4
Schizoid Sex
Hijacked by the Hookup Culture
After giving a presentation on apologetics recently at a local church, I was surrounded by several twentysomething young men. “Now we need a talk on how to get a date,” one said with a wry smile. “Maybe you can give us some tips.” As the comments flew back and forth, I discovered that none of these half-dozen young men had ever gone on a date.
Today’s hookup culture glamorizes impersonal sex but gives no clue how to start a real relationship. An evening when you just go out for dinner and have a conversation? None of these young men had ever done it.
At Boston College, professor Kerry Cronin was shocked to learn that none of the students in her senior seminar had ever gone on a date either. So Cronin started including how-to lessons on dating. The final assignment: You must ask someone out on a date. Over the years, Cronin’s “Go On a Date” assignment has achieved considerable notoriety on campus. She has been dubbed the “dating doctor.”1
What is the doctor’s diagnosis? Why have so many young adults lost the ability to form relationships? Because the “social script” they hear most often tells them that having fun means engaging in physical relationships without emotional attachment.
If you have not talked with young people lately, you may not realize how soulless the hookup culture is. A hookup can be any level of physical involvement, from kissing to sexual intercourse. According to the rules of the game, you are not to become emotionally attached. No relationship, no commitment, no exclusivity. The script is that you are supposed to be able to walk away from the experience as if it did not happen.
Researcher Donna Freitas, after interviewing hundreds of students, concluded that the hookup culture “creates a drastic divide between physical intimacy and emotional intimacy.” It teaches young people not to “reckon with someone’s personhood.”2
Does the hookup culture reflect the same personhood concept that underlies arguments for abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia? Surprising as it may seem, the answer is yes. The same Cartesian dualism is responsible for the “drastic divide” that Freitas observed between physical and emotional intimacy. The dualistic mentality encourages young people to disassociate their bodies sexually from who they are as whole persons. It devalues the body and drains relationships of their moral and emotional depth.
Young people desperately need to hear the biblical ethic framed in positive terms showing that it overcomes the two-story divide—that it reintegrates body and person. When young people learn how to “reckon with someone’s personhood,” the result is sexual relationships that are far healthier and more fulfilling.
What Rolling Stone Says
What does it mean to say the hookup culture is based on Cartesian dualism? Most college students have probably never read Descartes. But they can describe the split mindset perfectly. In an interview in Rolling Stone magazine, a student named Naomi said hooking up has made “people assume that there are two very distinct elements in a relationship, one emotional and one sexual, and they pretend like there are clean lines between them.”3
Do you recognize the language of dualism? Young people assume that sexual relationships can be solely physical (lower story), disconnected from the mind and emotions (upper story)—with “clean lines” between them. This is Descartes’s ghost in the machine in a new guise. You might picture the division like this:
Sexual intercourse, the most intimate of bodily relations, has been disconnected from personal relations. Sex is cast as a purely recreational activity that can be enjoyed apart from any hint of love or commitment. All that matters is consent (as though agreeing to perform an act makes it right).
Young people can recite the script by heart, even if they don’t like it much. A college student named Alicia says, “Hookups are very scripted. . . . You learn to turn everything off except your body and make yourself emotionally invulnerable.”4 Another student, Fallon, laments, “Sex should stem from emotional intimacy, and it’s the opposite with us right now.” A senior named Stephanie chimes in: “It’s body first, personality second.”5
Sexuality is treated not as the embodied expression of our selfhood but merely as an instrument for physical release and recreation.
What Miley Cyrus Finds Hard to Do
Living out the hookup script is not easy, however. In her interviews, Freitas learned that students have to work hard to disassociate their feelings from their sexual encounters. They find their meaningless sexual encounters disappointing. They feel hurt and lonely. Privately they admit they wish they knew how to do more—how to create a genuine relationship in which they are known and appreciated for who they are as a whole person. Even Miley Cyrus says, “F—ing is easy. You can find someone to f— in five seconds. We want to find someone we can talk to. And be ourselves with. That’s fairly slim pickings.”6
At the same time, students feel intense pressure not to admit their dissatisfaction with the hookup scene. If you admit that you want more than sex, students told Freitas, you will be labeled needy, clingy, and dependent. A student named Amanda said, “It’s a contest to see who cares less. . . . But if you say any of this out loud, it’s like you’re weak, you’re not independent, you somehow missed the whole memo about third-wave feminism.”7
To suppress their emotions, students often turn to alcohol. Many admit that getting drunk is the only way they can go through with having sex with people they do not like or even know. One student was particularly candid: Though she had a regular hookup partner, she admitted that without alcohol, the two of them could not even sustain a conversation. “We don’t really like each other in person, sober,” she told the New York Times. “We literally can’t sit down and have coffee.”8
George Bernard Shaw highlighted the same problem in his 1932 play Too True to Be Good, even using the image of an upper and lower story. A character says, “When men and women pick one another up just for a bit of fun, they find they’ve picked up more than they bargained for, because men and women have a top story as well as a ground floor.” He adds, “You can’t have the one without the other. They’re always trying to; but it doesn’t work.”9
Today’s young people are still desperately “trying to,” but it still doesn’t work. Freitas writes, “Regardless of what students brag about or tell their friends, most are terrible at shutting out the emotional dimensions of sexual intimacy.”10
The fact that it does not work ought to tell us something. It means the hookup culture rests on an inadequate conception of human nature. People are trying to live out a worldview that does not fit who they really are. Because humans are created in God’s image, the secular view will never quite match their actual experience. The square peg of their convictions will never fit the round hole of reality. As a result, in practice, non-Christians will always run into some point of contradiction between their secular worldview and their real-life experience.
