8: Repressive
Disconnection: “It just feels like the church’s teaching on sexuality is behind the times. My lifestyle may not be perfect, but you know . . . it’s just sex.”
—Dennis
Reconnection: “Even though many of my Christian friends told me to cut off contact with my friend after she had the abortion, I couldn’t do it. I still love her. I still accept her. I still believe in her. I still believe in what God wants to do in her life.”
—Amanda
Let’s get right to it. Sexuality is one of the greatest expressions of God’s creativity and of his intention for human flourishing. It is also confounding and confusing to teenagers and young adults on their spiritual journeys. Marriage and childbearing, if they happen, are coming later in life for most young adults—but sex is in the picture earlier than ever.
Among many of those with a Christian background, the perception is that the church is out of step with the times. Many, though not all, view the church as repressive—controlling, joyless, and stern when it comes to sex, sexuality, and sexual expectations. On the other hand, many are also dissatisfied with the wider culture’s pressure on them to adopt lax sexual attitudes and behaviors. They feel torn between the false purity of traditionalism and the empty permissiveness of their peers.
The Christian community needs a “new mind” to engage the next generation in the arena of sexuality. I will do my best to describe the situation in this chapter but I want to recognize at the outset that the subject of sexuality can be contentious and divisive because it is so personal. My posture here—as in the entire book—is grounded on two desires: to clearly explain what we have discovered in our research and to humbly call the Christian community to a new place of faithfulness in a changing world. I hope you will read what follows with these intentions in mind.
Let me begin by briefly describing four encounters.
———
I sat on our couch across from Dennis, who is in his early twenties, and tried to help him reconnect with his Catholic upbringing. Some of his misgivings and hesitation related to his sexual habits. Dennis loves to have sex, especially with older women.
“I understand what you’re saying about faith and about Jesus, David. But it just feels like the church’s teaching on sexuality is behind the times. My lifestyle may not be perfect, but you know . . . it’s just sex.”
———
A friend of mine, Aly, told me about a young Christian woman with whom she recently had lunch. Jenna told Aly that she went into marriage as a virgin three years ago with high hopes that sex would be perfect—because that’s the picture her youth leaders and college pastor had painted.
“It didn’t take too long to realize that sex is nothing like that. Sometimes it’s incredible but sometimes it’s hard work, just like the rest of the relationship. In fact I’m learning it’s all related . . . good sex doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s entwined with every part of my life. But I feel like my church and youth group compartmentalized everything, and so I did too. Here’s your faith in this pigeonhole. Here’s your education. Here’s your work cubicle, and there’s your family. Over there is sex, all by itself behind the curtain. I feel like becoming an adult is this painful process of decategorizing my life. There are no categories. There’s just life.”
———
Not long ago I met a young Christian man, Keith, who had become addicted to online pornography as a teenager. He told me that a thought had occurred to him: What if this stuff wasn’t just on a computer screen? What if I could really have sex right now? “So a few clicks later,” he said, “I had tracked someone down who lived nearby. I was ready for action.” The resulting sexual addiction ran rampant for several years and involved dozens of hookups. He is in recovery now, but Keith will deal with the addiction for the rest of his life, just as recovering alcoholics and drug addicts do.
One of the most unsettling things about Keith’s story is that his sexual activities had, at first, no effect on his involvement in church and youth group. He said, “I stayed active. I still led worship and was involved in leadership. I just literally led a double life, between sex and church.”
———
I met Max, a distinguished older gentleman, when I was invited to present research to his firm about the next generation. You would be amazed how effortlessly Max commands a room. He has built million-dollar businesses and world-changing ministries and he exudes confidence. After my presentation, Max had some thoughts he wanted to share. “David, I appreciate your coming all the way from California to speak to us, but you’re wrong about the next generation. I don’t have as much hope as you do. They are not following God. They are sexually promiscuous. They are living the lives Scripture warns us about.”
I asked, “If you don’t mind my asking, did you embody biblical values as a young man?”
“Well, no,” he said. “In fact I had my fair share of ‘experience’ as a young man. But that was a long time ago.” Max didn’t seem exactly ashamed of the wild oats he had sown. “The difference is, I didn’t flaunt it. I knew how to keep private things private. Kids nowadays have no shame.”
