where should this youth pastor start?!
how to talk to teens about sex? i think a hard thing for me is that in any given group you have kids that have already done the deed, some who are willing at any moment to do the deed, and others who have no idea to what “doing the deed” might refer! i like to talk about abstinence in the context of freedom. abstinence [saying no to things such as sex] frees us to say “yes” to a myriad of better things. when we say “no” to sex, we say “yes” to healthier aspects of relationship building.
i’ve had more kids respond to this message than to “abstinence pledges” and the classic fear based approaches that throw out STD statistics and show graphic images of all the things you don’t want to get.
Lauren Winner’s book Real Sex is a great resource for those working with young adults and students. she’s honest, and we all need to be more honest when talking with students about sex.
finally, i think of two movie clips whenever the topic of sex arises. both deal with sex-ed class in high school settings…
1) the movie “Saved” where the pastor is freaked out to even mention the word sex.
2) “Mean Girls,” where the gym teacher basically says, “Don’t have sex or you’ll die.” gotta love movies!

My wife and I lived together before we were married, and we celebrate our 17th anniversary today.
Personally, I think the downside of my daughter getting married in her early 20′s, not yet knowing what true love really is, is greater than the downside of her having sex in the interim.
Procreation is right there with food and shelter as a basic human instinct. Teenagers have sex, they’ve always had sex, and they’ll always have sex. It’s all over the OT.
I’m not encouraging casual hooking up. I’m just being realistic about the odds.
As the joke goes: “What do you call a father whose daughter wears a chasity ring?” “Grandfather.”
I know that’s unbiblical, but I’ll say it anyway.

Can’t agree with using the 1950′s as a tool for comparison. The pill gave women great freedom. I think it would be better to compare from post pill availability. Pre pill, sex meant maybe pregnant, post pill sex was for fun.

Born too late! Actually, I think it’s too bad that many 14,15,16 year olds are missing some beautiful parts of childhood, but the culture glorifies youth and sex, so what do you expect? Perhaps it hasn’t changed all that much except that birth control is easily available and modern communication, particularly the internet, prevents innocence from maturing. The only solution is to “get real.” Disinformation and judgmental appeals have the contrary effect. In fact,(check it out)I think teens who took abstinence pledges have a higher incidence of STDs, unwanted pregnancies, and abortions.
Doug
” is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms…”
WB Yeats

My heart is heavy for a generation (ok, a couple of generations now) where so many believe in no higher aspiration than doing what they feel like. It strikes me as more an instance of sloth than lust.

The average age of menarche has dropped from about 16 down to about 12 in 150 yrs. Over a similar time period the average age at which women are married has risen from about 18 to 25. Add to that the incessant and explicit exposure of sexual themes in just about all form of media (from billboards, film and television, the Internet, magazines etc) and it’s not to hard to see why sexual abstinence before marriage is now extremely rare.
I think we need to be careful not to put impossible burdens on our youth by 1. assuming that they aren’t having sex and 2. being afraid to discuss sexual relationship issues with them on the premise that doing so would be to tacitly condone premarital sex.
What youth get constantly from their peers is that if they’re not ‘getting it’, they’re not desirable or they’re abnormal.

I’ve mulled for some time now how I might comment on this post. Youth? A single generation? Much of what I hear seems to revolve around those thoughts. And little could be farther from the truth. If we want to talk generations, here is how it looks to me. My parents were part of the first generation of the sexual revolution (or whatever label you want to give it). That, along with the culture created by that shift, was part of the environment in which I was raised as part of the second generation. My children, adults and teens now, are the third generation. My granddaughter is the fourth generation.
However, the impact of these changes stretch back into generations before the sexual revolution itself. Seniors, when they lose a spouse, may or may not ever remarry. But they certainly have sex, usually without any decline in church attendance. And hopefully they have children and grandchildren who will speak frankly to them and teach them about safe sex in the modern world.
This is my world. This is the only world I’ve ever known. I don’t see any evidence that the reality within the church is any different from the reality of the world in which I grew up and by which I was shaped. Personal anecdotes and most studies all show little or no difference in churches. Actually, there is one difference. Within most church environments there seems to be a deeply ingrained culture of lies and denial.
I’m struck by an anecdote told by John Burke, the pastor of a little church a few miles down the road from me, in “No Perfect People Allowed”. He writes of a time when he discovered that a couple who entering into Christianity in his church and leading a small group were not married. His small group in some ways intervened with him and his initial reaction. John recounts his surprise when he discovered that he and his wife were the only couple in his own small group who had not lived together before marriage. That’s the reality of my world.
Now, I’ve been a Christian long enough to have heard many times that it’s probably better – or at least more in line with a Christian sexual ethic – for people to get married before they have sex. And Lauren Winner’s book, Real Sex, actually put that in terms which connected on a visceral level. But it doesn’t bother me in the slightest when people don’t. And that includes parents, in-laws, children, etc. I don’t experience any negative reaction on that basis alone. Now, there are things that have or would concern me. But they have more to do with ill-treatment, inappropriate age differences (with my kids), abuse, and similar things. I don’t know that 80% of people proactively “approve” of sex before marriage as in promoting or encouraging it. It just seems perfectly normal. It’s hard to be disturbed over something that in no way seems unusual or strange.
I don’t have any answers. But it would help if our churches would actually start by facing reality. Let’s not pretend that somehow it’s different among those who attend church. It’s not. Start with where we are. Acknowledge it. And then maybe we can begin to figure out where to go.

