Innocent Ecstasy, Updated Edition

How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure

Peter Gardella

Describes how Christian influences led Americans to seek ecstatic pleasure and to expect freedom from guilt in their sexual relations
Traces the history of the doctrine of original sin and its evolution through today's popular culture

New to this Edition:

New conclusion explores how popular music, gay liberation, and recovery from sexual abuse have substantially expanded innocent ecstasy during the past thirty years while continuing the Christian themes of redemption and mission
New afterword deals with contemporary developments in popular culture and offers thoughts about the future

Innocent Ecstasy, Updated Edition

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. The book explains 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.

In this new edition, a new conclusion explores how popular music, gay liberation, and recovery from sexual abuse have substantially expanded innocent ecstasy during the past thirty years while continuing the Christian themes of redemption and mission. A new afterword deals with contemporary developments in popular culture and offers thoughts about the future

Innocent Ecstasy, Updated Edition

How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure

Peter Gardella

Acknowledgments
Preface to the Updated Edition
Introduction

1. Catholic Sensuality
2. Protestant Reactions
3. Medical Christianity
4. Medical Prophets
5. Evangelical Ecstasy
6. The Song of Bernadette
7. Redemption through Sex

Conclusion: History and Theology (1985)
Since 1985: Redeeming the Body
Afterword: Projecting the Future

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Innocent Ecstasy, Updated Edition

How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure

Peter Gardella

Author Information

Peter Gardella is Professor of World Religions at Manhattanville College.

Innocent Ecstasy, Updated Edition

How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure

Peter Gardella

From Our Blog

Sex, Pope Francis, and empire

Pope Francis recently said in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, and on several occasions over the last year, that Western nations are exporting an idea that gender is a choice. Pope Francis asserts that this 'gender ideology' is the enemy of the family. Here the pope disappoints many in America and Europe, who hoped that he might free Catholics from the heritage of homophobia and repression of women that has been protected and promoted for millennia by the Roman Catholic Church.

Posted on October 12, 2016

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