That contradiction provides an opening to make the case that the secular view is flawed. It does not fit reality. Young people are trying to live out a worldview that does not match their true nature, and it is tearing them apart with its pain and heartache.
The key to understanding the secular ethic is that it is based on a materialist view of nature. It tells us that our bodies are products of purposeless, amoral Darwinian forces and therefore they are morally neutral. The implication is that what we do with our bodies has no moral significance. The self is free to use the body any way it chooses, without moral consequences.
“Sex raises no unique moral issues at all,” says Peter Singer of Princeton. “Decisions about sex may involve considerations of honesty, concern for others, prudence, and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect, for the same could be said of decisions about driving a car.”11 For Singer, the act of sex itself is amoral. It has no moral significance. The only moral dimension comes from accompanying attitudes like honesty and prudence. Like driving a car.
What does this amoral view look like in practice? Feminist author Naomi Wolf found out in extensive interviews with students. One young woman said, “We are so tightly scheduled. Why get to know someone first? It is a waste of time. If you hook-up you can just get your needs met and get on your way.”12 This bleak, one-dimensional view of sexuality assumes that sex is just a physical urge—that there is no deeper, more wholistic yearning to connect with another person. Anonymous perfunctory encounters are enough to “get your needs met.”
We might call this the Proverbs 30 picture of sexuality, with its portrayal of someone who has committed adultery: “She eats and wipes her mouth and says, ‘I’ve done nothing wrong’” (Prov. 30:20). In other words, sex is just a natural appetite, like eating. When you feel a sexual hunger, you satisfy it. No big deal. It is a dishearteningly low view of sexuality.
Some may think sexual hedonism gives sex too much importance, but in reality it gives sex too little importance. It treats the body as nothing more than a physical organism driven by physical urges. It treats sex as a strictly physical act isolated from the rich inner life of the whole person. Thus it deprives sex of its depth by detaching it from its meaning as self-giving between a man and a woman committed to building an entire life together.
Under all the hype about sex as fun and games is actually “a fundamental despair” about the body, explains Catholic writer (and former lesbian) Melinda Selmys. “Beneath all the pageantry of free sex and self-love, there is a fundamental belief that the body doesn’t mean anything, that it is insignificant in a literal sense: signifying nothing.” Therefore what you do with the body has no moral consequence. “You can do anything that you like with it,” Selmys says. “You can pleasure it with a vacuum cleaner or . . . you can give it away to anyone for any reason. It’s just a sort of wet machine, a tool that you can use and exchange for whatever purpose suits your fancy.”
When scientists and philosophers decide that nature is just a vast machine, that has implications for morality. The human body becomes a “wet machine.” As Selmys concludes, you must implicitly accept that “your body is not you, it is just a shell, or a juicy robot, that the real you—the disembodied ghost—controls.”13
The ghost in the sex machine.
In literature on the ecology movement, it is often asserted that Cartesian dualism has alienated us from nature, leading us to mistreat and pollute our environment. Yet we rarely make the connection to morality: The same dualism has alienated many people from their bodies, leading them to mistreat their bodies sexually. As Meilander says, the environmental movement has taught us that we should “not treat nature as simply an object over which we exercise dominion.” Yet many people are “strangely unconcerned when we objectify and instrumentalize the body.”14
Feminists complain that sexual hedonism objectifies women, but the problem runs much deeper: It objectifies the human body itself.
“Be Like Porn Stars”
Unfortunately, adult culture is not helping. Sex education courses typically focus solely on the physical dimension: on body parts, health risks, avoiding pregnancy, and the mechanics of sex. Universities invite sex toy companies on campus to display their wares. At Yale University’s Sex Week, porn stars have been invited as speakers, and students are invited to attend workshops on topics such as sadomasochism, incest, and bestiality. “The message: Don’t be boring. Be like porn stars.”15 But sex education programs do not teach how to form and maintain a relationship.
Adult culture is essentially telling young people that they are mature, they are ready for sex, if they can be uncommitted and emotionally detached. The message in this kind of literature, says Shalit, is that those who can separate sex from love are sophisticated. “They are ready to embark on a lifetime of meaningless encounters. Conversely, those who still dream of love are immature, and should return to playing with dolls and trucks until they can be callous enough to seek sexual non-intimacy.”16
Educators are so afraid of being “moralistic” that they submit to a strict code of political correctness governing what they say to students. A UCLA psychiatrist named Miriam Grossman reveals that she was not permitted to counsel students in moral terms of right and wrong—or even to discourage harmful behavior. She grew so frustrated about the limitations placed on her counseling that she wrote a book titled Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student.