For some time now, I have been wondering about the whole Christian position about sex before marriage. Most people accept that some instructions in the Bible are cultural (eating pork, wearing hats etc) which were instructions to the culture in the time that they were written, and do not apply to us today.
With the advent of the pill, I have wondered if this marks a paradigm shift for the instruction about sex before marriage. What if that standard was required simply there because of the requirement for children to be raised in a safe and nurturing family environment? Contraceptives have moved sex from procreation to recreation, so does this mean that the old instruction doesn’t apply in our current culture?

I believe that sex was and is meant to be between a husband and wife. Not boyfriend and girlfriend or just because. If you seek God in ALL things, he will guide your path and it WILL be right. Date, have fun – be compatible – worship together – read your bible together and God will make sure you find the right person to marry and when you have married and have sex it will be right.

I have lived with and thought long and hard over this issue of premarital sex for years. This is what I have come to: there is horrifying damage being done to many, many people as the result of what is essentially sexual anarchy. On the aggregate, children born outside of wedlock are at high risk for everything from mental health problems to abuse to school failure to criminality and on and on and on. There is also the fact that 3000 abortions are performed a day in this country. STD rates are also shockingly high, although they have now become so common that many people don’t see this as a particularly big deal. So those are the problems (or at least the easily quantifiable problems).
Now, the average, reasonably well educated middle class person – church goer or not – looks at the matter of sex and is pretty well equipped to navigate the minefield of pre-marital sexual relationships. They have been raised and acculturated in such a way that they have enough impulse control, organizational and relationship skills, long term vision, ability to delay gratification, etc that they are probably unlikely to get pregnant, get an STD and perhaps will even refrain from bed hopping. Taking a pill everyday or making sure you have and use a condom every time are easy enough for them. And research shows that people with higher levels of education and income are not much more likely to have a baby out of wedlock or even get divorced than they were 40 years ago. So, many people from this group figure that when it comes to matters of sex it’s “no harm, no foul”.
However, the problem is that this group is helping to create a cultural norm where in sex and marriage are decoupled. And while that norm doesn’t necessarily result in the decoupling of children and marriage for the above segment of the society, the results of this new cultural norm are devastating for many, many other people. I sometimes think that what we have done is like moving from a raquetball court to a tennis court. Those who have been trained to play tennis enjoy being out in the open and do OK. But those who have not been so trained and needed the security of the walls to help them stay in the game long enough to learn to play it well don’t do so well out on the tennis court. While those who have the necessary skills and training enjoy playing tennis, many other people are left searching the bushes for the ball they lost. It may seem that the solution then is to train everyone to play tennis. However, spending a lot of time in the bushes trying to find your ball means that whatever instruction is offered (free birth control, sex ed in grade school, etc, etc) cannot be effective.
So, I would argue that sex without boundaries is irresponsible, even when one isn’t personally harmed by it, because of the effect that this powerful norm has on society at large. But we haven’t really been taught to consider society at large when we make our decisions. And we instinctively resist the idea that we ought to restrain ourselves from participating in something we may want and enjoy because of the needs of a larger community of people who we may not know or even care about.
(There’s obviously much more too the matter than this, but this is long enough and I could seriously write a book!)

