Monogamy is really hard to practice and the majority of married couples do a lousy job of it, so says American Sex Advice Columnist Dan Savage, in Australia for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas this month. Cheating is therefore something that happens in the majority of relationships and so it should be seen as normal and recognised as ‘no big deal’. (If you Google Dan Savage you will get over 28,000 results but if you choose to wander through them be prepared for some graphic sexual narrative. The Wheeler Centre’s blurb on Savage gives a G rated version on who he is and what he says as does Wikipedia.)

Dan Savage is known as America’s most influential sex advice columnist and he is fast developing hero status here in Australia. Savage writes a weekly column called Savage Love and it is said of him that ‘except for pornography, he’s probably the biggest influence on what Americans do in the bedroom’. He is the author of five books, one of them with the intriguing title ‘Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America’.

Savage is based in Seattle, Washington. He had a Catholic upbringing and is a homosexual man, married to his male partner for the last 20 years and together they have a 15-year-old son. Among other things he believes and teaches that monogamy is unnatural and should never be expected.

He further states, “I acknowledge the advantages of monogamy, when it comes to sexual safety, infections, emotional safety, paternity assurances. But people in monogamous relationships have to be willing to meet me a quarter of the way and acknowledge the drawbacks of monogamy around boredom, despair, lack of variety, sexual death and being taken for granted.”

I heard Dan Savage speak recently at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in the Melbourne. I found his ideas not only dangerous but nonsensical and poorly thought through. Apart from anything else, he didn’t seem to get the difference between cheating and permission giving. What he was describing as healthy for relationships was the giving of freedom to experience multiple sexual partners and he kept on referring to this as cheating. While I am diametrically opposed to this so called freedom as a way to deal with marriage difficulties, it is a far cry from cheating. Cheating involves the undermining of trust and has the basic assumption that I am going behind your back and deceiving you. Nothing destroys a healthy (or unhealthy) relationship faster than the undermining of trust.

Savage is more controlled in his writing and in public appearances like a recent ABC Q&A he was contributing to, but when I heard him at the Festival he was way out there, perhaps encouraged by his eager fans. Here are some of the things that I heard him say at the Festival:

• Cheating in our closest relationships is to be encouraged.
• Controlled cheating keeps couples together.
• Monogamy is too hard and so licence should be given to be monogamish (able to cheat occasionally but more monogamous than not).
• The majority of relationships experience cheating so it needs to be legitimised.
• Such infidelity is to be seen as a virtue and it creates such virtues as honesty and realistic love
• This sexual ethic honours the reality rather than the romantic ideal of marriage.
• ‘We can’t help our urges and we should not lie to our partners about them’. He believes that we have developed through evolution to be humans who are biologically equipped to have multiple sexual partners and that it is now a natural occurrence.

It was not just his views which are so diametrically different to my own, but the way he presented them. He went out of his way to be crude and grossly detailed as he described various sexual acts. It was not the way I usually spend my Sunday mornings.

But what concerned me even more was the response he got from the packed theatre. There were over 1,000 people there, mainly young ‘hip’ adults. And they treated Savage like a hero, like a rock star had come to town. They loved him and what he was saying and any divergent voice would’ve been ridiculed out of town. I felt ostracised just by my lack of applause and raucous laughter, let alone speaking up with an alternative ethic.

You come away from an experience like this feeling like it’s the new hip and to be anything different is just so ‘yesterday’, it’s not funny. I also came away deeply concerned about the way our society is headed and feeling compassion for our young people who are bombarded with alternative ethics in all sorts of areas that are presented as the norm. It’s really tough to stand firm in that sort of barrage.

So what is that alternative ethic? It first needs to be said that this is nothing new. Romans 1:28-32 tells of the downward spiral of a society based on this type of ethic where what is wrong is applauded as being right. We see examples of it in Gomorrah, Rome, the Free Sex era of the 1960’s and now this.

The Bible calls us to a radically different ethic in the area of sexuality and relationships. Solomon tells a story (Proverbs 7:6-27) of a promiscuous wife whose husband is away on a business trip and she calls out for a passer-by to come and enjoy her bed. Solomon says that wisdom cries out and warns that this is the way to death not life. Jesus states very clearly (Matthew 5:27-32) that adultery (cheating in Savage’s terms) is a killer of relationships and Paul (1 Corinthians 6:12-20) tells his readers that even though freedom might say you are allowed to do anything, not all things are beneficial. He goes on to say that sexual promiscuity is certainly not conducive for healthy relationships and he later sings the praises of faithfulness in his ‘love chapter’ (1 Corinthians 13) which is celebrated in secular and faith circles as being one of the finest pieces of literature the world has known.

Why is this ethic so clearly and forcefully put to us as the way to live? Because it is an expression of faithfulness and we love faithfulness. We applaud it in Hollywood movies, we decry the lack of it in public figures, and we build monuments to dogs who have expressed it! We look for faithfulness in our leaders, in our children, in our friends and our business partners…and yes, in our marriage partners as well. God applauds it as Jesus noted in his story recorded in Matthew 25. ‘Well done good and faithful servant. You have been faithful in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things.’

On the other hand we hate cheating. We cry out long and loud against cheating in sports, we put tax cheats in jail, and we fail students who are caught cheating on exams. Why then is it OK to cheat in the closest relationships we have? Dan Savage tells us it’s because it’s too hard not to! I don’t agree with that but even if it is, since when did making something OK become a way of dealing with hardships? ‘It’s too hard to keep to the speed limit in my new sports car so let’s make it legal to break the speed limit if you drive anything sporty’ or ‘I’m finding it really difficult to raise my kids now that I have three so let’s make it a law that you can get rid of one of them’ and so on we go!

There are many other biblically based virtues that engage with this topic. Virtues such as trust, honesty, genuineness, integrity, self-control, constraint, delayed gratification, self-denial, and other-centeredness all cry out against an ethic of self-obsessed, permissive irresponsibility. We live in a sex saturated, self-indulgent society that is more than ready to listen to the false teaching of people like Dan Savage giving permission to be self-centred. We are called to an ethic of difference so let’s support one another in living this ethic!

Food for thought.

Dr David R Wilson is Director of Sophia Think Tank, a Bible Society project.