For example, Grossman describes a freshman named Olivia who came to see her, in deep depression over her first sexual encounter with a boy who dropped her soon afterward. “Why, Doctor,” she asked, “why do they tell you how to protect your body—from herpes and pregnancy—but they don’t tell you what it does to your heart?”
Why indeed? Grossman asks. “Why are students inundated with information about contraception, a healthy diet, sleep hygiene, coping with stress and pressure—but not a word about the havoc that casual sex plays on young women’s emotions?”17 Despite extensive research, Grossman found virtually no educational materials designed to take young people beyond the sheer physical dimension.
Sex education reduces the meaning of sex to a how-to manual.
It is demoralizing to young people to suggest that the only protection they need is instruction in how to use drugs and devices for safe sex. It infantilizes them by denying them any moral agency in a context where they desperately need to be empowered to act as moral agents—in matters that affect their physical, psychological, and spiritual health. A male student named Vu Le writes in a student newspaper, “I am amazed that there is no academic course or guidance in that all-important area, the Romantic Relationship.”18
And let’s not forget the other segments of adult culture that push young people into early sexual experimentation. Businesses and corporations are complicit in the sexualizing of ever-younger children, producing “slut” style fashions for little girls—all the way down to infant clothing that says “I’m Too Sexy for My Diaper.” Dolls have morphed into “tramps” wearing fishnet stockings, red-hot lingerie, and heavy makeup. Advertisers use sex to sell, filmmakers use sex to entice viewers, musicians incorporate sexualized lyrics into their songs and music videos.
The irony is that when young people experiment sexually, they typically think they are rebelling against adult culture. But in reality they are following a script that adult culture is giving them. They are falling for a sales pitch. The real rebellion in our day is to practice chastity. That requires genuine courage.
“No Names, Just Sex”
Why does secular sexual morality place such a strong emphasis on emotional detachment? Because if the main goal is pleasure, then taking account of the partner as a whole person gets in the way. “When sex is reduced to an exchange of pleasures, the other person’s personality becomes a burden,” explains Selmys.
If the purpose of sexuality is mere pleasure, sooner or later the other person, with all of their personality and their own, separate desires, is going to become burdensome. The ideal, then, becomes “no names, just sex”; the partners use each other to gain a particular pleasure, trying as much as possible, to remain totally separated in their own realms of subjective experience.19
Recognizing the other individual’s personhood is “a burden” to impersonal sex.
The irony is that impersonal sex is rarely satisfying, even to the person who seeks it out. The pleasure of sexual activity is not just physical. When we reach out for another person, we are not driven by a desire for sheer physical pleasure but by a hope for at least some level of personal contact.
William Beardslee, psychiatry professor at Harvard University, says young people are trying to persuade themselves that “true sexual intimacy is unconnected from personal intimacy.” But they are fooling themselves.20 Humans can’t help functioning as a body-person unit—which is just what the biblical worldview says we are.
Christianity is often accused of being negative because of its teaching on sin and guilt. But in reality it has a much more positive view of sexuality than the secular view. As Juli Slattery and Dannah Gresh write in Pulling Back the Shades, “The truth is that you were created for something more! Your sexuality was never meant to be separate from your deepest spiritual and relational longings but to be an expression of them.”21
Porn vs. Intimacy
The most extreme example of depersonalized sex is pornography. The viewer disconnects the woman’s body from any interest in who she is as a person. Pornography tears apart what is meant to be integrated, treating the body as an object or instrument for one’s own purposes.
Tragically, porn is where many young people are getting their sex education today. Naomi Wolf describes students she interviewed at a large university: “It became clear that after a decade of having access to the internet they were intimately familiar with porn, but intimacy—and the hearts of the opposite sex—were more of an elusive mystery than ever.”22
From childhood, young people are awash in sexual imagery, but sexual intimacy is increasingly difficult to achieve.
Even secular researchers are growing alarmed about porn’s harmful consequences. Porn is “a public health crisis,” blared a Washington Post article. “The science is now beyond dispute.” For example, “In a content analysis of best-selling and most-rented porn films, researchers found that 88 percent of analyzed scenes contained physical aggression.” Most of the victims were women. As a result, those who watched mainstream pornography “were more likely to say they would commit rape or sexual assault (if they knew they wouldn’t be caught).”23
Today, the average age that a boy first encounters pornography is nine years old. By the time he is an adult, he has been consuming porn for more than a decade. How does that affect his relationships with real women? Time magazine reports, “Many of them are simply unable to experience a sexual response with a real live woman. They are only able to respond to pornography. In fact, they prefer pornography.”24 In other words, they prefer not going to the trouble of dealing with a real person.
