The sex scandal still allows us to assert our own righteousness as we gossip over the transgressions of others. Religion and the sex scandal are still closely linked, though the targets of public outrage have morphed: it is often religious authorities and bearers of traditional morality whose sexual desires and actions are publicized and condemned. With so many religious institutions and their authorities rocked by sex scandals in a litany of abuse and victimhood, it behooves us to ask what, precisely, is being exposed and denounced, and, conversely, what is being protected and perhaps even obscured. What aspects of “religion” are under fire in these scandals? What role does “spirituality” play in this discursive reconfiguration of sexuality and religion?

The scandal is a public act of abjection, a procedure of expulsion through which we safely distance ourselves from scandal’s targets. The intensity of public interest simultaneously reveals a hot spot in our collective sense of self, suggesting the discursive polarities and fault lines that establish and challenge the everyday order of our lives, exposing the contours of power through which this order is maintained. Today’s scandals articulate the sexual “orthodoxies” of modern secularism and its discursive operations by locating specific structures of sexual desire, activity, and prohibition (such as the religious functionary who has sex with underage members of the church) and judgment (such as the religious functionary who condemns a homosexual, or a father who commits an honor killing because of a child’s sexual transgression) beyond the secular pale. The condemned acts are presumed to be acts that are unthinkable for the liberal, secular subject. Yet these are also acts that may be readily, and even eagerly, attributable to those who are committed to traditional or “conservative” religion.

The liberation of some sexualities is thus linked with the new condemnation of other sexualities, which, while never fully legitimate within older moral orders, were often not “seen” publicly at all, as the public rather turned its eyes away. These newly scandalous behaviors take a limited range of forms. One involves sexual activity with young people who are at an age that is now defined as childhood, a definition that has been delinked from any obvious manifestations of physical maturity. Another involves the mixing of sexual behavior with compulsion in private settings in which sexual activity might otherwise be normal and expected, as when a husband “rapes” his wife. Yet another involves privately meted, often extreme punishment for manifestations of sex outside of marriage, or marriage across group boundaries. These newly scandalous behaviors all have the same character: they involve private exertions of power over someone presumed to have less power (elder over junior, male over female) by controlling the other’s sexual activity.

Today we live in a world that pits tolerance (often associated with liberalism, secularism, and even spirituality) against religious conservatism or fundamentalism in ways that cross-cut traditional religious boundaries. As a website focused on “religious tolerance” and Islam puts it:

A person’s beliefs about homosexuality tend to be determined less by their specific religion, and more by where their beliefs lie on the liberal-conservative divide. For this reason, conservative Christians and Muslims tend to have similar beliefs about the nature and origin(s) of homosexuality, as well as God’s attitude towards homosexuals.

This approach also finds liberal spirituality and sexuality within Islam, often associated with Sufism. On the “religious tolerance” website, the liberal position is associated with reason, personal experience, and the acceptance of homosexuality as normal for some individuals, while conservatives are characterized in the following terms: “Their beliefs are anchored to the past [. . .] They generally regard homosexuality as a deviate and disordered behavior, which is immoral, changeable, chosen, abnormal and unnatural.” Within this conceptual framework, “spirituality” is deployed to authorize a secular political self in ways that transcend boundaries between religions such as “Islam” and “Christianity.”

Within modern sexual politics, spirituality also marks an interior terrain parallel to and linked with sexuality. Both are immanent sources of self within the liberal agentive subject, who engages in sex only with other consenting adults.

Despite the apparent iconoclasm associated with the politics of queerness, spokespersons for queer politics—especially queer spirituality—stress that spirituality is a source, not only for personal discipline, as in twelve-step groups and retreat centers, but also for social justice. In her advocacy of queer spirituality, for example, Mona West draws a series of contrasts between popular stereotypes that see spirituality as meaning that “anything goes,” or as being mere individualistic naval gazing, with various spiritualities (queer, feminist, Native American, and other groups) that are concerned with real world problems and are sources for social justice for groups with “common histories, cultures, experiences and ethnicities.” West draws an implicit contrast between the negative idea of “naval gazing” and her assertion that “a queer spirituality exists today because we are learning to drink from our own wells!” The spiritual subject looks within to find, not only a true self and authentic sexuality, but also social justice for those oppressed by traditional social hierarchies.