-I once heard a Civil War historian give a talk on BookTV. He compared marriage and birth records in different locales and extrapolated that at least one third of couples were pregnant “at the altar” during those years.
-When in our lives do we really finally get a grip on what love really is?
-Chad’s approach seems healthier than most. And there is Rebeccat’s point too; not only are sex and marriage decoupled, but they are both decoupled from producing children, and this is reflected in disturbing sociology statistics. Fr. Stephen Freeman was once asked why the church should have anything to say about one’s sex life; his answer was, “Because you are raising my children.” Our coupled relationships are actually not private; they affect our whole community. Nobody talks about that.
-And yet, there are no guarantees that any child will be raised in a safe, nurturing family environment. My father used to say, “You ought to have a license to become a parent.” And very close family friends, rather wealthy, bamboozled case workers into giving them a child to adopt, because they had to have one of those, too… The child was emotionally neglected and pretty much raised by my mother. Safe? Sure, physically. Nurturing? Not very much.
-The Pill actually has given *men* much more freedom than it has ever given to women.
-I find it making a strange kind of sense that many kids my kids’ ages (early 20s) actually respect the sensibility of marriage so much that they hesitate to enter into it because they don’t want the relationship to end in divorce, so many of them having already lived through that with their own parents.
Dana

Some interesting points, but I probably wouldn’t be who I am if I didn’t push back. I’m not sure I necessarily disagree. But I’m not convinced I agree either. I’ve also given this considerable thought over the years. How could I not? Sexualized childhood – probably even beyond the societal norm. Teen father at a pretty young age. A set of experiences by the time of my third marriage that probably fall somewhere outside any typical set of experiences. And then trying to make sense of the idea of a Christian sexual ethic after my journey landed me inside Christianity. The practice has not been a particular issue for me. The core of what I was actually doing, having monogamous sex with one woman, was something I committed to in my marriage and had nothing to do with Christianity. For the most part, I’ve always been more of a serial monogamist by nature anyway. I’ve never been very casual about intimacy of any sort. But trying to figure out what to say and how to explain a proper context for sexuality to my kids has been a nightmare. I don’t have any major issues talking about sex with them. Honestly, I know the subject embarrasses them much more than it ever does me. I mostly stick to practical advice and doing the best I can to answer their questions because I don’t know what else to say that even makes sense to me, much less them.
Rebeccat, I think the statistics you cite are more related to poverty and being abandoned by one parent than children ‘born out of wedlock’. I know here in Austin, it’s increasingly normal for parents to have children together while eschewing marriage. And, of course, gay couples with kids can’t legally be married. In both cases, the kids don’t fare any worse than those in middle-class ‘marriages’. It can be thorny separating influences, but I think poverty is the prime force in the sorts of problems you describe.
Further, people talk about decoupling sex and procreation as if it were an essentially bad thing. I’m not sure I agree. I know enough about history to know that I can’t really find a time when those two were coupled that the cultural pressures did not at least attempt to reduce women to something more like the status of property. And yes, though there were some improvements in the first half of the 20th century, they were minor compared to the latter half. As with all things, it’s been a very mixed bag. But show me a culture and society in which sex and procreation remain tightly coupled and yet women have been treated as the equal of men and provided all the same opportunities, and I’ll happily explore it. I know of no such example. I’m not willing to put that on the table. For my daughters. For my granddaughter. Or for any women I know. Or did you have in mind some way to recouple sex and marriage without bringing procreation into the mix?
Very few people argue that sex without boundaries is responsible. That’s a straw man. Almost everyone has boundaries of some sort. The discussion is about where those boundaries should lie.
Dana, I do agree that we have lost almost all sense of societal and communal responsibility in raising all kids. We shouldn’t be in this by ourselves. It really does take a village to raise a child, at least to raise a child well. No argument there.
However, I do not agree in the slightest that the pill has given more freedom to men than to women. See above and find me an example anywhere in history where sex and procreation are coupled that women are not significantly lower than men on the property scale. And frankly, the sort of men who would find the pill “freeing” are the same sort who didn’t give a rat’s a** before the pill. Yes, there are still and will always be those sorts of men. Modern birth control has given us some similar sorts of predatory women, probably in ways that once were not probable. I’ve known some of them and dealt with some of them with my sons.
Besides, Christians aren’t just talking about intercourse, the sort of sex that can lead to procreation, when they are talking about a sexual ethic. Although it’s never been particularly clear to me where a behavior shifts from not-sex to sex within a Christian sexual ethic, I’ve never really disagreed that oral sex or any behavior that leads to orgasm for one or both parties is a form of sex. But there doesn’t seem to be any consistently held or defined line before then. I think back to the person I was and I know I had an ethic against making promises with my body that I was unwilling to follow through with in some way if desired. All forms of intimacy were always intertwined for me. I didn’t want to be physically intimate on a casual basis. But if I was emotionally or spiritually intimate, I was always open for physical intimacy. I never started anything physical with someone I didn’t at some level already feel more than a physical attraction for. I’m sure I don’t even understand myself well enough to define the reasons, but I tended to allow them to define at least some of the limits.
Now, a personal ethic that says that you shouldn’t intentionally raise physical expectations and tension that you are unwilling to satisfy still doesn’t seem to me like a bad ethic. But how do you translate that into a Christian ethic? Avoid any intimate physical contact? After all, based on my past experience, there’s not much physical contact I could make that would not at least possibly raise the expectation of more.
That’s the sort of thing I mean. A generalized statement that you should only have ‘sex’ (whatever you may mean by sex) within the context of marriage is a great start I guess. But if I can’t take that generalized statement and work out a nitty gritty sexual ethic that I think would be workable if I were not already married, how can I possibly communicate anything meaningful to my kids?
Nor do I see much of anyone, Christian or otherwise, living a significantly different ethic than I lived before I was a Christian. So where do I even look? At least I’m honest that I don’t get it. My observation is that many Christians, to judge by behavior, are either lying or in self-denial when they say they do get it. Fortunately, I’ve been married for almost 19 years now and hope to be married for many more. Statistically, my wife is likely to outlive me. I pray for that sometimes. So in practical day to day terms, it doesn’t matter all that much to me. I’ll do essentially the same thing either way. But I’ve done a pretty lousy job so far teaching my kids anything coherent mostly because I’m largely clueless. And my wife has been shaped by the same culture that shaped me. She’s closer to whatever the norm is than I am, but when it comes to this, we’re both just muddling through.