SEXUAL DISCONNECT
These conversations reflect the broad issues at stake when we begin to talk about sex, the life of faith, and the next generation. They also suggest the complicated feelings young adults (and older generations) have about both sex and the church.
Recently a Catholic friend of mine who is also a lawyer emailed me about this book project. He expressed his theories about why young people leave the church. “It’s usually for one of two reasons: bad catechism or sex. The former is the fault of priests and bishops; the latter is, well, the way of the world, and when it’s the latter, it’s almost always disguised under a claim of other reasons (boring, rigid, etc.). They so insist on justifying their sexual choices that they invent a thousand other reasons to explain why they have left. No one leaves the church because of the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. They leave for pelvic reasons.”
There is probably some truth to this, though our research shows it’s not quite that simple. Twelve percent of young people told us that it is “completely” or “mostly” true that they are less interested in faith as a result of becoming sexually active. This doesn’t mean that only 12 percent of Christian young adults are having sex. Recent studies have shown that most evangelical teens and young adults are surprisingly similar to national norms in terms of sexual behavior. According to one recent study, four out of five unmarried evangelicals ages eighteen to twenty-nine have had sex.[51]
We humans are complicated and multilayered beings, and my strong impression from face-to-face interviews is that often sexuality intersects a person’s faith journey in subconscious, below-the-radar ways. The story of a generation and sex is complicated and layered too, filled with judgment, rules, old and new media, hypocritical religious leaders, values turned on their heads, a world saturated with sexual images, and double lives trapped between soul and pelvis.
While few young Christians admit that their sex life specifically caused them to drop out, many perceive the church and the faith to be repressive. One-fourth of young adults with a Christian background said they do not want to follow all the church’s rules (25 percent). One-fifth described wanting more freedom in life and not finding it in church (21 percent). One-sixth indicated they have made mistakes and feel judged in church because of them (17 percent). And one-eighth said they feel as if they have to live a “double life” between their faith and their real life (12 percent). Two-fifths of young Catholics say the church is “out of date” on these matters (40 percent). Add it all up, and millions of young Christians feel torn between two ways of understanding and experiencing sex.
Repressive | In Their Own Words
Percentage of 18- to 29-year-olds who have a Christian background
completely true of me
completely or mostly true of me
The church’s teachings on sexuality and birth control are out of date.*
23%
40%
I do not want to follow all the church’s rules.
14%
25%
I want more freedom in life and cannot find it in church.
12%
21%
I have made mistakes and feel judged in church because of them.
8%
17%
I have to live a “double life” between my faith and my real life.
5%
12%
I am sexually active and now less interested in faith as a result.
5%
12%
TRADITIONALISM VERSUS INDIVIDUALISM
Christian teens and young adults are caught between two narratives about sexuality. The first we will call traditionalism and the second individualism. I am indebted to Dale Kuehne’s Sex and the iWorld: Rethinking Relationship beyond an Age of Individualism (Baker, 2009) for the framework I sketch here, and I commend this excellent book to anyone interested in a more thorough exploration of this multifaceted topic.
Traditionalist Sexuality
The traditionalist view can best be summed up this way: Sex? What sex? I am not the first person to point out that, in the landmark 1950s television show I Love Lucy, Lucy and Ricky shared a master bedroom with a pair of twin beds. The fact that Little Ricky came into their lives after a few years only made this unlikely scenario all the more ridiculous. The morality police in Hollywood agreed that even a whiff of a suggestion that a married couple might have sex should be absolutely avoided.
Traditionalists are quite numerous among the Elder generation (born before 1945). My grandparents (were they alive) would undoubtedly shudder at the content of this chapter. That’s because the traditionalist policy is to exclude sex and sexuality from polite conversation. Even if a person sleeps around, as Max apparently did as a young man, one should never mention it.
