Soulforce and the Catholic Church: Sexual Purity

Soulforce and the Catholic Church

Mel White and Mahatma Gandhi on Sexual Purity
Nowhere is the gap between Mel White and Gandhi more obvious than in the area of sexuality. Gandhi’s sexual ethic was much more ascetic than the Catholic Church’s. He equated sexual desire with lust, even within marriage. He condemned his own sexual ‘license’ in his youth, even though his sexual activity had been entirely confined to monogamous marriage. He believed that even within marriage, couples should only have sex for the purpose of conceiving a child. And, in his 30’s, he took a vow of celibacy, even though he was married. Hindus call this vow of complete sexual abstinence brahmacharya.

In his autobiography, Gandhi writes that after he took the vow, “the great potentiality of brahmacharya daily became more and more patent to me.” Shortly after taking the vow, he returned to Johannesburg, where the foundation of satyagraha was laid. “As though unknown to me the bramacharya vow had been preparing me for it. Satyagraha had not been a preconceived plan. It came on spontaneously without my having willed it. But I could see that all my previous steps had led up to that goal.”

After again mentioning brahmacharya as an important foundation of satyagraha, Gandhi writes, “Every day of the vow has taken me nearer the knowledge that in bramacharya lies the protection of the body, the mind and the soul. For bramacharya was now no process of hard penance, it was a matter of consolation and joy. Every day revealed a fresh beauty in it.”

Gandhi also demanded that those who joined his nonviolent resistance movement “must be leading a chaste life and be ready and willing for the sake of his cause to give up life and possessions.”

An incident from his early life will illustrate how seriously Gandhi took sexual purity, even as a young man: In India when Gandhi was a boy, it is the custom to have child brides, so when Gandhi went to school in England, he was already married. However, like many other Indians, he hid this fact from others in England, because he would have felt weird admitting to other undergraduates that he had married at 13. An old lady of his acquaintance, assuming that he was a bachelor, tried to arrange forhim to meet several promising girls. This never progressed beyond him conversing with the girls, but the conversations were under completely false pretenses because Gandhi was married and the father of a son. He finally told the truth, and both the old woman and the girls involved laughed it off. But so highly did Gandhi view his wedding vows that he called his deception “the canker of untruth.”

On the other hand, White describes several acts of adultery in his autobiography, and seeks to justify them to himself and his readers. White married a woman in college. But by his late 30’s, he decided that he couldn’t keep resisting his homosexual desires. So he picked up a man on a darkened street, and went back to the man’s apartment for sex. Of the man he had this encounter with, White writes, “I believe without any doubt that he was another of God’s gifts.” Later, White describes another encounter in a hotel on a business trip. Again, he rationalizes his adultery and says that “As I lay there feeling Tom’s arms around me, I began to imagine his arms as the arms of God.”

At one point in Gandhi’s life, he was a teacher, and two of the young people he was teaching had a moral fall. He went on a four and a half month fast because he wanted to do penance for their fall, and to help them to see the enormity of their failure. One can only imagine, if Mel White were Gandhi’s pupil, how many years of fasting Gandhi would have embraced on Mel’s behalf.

I feel sorry for Mel. He came of age at a time when the Church had little, if anything to offer a same-sex attracted man or woman. I grew up in a different era, with much more support available. Forced to play with the same hand Mel was dealt, I might well have made many of the same mistakes and ended up as bitterly alienated from the traditional Christian sexual ethic. I know that in my own life, having support from the Church and from Christian friends has been crucial in carrying me through the times of difficult temptation, and I would be very slow to judge those who had to face life without that support.

But to recognize that Mel’s sins are understandable human mistakes does not make them cease to be mistakes, and does not make his rationalizations true. Gandhi was relentless in his pursuit of total fidelity to his marriage vows in his youth, and later in total fidelity to his vow of celibacy. And he required all satyagrahi to be living chaste lives, because he believed that sexual purity was indispensable for a man who wished to attain the purity of soul necessary for the satyagrahi. Mel White’s sexual immorality and his efforts to justify it cut at the very heart of the philosophy that he claims to embrace.

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