Scott M,
I think your connection of sex, procreation and the status of women is worth lots of thought.
Perhaps my expression about freedom and the Pill was too cynical. I agree that cads will be found in every generation. Probably predatory women too, although it was more dangerous for them in the days before the Pill, since abortion was used as “contraception” and childbirth itself was pretty dangerous until the last 100 years or so. Pre-Pill, men knew sex carried the “risk” of pregnancy, and society upped the ante in terms of pressure to marry if pregnancy resulted. Post-Pill, men were free of this risk and societal pressure in ways that women weren’t. Single or divorced men are still better off economically than single or divorced women, not in every case, certainly, but generally; and it’s even harder for single women with children. Marriage benefits children most of all, with potentially all sorts of stability, because of how people usually will deny themselves for the sake of their children. But in comparing the lots of adult men and women only, I think women post-Pill have overall gotten the short end of the stick, so to speak.
I agree there is nothing remarkable about the sexual ethic of Christians in the last number of years. I think we’re all trying to muddle through without very good theology about this whole area, and most people are not honest enough to admit that.
I expectantly hope to find something in Orthodoxy that’s understandable and helpful. Yannaras is helpful in that, as with all relationships, marriage can’t be reduced to an institution or simply a matter of right vs wrong, and that it is a true signpost of the ultimate Love we will experience in union with God. More than that much of his thought, I can’t recapitulate very well.
Dana

Scott,
if I can push back a bit. First of all, the statistical evidence is quite clear – children born outside of a married, two parent home are at higher risk of all sorts of problems. Even when the parents are together but not married, the child is at heightened risk of negative outcomes, especially since unmarried couples are more likely to split than married couples are. Yes, many of these problems are exacerbated by poverty, but married couples almost always move out of poverty in time. The same can not be said of single parents. And even those children being raised by single parents who do have well paying jobs and careers are at higher risk of problems than their peers being raised in intact homes. Every bit of research into the matter has found that even when all other things are equal, single parenthood is associated with a higher risk of negative outcomes.
Of course, statistics are statistics and people are people. Not every married household is going to be superior and not every single household is going to be problematic. Yet, in the aggregate, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that single parenthood is much more likely to result in problems for the child than married parents. Given that, it makes sense that we would encourage people not to have children outside of marriage as a cultural norm. There will always be necessary exceptions, but the norm needs to be married parents. It’s like with smoking; most people who smoke do not get lung cancer. But people who smoke are so much more likely to get lung cancer that we discourage everyone from smoking.
Also, I think you underestimate the negative effect that the sexual revolution has had on women. I am 35 now and have friends and siblings ranging down to 19. And I was a resident assistant in a woman’s dorm in college, so I was in a position to be a confidant for a lot of college aged women. Unfortunately, young women often feel that they have no more choice when it comes to sex than their mothers did back in the 60s. The expectation is that if you are at all romantically involved with someone, you will have sex with them. If you will not have sex with them, then you will not be romantically involved. So, the choice isn’t simply “do I want to have sex?”. The choice is “do I want to have a boyfriend? Do I want to date? Do I want to find someone to marry?” Unless a woman decides that she is willing to forgo boyfriends, dating and finding someone to marry, then she is expected in this culture to be sexually active. There is no real choice in the matter. Many young women don’t even think to lament the loss of having a choice of whether they want to be sexually active outside of marriage. There is no concept that it would be any other way.
The other thing I have seen is that men often do not have any sense of obligation to the women they sleep with. Birth control is her responsibility and if she does get pregnant, abortion is easy and cheap and many young men will pressure a girl they impregnate into getting one. And it’s not just the cads who view things this way – it’s many young men who are simply immature, looking to get what they can in life and have no cultural pressure on them to behave or think otherwise. I have known more than a couple of men who are now paying child support and still cannot believe that there is any justice in the idea that they made an 18 year financial commitment to a woman they had no intentions of marrying simply by having sex with her. As one man told me, “I should have just found the most expensive hooker on the planet and had sex with her. It would have been cheaper.” It’s hardly a picture of healthy male-female relationships on the ground for a lot of people.
Also, I get what you are saying about the connection between women’s equality and sexual “freedom”. However, the truth is that we haven’t ever seen a society with either women’s equality OR sexual freedom before, much less both together. We are probably presuming too much if we assume that the two are necessarily linked. Since neither of these things have really been tried before, we just don’t really know what the actual relationship between them is. The one example I can think of would be the early Christian church. In that subculture, women enjoyed higher status and independence than was the norm pretty well anywhere else. And almost certainly, the sort of sexual freedom that we have today did not exist in the early church. We tend to look at that part of church history as being vanishingly brief, yet it went on for a couple centuries. But it does perhaps point to a time and place where women’s equality and the link between sex and marriage existed side-by-side. I think China since the revolution may be another example, but that’s been such a dysfunctional society in other ways that it’s probably hard to glean much from that example.
At any rate, as someone pointed out above, what I am talking about isn’t really about the church or Christianity. But I think that since the church looks pretty much just like the rest of culture on this issue, we need to start by taking a realistic look at what is actually happening with sex on the ground. I don’t think that even Christians who advocate for abstinence really “gets” what is going on and the reality of the challenges we face. Many Christians today don’t even know what it would look like for things to be different, except that when it was different, there was a bunch of other undesirable stuff going on at the same time. There is a lot to be said about the basis for Christian teachings with regard to sexuality (and it’s not in the least bit a matter of culture). But at this point, most people don’t even really get that there is a problem.

