Marvin Ellison's newest book, Making Love Just, presents a radical rethinking of Christian sexual ethics. This accessible book builds on the controversial 1991 report Presbyterians and Human Sexuality, which claimed “justice-love” as the new norm for all sexual actions. Ellison coauthored that report, and his writing over the past two and a half decades has been devoted to developing and promoting a justice-based sexual ethics. The case he presents in this book is passionate, consistent, and unapologetic. While Ellison's positive sexual ethic represents an improvement over narrow, rule-based, negative theologies of the past and present, his lack of willingness to engage those who do not share his views limits his argument.
Ellison frames his ethic as a response to a rigid ethical method and a patriarchal, sex-negative tradition. The Christian approach to sexual ethics, according to Ellison, assumes that truth is primarily found in the past and adopts an abstract, ahistorical, deductive method of argument (5). Because the tradition is patriarchal, suspicious of sexual pleasure, convinced of the superiority of celibacy, too focused on the procreative potential of sex, and wrongly focused on abstinence for anyone not in a heterosexual marriage, it fails to provide helpful guidance. Even in the twentieth century, Christians have been “preoccupied with the need to police themselves and also to regulate the sex lives of others” (29).
In response, Ellison offers a liberating ethical method in which adults are encouraged to evaluate sexual actions based on whether “they are loving, just, and based on mutual respect for all persons” (38). With this ethical foundation, he is able to find a place not only for same-sex marriage but also for “a more fluid marriage model” open to the possibility of secondary sexual relationships (52–58), committed sexual partnerships other than marriage, teen and young adult sexual relationships (133–37), and abortion, understood as a necessary component of women's moral agency and sexual freedom (111–12).
Ellison's text has many strengths to recommend it for undergraduate students or adult readers. His focus on encouraging people to think less about following rules and more about how to love justly will (regrettably) be new to many readers. A welcome concern with intersectionality (linking issues of sex, gender, and sexuality to race and class) marks the text. The compelling chapter on violence focuses on how the social construction of gender enables rape and abuse. His insistence on the need for sexual ethics and on naming sexuality as “a justice issue” (9) are crucial. Especially for those tempted to adopt an individualistic approach, Ellison provides ample reason to continue ethical discussion about sex.
Still, the book disappoints in its narrow range. The Christian tradition is consistently characterized in broad, sweeping terms as negative, rigid, patriarchal, inattentive to injustice, anti–sexual diversity, and woefully inadequate as a guide for moral life. There is virtually no engagement of Scripture, no retrieval of historical theology, no sense that while believers may at times rightfully question tradition, at other times tradition rightfully calls believers to account. Stark lines are repeatedly drawn between right (Christian Fundamentalists, the Religious Right, Focus on the Family) and left (progressive Christianity). Ellison approvingly quotes Rosemary Ruether's affirmation that “no reconciliation is possible” between these two sides (140).
Yet most contemporary Christian theologians agree with Ellison on the need to move beyond rules and offer a more positive, nuanced sexual ethic. Protestant thinkers David Gushee, Glen Stassen, and Dennis Hollinger are more challenging dialogue partners than Focus on the Family. Among Catholics, surely Jason King, David Matzko McCarthy, and David Cloutier, but also Todd Salzman, Michael Lawler, and Lisa Sowle Cahill, are worth engaging. Some of these theologians make strong personalist arguments for the centrality of marriage and for lifelong mutual fidelity, raise serious questions about abortion while affirming the societal duty to support women and children, and offer more caution with respect to young adult sexuality. Many are well informed by recent social scientific studies. While they see the sex negativity of the church as part of the problem, they also worry about a grossly deficient cultural sexual ethos. If Ellison would engage questions from a broader range of theologians, his important call for more just love in Christian sexual ethics could become a more serious challenge with a more promising trajectory.
