Pistis Christou

Institutions are a part of the fabric of our human cultures. Institutions provide direction and security to our life, making it possible for a larger network of people to be able to coordinate their behaviors in such a way as to minimize confusion and mitigate against harmful behaviors. According to Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, the shape of institutions arise from a “reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors.”¹ In other words, as certain behaviors become routine between different persons, these behaviors become classified and become part of the life of an institution. As these behaviors become accepted as a matter of fact and objectively true,² much as money is automatically treated as useful for exchange even though the paper (or plastic cards) have little intrinsic worth, these become institutional facts as per John Searle.³

The relationship between an institution and institutional facts is not always clear. Sometimes, institutional facts may exist without any formal institution to enforce it, For instance, in stores, it is taken for granted that people line up and are served in the order they arrive: first come, first serve. The main means of enforcement is the idea that other people will be angered by cutting in line and not any recognized authority. This is more than simply a common routine or habit of everyone precisely because any other practices that directly violates the first come, first serve principle. In fact, when governments have tried to reverse the “first come, first serve” principle when it comes to merging traffic, trying to encourage “zipper merging” rather than everyone waiting their turn to get through, many people get angry and resist this sense of unfairness. There is a way that has been done, and it should continue to be done that way. 

There are other times where an institution actively enforces the institutional fact. Much of the time, the institutions educate others as to the accepted practice(s) and the reasons for such. Ethics training offer a way of directing people towards avoiding certain, unethical behaviors and prescribing appropriate ways to engage in one’s business; these training events are often times joined with further explanations as to the importance of one’s ethical conduct. For instances, therapists and counselors are training to minimize contact with their clients after therapy has completed because of the potential problems that can arise when therapist and client attempt to engage in other types of relationships. We might call these institutional reasons. Institutional reasons offer a way of helping people to maintain conformity to the institutional facts.

Sometimes, however, an institution will enforce an institutional fact without offering an institutional reason. Walking through places with high security, such as government buildings, airports, etc., there will be a plethora of doors that are marked “Authorized personnel only.” Delimitation of boundaries represent a clear institutional fact but no attempt to offer an institutional reason is offer. This can occur for two reasons. Firstly, most people intuitively understand the reason for such an institutional fact: for instance, boundaries in an airport represent a way of managing security. Secondly, when people have no particular vested interest in what type of behaviors they engage in, they will be inclined to obey instructions apart from any reason; people in the airport are seeking to travel, so security boundaries do not interfere with people’s personal interests.

It is where institutional facts do seem to interfere with people’s interests where institutional reasons begin to be offered. You may feel inclined to do one thing, but reasons are offered that it is better for you to act differently. Institutional reasons function as regular and/or formal reasons of persuading people in order to maintain institutional facts. Perhaps the reason is as simply as punishment; the government relies upon the prosecution of money counterfeiting to discourage such behavior. Perhaps the reason addresses other forms of interests, such as campaigns against drugs that portray the negative consequences of addictions to these drugs. In the end, there may be many potential institutional reasons that can be offered to enforce certain institutional facts, some being more effective than others.

Sometimes, these institutional reasons will change over the course of time. For instance, the original reason certain behaviors became regularized and then institutionalized may different from later institutional reasons. For instance, the right to bear arms as part of the Second Amendment in the United States was put originally crafted to allow for the operation of militias in case of a need to defend the people from other threats, including the federal government. However, the reason offered for the Second Amendment has morphed into a matter of personal freedoms (with only occasional reference to concerns about national defense).

Such change of reasons can be quite significant. Reasons function to provide a broad base for directing behavior; the can enforce certain institutional facts, but they also direct behavior in other ways. For instance, the reason of personal freedom is used to support the right to bear arms, but can also be used to support other behaviors, such as the freedom to marry who one wishes. When reasons are accepted, they do not remain restricted to simply the original fact or prescription they are used to support, but they become multi-functional, directing other behaviors and thinking.

So, with this analysis on offer, I use it to assess the problems that emerged in the “purity culture” of American evangelical Christianity. As the sexual liberation movement emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, the institutional fact/regulation of marriage and sex came under serious challenge. More and more people felt free to cast off sexual inhibitions; they thought government and society had no legitimacy to regulate people’s sexual lives.