I want to clearly distinguish between traditionalism (or traditionalist) and traditions. Christian traditions, such as chastity and fidelity, are significant features of spiritual and sexual wholeness emerging from an understanding of God’s revelation in the Bible. Traditionalism, on the other hand, is an ideology that seeks to replace a thriving, grace-filled relationship with Christ with human-made rules and regulations. Unfortunately, traditionalist narratives about sexuality have mingled legalism with Christian tradition. As such, what many churches have taught about sex is steeped in traditionalism, not biblical tradition.
For traditionalists, shame is the watchword when it comes to sexuality. There is something dirty about all sexual pleasure—even within marriage. Sex is so shameful that it would be best for everyone if sexual activity were confined to procreation, its most basic utilitarian function.
The traditionalist focus on making babies, while affirming the Christian tradition of family and the biblical mandate to “be fruitful and multiply” (see Genesis 1:28), has a dark side, especially for women. If sex should be limited to fulfilling one’s obligations—to obey the church, to marry and stay married as a social responsibility, to bear and rear children—there is little room for self-giving love, which requires the freedom of personal choice. Until the last fifty years in the West (and in many places around the world still today) the freedoms of women were limited, if not by law, then by societal expectations. The traditionalist paradigm made sex (at least for women) into a duty.
Anyone who does not comply with the rules written by traditionalists are outcasts. But when the Boomers came of age in the 1960s, they were sick and tired of traditionalism’s “repressive” notions about sex. During that decade of social upheaval, Boomers attempted to replace the traditionalist narrative with something new—the individual’s personal journey toward sexual fulfillment.
Individualist Sexuality
The new narrative, which has come to define our broader Western culture, is that of the individualist: Sex is about me. In the individualist narrative, sexuality is about personal satisfaction. Pornography is the most blatant case in point. “You don’t even need anyone else to enjoy it! Or if you want to use porn to ‘get revved up’ for a real-life sexual encounter, go for it! You be the judge. Your own intuition will tell you where to draw the line.”
The rules of individualist sexual encounters are self-defined. The highest goals of sex are not just pleasure, but freedom and self-expression. At best, young adults’ “rules” for sex are loose, self-driven, and self-oriented guidelines. These “new rules” are described by Mark Regnerus in his book Forbidden Fruit: “(a) don’t be pressured or pressure someone else into sex, (b) don’t sleep around for the sake of your own reputation, (c) the only person who can decide whether a sexual relationship is OK is you, and (d) sex should optimally only occur within the framework of a ‘long-term’ relationship: at least three months.”[52]
At worst, however, the “rules” are whatever everyone else in the social circle says is “normal.” In the preface to Sex and the Soul, professor Donna Freitas recalls the day when the students in her undergraduate dating class decided to start a sexual revolution. They had just returned from spring break, where “they’d partied hard. They’d hooked up. They’d drunk until the wee hours of the morning and then dragged themselves onto the beach by noon, only to start the cycle over again.”[53] The students recounted their exploits that morning in class until something unexpected happened. One young woman admitted “that the campus hookup scene made her unhappy, even depressed, though she embraced it as if it were ‘the best ever,’ just a normal part of the college experience. She thought she was supposed to like it, but to be honest, she actually hated it.”[54]
To Dr. Freitas’s surprise, other students chimed in. “Hookup culture,” they agreed, promotes “reckless, unthinking attitudes and expectations about sex. . . . After a few years of living in this environment they felt exhausted, spent, emptied by the pressure to participate in encounters that left them unfulfilled.”[55]
Unfortunately, the determination to swim up the cultural stream, as Freitas’s students decided to do, is in short supply among many young adults. It’s easier to just go with the flow. The irony, of course, is that individualism is supposed to be about personal choice. In my grandparents’ generation (born in the 1910s and ’20s), people who did not conform to social norms were outcasts. Today young people who do not conform to social expectations are prudes, quaint anachronisms from a bygone era. In fact noncompliance with the individualist sexual ethic is one of the reasons the church is perceived as out of touch. “Repressive” is how individualists describe traditionalists.
Our rapidly changing culture has been hard at work relieving the traditionalist narrative of its relevance. One way it does so is by identifying those who abstain from sex outside of marriage as hopeless relics from yesteryear. Sexual attitudes and practices have obviously become more cavalier—and those attitudes have become much more widespread—since the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s. Individualism has sparked the concepts of casual sex, hooking up, friends with benefits, and one-night stands. As Dennis, the nomadic and sexually active Catholic, said, “It’s just sex.”
