Jeffrey Donaldson’s wicked crimes Puritans made sex monstrous

Jeffrey Donaldson, one of the most notable politicians in Northern Ireland, was convicted of child rape on 22 June. The BBC’s News at Six bulletin made no mention of it, save for a few words in the ticker. It’s true that the same day witnessed the resignation of the Prime Minister, but the TV news still found time for an item on the heatwave.

This will not have escaped the attention of the good citizens of Northern Ireland. Some of them believe that if an earthquake were to shatter Belfast, the London-based media would overlook it in order to announce the opening of a new bus lane in East Grinstead. The very province which proclaims its loyalty to Britain most clamorously feels side-lined by the sovereignty it has fought to preserve. When they think of the United Kingdom, some Ulster Unionists feel an ambiguous mixture of pride, resentment, sullenness and superiority. (The superiority being related to what they see as the mainland’s liberal and Godless culture.)

The Unionists’ very insistence on their British identity, which is what turns them outwards to the nation as a whole, is paradoxically intensely parochial and inward-looking. This is partly because loudly asserting your identity hasn’t, until very recently, been very British. The essence of Englishness, as with the essence of aristocracy, has been to take most of life for granted — from who butters your toast to where you were educated. Northern Irish Protestants, however, are cursed with being unable to stop thinking about themselves, which is always a sign of the outsider.

They also have their own peculiar language. Jeffrey Donaldson declared that when he moved from one home to another to promote his political career, it was God who told him to do so. He announced that “I have seen for myself what God’s amazing grace can do to lift a sinner from the deep pit of sin” — though it wasn’t enough to get him off. It’s hard to imagine Andy Burnham speaking in the same terms.

Protestants, though, are obviously different from Catholics, not least because they’re more open to the influence of Puritanism. Some English visitors to Catholic Ireland in the 18th century were amazed at what they saw as the loose sexual talk of the young women, perhaps fondly imagining that it reflected their behavior. The Irish may have become more puritanical about sex after the Great Famine, when the perils of overpopulation had to be more urgently confronted, but they continued to enjoy dancing, singing and gambling. When they came to work in Britain, building railways and canals in the 19th century, they were often derided as lazy by native workers; but this was because as former small-time tenant farmers and farm laborers they had much less of a history of submission to industrial routines, and intended to keep it that way.

Puritans can have fun, of course, but for them life is fundamentally a serious business. The ultimate drama of salvation and damnation is inscribed in the minutiae of everyday existence, so that you’re spiritually at stake at every moment. Ludwig Wittgenstein once grimly remarked that we weren’t here to enjoy ourselves, which from a theological viewpoint is surely mistaken. So-called eternal life means self-delighting life, life without a utilitarian goal but lived as precious for its own sake. There’s absolutely no point to God, or for that matter to human history, any more than there is to a work of art. It’s this that the puritans, philistines, utilitarians and teleologists find so hard to take. They don’t see that trying to get somewhere is part of the problem, not the solution. Instead, they see each instant as merely a jumping-off point for the next, each feature of existence a function of something larger. In revolting against this ethic, art attempts the well-nigh impossible business of seeing something purely as it is in itself. It’s the true meaning of the term “realism”.

Pleasure, not least sexual pleasure, poses a threat to some puritans because it doesn’t seem to get you anywhere. This is one reason why so many Americans, who spring from a deeply puritanical culture despite all those strip clubs, find it hard to stay in bed in the morning. Doing nothing is morally suspect, while actually enjoying doing nothing borders on the sinful. It’s much the same with sex. Sex for the puritan mind is tolerable when it has a function (reproduction), but not when you relish it for its own sake. This is why it has to be confined to marriage. This is to see sexuality as an adversary. It’s a potentially destructive force which must be confined to the domestic arena in the same sense that a tiger in captivity must be confined to a cage. Once you transgress these bounds, all hell is likely to break loose, which is what has just happened to a devoutly Christian former leader of the DUP.

Puritans are right that sexuality can be a destructive force. Like all sacred phenomena (which is to say, things that are both life-giving and potentially devastating), it has to be handled with caution. But this doesn’t mean you have to regard it as an enemy. Rather as in ancient Greek tragedy the powers of Dionysus, a god who is both joyous and deathly, playful and savage, must be welcomed into the city rather than brutally repressed, so Eros must be given its place of honor there. Otherwise it’s likely to turn against civilization and tear it to pieces.

It’s this which puritanism is incapable of doing. In its view, sexuality is either a necessary evil or an anarchic force, and it’s hard to draw the line between the two. Yet as industrial society begins to emerge, it’s exactly this which we’re required to do. For the human body to submit to the disciplines of industrial labor, or to the ceaseless business of accumulation, means splitting it down the middle. Its less productive energies have to be siphoned off from its more productive ones, in case they interfere with their functioning. The place to which they’re diverted is generally known as culture, and consists of three main areas: religion, art and sexuality. Or — to put the matter in Freudian terms — the creative, imaginative, libidinal instincts must be repressed.

The trouble with the repressed isn’t only that it has a tendency to return, like a zombie clambering vengefully from its grave, but that it lends the forces being stifled a new kind of glamour. Nothing is more seductive than the prohibited. We desire what we aren’t permitted to have. Censorship and concealment breed curiosity. Perverse creatures that we are, we have only to sniff an injunction to feel the itch to transgress it. Which is to say that the ego bows submissively to the authoritative superego, but also yearns to rebel against it. The son loves the father but wants to bring him low. This is one reason why no sovereign power can be secure. It’s also deeply relevant to the crimes of Jeffrey Donaldson.

Presbyterianism, a sect to which many in Northern Ireland loudly subscribe — including Donaldson — is an offspring of the Reformation of John Calvin and John Knox, and can display some particularly repressive attitudes towards sexuality. For the former leader of the DUP, ex-assistant grand master of the Orange Order and hard-line Right-winger, sex seems to have been the monstrous force which burst through its proper confinement to lawful wedlock and began to run riot.

The Christian Gospel to which Donaldson is dedicated, and which one imagines might be his only solace while behind bars, is remarkably casual about sex. It doesn’t mention it much, and when it does its attitude is generally relaxed and forgiving. Nothing could be more different from Christians, many of whom make a fetish of sexuality whatever their denomination. In this, ironically, they find themselves at one with a good deal of postmodern culture. Perhaps the solution is to get sexuality in perspective. That, however, is more easily said than done, because there seems to be something inherent in our sexual make-up which is lop-sided, disproportionate, hard to get into focus. It’s hard to avoid either hyping it or suppressing it. And this is because we’re not, at root, well-balanced beings at all, whatever the BBC might think.

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