Like other dichotomizing terms, such as “cosmopolitanism,” this understanding of the secular subject reconfigures the world in a way that appears to transcend Orientalism but nevertheless divides an “us” from a “them,” the spiritual liberal from the religious conservative. Within this discourse, the prominence of sex scandals associated with religious institutions makes conservative views of alternative sexualities and sex outside of marriage as sinful and/or pathological seem especially hypocritical. How could the churches be involved in such cover-ups? How could these priests, ministers, and church elders have been child molesters while preaching family values? Do they utterly lack inner control? How could Muslim fathers murder their daughters? The secular, liberal answer in each case is “traditional patriarchy”: Perhaps these beacons of religious tradition lack “spirituality” because of their embeddedness in traditional structures of power and authority that distort the self. In contrast, the liberal, secular subject is attuned to an inner source of sexuality and immanent spirituality that radiates as a benign natural force that is manifested as a spontaneous yet egalitarian self.  Spirituality and sexuality are manifestations of the true self undistorted by hierarchies of power.

However, the phenomenon of the sex scandal suggests another source of the spiritual discipline of the liberal sexual subject: the far from reasonable process of abjection and stigmatization that reinforces the boundaries and polarizations between “us” and the religiously conservative “other.” Bethany Moreton has asked “Why Is There So Much Sex in Christian Conservatism and Why Do So Few Historians Care Anything about It?” Secular, spiritual liberals and religious conservatives appear to be locked in an unresolvable battle centered on sexuality. Foucault identified the rise of “sexuality” as an essential aspect of governmentality in the modern nation-state. Charles Taylor has noted the recasting of the secular subject as a sexual subject. Michael Warner has pointed out that the creation of the Religious Right out of diverse Christian groups in the U.S. depended on sex (in the form of resistance to birth control, abortion, and homosexuality) for its very existence as a political movement. In the same forum, Beth Povinelli challenged the naturalization of sexuality as identity by posing a conceptual alternative that is powerful precisely because of its offhandedness and absurdity: she suggested that sexual activities of any sort should be seen as “a minor form of spitting,” rather than as a basis for identity formation.

By focusing on sex scandals as something that did not disappear with sexual “liberation” and the success of the gay rights movement, I not only affirm the extent to which our discursive world has been sexualized, but also identify one mechanism by which sexualization reproduces a globalized bifurcation of us and them that is often marked and reinforced by contrasting spirituality and religious traditionalism. Furthermore, the self-evident “truth” of these sex scandals also obscures any possibility of questioning the pieties by which “patriarchal” sexuality and other forms of secret sex are condemned or pathologized. Sex with anyone under a certain age (ranging from 14 to 18, depending on the state and the age of the offender) has become illegal and is defined as sex with a powerless child whose rights have been violated. Despite Freud’s “discovery” of the sexuality of children (and the fact that a “child” who commits a violent crime may be tried as an “adult”), children are sexually innocent before the law, adults are sexual predators, and children have been sexually assaulted.  Could it be that some of the trauma associated with such sexual experiences comes from a sense of guilt that as a child one might not really have experienced oneself as so innocent or powerless? How do the discursive battles over sexuality and scandal both empower and traumatize those who are defined as victims? Conversely, we now live with a myth of “consenting adults,” as if it were possible to live in a world in which power could be extracted from sexuality or from spiritual organizations.

Sociologist Gene Burns unfolds this shift in the context of Vatican II. According to Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), a key Vatican II document that clarifies the doctrine of papal infallibility pronounced in the First Vatican Council of 1869, the pontiff exercises “infallibility in virtue of his office when, as supreme pastor and teacher of the faithful . . . he proclaims in an absolute decision a doctrine pertaining to faith or morals.” Of these, “faith”—that is, faithful membership in the One True Church—is understood to be obligatory for Catholics only, and beyond the power of democratic governance to enforce. “Morals,” however, because they ostensibly inhere in natural law rather than in Catholic teaching, remain binding on all, Catholic and non-Catholic, without regard for democratic norms. Trading its earlier presumption of unimpeachable temporal power for charismatic authority in the realm of “faith and morals,” the Church since 1965 has come increasingly to pronounce on questions of morality, and overwhelmingly to define morality in terms of sex and gender. Particularly since the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reiterated its condemnation of all forms of artificial birth control, the Catholic Church’s ever more visible commitment to regulating sexuality—a way of consolidating its authority in an era of secularism and religious pluralism—has strengthened its ties with conservative forces in the United States and worldwide. In this way, the ostensibly progressive reforms of Vatican II yielded new reinforcements for an ideological hierarchy in which “morals”—the Church’s teachings on sexuality and gender, understood to be universal and absolute—occupy the highest position, Catholic faith and doctrine the middle ground, and Catholic social teaching on issues like war and poverty the lowest, most discretionary rung.

