c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Christine E. Gudorf is professor of religious studies at Florida International University. Her most recent book is”Body, Sex and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics.”)

UNDATED _ More than once over the last few months I have turned off the morning TV news rather than listen to more of what has passed for reporting on the Clinton scandal.

Recently, however, it occurred to me that though the media has repeatedly treated the scandal as, at its core, a moral, even religious issue, I have never seen any news program interview theologians, ethicists or pastors.

It is ironic that in exploring a subject freely characterized as about betrayal, sin, dishonesty, forgiveness and reconciliation, the news media consult not religious authorities but former White House employees and people on the street. The assumption seems to be that we are all religious experts _ not only on sin but on reconciliation and forgiveness, and we need neither moral and theological scholars nor moral dialogue.

Meanwhile, some critically important unprobed religious assumptions in the scream for attention.

One centers on Hillary Clinton’s apparent forgiveness of her husband.

Some have suggested that since Mrs. Clinton is a feminist and this is not the first time President Clinton has broken his vows, her remaining in the marriage must be for political or other power considerations. Suggestions that there could be no other reason for Mrs. Clinton’s staying in the marriage than that”she likes the look of the world from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,”as columnist Maureen Dowd has asserted, presume to judge the unknowable motives and intentions of another.

Worse, they deny the validity of all the other possible reasons for staying married. Are feminists not allowed to believe there is a value to forgiving others as God has forgiven us? Can’t feminists believe in honoring marriage vows?

Mrs. Clinton is an observant Methodist. Less than a generation ago Christian women in this country were routinely expected to forgive sexual transgressions by their husbands for reasons both religious and familial.

Much of this was merely the old double standard at work: women were bound to marital fidelity but men were understood as somehow above the rules.

The double standard still prevails in much of the world and it is good we are moving beyond it even if our practice has not yet caught up.

Eliminating the double standard, however, should not also erase Christian or other religious teaching on sin and forgiveness. No one should be pressured to remain in an abusive relationship. But if all moral failures in marriage are understood as abuse, then what can it mean in marriage that we are called to forgive those who sin against us? Surely there is no marital exemption to the call for forgiveness.

We have had an ongoing dialogue about the family in this country the last few years, on the importance of stable families not only for children but for the society as a whole. Most of us feel about divorce like we do about abortion _ we want it legal and as accessible and safe as possible, but we also want people to choose many fewer than now.

We want people to work on their marriages.

The idea that adultery by a spouse is impossible to forgive, that any self-respecting person will head for divorce court in the face of adultery, is as problematic as the idea that women should accept and expect adultery by their husbands.

Adultery damages the trust in a marriage; it does not necessarily destroy the love. Many spouses with straying partners wish it did, because that would lessen their pain. Sometimes love may not be enough, and after repeated violations of trust there is no basis for rebuilding trust in the relationship. But that is impossible to judge from outside a relationship.

The understanding of marriage in our culture has come to include more emotional intimacy over the last few generations; spouses have become more emotionally dependent on each other. This makes infidelity more potentially destructive. Yet in our own culture and even throughout the wide spectrum of diverse cultural models of marriage in the world, the possibility of forgiveness and ultimate reconciliation remains real.

Christian churches were wrong to interpret Christian teaching on forgiveness in terms of the double standard, but they are right when they stress marriage not only calls us to obey vows of sexual fidelity, but also calls us to forgive each other our many other failures _ sexual and non-sexual _ and to love the spouse, just as God forgives us.

Of all the relationships in our lives, marital relationships should evoke in us the most humility and the least self-righteousness _ especially when the marriage is somebody else’s.

DEA END GUDORF