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Lust, marriage, sex, and other taboo topics… What does the Bible have to say about them? 

Just ask Dean Robertson, a retired evangelical minister and the author of Sex Was God's Idea: An Honest Look At Biblical Sexuality and The Rightful Role of Women. 

I was stunned to learn that someone with such strong religious ties could have such different views about sexuality, open relationships, nudity, and the role of women than what I would expect from someone who spent his entire adult life in the Christian ministry in various capacities. He's held roles as senior pastor, church planter, mission director, evangelist, denominational superintendent, and keynote convention speaker. 

His international ministry experiences have taken him all over the world. Coupled with his continued passion as a studious biblical scholar, along with studies while earning his Master's degree in intercultural studies, Dean has a lot to say about some of the most taboo and controversial topics.

With Sex Was God's Idea, Dean's mission was to "set men and women free from guilt and bondage" concerning sex and marriage, and he supports his perspectives with passages from the Bible. 

Which is why I was so curious to get to know more about him and his passionate views. 

In this exclusive interview, we talked about marriage, lust, desire, the role of women, nudity, the swinger lifestyle, and much more. 

Read on! 

LEXI SYLVER: What motivated you to write this book? 

DEAN ROBERTSON: There were several things. I think that because often, when you get old, you think back to where were the turning points, the signposts that took you in another direction. And I can remember this was my scenario: 

There's a bride and groom standing at the altar, waiting for the minister to come and marry them. Now, he's going to come in; they're going to say a few words and go through some stuff and put a few bits of metal on their fingers. And then, if they go and have sex, it's a beautiful thing, symbolizing the union between Christ and his church. 

But what if the minister got stuck in a snowstorm and called to postpone the wedding? And the couple already had their honeymoon booked at the hotel, and they go to the hotel and have sex? According to the minister, the bride and groom are going to hell. Now, what kind of rationale is that? 

Even if you were to be a reasonable person and say, well, you know, they were at the altar, and the minister didn't show up, that's understandable that they would have sex. Okay, but what if they only made it to the door of the church? You keep moving the boundary back; at which stage does this mystical union between Christ and his church become evil? 

So that's where my interest in writing about all this started. 

LS: So you've been thinking about writing your book for quite a while, then! 

DR: I always said I was going to write a book one day and was always gathering information. And the trouble is that this information keeps building, even though the book's only been out a short time, and already I have more material to put in there. My thought was that if this is for the Evangelicals, most of whom have run off the rails, my book has to be biblically based. 

LS: And Sex Was God's Idea is full of those quotes, lending concrete support to each of your viewpoints about everything from marriage to nudity and lust, and then some.

DR: I've always been a Bible scholar. It's not me coming up with anecdotal evidence. It's clearly shown in the Bible why I believe what I do.

LS: Your perspective, reconceptualizing desire and lust and everything. It's a different take on sexuality, monogamy, and non-monogamy. So, who did you write this book for? 

DR: I wrote it primarily for the white American Evangelical, Fundamentalist Conservative church… Unless they see it as being from a Christian and a theologian, they're not going to read it or accept it. 

LS: Besides in your book, which is written under an alias, how open have you been with others about your views, especially about those two polarizing themes of sex before marriage and masturbation? 

DR: My views have never been public. If I had shared these thoughts from the pulpit, I'd be out looking for another job. That would be the end of it. I've just told select people that I could trust. 

LS: You wrote about marriage and the way it's not defined in the Bible. It was fascinating to read the biblical excerpts you shared that shed a whole different light on what most of us tend to believe the Bible has to say about marriage. Can you elaborate? 

DR: There's no definition of marriage in the Bible other than sex: "a man having sex with a woman." That was the thing that really pushed me forward to write the book. What we do is put our definition into it. Marriage has to involve love, and it's 'til death do us part, faithfulness. Well, even if a couple weren't married, who said that these things that we put into our paradigm of marriage aren't from God? Our present concepts and paradigms of marriage are about 95% man-made. 

LS: And what about adultery? 