In walks in the Moral Majority of the 1980s, focused on trying to take American back from what they say as the moral decay, including the evil of sexual debauchery. The institutional facts they had supported were being eroded, both as the level of society but also as the government/institutional level. At stake for conservative-minded Christians was to reinforce the institutional facts of marriage, along with a host of other behaviors. However, as this institutional fact was under challenge in the first place, thus it would require persuasion. Reasons would need to be offered to try to persuade people to live according to the traditional views of marriage and sex. But, there were a couple problems.

Firstly, the Bible was decreasingly taken as authoritative; reference to Scripture would not have the persuasive appeal as it would have had in the past. For some Christians, they recognized this lack of persuasive appeal to others. But many conservative Christians ignored this, however, and continued to operate as if the Bible was a lawbook for society.

Secondly, even for those people where the Bible was authoritative, it isn’t as exactly clear on certain sexual matters such as premarital sex; the Biblical documents certainly imply sex is reserved for married persons, but it is never proscribed in a clear fashion. Thus, in order to continue to enforce the traditional views on sex and marriage, a combination of two tactics were involved: 1) exaggerate the offense of pre-marital sex as if it is to be included in the more egregious sexual sins (resulting in increasing shame and judgment) and 2) coming up with non-Biblical reasons for avoiding pre-marital sex, such as the idea that someone is saving themselves for their spouse.

The net effect of this is that it attempts to ground the traditional view of sex and marriage on very different grounds than the Biblical texts provide. As I mentioned two posts ago, the Biblical basis for regulation of sexual behavior was grounded in avoiding being like the nations in their sexual practices, which commonly lead to exploitative and unjust behavior. One’s sexual behavior was tightly connected to the way one reflected God’s holiness (as in Leviticus 18) and how one regards and treats each other (as in 1 Thessalonians 4).

Instead, the “purity culture” reinforced a heightened sense of physical purity while also directing people to determine their behavior for the sake of their future spouse. The end consequence: 1) one’s relationship to God was regulated by a rule like obedience to abstaining from sex rather than the type of person one becoming and 2) the impacts of sex with another person wasn’t important if they weren’t your spouse. In other words, the evangelical “purity culture” created a legalistic mindset towards God that did not spend much time teaching people how to treat others with respect.

This stems from an attempt to try to rationalize the traditional sexual ethic with reasons that are not apparent within the Scriptural witnesses. However, the more Scriptural rationale for direct sexual behavior isn’t as readily usable for the interests of the Moral Majority and the culture it spawned in evangelical churches. The (hyper)literalist hermeneutics of this brand of Christianity that mined the Scriptures for readily usable theological and ethical rules were not going to pay as much attention to the underlying reasons that the Scriptures do point towards. Secondly, as the Scriptural witnesses have a much broader concern than simply saying “Don’t have sex before marriage,” the more faithful reasons would not be as readily useful for the attempts to try to stop the spread of influence of the sexual liberation culture.

At the end of the day, as the “purity culture” was birthed more out of an attempt to fight and overtake the oppositional culture, it increasingly overlooked and devalued the other (unintended) consequences of its pedagogy. By attempting to preserve and retake the institutions that it felt comfortable and safe with, evangelical Christianity worked against itself in the long run; both through its response to sexual concerns but also other socio-political matters. We are witnessing the fruits of this in the present day as evangelicalism is coming under many, strong challenges rooted in much anger, hurt, and even hatred.

Although, this is not necessarily a harbinger of death for evangelicalism into the future. While the name “evangelical” may forever tainted, the underlying theological and ethical spirit that seeks maintain faithfulness to God as made known in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit that is authoritatively witnessed to the Scriptures can be preserved. But it will entail recontextualizing our various ways of life, including our more traditional sexuality, on a more literate and responsible understanding of the Scriptures while being willing to listen to the sharp criticism directed towards the past practices of evangelicals. Doing both will entail being thoughtful and engaging in significant conversations pertain to sex and other charged issues, so that we can learn to see the Scriptures afresh through communication and so that we can discern the legitimate substantive of the criticisms directed towards evangelicals and address them without feeling pressured to embrace the modern culture of sex. But this will entail the death of many Christian institutions, institutional facts, and institutional reasons that is followed by a renewal of the people with a rightly direct zeal.

1. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2011), 54.
2. Ibid., 56-60.
3. John R. Searle, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. (New York: Oxford Press, 2010), 93-100.