Innocent Ecstasy

How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure

Peter Gardella

"Arresting...intellectually satisfying....Reveals a curious and previously hidden history of sex in America, in which scientific theories offered seemingly rational foundations for sexual abstinence, while religion, for once, gave us the nod of cosmic approval"--Psychology Today. This provocative book shows how Christianity has shaped Americans' sexual expectations--and laid the foundations for the sexual revolution.

Innocent Ecstasy

How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure

Peter Gardella

Description

Though they disagree on virtually everything else, evangelicals and gays, Catholics and agnostics all agree that sex should be innocent and ecstatic. For most of Western history people have not had such expectations. Innocent Ecstasy shows how Christianity led Americans to hope for so much from sex. It is the first book to explain how the sexual revolution could have occurred in a nation so deeply imbued with Christian ethical values.
Tracing our strange journey from the hands of Jonathan Edward's angry Puritan God to the loving embrace of Marabel Morgan's Total Woman, Gardella draws his surprising evidence from widely disparate sources, ranging from Catholic confessionals to methodist revival meetings, from evangelical romances to The Song of Bernadette. He reveals the sexual messages of mainstream Protestant theology and the religious aspirations of medical texts found at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research. He sheds new light on such well-known figures as Henry Adams, Margaret Sanger, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and introduces us to such fascinating, lesser-known characters as Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and Sylvester Graham, inventors of corn flakes and Graham crackers, who devised their products as anti-aphrodisiacs. While detailing the development of moral obligations to pursue sexual pleasure and to follow certain patterns of sexual practice, Gardella incidentally provides one of the few books to bring together the liberal Protestant, Roman Catholic, and evangelical perspectives on any aspect of American culture.
Gardella attributes the American ethic of sexual pleasure to the eagerness of Americans to overcome original sin. This led to a quest for perfection, or complete freedom from guilt, combined with a quest for ecstatic experience. The result, he maintains, is an attitude that looks to sex for what was once expected from religion.

Innocent Ecstasy

How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure

Peter Gardella

Author Information

Peter Gardella is Assistant Professor of Religion at Manhattanville College. He has also taught at Yale, Colgate, Indiana University, and Miami University (Oxford, Ohio).

Innocent Ecstasy

How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure

Peter Gardella

Reviews and Awards

"Gardella's writing is refreshingly straightforward, and the historical narrative expressed is compelling Without question, the scholar and teacher will find this book to be an excellent resource for a historical understanding of how American Christians navigated their way from the depravity of sex to the innocent ecstasy of sexual pleasure."--Journal of the American Academy of Religion

"A perceptive, insightful, and intelligently written account of American Christianity's attitudes toward sex. For anyone interested in innovative religious history that departs from traditional denominational or theological narratives, Gardella's study would be an important model."--Church History

"Arresting...intellectually satisfying....[The book] reveals a curious and previously hidden history of sex in America, in which scientific theories offered seemingly rational foundations for sexual abstinence, while religion, for once, gave us the nod of cosmic approval."--Psychology Today

"A wonderfully entertaining and seriously motivated piece of historical writing....[Gardella] most emphatically shows that the dialectic between the Christian moral tradition and sexual health is a very complicated, nonlinear and subtle one."--National Catholic Reporter