Sexuality Beyond Sex: A Q&A  

In this month’s Q&A, our own Nathaniel Peters interviews Julia Hejduk about her most recent book, co-authored with Gregory Coles: Sexuality Beyond Sex: An Unexpected Conversation on Embodiment, Identity, and Desire.  

Nathaniel Peters: It’s rare to find two authors with such different backgrounds—Catholic/Protestant, married/single, straight/gay—coming together to write a book on sexuality. How do you define sexuality, and what prompted the two of you to embark on this project? 

Julia Hejduk: Our definition of sexuality is the one most ordinary people would accept: the desire and capacity for sexual union. How we got into this project is a bit of a longer story. 

In 2018, my sixteen-year-old son Nathaniel came out to me as gay. As a faithful Catholic who was (and is!) convinced of the truth of the traditional sexual ethic, I had no idea what to say or do, aside from assuring him of my unconditional love. For the next four years—which were deeply painful, and also a time of much growth in my relationship with God—we didn’t talk about his sexuality any more. Then a friend gave me a book called Tenderness: A Gay Christian’s Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God’s Extravagant Love, by Eve Tushnet, a Catholic convert who embraces the Church’s teaching and identifies as a (now celibate) lesbian.  

I apologized to my son. He gave me the biggest hug he ever has. And I dove into researching this strange new Christian community I hadn’t known existed.  

In October 2022, I went to the annual conference of Revoice, an organization for LGBTQ+ and same-sex attracted Christians who believe in the traditional sexual ethic. I went around introducing myself as “a prodigal mother of a gay son.” There I met Greg Coles, one of the most radiant lovers of Jesus I know. We started sharing our writings, and eventually we realized that God was calling us to take our conversations public—that the two of us “gathered together in his name” could unleash God’s grace and glory far more powerfully than either of us could do on our own. 

NP: Sexual desires are some of the strongest feelings we experience, but also some of the most emotionally freighted. It can be easy to think that life would be better without them, or to wonder what the purpose of our sexuality is if it’s so hard to live out in a good way. What can sexuality teach us about ourselves? What can it teach us about God? 

JH: Our modest aim is to reorient the way people think about sexuality, themselves, and God! Most of what we’re saying isn’t really new. The puzzle pieces are there in Scripture and Tradition. But we’re convinced that when those pieces are put together correctly, the picture they reveal becomes a source of joy and hope for everyone, especially people whose sexuality doesn’t fit the norm.

In a nutshell: human history is a long, messy love story that culminates in the eternal marriage between God and his bride, the Church. The exquisitely erotic Song of Songs—which Christian tradition has long recognized as a love duet between God and his people—is the hermeneutic key to understanding the deepest longings of the human heart and body. God created our sexed bodies, and the “incompleteness” and craving for intimacy that goes with them, to draw us into union with himself. Only in the mystery of the eternal marriage does the mystery of human sexuality take on light.

The problem is, our ancient enemy, the accuser (Satan) and divider (Diabolos) and father of lies, is an expert sniper. He recognizes that our sexuality is one of the things that can bring us the greatest happiness and glory, and therefore he works overtime to twist and corrupt it. One of his favorite strategies is to lure us into idolatry, where we worship something very good as if it were the supreme good. Modern secular culture idolizes sex. Modern Christian culture idolizes marriage.  

NP: In what ways should our sexual desires shape our identity? 

JH: Let’s start with the way they often do shape our identity. In secular culture: “You will be happy and whole once you have unlimited fabulous sex.” In Christianity: “You will be happy and whole once you have unlimited fabulous sex with your spouse.” Progressive denominations might add, “And if you’re gay, that spouse can be someone of the same sex.” Conservative denominations might add, “And if you’re same-sex attracted, you’ll need to overcome your same-sex attraction.”   

Now, here’s how Greg and I say our sexual desires should shape our identity: “Your aching longing for sexual union with another person is just the palest glimmer of God’s longing for you—and yours for God, whether you know it or not. You are his beloved and, if you will give your consent, his betrothed! Whether you choose celibacy or marriage, you get to participate in the eternal marriage, the bliss that will fulfill all your desires beyond your wildest hopes. There’s just one catch: the only way to be fully united with Christ is to share in his suffering. Sexuality, like most things in this fallen world, will indeed bring you some measure of suffering. Yet that thorn in the flesh, if you offer it to God, will become a conduit for grace flowing into you and out from you.”  

NP: Were there particular resources in Catholic and Protestant theology that you and Greg found helpful for understanding sexuality? 

JH: So many great saints have had a hand in this book! We begin and end with Augustine, a friend to all people who struggle to order their sexuality rightly (i.e., all people). Naturally, John Paul II’s theology of the body is a major influence. Our discussion of “mystical marriage” owes much to Francis de Sales, Mother Teresa, and the great Carmelites John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, Elizabeth of the Trinity, and Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein). Catherine of Siena tells us how God is “crazy with love” for us. Thérèse of Lisieux shows us how to spin frustrations and failures into spiritual gold. And so on. Almost-saint Fulton Sheen makes some nice contributions too. 