If fading traditionalist morality was about private confinement of (shameful) sex, today’s mindset is about free and public expression. Oral sex and other forms of “nonintercourse” sexual practice are considered normal and healthy for teens, and much more so for twentysomethings. “Sexting”—the use of a cell phone or mobile device to send text messages with sexual content—has become a common practice among both teens and young adults. Other tech tools, as well, give access to new ways of expressing sexuality and desire. “Put it out there. Put it on Facebook. Don’t make yourself look too slutty, but don’t be too inhibited.”
The changing narrative of sexuality, like the other areas we’ve explored in this book, has been shaped in the next generation by the three As, covered in depth in chapter 2. Young people have grown up with unprecedented access to sexual content via the Internet, television, movies, music, and video games, which have brought sexuality into their lives earlier and more easily than was true for previous generations. Their alienation from formative relationships (especially from absent fathers) has created a host of emotional issues, many of which are manifested in their sexual decision making. And their suspicion of authority, inherited from their Boomer predecessors, invites them to dismiss “old-fashioned” traditions without wondering first whether they might be healthy and life-giving.
The women’s liberation movement, which ran parallel with the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, sought to achieve more leverage for women in our culture. In many ways, the movement was a reaction to traditionalism’s insistence that women have an obligation to marry and have children and so do not need opportunities to participate in business, politics, and other arenas of cultural power. Unfortunately, the positive goals of women’s lib were soon bound up with individualism’s approach to sex. One could easily make an argument that the real winners, in the aftermath, have been men, who are no longer bound by traditionalism’s demands for commitment in sexual relationships. Rather than empowering women, it can be argued that the sexual revolution and women’s lib combined to make them even more vulnerable to exploitation.
To an individualist, marriage is—like everything else—one option among many. It is an alternative best saved for later in life, because choosing one person means you’re not choosing a lot of other people. After the wedding, divorce is also an option, especially if the other person is not meeting your needs, sexual or otherwise. “Sex is about me. Commitment, chastity, fidelity, family—these are options to exercise if and when I believe they are right for me.”
TORN
Young Christians are torn between two competing narratives—and neither of them is the Christian story of sex (more on that in a moment). Most young people think of their communities of faith as traditionalist, because a hyperconservative ethic is, in reality, quite common among older churchgoers. “Don’t talk about it. Keep it in the bedroom.”
To the typical Mosaic, the traditionalist view seems quaint and old-fashioned, or even repressive and controlling. The individualist culture around them, by contrast, is bursting with invitations for self-fulfillment and personal expression. “Get what you need. Find yourself. Express your sexuality.” Young Christians—whether Catholic, evangelical, or mainline—are immersed in a culture that highly values all manner of sexual freedom.
The unsustainable tension between the traditionalist and individualist views has led to profound cognitive and behavioral dissonance in the next generation of believers. Young Christians hold more conservative beliefs about sexuality than the broader culture (for example, that one should wait until marriage to have sex, that homosexuality is not consistent with Christian discipleship, and so on). Yet their sexual behavior is just as libertine as non-Christians in most ways.[56] In other words, they think in traditionalist terms, but most young Christians act like individualists.
Here is how Mark Regnerus describes his findings on the sexual behavior of Christian teenagers:
Evangelical Protestant youth may hold less sexually permissive attitudes than most other religious youth, but they are not the last to lose their virginity, on average. Not even close . . . evangelical teenagers don’t display just average sexual activity patterns, but rather above-average ones. There are several explanations for this anomaly, but I give most weight to the clash of cultures that evangelical adolescents are experiencing: they are urged to drink deeply from the waters of American individualism and its self-focused pleasure ethic, yet they are asked to value time-honored religious traditions like family and chastity. They attempt to do both . . . and this serving of two masters is difficult.[57]
The problem goes even deeper. I would suggest that many churches today have responded to the sexual crisis of our age by grafting the individualist narrative onto Christian teaching and practice, much as the traditionalists did in the middle of the last century. The church has accommodated the ethic of individualism in many quarters. An increasingly common theme in religious books and sermons, for example, is pursuing pleasure in our sex lives.
