Report on Sexuality Shakes Presbyterian Church to the Core : Best-seller: An internal document calls for the denomination to view sexual relations as a God-given gift to be enjoyed by married couples, singles, homosexuals and responsible adolescents.

A national committee of Presbyterians has shaken the church of John Calvin to its core by recommending that the denomination rid itself of sexual taboos and view sexual relations as a God-given gift to be enjoyed by everyone, including single men and women, gays and lesbians and responsible adolescents.

The report on human sexuality, designed as a study resource for church agencies and congregations, will be voted on by the full assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in June. Five of 17 committee members dissented and produced a minority report for the 650-member assembly that will meet in Baltimore.

The majority report attacks the sexual attitudes of the church and this country as patriarchal, homophobic and biased toward heterosexuality.

It questions the importance that Americans place on marriage, affirms masturbation and petting among teen-agers and says that maturity, not marriage, should determine when teens engage in intercourse. It says the church should endorse new family structures including same-sex couples with adopted children.

Homosexuals should be able to be ordained into the ministry, the report says, and gay and lesbian couples should enjoy the same rights as heterosexual couples.

The report has become a Presbyterian best-seller. Published in February, it has sold 20,000 copies at $5 each, and requests continue at the rate of about 1,000 a week.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Marj Carpenter, longtime public information director at denominational offices in Louisville.

“Middle-class America had a heart attack,” said committee chairman John J. Carey. “At least we’ve gotten their attention.”

Larry Rasmussen, professor of Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York, said the report is the first public sign of a “general reappraisal of Christian sexuality” under way among several Protestant organizations. “These reports are going to look very different from traditional reports,” he said.

Two Southern California regional executives say the study deserves a hearing.

Much of the negative reaction to the report is premature, declared the Rev. Neil W. Brown, executive of the 20,000-member Presbytery of San Diego.

If the study is totally rejected, the church “is in danger of losing very helpful” perspectives, such as its criticism of tendencies to consider elderly people as “non-sexual beings” and to casually accept sex as a sales tool. At the same time, he said, he did not agree with every recommendation.

“Few would assert that the present norms and practices in our society are healthy and helpful in every respect,” Brown said.

One member of the task force majority--the Rev. Robert Fernandez, executive of the Presbytery of San Fernando--said he has sent a letter to the 35 churches in his northern Los Angeles County region “encouraging them to study the issues from an emotionally balanced point of view rather than from a reactionary view.”

Opposition to the report’s recommendations and underlying philosophy prompted the Rev. John Huffman, pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, to become a nominee for General Assembly moderator. The report “flies in the face of biblical teaching on sexuality,” he asserted.

The report’s challenge to marriage seems to be drawing the most fire. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), like other Christian bodies, has viewed marriage as a prerequisite to sexual intercourse and considered sex outside marriage a sin. Those beliefs must change or the church will be seen increasingly as irrelevant to most people’s lifestyles, the report says.

“Rather than inquiring whether sexual activity is premarital, marital or postmarital, we should be asking whether the relation is responsible, the dynamics genuinely mutual and the loving full of joyful caring,” the report says.

The language on marriage is “confusing, and seems to be endorsing the covenant of marriage in some places and not in other places,” said the Rev. Teri Taylor, who is the leader of Presbyterians in the Washington area. Taylor said she likes parts of the report but finds others “not consistent with the Scriptures as I understand them.”

A letter to the June assembly from six former moderators said, “We affirm what our Confessions say about the unique role of Scripture in guiding human life and conduct. We feel the report does not recognize this authority.”

One of them, the Rev. Charles A. Hammond of Philadelphia said he also is disturbed by the language that praises the erotic as a moral good. “By their deification of sexual needs, they’ve attempted to turn us into fertility cults,” he said.

Carey, professor of Bible and religion at Agnes Scott College, a Presbyterian women’s institution in Atlanta, said, “The history of Christianity is to regard anything from the waist down--’the stirring of the loins’--as demonic. . . . That’s all baloney. We think it is time to affirm the eros.

“Someone told me the one problem with Presbyterians is they all look like they were weaned on pickles,” he continued. “A little joy is called for.”

Carey said the committee took the view that the Bible and faithfulness to God must be interpreted in light of changing social situations.

The diverse and changing needs of their 2.9 million members is one reason Presbyterians at their annual meeting four years ago called for a new look at their sexual teachings.

Carey said that one-third of the church’s members, for example, are single, and “the church has never had a graceful thing to say about their sexuality.”

Declining membership also prompted the report. There are 1 million fewer Presbyterians than 20 years ago, according to Carpenter. The report’s supporters say the church’s outdated rules, including sexual prohibitions and the guilt they induce, have turned people away.

Times staff writer John Dart contributed to this story.