The Los Angeles Times offers simple solutions instead of making important connections between religion, sex and politics.

By Diane Winston

The “A” section of the December 7 edition of the Los Angeles Times featured five (yes count them five) articles on the intriguing intersection of religion, sex and politics. Unfortunately, none of the reporters or editors involved in the stories seemed to make the connection — or grasp the import.

The paper’s “Column One” story — the notable feature of the day — was on the “new” masculinity movement for young(er) evangelical men. Reporters Jenny Jarvis and Stephanie Simon provide a lot of theatrics — strobe lights and rock-and-soul bands, “testosterone-friendly” preachers and “Train Your Penis” workshops. But they miss both the immediate context and the historical continuity of the amen-for-men movement.

Evangelical outreach to men didn’t start with the Promise Keepers (the 1990s parachurchmovement founded by former UC-Boulder football coach Bill McCartney). Back at the turn of the (last) century, church leaders worried that a sissified Jesus and a femininized church drove men from the pews.

Holy hunk Billy Sunday, a born-again baseball star, did not mince words when he prayed, “Lord save us from off-handed, flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned, weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate, sissified, three-carat Christianity.” Sunday also worked with the “Men and Religion Forward,” an early 20th century movement that organized lectures, rallies and activities to bring men back to God.

But the larger social, cultural and political forces that motivate these movements then and now are MIA in the Times story.

Why now? Clues are everywhere. Gender anxiety (stories on pages 15, 22 and 23 of the paper indicate growing acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships ), poor political performance (see page one on Bush’s scorecard as Warrior in Chief) and a zapped zeitgeist (okay — no stories today on the imminent collapse of the environment, the economy or the educational system but there’s always tomorrow) feed a desire for easy answers and simple solutions.

And what’s simpler than the broad shoulders of a good, strong man (Braveheart without the blue paint).

Elsewhere in section one, we learn conservatives are soft-pedaling their reactions to the pregnancy of Vice President Cheney’s gay daughter, Rhode Island courts have gay divorces on the docket, Judaism’s Conservative movement will now allow gay seminarians and blessings for same sex couples and that a Congressional bill requiring “women seeking abortions to be informed that some fetuses feel pain” failed.

These four stories are illustrative of the cultural arena in which the new men’s movement is gaining traction. But that’s not explained nor is the negotiation between religious sensibilities, political realities, and scientific understanding which results in noteworthy shifts among Conservative Jews, conservative Christians and conservative legislators.

Underlying all of this is the $64,000 question: How and why did religion and politics become all about sex?

Jesus and Paul said comparatively little about sex and human sinfulness. They focused instead on love, forgiveness, and a concrete concern for serving “the least of these.” That message mobilized early English settlers in the New World. The Puritans were more concerned with building godly communities in America than in cataloguing immorality.

Puritanical behavior? For Mass Bay colonists, that meant caring, compassion and civic responsibility. Although this first wave of religious conservatives had a healthy respect for the body, they were neither prim nor particularly prurient. Legislating sexuality was not a central component of their community. Nor was it for subsequent religious groups, with exceptions such as the nineteenth century campaign — mounted by politicians as well as preachers — to outlaw polygamy.

What happened in the last 25 years to turn sexuality from a private pursuit to a public obsession? Some cite social changes that sprang from better birth control; others say the cultural vacuum after the fall of Eastern Bloc communism. Still others blame the emotional overload of an interconnected and increasingly complex world.

I think it’s something else — something deeper, darker and more difficult to confront than the pill, the Internet or religious terrorism.

Getting and spending, our ubiquitous market culture, has made heretics of us all. At the heart of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and Qu’ran, is an emphasis on economic justice and social responsibility. Sexual morality is more honored in the breach than the observance. Biblical menfolk prostitute their daughters, cast off their wives and chop off their adversaries’ penises. But they’re hospitable to strangers and suffer divine wrath when they’re not. Until very recently, charity, compassion and concern for the poor were Christianity’s key tenets and practical applications. Here in America, their centrality spanned the establishment of a Puritan commonwealth, the evangelical crusades for abolition, labor reform and suffrage, and most recently the civil rights movement, which Martin Luther King hoped to transform into an interracial poor people’s campaign for economic equality.

Most of King’s supporters could not follow him there and even fewer would be able to do so today. What is economic justice in a world where everyone wants to be a millionaire, and the health-and-wealth gospel is a staple of televangelists who preach that the products of affluence — Jags, jets and mega-mansions — are evidence of God’s grace?

With a social system gone awry and a religious vision to match, believers look outside themselves to find and judge sin. Out of control, they seek to control others and their bodies. But faced with the challenges of nuclear proliferation, bioterrorism, environmental cataclysm, and the growing gap between rich, can we really afford a myopic focus on each other’s genitals?

Perhaps the LA Times could send a reporter to the “Train Your Penis” workshop and let us know.

Diane Winston, Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the University of Southern California and a Revealer contributing editor, is the author of Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army.