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THE UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH is coping with a sex report issued by a twelve-member task force of church professionals. It suggests that the arbitrary requirement of premarital virginity be replaced by a sliding scale of allowable premarital sex, geared to the permanence, depth and maturity of the relationship. The report finds "exceptional circumstances" in which adultery might be justified: for instance, when one spouse suffers permanent mental incapacity. It also says the church should explore the possibility of communal and other sex styles for the unmarried. The church's General Assembly voted to "receive" the report for study after deciding by a narrow margin to insert this amendment: "We reaffirm our adherence to the moral law of God that adultery, prostitution, fornication, and/or the practice of homosexuality is sin."
THE UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST has in hand a statement written by six Christian education executives which maintains that sex is moral if the partners are committed to the "fulfilling of each other's personhood"—pointedly omitting marriage as a prerequisite. The statement, which shows how far some U.C.C. leaders have moved from the sex ethic of their Puritan forefathers, also urges the church to recognize the sexual needs of single persons. The church's synod has not yet discussed the report, and seems unlikely to.
Officially, the Roman Catholic Church hews to its strict teaching that everything from impure desires to adultery is serious sin, but a modest liberalization is going on at two levels. First, increasing numbers of pastors are softening their application of the traditional morality, often on the grounds that people who engage in illicit sex may be so immature that their guilt is not always a serious matter. Second, some theologians are challenging the "natural law" doctrine that lies behind the church's moral standards. According to natural law, an act is wrong if it is "against nature," but the new moralists are skeptical that the church can be certain about what "nature" actually is.
Divine Design. In particular, some Catholic theologians who favor birth control have questioned the traditional view that "nature" requires each sexual act to be open to procreation. But, argues John Giles Milhaven of Brown University, having rejected natural law in order to permit contraception, the theologians have undermined its moral force as a barrier to nonmarital sex. Milhaven himself believes that, instead of laying down dogmatic rules, the church should use the behavioral sciences, particularly psychology, as a guide in counseling individuals with sexual conflicts. Generally, he finds far more reason to condemn adultery than premarital sex. A more cautious new moralist, Catholic University's Charles Curran, concedes that sex outside marriage might be justified, but only in "quite limited" cases.