It’s all about sex

Before he wrote on religious ceremonies, Jean Frederic Bernard wrote a treatise on the State of Man in Original Sin , which reworked the notorious On Original Sin (1678) written by Adrianus van Beverland. Beverland had argued that the fall story of Genesis 3 was an allegory for the discovery of sex, and he defended a materialist outlook in which sex was the driving force of human knowledge and that curbing sexual desire is counter-productive.

Bernard agreed, and turned Beverland’s treatise into a quasi-Freudian theory of religion. As summarized by the authors of The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (122-3). Bernard denounced “established churches, especially the Roman Catholic Church, and their officials, who for time out of mind have threatened believers with eternal damnation for an urge they are unable to suppress. The church yokes humankind with a convoluted system of ceremonies that are fundamentally superfluous because the death of Christ has already earned all of humankind God’s grace. The consequences of this relentless crusade against sexuality in the name of religion are dramatic: a perverted church whose officials do not shrink away from exploiting brothels themselves, a lascivious society, an abundance of superstitions, the prevalence of external devotion rather than inner conviction, and a distressing record of persecution that has lasted more than a thousand years.”

Religion’s war against sex is at the heart of the corrupting ceremoniousness of religion: “Bernard explicitly tied the rituals of purification in many religions to the feelings of shame and remorse about the sexual act induced by religious teaching itself . . . . the universal experience of sexual arousal . . . triggers the impulse to purify the body, to cover it in white, to ask the gods for a primordial act of forgiveness because human urges are by definition too powerful to resist. The resulting shame breeds the necessity for religious ceremony.”