Christian Church(Disciples of Christ)
Christian Church
(Disciples of Christ)
Contact: news@cm.disciples.org
96b-26
April 22, 1996
By KAREN R. LONG c.1996 Religion News Service
(RNS) -- In the United States, the typical prostitute begins work at age 14.
Along the Pacific Rim, where the governments of the Philippines and
Thailand promote the sex trade under the guise of "tourism,"prostitution
begins even earlier. For travelers who flock to the Asian sex industry,
fear of AIDS has increased their demand for ever younger children.
Forget fallen women. Forget the hooker with the heart of gold. Forget fey,
romantic images in the movies "Pretty Woman" or "Mighty Aphrodite."
Prostitution is child abuse, says Rita Nakashima Brock of the Christian
Church (Disciples of Christ).
Brock, who holds an endowed chair in religious studies at Hamline
University in St. Paul, Minn., was one of the organizers of "Re-imagining,"
a 1994 gathering of Christian feminists who were seeking alternatives to
masculine ideas of God.
After six years of research, Brock and colleague Susan Thistlethwaite
declare that Christianity and Buddhism are complicit in the global sex
trade. Their findings are contained in the forthcoming book "Casting
Stones: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States"
(Fortress Press). The scholars examined the sex industry in Korea, the
Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan and the United States.
"In every country where we studied prostitution, it was illegal," Brock noted.
"And in every country, it thrives." In Thailand, for instance, the sex trade
now represents more of its gross national product than rice, she reports.
Advertising has helped attract customers to Thai child prostitutes from
around the world. Eighty percent of tourists to Thailand are men.
Christianity -- from Thomas Aquinas' approval of prostitutes as necessary
"sewers" to the widespread fallacy that Mary Magdalene was a whore --
feeds the thinking that allows the sex industry to flourish, Brock says.
"We found that religion undergirds the attitudes that lead to the entrapment
of women in prostitution," she says. "And when Christian theologians have
reflected on prostitution, they have made the prostitute into the archetype
of the sinner."
She says the problem with dividing women into good or bad, saint or sinner,
virgin or whore, is that it locates sin in the character of a woman, and not in
a system that exploits and victimizes children.
Brock, who co-chairs the Common Global Ministries board for the Disciples
and United Church of Christ, began the writing project after Thistlethwaite
returned from a tour of Asia. Thistlewaite is a feminist theologian at Chicago
Theological Seminary and an ordained UCC minister of United Church of Christ.
The two were prompted to write the book because several Taiwanese
prostitutes had suggested the educated American could help by shedding
light on their experiences.
Brock, 46, said examining how police, judges, fathers, uncles, pimps,
pornographers and customers all take a piece of these children was harrowing.
And customers, according to prostitutes in all five countries, include clergy.
The research "pushed us through our own outrage, discouragement, repulsion
and grief to look at the daily social justice work of those groups struggling to
turn the tide of this kind of exploitation," Brock says.
Initially, the authors assumed they would concentrate on the economic, legal
and cultural underpinnings of prostitution. But as they delved, they say they
discovered the industry runs on even deeper assumptions rooted in world
religions.
The two scholars trace part of the abiding linkage of women and sin to the
sixth century B.C., when world religions were incorporating core values from
older, military models.
"They basically import the same (military) hierarchy and patriarchy into their
religious systems," Brock says. "So monastic training is just like military
training. They are virtually indistinguishable in their structure and in their
methods" of separating young men from their families, forcing them into
a regimen of physical austerity, sleep deprivation, uniformity and
indoctrination.
Buddhist and Christian monasteries both share this heritage, Brock says.
They also share a tradition that puts celibacy above marriage. "Christianity
has no positive language, no positive theological language around sexuality,"
Brock says. "It's virtually all associated with control, contract and sin. The
only acceptable forms of sexuality in the Christian tradition are
heterosexual sex under the legal contract of marriage for procreative purposes only.
"It's no wonder we have a society that is deeply pathological about the way it
understands sex. And we can't have public discourse about it that is not
polarizing, that's not laden with guilt, accusation and blame."
The more sex is associated with guilt and shame, the more silence surrounds
it, Brock says. This silence creates excellent cover for the sex industry. What
chance, then, does a child prostitute have? She is invisible to those who
don't want to see her, even in a culture that treats her "work" as inevitable,
Brock says.
But Brock has no use for simply bashing Christianity. She wants theologians
to use their voices and their outrage to expose those who grow rich off the
sex trade. And she wants Christianity to rethink its notions of sin.
For this, Brock borrows from Nel Noddings, a Stanford University scholar.
Noddings defines evil as whatever increases three things: pointless pain
(such as torture), helplessness and separation from relationships of love
and care.
Prostitution does all three. Theologian Mary Potter Engel defines sin as
what individuals do to reinforce these three evils. She counts betrayal,
lack of care, distortion of feeling and lack of consent to vulnerability.
These four sins permeate the sex industry and help identify who the
true sinners are. "Christian theology has paid too much attention to a
list of sins committed and far too little attention to the woundedness
and pain that sin creates," Brock concludes.
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