I believe that both Scripture and tradition send a fairly clear message that Christians ought to pursue sexual happiness in marriage and avoid it outside of marriage.
For convenience, I copy-pasted part of the 1 Thess 4 passage below. A couple features that are clear: 1. This instruction was in the authority of Jesus. 2. Sexual immorality is off-limits. 3. “The heathen” do what they do because they don’t know God. Those who know God ought to live differently. 4. There would be those who would reject these instructions but this would mean they were rejecting God, not the men who delivered the instructions.
1 Thess 4 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20thess%204&version=31)
1Finally, brothers, we instructed you how to live in order to please God, as in fact you are living. Now we ask you and urge you in the Lord Jesus to do this more and more. 2For you know what instructions we gave you by the authority of the Lord Jesus.
3It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; 4that each of you should learn to control his own body[a] in a way that is holy and honorable, 5not in passionate lust like the heathen, who do not know God; 6and that in this matter no one should wrong his brother or take advantage of him. The Lord will punish men for all such sins, as we have already told you and warned you. 7For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. 8Therefore, he who rejects this instruction does not reject man but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit.

Rebeccat, being who I am with the sort of personal history I have, I’ve always paid attention to the various studies on risk factors. You shifted again in this one to single parenthood. I do agree that single parenthood is a significant risk factor just as poverty is. However, that’s not highly correlated with ‘out of wedlock’ children. Single parenthood in the US remains most correlated with divorce. While I have seen some studies that attempted to show that children with two parents who were together, but did not get married were at higher risk than those with parents who did. Frankly, I haven’t seen one that was convincing. It’s tricky looking at human behavior and environment and attempting to distill correlated risk factors. I do agree that single parenthood and poverty (which are both big, tangled things themselves) are significant risk factors for children. Neither is the same thing as being born ‘out of wedlock’.
I will comment that, though it was always fighting against culture and had high points and low points, the Church was not simply a place with a higher than cultural recognition of and freedom for women in the first couple of centuries. It continued being such even up into the medieval Roman Catholic Church – which was often a refuge for women in a pretty hostile cultural environment. Again, never perfect and sometimes expressing it poorly. But definitely working against the tendencies and limitations of culture. Most notably, the church insisted on the essential humanity of women. The Reformation was a pretty mixed bag, but certainly by the time of Wesley that had been recovered and reemphasized.
However, the Church is not (or should not be) representative of the culture within which it was embedded. We have lots of cultures throughout human history and the present day. Looking at them I do see a correlation between the impact of reliable contraception on the Western world and the increasing freedom of women. Such things are notoriously difficult to pin down. I certainly wouldn’t elevate it to the level of causation. But I wouldn’t dismiss it either.
Nor, looking at cultures worldwide, will some generic sense of ‘marriage’ have any significant impact on a lot of the factors you cite. Third world, rural areas tend to have a strong cultural view of marriage. It wasn’t the breakdown of marriage that led to the epidemic of HIV and AIDS in Africa. In fact, it was often tribal customs surrounding marriage in addition to things like tribal tattoos and, of course, deep poverty. Perhaps you mean a specifically Christian ethic of marriage? One man and one woman in a monogamous lifelong bond? You do know that that perspective has not often been the normative perspective outside a Christianized culture? And women have usually held the short end of that straw.
I also don’t disagree that ‘sexual revolution’ has carried with it a host of negative consequences. Perhaps chief among them is the sexualization of children and the breakdown of the cultural norm that teens, even older teens, are not viable sexual partners. And believe me, that’s true for both boys and girls.
None of that, however, strikes me as some inevitable or natural consequence of birth control. And it has impacted both men and women. Why do you not feel that men face equal pressure to have sex, whether it’s what they want or not? Or do you buy the BS that young men are nothing but mindless, hormone-driven masses of flesh seeking sex? That’s a caricature and it’s simply not true. I’ve raised and am still raising both sons and daughters. My oldest is 27 now. My youngest is 12. All but my youngest have already been through at least some of the wringer. And even she has a lot on her plate already. There seem to be few boundaries and rules around sexual behavior today. And that affects our boys just as much as our girls.