On the Protestant side, many insights have come from prophetic voices on the margins. David Bennett’s stunning conversion memoir, A War of Loves: The Unexpected Story of a Gay Activist Discovering Jesus, makes an impassioned case for the Church holding fast to her teaching on sexual ethics. Greg Johnson’s riveting history of the rise and fall of the “ex-gay” movement, Still Time to Care: What We Can Learn from the Church’s Failed Attempt to Cure Homosexuality, also offers a compelling rebuttal to “The Rising Challenge to a Historical Ethic.” Laurie and Matt Krieg’s gritty autobiography, An Impossible Marriage: What Our Mixed-Orientation Marriage Has Taught Us about Love and the Gospel, is one of the best books I’ve seen on marriage (I’ve given it as a wedding gift to several straight couples!).  

NP: Public Discourse readers may be familiar with other recent books on sexuality, embodiment, and identity, especially those by Angela Franks and Carl Trueman. How does your book complement theirs or disagree with them? 

JH: Angela Franks’s Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self and Carl Trueman’s The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades our Humanity are important, compellingly written studies. A pencil-in-hand reader, I find myself underlining and starring constantly! Both complement our book in many ways. The biggest difference is one of tone and purpose. While their aim is primarily to diagnose modernity’s disease, we are more focused on presenting the remedy, which we unabashedly proclaim can be found only in receiving the gift of Himself our divine Bridegroom yearns to give every person.  

I am full of admiration for Franks’s extensively researched diachronic investigation of the condition she summarizes as “liquid bodies, empty selves.” Though her academic monograph is many levels of scholarship beyond our little trade book, and somewhat less focused on sexuality per se, there’s resonance especially with our chapter “Sex—Reality or Substitute?”—a whirlwind tour of the conversation about sex from Homer to Foucault. It’s a sweet coincidence that the chapter’s epigraph is from C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces (probably my favorite novel), about which she has a lovely discussion in her chapter on “Empty Selves in Literature”! Her section on “The Body as Totem” also aligns elegantly with Greg’s on “Sex as Simulacrum,” which is based on the theory of French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (whom Franks doesn’t discuss but whose ideas dovetail with the theorists she does discuss).  

Trueman’s study is a gripping depiction of the bitter fruit of “desecration,” especially in the realm of sex. I completely agree that the Sexual Revolution has been a huge factor in driving people away from God, and that it has had a disastrous effect on human hearts, souls, and bodies, as the gruesome Cornell rape case has recently brought to the fore. I completely agree that the only hope for healing our culture’s withered anthropology lies in the “creed, cult, and code” centered on the historical truth that Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the grave. So I pray that the three friendly amendments I might suggest to Trueman’s work will be read in that light.   

First, I think he doesn’t go quite far enough in ferreting out the roots of modernity’s sexual malaise. He correctly observes that Martin Luther’s prioritization of interior experience helped usher in the era of expressive individualism. But as my Protestant co-author points out, Luther also argues that having sex and making babies is “more necessary than sleeping and waking, eating and drinking, and emptying the bowels and bladder”; not only must celibate people renounce their vows and get married, but married people who aren’t getting enough sex or making enough babies must trade in their spouses for more fertile and sexually compliant ones. (Yes, really.) To borrow the language of St. John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, the denigration of celibacy and idolization of sex and marriage are not a corruption of Luther’s Protestant legacy, but a development arising out of his deeply held beliefs. 

Second, Trueman’s presentation of “homosexuality” tends to elide the crucial distinction between homosexual acts and homosexual persons. There would seem to be no place in his “social imaginary” for the prophetic witness of celibate gay Christians. He also doesn’t consider the variety of motivations people might have for not adhering to the traditional sexual ethic. He’s right that part of the dark attraction of sin may be the feeling of godlike power that comes from willful transgression, as St. Augustine so brilliantly explores in his notorious pear-stealing episode (Confessions 2.6). But acting out sexually is sometimes more of a self-defensive reaction to shame and isolation. This is the testimony of many gay people who wanted to belong to Christ and his Church and were ostracized by straight Christians, not for sinful behavior, but for being honest about an aspect of themselves they didn’t choose. 

Finally, I disagree with Trueman’s assertion that the telos of our sexuality is marriage and procreation. That would mean Jesus, Paul, and most of the canonized saints missed the boat! I fully embrace the Catholic Church’s teaching that sexual activity can be morally licit only if it’s ordered toward the giving of life within a marriage, because marriage was created partly to be an icon of the community of life-giving love the triune God is. But the key word here is icon, something that points beyond itself to a higher reality. 

Greg and I believe that the true telos of our sexuality is union with God. Therefore, strange as this may sound, the most intimate human act is not sexual intercourse. It is receiving the Eucharist, where we invite God himself to penetrate every cell of our bodies so that his divine life can grow within us.  

We also believe that the most perfect realization of human sexuality involved no sexual activity at all. Through the free consent of Mary, heaven and earth became one flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. As my celibate friend says at the close of his letter to her, the mother of his Beloved, “If your sexuality wasn’t wasted, neither is ours.” 

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