The Shame of Conjugal Sex

This chapter traces the effects of Pauline and Augustinian soteriology on Protestant views of marriage. The Reformation is conventionally understood as elevating conjugal love above the lifelong celibacy privileged by the Catholic Church. But this redemptive vision of marriage overlooks a key argument of leading reformers like Luther and Calvin: both deemed marriage superior to celibacy not because marriage sanctifies shameful creaturely desires, but because it publicly acknowledges them. This view of marriage as humbling confession of impurity runs counter to the ideals assumed by the US Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the majority affirmed the constitutional right to marriage equality on the grounds that marriage confers unique dignity. By contrast, Protestant anxiety that nuptial sex shares the excess and indignity of fornication structures the sexual and racial fantasies of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion. When Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets cast poetry as a reproductive technology free of the contamination of lust, they valorize not only same-sex desire but also the preservation of specifically “fair”—white—life and culture. Spenser reveals that the ideal of chaste romance generates sadomasochistic fantasies that naturalize white male sexual violence and racialize female innocence.