We should, of course, teach that God created sex and that it is good. Yet I have to wonder if we in the church have immersed ourselves too deeply in the all-American river of self-satisfaction. One older teen we interviewed told us about a leader in his church who talked to the young men in the youth group about going to Victoria’s Secret to buy sexy apparel for his wife: “He said he was trying to show us how much pleasure his sex life brings him. But I kept thinking, Really? Too much information! I didn’t see what lingerie choices had to do with being a Christian.” There is a big difference between frank, nurturing talk about sex and self-centered bragging.
I have also started to wonder if we have embraced the individualist narrative by agreeing that students should finish their education, pay off debt, get a job, and get settled before marrying—that is, expecting young people to get their lives nice and ordered as American consumers before committing to marriage. This late-marriage approach is unrealistic for many, especially if we advocate celibacy until marriage. I do not intend to suggest that everyone should beat a path to the altar before age twenty, but we need to think clearly about the reasons behind the demands we make of young adults.
Based on our research, I also worry that some of the Christian community’s teaching on abstinence focuses too much on the personal, individualist benefits of delaying sex until marriage. I am certainly not questioning the motives of those who urge the next generation toward sexual purity but I do wonder if some of the methods reflect a mindset influenced by individualism. “Save yourself for marriage and have fantastic sex with one partner, the way it’s meant to be. Sex as God intended will blow your mind. Be safe; avoid the risks of STDs and an unwanted pregnancy. Think about your future.” Much of the abstinence messaging, however well-intended, capitulates to culturally cultivated individualism: sex is about me.
In the tension between traditionalism and individualism, could we be missing a richer story, a truer narrative about sex? Lauren Winner, in her influential book Real Sex, points to the gap in her own experience after coming to faith in Christ as a young woman:
I did not write this book because I want to challenge or overhaul traditional Christian teachings about sex, but rather because I want to challenge the way the church typically helps people practice those teachings. I have, by now, read countless books and heard countless lectures on singleness, chastity, and refraining from premarital sex. Many of these lectures and books seem out of touch with reality. They seem naïve. They seem designed for people who get married right out of college. They seem theologically vacuous. Above all they seem dishonest. They seem dishonest because they make chastity sound easy. They make it sound instantly rewarding. They make it sound sweet and obvious. . . . Somehow the tools we give people to live premarital chastity are not working as well as we might hope.[58]
It seems that the way we communicate about and live the truth of sexuality has produced a generation of torn souls.
REPRESSIVE TURNS TO RELATIONAL
My goal in this final section is not to outline a complete sexual ethic or to answer every (or even most) questions. Instead, my objective is to spur our thinking about the biblical narrative of sexuality to a relationally minded generation. Frankly, God has stretched me through the process of writing this chapter, and my posture in these paragraphs (indeed, I hope in the entire book!) is not know-it-all researcher but rather fellow broken soul.
We need a new mind to cultivate a deeper, more holistic, more Christ-filled ethic of sex. Neither traditionalism nor individualism is working—nor are they biblical. Most of us sense this, but what can we do? We need to rediscover the relational narrative of sexuality.
Sex is about selflessness, not primarily about self. It is about serving, not only about personal pleasure. It is about God’s creativity intersecting human action, not our personal identity and self-expression. Rather than saying that sex is taboo (traditionalist) or that sex is about me (individualist), the relational approach to sexuality says, sex is good and it is about us.
We need to approach the issue of sexuality with utter humility. Because of sin, our relationships with God, each other, and our community are broken. Jesus saved us from sin by his death on the cross, sent his Spirit, and gave us his written Word so that these relationships can be fully restored. Yet as we read the Bible, we find every kind of distortion of and troubles with sexuality, even among God’s people. By humbly acknowledging our common brokenness, we can deal with problems when they arise rather than sweeping them under the rug.
One way we accept our common brokenness is by keeping up our guard when it comes to sexual temptation. But how can we help each other avoid temptation without becoming legalistic rule makers? We can do it by understanding the impact of sexual beliefs and actions on our whole community.