DR: In biblical times, it was the accepted norm that a man could have sex with any woman at all as long as it wasn't another man's wife. Jesus never even addressed the issue. Surely, if marriage were to be with the concept of the marriage vows that we make today, it would have been perfectly normal for Jesus to say something about it. But he didn't. Surely, that tells us something about the concept of fidelity in marriage. So, that's the definition of marriage. Most people's definition of marriage has come from hundreds of years of Western civilization. That doesn't mean to say that's God's definition of marriage.

LS: When you ask people what their view on marriage is, their perspective is often influenced by their family, friends, community, culture, and religion. So is the concept of lust. You devoted a whole chapter in your book to the topic. 

DR: This was another pivotal point for me, coming home from church one day. The pastor of the church was talking about the wickedness of lust. Here’s the problem. Lust is not sexual in nature. Sexual desire can be lustful, but lust in itself is not necessarily sexual. In the Bible, Paul talks about earnestly seeking the best gifts, and he used the Greek word that is often interpreted as lust. Lust means a compulsion that I must have it. It’s not sexual desire. 

LS: And what about sexual desire? 

DR: Sexual desire came from God, so what makes anyone think there’s something wrong with that? Does that mean to say you can just do whatever you like? Of course not. We have our freedom in the world to do most things as long as we abide by the norms of society, the law, and respect for other people. But just the fact that an individual sex has an extra powerful sex drive does not mean there is anything wrong at all. God made us; we are made in the image of God. It's as simple as that. So, if someone has an incredibly powerful sex drive, that's not lust. That's just a strong sexual desire. 

LS: It’s the most natural thing in the world. 

DR: When we look at the whole picture of creation, we see infinite variety. Now imagine being told when you’re younger that you have to decide on one food that you’ll eat for the rest of your life, and if you don’t, you’re going to go to hell. The thought is so bizarre. But what’s the difference between that and sexual desire? 

LS: What does the Bible have to say about the equality of men and women? 

DR: Paul says we're all equal in Christ. We're all exactly the same. But people will cherry-pick the verses in the Bible that support their preconceived biases without ever looking deeper into the statement or the context in which it was given. 

LS: And what about the story of Eve and original sin and the impact it’s had on tainting the view of women? 

DR: The original story was that the punishment for Eve for eating the fruit was being cast out of the Garden of Eden. However, that was the punishment — not the plan. 

LS: So, you're talking about the subservience of women that a man would rule over her. And then we have a lot of examples of what marriage is and how a man owns a woman. So if we keep following that tree, if you will, of all of this echoing down into the way women were viewed in society — even still today — and our role in relation to men. 

DR: So, if individuals, particularly men, believe that the punishment is still in effect, that would mean that every man that is not earning his living by the sweat of his brow and by pulling out weeds is, in fact, breaking God’s law, and therefore he is sinning. That includes all clergymen. Paul said that just as sin came into the world through a woman, “so through Mary came redemption.” Well, if that's redemption, that should cancel out that punishment; it's gone. It was supposed to have been a new covenant based on love. The swinging lifestyle is run by women, correct? 

LS: Definitely. There are rules in place that are designed for women to feel safe and protected that emphasize consent. 

DR: I think of the creation order. God first created the cosmos and the Earth. The next thing he did was to create vegetation for the animals. He then created the animals. Then He created a man, and then He created a woman. Anyone can see that there is a distinct ascending order of creation. Each entity that was created was designed to serve the next level that God created. So, common logic would clearly point out that man was created to serve not only God, but women. So, in my thinking, Eve has to be the top person, or at least equal. Never in God’s creation order was she to be subservient. 

There’s a Hebrew word when God said, “I will make a helper for him.” But it’s not the correct Hebrew word. The translation is closer to the word “savior.” 

LS: Ooh, I love that! 

DR: I say this kind of thing at weddings when I'm performing a wedding ceremony. And I have people really laughing. Afterwards, they say, “Oh man, that was the best wedding sermon I ever heard.” I say, “God saw that man needed a savior. And so he sent a woman.” [laughs] Women realized this millions of years ago, and men are finally waking up to it. 

