On November 17, 2008, a positively giggling Robin Young, of National Public Radio’s Here and Now, interviewed Texas megachurch evangelist Ed Young. Young gained considerable notoriety and media airtime in 2008 when he preached a sermon encouraging his megachurch flock to have more sex. Of course, this admonition was for married church members only, a subsequent clarification that underscored the presumptive place of marriage as the standard for both Christian and citizen, which, from the evangelical perspective, are the same things. Young’s original message for “seven days of sex” was complete with the drama and optimism (albeit the hellfire-and-damnation variety) evangelicalism brings to every topic, delivered as Young paced in front of a huge bed, set up in the church of his flock of twenty thousand. Young occasionally reclined on the bed during this most unusual sermon, flipping through a copy of the Bible and emphasizing, as the New York Times put it, the need to “put God back in the bed.”

Once this original sexperiment came to an end, the pastor, apparently having a high old time, admonished his flock to keep it going. Parishioners at a Grapevine, Texas, satellite branch of the church were treated to a prerecorded message from Pastor Young, broadcast on jumbo screens, encouraging them to press on. Of course, Mrs. Young was on the recording, too, a mix of submissive wife/Virgin Mary – “[Do] unto me according to thy word” – and pornographic sex goddess (in jeans and knee-high black boots). “Some of us are smiling,” she said, playfully. The pastor, for his part, made crystal clear how important real sex is. “We should try to double up the amount of intimacy we have in marriage,” he said. “And when I say intimacy, I don’t mean holding hands in the park or a back rub.’’ Why not, you ask? (at least, I did). Well, we don’t get the answer from him. What he does give us is a direct link between sex, marriage, and patriarchal theology.