Mosaics, remember, embody a relational identity. While they are often narcissistic and thoroughly immersed in a culture of individualism, young Christians show enormous capacity for and aspiration toward relational connection and “staying true” to family and peers. So I hold out a great deal of hope that this generation is ready for a different, more biblical approach to sexuality. In other words, we have a great opportunity to help the next generation live a new narrative of sexual life—the relational narrative. We can begin by doing two things—making sex everybody’s business and making sex God’s business.
Making Sex Everybody’s Business
Sexual sin is not worse than other sin but it does have profound consequences for relationships. I remember talking one day with my brilliant friend Eric Twisselmann about all sins being equal in God’s eyes. He said, “That’s true; Jesus said that sexual fantasies are no less sinful than actually having an affair. But the social consequences are different. Don’t believe me? Just ask your wife.”
Sex matters to everyone. It is integral to the health and wholeness of families, churches, and communities. Don’t think that’s true? Just ask someone who has had an abortion how it affected the relationship with her significant other, her parents, and her church family. Ask a young man dealing with an addiction to porn how his relationships with his mom and other women have changed. While most Americans believe that their sexual appetites are a matter of personal preference, the fact is that our sexual practices and beliefs have a far-reaching impact on those around us. The relational story of sex powerfully counters the individualist view in this respect. “Sex is not about me,” it says. “Sex is about us.”
Because sex is about us, we need to talk about it. One unfortunate effect of traditionalism was the church’s reluctance to talk openly about sex and sexuality. There are clear scriptural injunctions against vulgar speech, but only a traditionalist would argue that all talk about sex is vulgar. I believe we must cultivate an environment in the faith community that invites open conversation about the power, beauty, darkness, and full reality of sex. Mosaics will find out what they want to know and will connect with others who are asking the same questions—they have the world at their fingertips! When the Christian community is hesitant to dialogue about sex, we lose the opportunity to apprentice the next generation in transparent, trusting, Christ-centered relationships. We need to initiate respectful, frank (not vulgar or self-congratulatory) conversations that will help young people develop a deep, nuanced, and livable sexual ethic beyond “Sex is dirty; save it for the one you love.”
I also believe our conversations need to be courageous and reflect our refusal to take ourselves too seriously. Sometimes our discussions will be earnest and quiet. Other times they may be lighthearted, self-deprecating, even comedic. The connective tissue must be a sincere desire for flourishing relationships.
I think we need to reconsider doing “sexual formation” on a mass scale. Our research leads me to be skeptical of the long-term transformational power of events and rallies. I’m not saying we should never have large-scale worship events or that proclaiming the gospel in public places is pointless. It is not, and doing so is clearly a biblical pattern. Yet if we measure our impact solely by the number of students making pledges or raising their hands, I think we have to wonder if we are really committed to making disciples.
Finally, we need a willingness to talk about and “own” our struggles with sex, even as we stay on high alert for pretense or judgmentalism in our hearts. Hypocrisy might be defined as leniency toward ourselves and strict standards for everyone else. The comments made by the older gentleman, Max, about “kids nowadays” belie a willingness to wield this double standard. I pray that, in our relationships with young adults, we will be governed by honesty and grace, and that we will refuse to withhold love, respect, or mercy from those who do not comply with the biblical, relational narrative of sex. Leaders may have to exercise church discipline on occasion but they must do so with mercy in mind—for God has shown us mercy! Remember that those who don’t conform to traditionalists’ standards are outcasts, and those who don’t conform to individualists’ ideology are prudes. We who live by a new Way reject rejection in favor of grace.
Topics we need to start talking (and listening) about include:
This list is certainly not exhaustive but it represents key themes we must address together in our communities of faith.
Making Sex God’s Business
Both traditionalism and individualism use God-talk to manage behavior, rather than responding to and strengthening relationships with God. Traditionalists use the threat of divine punishment, while individualists use the promise of divine blessing. The relational narrative about sex says that behavior management is a poor substitute for a whole, integrated, restored life with God. It seeks to reclaim sex as sacred and truly good. In other words, it makes sex “God’s business”—because life is God’s business.