I will point out that, whatever the societal and cultural norms may have been before the Western “sexual revolution”, it doesn’t much help us in finding a path forward. Little or nothing of that era remains. Even the sexual behavior of seniors, whose early formative culture mostly predates this period, has been radically altered to the point that it doesn’t look drastically different from that of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
I’ve also explored how Christianity interacted with the highly varied sexual cultures it encountered, especially in the first millenium. But I haven’t found a lot that I could distill into anything meaningful today, or at least nothing I could see a way to apply absent the sort of unified church which was both catholic and ecumenical they had. But it’s not just the church. The culture is also unprecendented. While many were distinctly unchristian, all ancient cultures had many rules and customs regarding marriage and sexual behavior. The closest I can discern today is something akin to the Wiccan Rede, “An Ye Harm None, Do What Ye Will”. Yet, while some sorts of behaviors are clearly harmful and pretty much universally condemned, the distinction of ‘harm’ is mostly an extremely fuzzy one. It does not produce a cultural standard.
One thing is clear. We can’t change the behavior of the church by changing the behavior of the culture. But we can’t even do anything to alter the sexual behavior within the church if we can’t both clearly define a workable and detailed sexual ethic (something I mostly haven’t seen) and be something close to one. Our radically fragmented ‘church’ is culturally marginalized and insignificant. There is no struggle between ‘Christian’ and cultural values and ethics, at least when it comes to sex. There are only cultural values. Whether or not someone also wears the label ‘Christian’ statistically seems to have little significance.

Scott, we could go round and round with minutia and details, but my bottom line is that I think that the net result of the sexual revolution, especially for the people Jesus taught us to be particularly concerned about – the poor, the oppressed, etc – have been horrifically bad. I don’t really care about birth control per se. What I care about is all of the harm done to children in particular by the decoupling of sex and marriage, and consequently of marriage and parenthood. 70% of African American children are now born out of wedlock. Those children deserve better. The fact that many white, middle class, church going people navigate these waters better (and even there we’re now up to 1/3 of white kids born out of wedlock) may make our current arrangement seem manageable. But really, that we can look at this privileged groups, see that it works well and ignore the damage done farther down the class line only highlights how callously we view the suffering of others. It is stomach turning for me to contemplate.
Other than that, I could be reading you wrong, but you seem to be speaking to a lot of assumptions about what you think I think rather than to what I said. Perhaps we’re all just pulling out the same time-worn arguments that people go round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round with these day. Of course I know that marriage has looked differently in different places and times, of course I know that marriage customs have been used to oppress women (as have economic systems, styles of clothing, sports, and pretty much every other aspect of human culture. Yet sex, religion and marriage seem to be the only one where the correlation is assumed to be a necessary one.)
I agree that the church cannot change the culture. But when the culture has so completely infiltrated the church, we need to take a look at the reality of what we are dealing with. I am not in the least a black-and-white thinker. But this is one of the few subjects that I do see in very black and white terms – Christians must embrace a sexual ethic where sex and marriage are intertwined. But to even begin to get back there, we must stop with all the obfuscating and make a clear, reasoned presentation of how wrong and damaging the current state of affairs is. We have the tools to model a better way of retaining egalitarian views towards women AND sexual purity within our faith. I’m afraid that I fail to see or comprehend why we’d want to argue against that within our churches.