When these men marry, they are shocked—shocked—to discover that porn has destroyed their ability to relate to their spouse. It has trained them to objectify the opposite sex. They literally don’t know how to relate to a woman as a full person.
The first longitudinal study on porn found that men who start watching porn after they marry are twice as likely to divorce.25 Other studies found that watching porn actually shrinks the brain and reduces neural activity.26 There is now firm data showing that porn is addictive, it leads to violence, it destroys relationships, it feeds sex trafficking and prostitution.
Yet, surprisingly, teens and young adults tend to shrug off porn as unimportant. In a Barna survey, they rated it as less morally objectionable than “overeating” or “not recycling.”27 As a result, an organization called Fight the New Drug addresses especially young people with the message that “Porn Kills Love.” For example, one survey found that porn puts enormous pressure on women:
Girls and young women are under a lot of pressure to give boys and men what they want, to become a real life embodiment of what the boys have watched in porn, adopting exaggerated roles and behaviors and providing their bodies as mere sex aids. Growing up in today’s porn culture, girls quickly learn that they are service stations for male gratification and pleasure.28
There’s a reason Jesus said sin gets its hold on us first in our hearts: “Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:28). We could translate that into a modern idiom by saying, “Don’t objectify women. Don’t strip them of their identity as full persons by reducing them to objects of your sexual lust.” Pornography is literally training a generation of young people to violate Jesus’s proscription by engaging in depersonalized sex. And the mental habits taught by porn bleed into real relationships.
The next step, some say, is robotic sex (with sex dolls). Futurists predict that in ten years sex robots will become more popular than porn. The first sex doll brothel has already opened in Barcelona, Spain.29 A materialist philosophy has been teaching people that they are merely complex mechanisms, and now we are seeing the logical outcome—the substitution of machines for real persons. The ultimate depersonalization.
The irony is that science is constantly uncovering new evidence of the profound interconnection between body and person. Pick up any recent book on sexuality and you will read about the role played by hormones such as oxytocin and vasopressin. Scientists first learned about oxytocin because of its role in childbirth and breastfeeding. The chemical is released when a mother nurses her baby, and it stimulates an instinct for caring and nurturing. It is often called the attachment hormone.
Imagine the surprise when scientists discovered that oxytocin is also released during sexual intercourse, especially (but not exclusively) in women. Consequently, the desire to attach to the other person when we have sex is not only an emotion but also part of our chemistry. Oxytocin has been shown to create a sense of trust. As one sex therapist puts it, when we have intercourse, we create “an involuntary chemical commitment.”30
The upshot is that even if you think you are having a no-strings-attached hookup, you are in reality creating a chemical bond—whether you mean to or not. An advice columnist for Glamour magazine warns that because of hormones, “we often get prematurely attached.” Even when you intend to just have casual sex, “biology might trump your intentions.”31
That may be why Paul said, “Whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body” (1 Cor. 6:18). Sex involves our bodies down to the level of our biochemistry.
The same holds true for men. The main neurochemical responsible for the male response in intimate sexual contact is vasopressin. It is structurally similar to oxytocin and has a similar emotional effect. Scientists believe it stimulates bonding with a woman and with offspring. Vasopressin has been dubbed the monogamy molecule.32
As Grossman observes, “You might say we are designed to bond.”33
Paul’s words ring even more true today than in his own time: “Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, ‘The two will become one flesh’” (v. 16). Lauren Winner at Duke University translates Paul’s words like this: “Don’t you know that when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise, whether you do or not?”34
The implication is that repeatedly hooking up involves repeatedly breaking that bodily “promise.” No wonder breakups are so painful that many young adults cultivate a cynical attitude just to overcome the pain. In many cases, their emotional detachment is a form of what psychologists call defensive detachment: I’m afraid you will hurt me, so I will build an emotional wall to avoid being vulnerable to you. As a result, however, deep attachment becomes ever more difficult. Even when young adults want to marry, they have a harder time making a lasting commitment. A YouGov poll found that almost half of millennials have given up the hope—or even desire—for a monogamous relationship.35
The hookup culture is unraveling the social fabric. It produces isolated, alienated adults who come together temporarily for physiological release. By repeatedly breaking up (or never connecting in the first place), many people fail to learn how to form the strong, resilient bonds needed to create happy, fulfilling, long-term marriages and families.
Even pornography has the addictive power it does because it literally changes the chemistry of our brains. Like other addictive triggers, pornography floods the brain with dopamine. That rush of brain chemicals, when it happens repeatedly, rewires the brain’s reward pathway and can become a default setting.
Brain scientists refer to this as neuroplasticity: Neurons that fire together, wire together.
Eventually the brain is overwhelmed by the chemical overload and shuts down some of its dopamine receptors—which means the porn viewer does not get the same “high” and has to seek out more hardcore porn to feel the same dopamine effect. That’s why porn is addictive.36
The latest science is confirming that the human being is a unified whole. The body/personhood divide is not true to who we are. In fact, the reason all the sex education and deprogramming aimed at young people is necessary is precisely because they do not, by nature, thrive on casual, meaningless sexual encounters. They crave emotional intimacy and fidelity.
