. When early Christians accepted the Greek idea of the separation of the spirit and the body, it enabled Christians to identify the bodily function of sex as something inferior. An example of the borrowing of attitudes toward homosexuality may be found among Israeli Jews in the last decades of the 20th century when some conservative Jewish activists went on tour in the United States with pro-Israeli right-wing Christian evangelists for whom opposition to homosexuality was a major theme and who became more stridently homophobic in their public comments at home.