What seems missing from many (not all) comments in this thread is a carefully thought-out theology of sex. Is intercourse a sacramental act uniting mystically two otherwise “other,” fundamentally different and separate humans, is intercourse symbolic of Christ’s union with and faithfulness to the church? Or is it just one among many appetites, with its own set of pitfalls if exercised unhealthily but otherwise not that different from eating, drinking and sleeping? Or would you articulate it differently altogether?
Doesn’t scriptural teaching on what sex is meant to mean and be and do – the spiritual “why’s” behind the Biblical teaching on sex – have greater force in a discussion among followers of Christ than a mere “Christian sexual ethic” expressed in the form of do’s and don’ts, or a discussion of appetitites, past and current societal norms, and statistics? Not that the latter discussion doesn’t have a place. But I think without a clearly articulated theology of sex, the participants in this kind of dialogue are going to be talking past each other.
I second the applause for Lauren Winner’s book, by the way. I think she does a good job of communicating the Biblical teaching on sex – not just that teaching’s content but its purpose – to a new generation. IMO that is the challenge – how to communicate an old message to a new generation in a fresh way that conveys not just “the rules” but the understanding of life and relationship and God in which those “rules” are there for protection and blessing – the “yes” that Chad M. mentions in post #1. Not to change the standard because it doesn’t fit with this generation’s expectations and experience, and in fact, has never been well-followed by any generation – facts which, though true, miss the point IMO. Humanity hasn’t done a good job of loving our neighbors, either. But that doesn’t mean we should scrap the Biblical standard/goal in favor of a more pragmatic one.

I did not say that the Church cannot change the culture. One need only look at the Roman Empire, at ancient Slavic Russia, at a host of places around the world to see how the Church dramatically changed culture. Heck, even our current Western culture, while post-Christian, owes much to a dynamic and interaction with Christianity. The Church not only can change culture, it must change any non-Christian culture within which it is embedded or it is simply not being the Church.
I did say that this utterly deconstructed, hyper-individualistic, fragmented, and disjointed thing that the American church has become cannot change culture. Nor do I see any way that it can ever do anything but mirror culture save in, perhaps, very small pockets.
I was also pointing out, as more of an outsider than not, that the emperor has no clothes. By and large, American Christianity cannot articulate a sexual ethic that moves beyond fairly useless generalities. Most deny that fact, but the evidence seems pretty clear.
The rest of my pushback was not because I thought, on balance, the whole of the sexual revolution has been a good thing. It’s much my lens, the stuff of my perspective, that I have a difficult time actually distinguishing it or discerning what else our culture might look like. On balance, I do think it’s harmful. But I found your use of statistics and cultural imperatives a little too simplistic. It failed to take into account either global or historical forces and cultures in its analysis. And I think you have to do that to begin to see at all. Statistics can mean a lot of different things, especially in sociology. Moreover, your statement does not lead to a solution. You grant that the larger culture is not Christian, but you seem to feel that the only solution is to somehow bring it back to a state that looks like the Christian norm. That is hardly the only thing marriage looks like or has looked like around the world. In fact, it’s somewhat unusual. I don’t see any way to reestablish that as any sort of norm without reChristianizing the larger culture.
So, do you have any ideas how we do that? I would suggest it might help is we first figure out how to reChristianize the American church when it comes to sexuality. If we can’t even do that, I don’t think we have much of a shot at the culture.
I do appreciate your thoughts. I guess I’ve struggled with this for so long, trying to understand it, and trying to figure out what to communicate to my kids, that I’ve become a bit cantankerous.

To get a better idea of the statistics Rebeccat is referencing, it helps to look at multi-year trends. This is one good report. Looking at the 2005 and 2006 reports, it seems that little has significantly changed in this arena since 1999. Things have been holding pretty steady with minor variation.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr48/nvs48_16.pdf
One interesting thing to note is that for many years, the rate of unmarried births to whites rose even as it fell for blacks so that the two became significantly closer as proportions by the 80s and 90s. One fact you’ll find in the report that is of particular significance is that the percentage of births to unmarried blacks is so high not because the unmarried birth rate has risen. It’s actually dropped. The percentage is so high because the birth rate to married blacks has dropped precipitously.
That brings into question one of Rebeccat’s core assumptions about underlying causes. Might the dramatic increase in black male incarceration rates have something to do with that sort of shift? I don’t know. But it does illustrate the complexity that lies just below the surface of the raw statistics.

