Christians under Covers: Evangelicals and Sexual Pleasure on the Internet

by Kelsy Burke

Christians under Covers shifts how scholars and popular media talk about religious conservatives and sex. Moving away from debates over homosexuality, premarital sex, and other perceived sexual sins, Kelsy Burke examines Christian sexuality websites to show how some evangelical Christians use digital media to promote the idea that God wants married, heterosexual couples to have satisfying sex lives. These evangelicals maintain their religious beliefs while incorporating feminist and queer language into their talk of sexuality—encouraging sexual knowledge, emphasizing women’s pleasure, and justifying marginal sexual practices within Christian marriages. This illuminating ethnography complicates the boundaries between normal and subversive, empowered and oppressed, and sacred and profane.

Genres: Sociology, Religion, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

Published February 9, 2016

About the author

Kelsy Burke is associate professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she studies how sex, gender, and religion collide in contemporary America. Her first book examining online Christian sex advice is the award-winning Christians under Covers: Evangelicals and Sexual Pleasure on the Internet (2016). She has published numerous scholarly and popular articles on topics ranging from racism in evangelical women’s ministries, debates over pornography addiction, as well as religious freedom laws and LGBT rights.

Reviews

[Anna]

“God and sex seem to occupy distinct and separate spaces within our communities and our psyches,” sociologist Kelsy Burke observes in her introduction to Christians Under Covers: Evangelicals and Sexual Pleasure on the Internet (University of California Press, 2016). In contemporary American discourse, “religious pleasures and sexual pleasures are often pitted against each other in den debates over contentious social issues like homosexuality, premarital sex, and pornography” (2). Yet what Burke found, in her ethnographic study of Internet-based discussions about faith and sexuality, was that for conservative evangelical Christians, religious commitment and sexual pleasure are deeply intertwined. As Burke evocatively puts it:

Users [of Christian sexuality websites] portray their marital beds as crowded. Their choices appear to be (or at least attempt to be) influenced by God, who celebrates sexual pleasure for married Christians; Satan, who thwarts sexual pleasure for married Christians; and the websites themselves …monitor[ing] these desires and behaviors through feedback, providing credibility for some acts while condemning others (3).

Read in full: https://medhumdailydose.com/2016/05/1...