In 1982, Marvin Gaye released the single, Sexual Healing; it went to number one and remained there for 10 weeks. The song basically promoted sex as a form of therapy for anxiety and depression.

Baby, I got sick this mornin’
A sea was stormin’ inside of me
Baby, I think I’m capsizin’
The waves are risin’ and risin’

And when I get that feeling
I want sexual healing
Sexual healing is good for me
Makes me feel so fine, it’s such a rush
Helps to relieve the mind, and it’s good for us. (1)

While this song may have seemed bold and new at the time, it merely reflected the age-old practice of trying to heal spiritual brokenness with physical sensation. Remember the sixties mantra, “make love not war.” Since sex is not the opposite of war, all we really did was distract ourselves from the horror of combat by offering a psychological excuse for “therapeutic” promiscuity. Peace is the opposite of war, so what we truly need is the Spirit of peace to take up residence in our personal temples and not the spirit of the age to transform them into brothels. A one-night stand hardly seems an adequate response to the prospect of war.

In a world where natural selection is our maker and its chosen sculpting tools are death and reproduction we are left with very little to enjoy in the battle to be the most fit survivor except a momentary sexual high. Sex is the opiate of the masses in a world run by Neo-Darwinian evolution because the only existential escape for a naturally selected organism is an orgasm.

Our culture promotes sex education for kindergartners because deep down it knows that a world without God is unlivable and feels obligated to give our youth a strategy to temporarily escape their meaningless world without the consequence of disease or pregnancy.  If life is just scratching and clawing from cradle to grave then all we can do in between is amuse ourselves to death. Sex becomes the opiate of the masses and our culture is more than happy to be its dealer. Interestingly, our efforts to minimize the psychic pain of evolution through sexual novelty has actually made us less fit by decreasing the birth rate through its associated bedfellows of abortion and contraception. We are hedonistically sending the human race into extinction because we so value the adult transcendent sexual high that we deprive the world of childlike innocence.

We turn up the volume on our vice to drown out the desperate cry of our soul but quickly find that, despite increasing levels of sexual experimentation, the “thrill is gone.” We hope that by sensually combining two spiritual vacuums we can be emotionally filled, but find that it only leads to more emptiness. Sex has become our cultural safe space, which is ironic since it is fraught with all sorts of emotional and physical danger such as pornography and sexually transmitted diseases. Sex may sell but in the end it actually creates more spiritual debt.

Why do we think that spiritual seeking should always come with a physical whoopee cushion? You can’t heal a broken spirit with chemicals, candy, or cohabitation. You need confession, contrition and Christ. Our spiritual brokenness must be set with a spiritual cast and not a sensual splint. Sex and spirit are only seamlessly combined in the God ordained monogamous mystery of the married man and woman becoming one.

In the end, sexual healing turns out to be nothing but spiritual malpractice.

“It is not pain that has driven the West into emptiness; it has been the drowning of meaning in the oceans of our pleasures.” (2)

(1) Marvin Gaye – Sexual Healing 

(2) Ravi Zacharias –  Jesus Among Other Gods