No Prozac for the Heart
When they fail to find intimacy and fidelity, many people turn to psychotherapy for help. Psychiatrist Dr. Paul McHugh says vast numbers of young women consult him because they keep getting sexually involved with men who don’t want to get married. “There must be something the matter with me,” these women say. “Dr. McHugh, give me a pill.” They’re asking for Prozac to help them get over their hurt and disappointment. “There’s nothing the matter with you,” McHugh tells them. The problem is that the world is pressuring you into “immediately hopping into bed with all these guys”37
Philosophy professor Anne Maloney reports the same distress among her students: “It is no coincidence that the top two prescribed drugs at our state university’s health center are anti-depressants and the birth-control pill.”38
Yet no amount of Prozac or Zoloft will solve this form of depression.
Young men often feel greater pressure not to admit their dissatisfaction with the hookup culture, but many are growing cynical. A Vanity Fair reporter interviewed several young men who use dating apps like Tinder. Some one hundred million people are using their phones as a sort of all-day, every-day, handheld singles club. “It’s like ordering Seamless,” says Dan, an investment banker, referring to the online food-delivery service. “But you’re ordering a person.”
Are the men happy with the “delivery service”? No. They complain that the apps make hookups so accessible that they reduce all incentive to form relationships. “When asked if there was anything about dating apps they didn’t like,” the reporter writes, again and again the young men said, “‘Too easy,’ ‘Too easy,’ ‘Too easy.’” Alex, a twenty-five-year-old New Yorker, lamented, “Romance is completely dead.”39
A young man quoted in Verily says, “I can’t stand how ads and TV shows and pop culture portray the idea that men just want casual relationships. . . . Who has ever been satisfied by that? We all want something that lasts, someone we can lean on and trust. We want authentic relationships that are grounded in sacrifice and not on fleeting feelings and pleasure alone.”40
What the Sex Therapist Prescribes
Roger Libby is a sex therapist who has made the rounds on all the big talk shows like Oprah, Donahue, and Geraldo. His much-touted contribution is to urge couples to engage in a PSD: a Pre-Sex Discussion to get to know one another. With all the flourish of announcing a breakthrough discovery, Libby says sexual relations are more fulfilling when a couple actually talks first. “A PSD is an intimate and entertaining conversation that informs prospective lovers about each other’s feelings, desires, expectations. . . . A PSD encourages mutual honesty; sex without honesty is not meaningful, long lasting, or fun.” Libby concludes that “a properly conducted PSD minimizes dangers and maximizes pleasures.”41
Who would have guessed? If people get to know one another as persons, even a little, they actually experience greater sexual pleasure. That may be why studies consistently show that the people who are happiest sexually are married, middle-aged, conservative Christians.42
How did so many Westerners lose sight of such a commonsense truth? What are the deeper roots of the hookup culture? We can help people gain a truer idea of sexuality if we know where false ideas came from and how they developed. As we learned in chapter 3, after the Enlightenment many leading thinkers began to adopt a materialist worldview, which sees humans as nothing but complex physical organisms. The logical conclusion is that the goal of life is to avoid physical pain and maximize physical pleasure.
What does a materialist worldview do with nonmaterial realities such as moral ideals and principles? Ideals cannot be observed, weighed, or measured in a laboratory. As a result, strict materialists dismiss them as unreal. They endorse a utilitarian ethic in which the only good is pleasure. “The Enlightenment’s great historical watershed lay in the validation of pleasure,” says historian Roy Porter. “The new science promoted mechanical models of man essentially as a machine motivated to pursue pleasure and avoid pain.”43
I was once asked on a radio show, “Why is America moving toward such moral debauchery?” I responded, “It proves the power that worldviews have on our minds. If it is true that humans are just complex machines, operating by stimulus-response mechanisms, the logical conclusion is that they are driven solely by pleasure and pain. Their bodies are pleasure machines. And they may use their bodies any way they want as long as it maximizes physical pleasure.”44
The Religion of Sex
Who are the key thinkers who forged the modern sexual ethos—whose ideas shape what is taught in today’s textbooks, from college down to kindergarten? When we look at the history of these ideas, we find that, ironically, even those who adopt a purely materialist worldview often end up turning sex into a substitute religion. If you picture matter in the lower story, even materialists keep climbing up into the upper story and claiming religious significance for sexuality.
