In this way he becomes a stand in for all people who are ransomed from sin and death by the atonement of Jesus Christ. He is literally released from a death sentence because Christ is crucified. The redemption is immediate and tangible. The Barabbas that Lagerkvist creates is the first Christian in one important sense: he was the first member of the human race to be redeemed by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Because it is not a book review, it contains spoilers. Barabbas imagines the life of the murderer and thief who was pardoned on the day that Jesus was crucified. The book is the short novel Barabbas (1950) by the Nobel-Prize winning Swedish novelist Pär Lagerkvist. This is not a book review, but it is a meditation inspired by a remarkable book that I read last week. “Because I want to believe,” Barabbas said “Why then do you bear this ‘Christos Iesus” carved on your disk?” “I have no god”, Barabbas answered at last. And, in this case, the differences are much more important than the similarities. But when we start looking at the differences between the two stories, we start to see very different understandings of human sexuality and religion at work. On the surface, these cautionary tales seem to have the same message, which is something like, “don’t follow your sexual impulses (except under carefully controlled circumstances) or bad stuff will happen.” It’s a message that Mormons hear a lot. The Latter-day Saint scriptural tradition contains two great cautionary tales about sex: the first is the story of King David, who saw Bathsheba bathing on the roof and summoned her to his quarters-an assignation that ended with the betrayal and murder of Bathsheba’s husband. The second is the story of Corianton, the son of Alma the Younger, who abandoned his missionary duties among the Zoramites and dallied with “the harlot Isabel”-thus imperiling the entire mission and bringing disrepute on the followers of Christ. Well, imagine my surprise and supreme delight to there discover a veritable hoard of Bic pens with tiny plastic penises on top! They were flesh-colored and everything!! I gingerly made my selection, signed the receipt, and would have returned the pen to its holder had the cashier not at that exact moment turned her back to fold some unmentionables. We quickly located a suitable specimen and made our way to the register where the cashier handed me a receipt to sign and motioned toward the pen jar. A garter! She’d forgotten a garter! How would her groom’s older brother ever get married if he didn’t catch the garter at their wedding? Luckily I, an otherwise respectable young Mormon woman, somehow knew exactly where the nearest lingerie shop was, so I enlisted my friend Christa to keep me company and we set off for Naughty or Nice, determined to save the day. Twelve years ago my friend Lianna pulled me aside in a panic at her wedding reception. <- Ha! That is going to be mildly to moderately funny when you find out what I stole!) The theft just so happened to take place on the exact day that I met my future husband, though he has nothing to do with why I did it. I might as well tell you about the only time I ever deliberately stole something. After all, the Personal Progress section on virtue still includes Moroni 9:9. This post is going to attempt that, because I don’t think that we can do better until we name such assumptions and get them out in the open. This critique ably clarifies what the scripture misses about consent and female agency (see also Kristine’s post), but it doesn’t explain the worldview in which it makes sense to say that virtue can be taken away. Most women will immediately realize that if there is no consent, there is no loss of virtue by the woman, and that a man who forces or coerces a woman, robbing her of consent, is committing a heinous crime against her. This should be evident to anyone who reads it it’s kind of an obvious point. Their virtue cannot be taken, it can only be given away, and when given at the point of a gun or through other coercive means, it’s rape, it’s not being unchaste. What’s objectionable is not that they lost their hymen, but that they were forced against their will, they were raped. Moroni 9:9, with its claim that women can be deprived “of that which is most dear and precious above all things, which is chastity and virtue,” is something of an infamous scripture, and justly so, because it suggests that chastity and virtue can be passively taken from someone instead of actively given away.
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