Most Christians will tell you that their faith is a relationship with Christ, not a laundry list of duty-bound obligations. That’s “religion.” Our approach to sexuality should take the same view. The purpose is relationship with each other and with God. Any rules we put in place, rather than keeping people “in” or “out,” like the rules of the traditionalists, are to help relationships thrive—and we stay on guard against rules taking on a life of their own, multiplying and expanding for their own sake. Biblical rules—like you shall not commit adultery—are absolutely necessary, of course. But the purpose is thriving relationships, not sexual repression.
A research study we conducted for Chip Ingram’s ministry, Living on the Edge, provides ample evidence that young Christians embrace less of a rules-oriented spirituality than older Christians. It’s possible that people become more rules-focused as they get older, but the generational gap is so extreme that I believe the difference is a fundamental shift in the next generation’s orientation toward rules. Perhaps, with some level of optimism, we might describe young Christians as fertile ground for grace.[59] This is good news when it comes to making sex God’s business, because the truth is that we all screw up and are in desperate need of restoration.
Christian young adults who are living with split selves, divided at a soul level between their pelvic urges and their saintly aspirations, need to be made whole. Eugene Peterson puts it masterfully in The Message: “If someone falls into sin, forgivingly restore him, saving your critical comments for yourself. You might be needing forgiveness before the day’s out” (Gal. 6:1). When we make sex God’s business, he will give us the grace we need to restore lives, families, and communities.
He will also help us nurture lives, families, and communities in the relational narrative, heading off problems before they begin. Research shows the huge impact of fathers on the sexual formation of their children, particularly daughters. Are we providing tools and encouragement to parents that will help them grow whole, sexually integrated kids? Are we connecting teens and young adults from single-parent and blended homes with couples and families so they can learn (or relearn) patterns of healthy relationships?
Making sex God’s business also means that our sexual ethics are based on the revealed truth of God through the Bible. Yet that’s not as easy as it sounds. When one of my Christian friends in high school became sexually active, I rushed home to find the verses in Scripture that clearly condemned his actions. It was harder than I thought it would be, much more difficult than my Sunday school experiences had led me to believe. I found that the Bible’s sexual ethic is much more complex, more nuanced, than I expected.
This generation needs us to be honest about the fact that the Bible is not crystal clear on all matters of sexuality. Together, we need to search it, test it, probe its essential meaning in its historical, cultural, and literary context.
This generation also needs us to live as if the Bible has a claim on our lives. Where we discover the clear teaching of God’s Word, we need to be willing to pursue its role in every facet of our lives.
PEOPLE OF SECOND CHANCES
On a trip to Chicago, I met a young woman (we’ll call her Amanda) in her early twenties. She’d had several abortions during her teen years. She told me how much these choices had hurt her and her mother because “my mom always allowed pregnant teens into our home. If there is anyone on the planet who would have understood, it was my mom.”
Now as a twentysomething, Amanda is trying to use her experiences for good. She has talked four pregnant teens out of abortions and is determined to help other girls avoid the same choices that, still today, fill her with regret.
At the same time, Amanda believes strongly in second chances. “I have another friend who still chose to have an abortion. Even though I tried to help her consider giving away the baby for adoption, she didn’t choose that. That hurt, you know? But even though many of my Christian friends told me to cut off contact with my friend after she had the abortion, I couldn’t do it. I still love her. I still accept her. I still believe in her. I still believe in what God wants to do in her life.”
It is stories like this that bolster my appreciation for the next generation—imperfect but eager to extend grace. This hyper-relational generation is searching for the meaning of one of the ultimate expressions of human relationships: sex. They want to share their stories, and they are blunt, irreverent, and sometimes crude when they do. And in a no-privacy, socially networked world, this bare-all impulse tempts them to share anything and everything with anyone who clicks through.
But there is also the positive side, as my friend Mike Foster points out. He is the founder of People of the Second Chance, so named because there are, as he says, “a lot of young people in this generation who are dealing with unfulfilled expectations. Life isn’t working out the way the American Dream scripted it.” Mike puts the grace generation in a whole new light: “It’s amazing what God can do once people reach a point where they really don’t care what you think of them.”
They might even start a new kind of sexual revolution.