And when sex becomes a religion, then nothing is allowed to stand in its way—especially not Christian morality. All the most prominent sexual theorists have been “morality critics” (to borrow a phrase from philosopher Brian Leiter). They treat morality as an obstacle to human happiness, an evil force from which we must be liberated.45 Let’s meet a few of the most influential, and learn how they shaped today’s politically correct sexual orthodoxy.46
Sigmund Freud: Sex as Instinct
Sigmund Freud fit the stereotype of the German scientist, with his round lenses and pointed white beard, a fat cigar propped between his fingers. Freud was a committed Darwinian, treating sexuality solely as a biological drive. He wrote that pleasure is “the main purpose” of our entire “mental apparatus.” Jonathan Ned Katz, a historian of sexuality, says Freud conceived of a person as “a machine with satisfaction as its mission.”47
Freud conceded that sexual restraint is necessary for civilization, but he taught that for the individual it is harmful and unhealthy, leading to neurosis. He had nothing but contempt for people who kept sex within the covenant bond of marriage: “Only the weaklings have acquiesced in such a gross invasion of their sexual freedom.”48 Freud had an enormous influence in persuading the modern world that sexual liberation is the path to mental and sexual health.
Margaret Sanger: Sex as Salvation
Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was another morality critic. She described the great drama of history as a struggle to free our bodies and minds from the constraints of morality—“the cruel morality of self-denial and ‘sin.’” In her view, sexual liberation was “the only method” by which a person could find “inner peace and security and beauty.”49 It was also the means to advance to the next level of evolution—to “remodel the race” and create “a real civilization.”
Sanger even resorted to explicitly religious language: “Through sex, mankind may attain the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world, which will light up the only path to an earthly paradise.”50
If this isn’t a religious vision, I don’t know what is. For materialist thinkers, immersion in the biological instincts became nothing less than a means of salvation.
Alfred Kinsey: The Pseudoscience of Sex
The 2004 movie Kinsey portrayed him as a heroic pioneer. But Alfred Kinsey was likewise a morality critic. He emphasized repeatedly that sex is “a normal biologic function, acceptable in whatever form it is manifested.”51
To liberate sex from morality, Kinsey reduced it to the sheer act of physical orgasm. He then claimed that all orgasms are morally equivalent, whether between married persons or unmarried persons, between people of the opposite sex or the same sex, between adults and children, between strangers or with prostitutes, even between humans and animals. He ignored the fact that these situations involve vastly different relational, emotional, social, moral, and spiritual dimensions. All of them he labeled simply “sexual outlets,” and he pronounced them all equally acceptable.
As the current slogan goes, “Love is love.”
Like his predecessors, Kinsey was deeply committed to Darwinian materialism, referring to humanity in reductionist language as “the human animal.” Any behavior that could be found among animals he considered normative for humans as well. For example, he claimed that certain mammals are observed to have sexual contact between males, and even across species. Therefore, he concluded that both homosexuality and bestiality are “part of the normal mammalian picture” and acceptable for humans as well.
Kinsey claimed his approach was scientific, yet his research methods clearly were not. His samples included a disproportionate percentage of sex offenders, sadomasochists, voyeurs, exhibitionists, and pedophiles. The pedophiles, in particular, were engaged in illegal behavior. Yet Kinsey took them at their word when they claimed that the children they were sexually assaulting enjoyed the experience.
Kinsey showed no concern about his unscientific research methods because ultimately he was not driven by science. According to Stanford professor Paul Robinson, Kinsey viewed history “as a great moral drama, in which the forces of science competed with those of superstition” (by which he meant religion and morality). He even spoke as if the introduction of Bible-based sexual morality were the watershed in human history, a sort of “fall” from which we must be redeemed.52 Sexual liberation would be the means for saving humans from the oppression of religion and morality.
Wilhelm Reich: New Age Sex
In the 1960s, psychologist Wilhelm Reich became a cult figure in the human potential movement. It was Reich who coined the phrase “sexual revolution” (in a book by that title). He preached a gospel of redemption through complete immersion in the sexual instincts. In his words, “The core of happiness in life is sexual happiness.”53 He promised that all human dysfunctions could be fixed by developing “the capacity for surrender to the flow of biological energy without any inhibition, the capacity for complete discharge of all dammed-up sexual excitation through involuntary pleasurable contractions of the body.”54
The serpent in Reich’s sexual Eden was Christian morality. He denounced it as a “murderous philosophy” that creates guilt and neurosis. A book describing his philosophy is aptly titled Salvation through Sex. It explains that for Reich, orgasm “is man’s only salvation, leading to the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.”55
Robert Rimmer: Sex as “Act of Worship”
Reich’s ideas were widely disseminated through a 1966 novel by Robert Rimmer titled The Harrad Experiment, which sold three million copies and was required reading in college courses on marriage and family. The book is credited with being the main force behind the creation of coed dormitories in American universities. Rimmer’s view of sex is frankly religious. One character states that intercourse “is actually an act of worship.” Another says, “What lovers feel for each other in this moment [sexual intercourse] is no other than adoration in the full religious sense.” Through sex we see that the beloved is “the naturally divine.”56 When I was in high school, a boy I was dating gave me a copy of The Harrad Experiment, obviously hoping to convert me to Rimmer’s religion of sex.
In a postscript to the 1990 edition of the novel, Rimmer wrote that sex can “become the new religion—a humanistic religion, without the necessity of a god.”
