"How and why did religion and politics become all about sex?" This is the question posed by Diane Winston in The Revealer, in response to five articles in the same issue of the Los Angeles Times on the intersection of religion, politics, and sex (including the recent piece on the Godmen).

What happened in the last 25 years to turn sexuality from a private pursuit to a public obsession? Some cite social changes that sprang from better birth control; others say the cultural vacuum after the fall of Eastern Bloc communism. Still others blame the emotional overload of an interconnected and increasingly complex world.

I think it’s something else -- something deeper, darker and more difficult to confront than the pill, the Internet or religious terrorism.

[...] Until very recently, charity, compassion and concern for the poor were Christianity’s key tenets and practical applications. Here in America, their centrality spanned the establishment of a Puritan commonwealth, the evangelical crusades for abolition, labor reform and suffrage, and most recently the civil rights movement, which Martin Luther King hoped to transform into an interracial poor people’s campaign for economic equality.

Of course, some of this relatively new focus on sex has to do with sexuality being so public, thanks to the media, advertising, and other entertainment industries. But those corporate entities just give us what we want (and, therefore, what will make them money), and what people want to see are issues revolving around sex. Is Winston right? Are politics and religion, at least in the public sphere, all about sex? Is this a healthy focus for our faith? And how did we get to this state?