What remains of the Catholic Church’s aspirations to universality in a secular age, then, inheres almost entirely in the register of sex and gender. For Charles Taylor, the binding-on-all quality of even post-Vatican II Catholic teaching on sexuality—binding on all because purportedly grounded in natural law—finds its enabling corollary in the sex-is-natural message of the Church’s post-sexual revolution critics. Importantly, Taylor locates the ramping-up of sexual regulation and the modes of its resistance much further back, in the Counter-Reformation, which also brings a broader set of considerations to bear on the enormously consequential question of why sex (and not, say, greed or aggression) became the Church’s favored site of prohibition.

Taylor’s partial answer, wrapped in a disclaimer (“I can’t pretend to be able to explain it”) is, first, to speculate that sexuality became an irresistible target of regulation for the Catholic Church because “violence and anger became less overwhelming realities of life” with the decline of “brigands, feuds, rebellions, clan rivalries, and the like” (it’s gotten so quiet around here, friars . . . so let’s talk about sex); and second to suggest that since sexual prohibition was a “central fact of life” for an avowedly celibate clergy , they’d understandably want to make it a central fact of life for everyone else, too. But what precisely is the Counter-Reformation context, here? Where, in other words, is the legacy of Protestantism in these developments? “What has often been forgotten,” Max Weber reminds us, is “that the Reformation meant not the elimination of the Church’s control over everyday life, but rather the substitution of a new form of control for the previous one. It meant the repudiation of a control that was very lax, at that time scarcely perceptible in practice and hardly more than formal in favor of a regulation of the whole conduct which, penetrating all departments of private and public life, was infinitely burdensome and earnestly enforced.” Evacuating Christian religious authority from its institutional locations, the Reformation generated its presence “everywhere,” not least in the form of the gendered bodily disciplines that went to the making of sexuality as the defining feature of the modern subject and the defining dilemma of modernity.

One implication of this is that until sex became a very big deal in Christendom, religion may not have been a very big deal in Christendom, either. There was, of course, the medieval Church with its virgins and martyrs, its cinematic splendor and gore. But by what storyline did we come to imagine that everyone, everywhere might be caught up in its net? The “more rigid sexual code [of early modern French Catholicism] directly attacked certain common male practices,” writes Taylor, citing a well established narrative, “particularly the rowdy lifestyle of young men . . . This tension drove many men out of the confessional-and eventually out of the church.” Note the slippage from the (at least potentially) faithful peasant who ardently desires the Church’s communion to the virile rowdy who spurns it, the “everything” of religious identity giving way to the “everything” of sexual identity. But what if the first of these—the religious subject, who cedes his place to the sexual subject in a declension variously celebrated and mourned—were instead a projection thrown back on the past by the same operations that produce the central fact of sexuality in modernity, produce sexuality as the central fact of modernity?

Surely the Catholic Church learned something from the Reformers—surely they have had much to teach each other—about the ways institutional power might be augmented in the appearance of its being relinquished. By the nineteenth century, Taylor notes, “morality takes precedence over everything [in the lessons of the French Catechism], and religion becomes its servant.” If “religion” no longer serves to define the reigning regime of modernity, then “morality”—sexuality—will have to do. And where sex is, can religion be far behind?

In the spirit, then, of Elizabeth Povinelli’s call to Taylor’s readers to do more than attend with renewed care to the “self-authorizing, self-fulfilling sexual subject”-to decide, for example, that sexual purity might in fact serve the cause of self-making as well as libertinism, or vice versa: How might we instead try to circumvent the genealogy-let’s call it the “secularization narrative”-by which a particularly descended form of religious authority still holds us in its grip as that whose imagined primacy has been dislodged by stronger claims to truth, and, so it follows, must either be a) fortified and restored, or b) kept ever again from exercising its repressive sway? For aren’t these the circumscribed alternatives that any iteration of sexuality as the central dilemma of modernity really poses?