Foucault: Sex Is “More Important Than Our Soul”
Clearly, the architects of the sexual revolution were driven by nothing less than a vision of redemption. The philosophy of materialism claims to stay solidly in the lower story, the realm of facts and science. But like everyone else, materialists search for a sense of meaning to life, and as a result they end up climbing into the upper story—even if it means turning materialism itself into a religion.
But why do materialists choose sex as their religion? Because in materialism, the core of human identity is in the biological, the natural, the instinctual—especially the sexual instincts. Sex is, after all, central to the survival of the species. Darwin’s theory of evolution even elevated reproduction to the linchpin of evolutionary progress. Because the theory offers no independent criterion of success, it boils down to differential reproduction—whoever has the most viable offspring wins. Reproduction is the key to evolutionary advance.
Michel Foucault, a French postmodernist and author of a three-volume set on the history of sexuality, writes that in the past, biologists treated sex and reproduction as merely one among many functions of an organism. But in the space of a few centuries, sex went from being just one activity of life to being our core identity. In Foucault’s words, geneticists now “see in the reproductive mechanism that very element which introduces the biological dimension: the matrix not only of the living, but of life itself.” Sex is treated as the “master key” to knowing “who we are. . . . Sex, the explanation for everything.” He goes so far as to say, “Sex is worth dying for.” It is “more important than our soul.”57
Is My Kid Reading That Stuff?
Why should you care what thinkers from Freud to Foucault have written? Because they function as the saints and theologians of the religion of sex. Their teachings shape today’s sexual orthodoxy. Many young people say sex education programs make them feel pressured into having sex. In one study, teens reported that they felt more pressure from their sex education classes than from their girlfriends or boyfriends.58 And no wonder: If sexual liberation is an alternative version of salvation, then sex education classes become recruitment centers.
Many families hope to protect their children from radical ideas by walling off the secular world—supervising what books they read, what movies they see, what music they listen to. But secular worldviews do not come neatly labeled so we can easily recognize them. Instead they mutate into forms that we hardly recognize, becoming part of the very air we breathe. The most powerful worldviews are the ones we absorb without knowing it. They are the ideas nobody talks about—the assumptions we pick up almost by osmosis.
The ideas we have traced from Freud to Foucault constitute the prevailing sexual orthodoxy. It informs the mindset of judges when they rule on sexual issues. It shapes the arguments of legislators when they formulate new laws. It guides the way reporters frame the news. It is the attitude portrayed in TV sitcoms, supermarket tabloids, and magazine articles. It is reflected in the lyrics of popular songs. It permeates virtually the entire entertainment industry. (How many movies have you seen that show sexual restraint as a good thing?)
Most importantly, it is the sexual orthodoxy that shapes the outlook of your children’s teachers and the writers of your children’s sex education textbooks. Virtually all of us have been influenced by these thinkers’ views of sexuality—even if we have never read a word of their writings.
To have independent minds, we must learn where these theories come from and then propose a Christian worldview as a viable alternative.
History bears out what Paul says in Romans 1—that everyone bases his or her life on some definition of ultimate reality. Those who reject the transcendent God of the Bible put something else in his place. They exchange “the glory of the immortal God” for something in creation (Rom. 1:23). In short, they create idols.
Since the beginning of the modern age, many Western thinkers have been materialists. That means they put matter in the place of God as the ultimate, self-existing, uncaused cause of everything else. Matter is their idol. Logically, then, they must define humans solely as material organisms evolving by Darwinian processes. Human behavior is shaped by biological drives and instincts. Liberation of the sexual instinct becomes the path to salvation—to a sexual utopia.59
This explains why it is so difficult to halt the sexualizing of modern culture. Sexual liberation is not just a matter of sensual gratification or titillation. It is a complete ideology, a vision of redemption. To stand against it, we cannot simply express moral disapproval. A person’s morality is always derivative. It stems from his or her worldview. To be effective, we have to engage the underlying worldview.
Body Language
How do we reconnect sexuality to a larger moral universe—to a vision of truth, goodness, and beauty? In a teleological worldview, all of creation declares the glory of God. The fact that humans reproduce sexually is not some evolutionary fluke. It is part of the original creation that reveals the wonder and beauty of its Creator.
The implication is that the body “speaks” its own language. We all know that a smile means friendliness while a punch in the face means hostility. Despite differences among cultures, there are broad similarities. When you hold hands with someone, does it mean anything? Does it communicate care and affection? What about a kiss? What does that communicate?
The poet John Donne wrote that the body is like a book where we read the intentions of the soul: “Love’s mysteries in souls do grow / But yet the body is his book.”60
This explains why it is possible to lie with our bodies. Have you ever kissed or held hands with someone you did not really like? Perhaps because you felt pressured into it? Or because you wanted the person to think you cared more than you really did? In either case, reflecting back on those situations, we can sense that we were lying—that our gestures “said” something that was not true.
That’s why Judas’s method of betraying Jesus was so painfully ironic: “Are you betraying [me] with a kiss?”—of all things (Luke 22:48, italics added).