Yes, ScottM, you are being cantankerous
We can get that way over our coffee and still be ok with one another.
I will grant that sexual activity that was previously hidden, for whatever reason, came out into the open, and honesty about it, at least, was a good thing. I’m still wary of the “sexual revolution” being deemed a good thing overall, though.
I agree with you completely that American Christianity cannot articulate a sexual ethic, particularly wrt relationships that aren’t going to end up being procreative, and that it needs to be re-Christianized when it comes to sexuality. I understand your holistic view of intimacy, and I believe that all types of intimacy should be expressed in marriage. I don’t believe that men and women in relationships of emotional and and intellectual intimacy necessarily have to end up in bed together. I don’t think sublimation is intrinsically dishonest.
Kathleen Norris writes about the Virgin Martyrs in “Cloister Walk”. One of the main reasons they were martyred was because by not marrying, considering themselves free in Jesus to not marry a non-Christian or not marry at all, they were committing a political act. They were defying the State, which valued a woman only for the ability to produce offspring for the Empire, which was facing a population decline of free citizens. It seems that as members of the Christian community, women were valued for more than reproductive capacity. Such valuing of women must be part of the discussion and the change in attitude. I think a large part of the problem is that overall in this country, women are still not valued as whole humans, either outside the churches or inside most of them. Crass generalization, I know, but there it is.
Dana

The hardest thing to do is to actually look at the lenses through which you perceive the world at large. As I’ve said, the forces typically labeled under the umbrella of the sexual revolution are a part of mine. With that said, I have pointed out a number of outcomes that I think were negative. It’s not that I think it was some wonderful thing. ‘Revolution’ is perhaps a fitting label, as they tend to be ambiguous tumultuous and even violent things. (And there has been much violence unleashed accidentally by the sexual revolution, including the lessening of the barriers that held that minors were not acceptable sexual partners for adults.)
With that said, with both a global and historical perspective, I have a very difficult time perceiving a path toward the sorts of gains we’ve seen for women without loosening the tight coupling between sex and procreation. Oh, it’s been far from perfect and women still are not valued as they should be. But the difference even between the first half of the twentieth century in America and today in America cannot be overstated. I’m utterly and completely a child of the latter half. Heck, I even find the way women were treated in the 50s and 60s unacceptably repressive when I read about them or through the lenses of the poets.
And I don’t see any way that the tight procreation could be broken that would not have led to something like the sexual revolution. That wasn’t the only factor, of course. But it was certainly one of the triggering agents. That doesn’t excuse it. It is what it has been and has left much damage in its wake. The indicators all seem to show that a number of factors seem to have plateaued over the last decade or two. But as I said, it has left little more than the Wiccan Rede in its wake as a cultural sexual ethic. To be honest, I think there are worse ethics than the Rede, in many areas of life, sex included. But as a cultural sexual ethic and rule of behavior it simply isn’t enough.
And that’s even before you factor Christianity into the equation.
That’s probably the best I can do at examining part of my own lens for interpreting the world. I am at least aware that it is part of my lens.
I did not say that men and women couldn’t be emotionally or intellectually intimate without being physically intimate. I said that all of those are so intertwined for me that I have a difficult time disentangling them. On the one hand, it’s not entirely bad to approach things, especially intimacy, with all that you are, whether that all is actually ‘whole’ or not. On the other, it’s caused me a lot of problems when I haven’t been married and left me pretty vulnerable more times than I care to recall. The holistic part was more of a personal thing. I do think we need more of it than we have. I don’t think it should look exactly like me or be acquired the way I acquired it.
The personal ethic I expressed out of that, however, was basically: Don’t lie with your body. It’s hard to explain the way that ethic worked out, at least for me, with out being more explicit than is appropriate. I think some of that, at least, is entirely appropriate for a Christian sexual ethic. But it does seem to rule out most romantic, sensual contact outside marriage – at least in our present world. Either that or you abandon the whole no sex outside marriage thing. Lauren Winner’s story makes sense here. I forget who, but someone told her don’t do anything you wouldn’t do in some extremely public setting. (I forget where.) That’s at least a start toward the sorts of explicit guidelines and boundaries we have to have. This generic ‘no sex outside marriage’ stuff is largely meaningless.
I’ve also studied a lot about Christian history over the last decade plus. At its best, from day one, Christianity acted counter to the prevailing culture in its insistence that women were human beings, were eikons of God, and had intrinsic worth. There have been lots of times when Christianity has been at anything but its best and we do see a lot of that today. But the history of Christianity is filled with examples like the one you gave.
Unfortunately, Christianity has never been as utterly fragmented and voiceless as it is in America today. We can’t establish any coherent sexual ethic within Christianity until we at least begin to heal that. And we won’t even be able to stand counter to culture, much less change it, until we ourselves have internalized and live a truly Christian sexual ethic, whatever the heck that might be.