LS: It’s about time the men caught up! [laughs] So, let’s talk about monogamy. Because lots of us here on SDC feel that monogamy is not right for them, and they’re looking for a lifestyle that will give them the freedom to express themselves sexually and emotionally. 

DR: There's nowhere specifically in the Bible that says monogamy is the spiritual thing to do, or that monogamy is designed by God. It just isn't there. You could say by inference that he made Adam and Eve; that's what it was supposed to be. I can accept that. But there's a whole lot of things that God wanted that don't happen in the world. I mean, wasn't his plan for you to get up and go to work every morning? You were supposed to live in the Garden of Eden. So, you know, do you lock yourself in your room and say, “No, I can’t go and work because Adam and Eve didn't work.” 

LS: What are your views about the swinging or open lifestyles? Because I know some swingers who are devoted to their religion, like, they'll go swinging on a Saturday night, and on Sunday morning, they're at church. Because religion and pleasure are not mutually exclusive, despite how religion also sometimes talks about how these kinds of pleasures are sinful. 

DR: I have a pastor friend who went through a divorce, went off the rails, and got big time into swinging, which was how I found out about how it operates. He told me about it.

And he would say it was God's way of rewarding him for all the nonsense he had to put up with in the church. [laughs] 

LS: [laughs] Wow, that's hilarious, coming from a priest! 

DR: [laughs] The other thing he would say, too, was that “everybody goes home happy — not like what so often happens after church.”

LS: [laughs] So, how did your friend sharing his tales about his swinging adventures and what the open lifestyle is about influence your views about ethical non-monogamy? 

DR: When I look at this whole swinging movement, I see God's handprints all the way through it. I really do. Think of the whole arc of humanity. Everybody, every religion, every philosophy, for whatever reason, rightly or wrongly, everything that man does to improve his lot in life and for others is striving to get back to the Garden of Eden, striving to get back to a place of perfection, and paradise, trying to find the place we all came from. And what do we find in the Garden of Eden? People running around naked and having sex, and nobody wants for anything. How do you argue with that?

LS: That sounds very liberating and shame-free! Speaking of nudity, many open lifestylers enjoy occasional nudism, and there are some who live full-time in nudist communities. So, when I think of the naked body, I just think of ourselves in our purest form. It’s natural, and there is nothing inherently sexual about a human body. But if you are viewing it through a lens that being naked is shameful, then it taints it. What are your thoughts on that? 

DR: There is a Lutheran woman pastor, I think she’s in Colorado, by the name of Nadia Bolzer-Weber. She wrote Shameless as a Sexual Revolution, and I owe her big time for this because that really was the key. She talks about the Garden of Eden, “OK, Eve took the fruit and ate it. They were naked. They hid, and God came looking for them and said, “Where are you? Why don’t you come out?” And Adam and Eve said, “Well, we were naked, and we were afraid.” And God says, “Who told you that you were naked?” 

Now, there were only four entities in this story. God, Adam, Eve, and the snake as Satan. God did not shame Adam and Eve for their nakedness. He gave them skins to cover up in his care and compassion. But the shame came from the evil one, Satan. To me, that was a burst of light that was absolutely powerful. So, God intended us to be naked. He did not intend us to wear clothes. Like I said in the book, shame is taught. Clothes are constant emblems and reminders of our sinfulness. 

LS: Exactly, we’re not born with that shame. It’s interesting that there’s so much diversity with different kinds of religion, and even people’s different interpretations of the same religion and religious texts. 

DR: In the sixties, when I was going through a theological college, I read an article in a preacher’s magazine on the new morality, which was about the free expression of sex. It said there are three reasons why we're dead against it. One, it's not scriptural. Two, it's not natural. And three, I'm not getting any of it. [laughs] You know what I mean? I never forgot that. 

LS: And now I’m never going to forget that! Thank you so much, Dean! What a lovely chat. 

DR: I can't tell you how much I appreciate doing this with you, Lexi. Thank you so much. 

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