Gestures mean something. Sexual intercourse, as the most intimate form of physical union, is meant to express the ultimate form of personal union in marriage. Common phrases for having sex indicate that it is the most you can do sexually—it is “going all the way” or “getting to home plate” or “sealing the deal.” That’s why it belongs only in a relationship where you “go all the way” on all other levels as well—when you commit to another person legally, economically, socially, and spiritually. You should become naked and vulnerable physically only when you are ready to become naked and vulnerable with your whole self. As C. S. Lewis put it, those who have sex outside of marriage “are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union.”61
Invariably my students ask, “Isn’t it enough to be in love?” The answer is that even being in love falls short of committing one’s entire self and future in biblical nakedness to another person. Biblical morality asks us to be consistent in what we say with our bodies and what we say with the rest of our lives. To tell the truth with our bodies.
Timothy Keller writes, “Sex is God’s appointed way for two people to say reciprocally to one another, ‘I belong completely, permanently, and exclusively to you.’”62 When we have sex outside of marriage, we are essentially lying with our bodies. Our actions are “saying” that we are united on all levels when in reality we are not. We are contradicting ourselves. We are putting on an act. We are being dishonest.
Some people think it sounds very spiritual to say God is above caring about something so inconsequential as what we do sexually. A Catholic feminist writes, “God does not care what we do with each other’s bodies, he only cares whether we treat each other as persons.”63 But can we really do anything to a person’s body and still respect him or her as a person? Such a sharp body/person division is more Gnostic than biblical. The biblical ethic expresses a rich concept of the whole person as an embodied being. Our bodies matter.
Yada Yada
The first biblical passage that talks about sex is the Genesis account of Adam and Eve, and it speaks powerfully of the interconnection between body and person. “A man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). Does the phrase “one flesh” refer only to the bodily correspondence between the two sexes? Clearly not. The reference to physical unity was intended to express a joyous unity on all other levels as well—including mind, emotion, and spirit. Scripture offers a stunningly high view of physical union as a union of whole persons across all dimensions.
Genesis uses a charming euphemism for sexual relations—the verb to know. “Adam knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain,” her first child (4:1 ESV). The English word know is a translation of the Hebrew yada, which means to know by experience. It is the same word used in that most personal of psalms, “You have searched me, Lord, and you know [yada] me” (Ps. 139:1). Elsewhere the godly king Josiah is described in these words: “‘He defended the cause of the poor and needy. . . . Is that not what it means to know [yada] me?’ says the LORD” (Jer. 22:16). The term carries connotations of a deep, personal way of knowing, and when used as a sexual euphemism, it means that sex is meant to be a profound connection of two persons.
Scripture teaches that the relationship of husband and wife even has the supreme dignity of reflecting the relationship between God and his people. Through the prophet Hosea, God says to the people of Israel, “I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know [yada] the LORD” (Hos. 2:19–20 ESV). Covenant marriage is intended to be a visual image of the human-divine relationship.
In the New Testament, the same imagery of marriage is applied to Christ and to the church as his bride. Paul says, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). And in his vision of the end of the world, John says, “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” (Rev. 21:2). When people witness the loving, faithful relationship between husband and wife, they are meant to see a picture of how much God loves his people.
Creation: Sex Was God’s Idea
How can we gain a balanced understanding of what the Bible says about sex? The Bible teaches that all of creation participates in a great drama of three acts: creation—fall—redemption. If we are ever tempted to think that sex is corrupt or dirty, we need to remind ourselves that it was God who created it in the first place. Sex is not something introduced after the fall. It was part of the original creation of humans in God’s image, which God pronounced “very good.” Having created humans as male and female, God commanded them to “be fruitful and multiply.” Making a culture starts with making babies.
The biblical teaching that we are created in the image of God means that even though humans are part of nature, we do not find our full identity in nature. We cannot be reduced to merely part of the natural world. Even the features we share with other organisms, such as our sexuality, cannot be fully understood in merely biological terms. Sex is not only about biological drives and needs, whether for pleasure or reproduction, but also about the communion of persons. The communion of male and female is meant to mirror the communion of divine persons within the Trinity.
The classic theological definition of the Trinity is that God is one substance in three persons. The practical meaning is that God in his ultimate being is not an impersonal force, as in Eastern religions; instead God exists as distinct persons who give themselves to one another in love. “As human beings are made in God’s image,” writes John Wyatt, “we reflect God’s nature in our personhood; we are created to give ourselves to God and to others in love.”64
That’s why Paul calls the marriage relationship a “profound mystery” (Eph. 5:32). The Greek word for mystery means the revelation of something otherwise hidden.65 Our sexuality is meant to reveal God’s own character. Romans 1 says the created order gives evidence for God, and because our bodies are part of the created order, they too speak of God and give evidence of his character. We have to tune our ears to “hear” what the body says to us of the divine nature. The God who exists as a communion of Persons has created embodied persons who are ordered toward one another physically as man and woman.
The Fall: Torn Apart
Reading further in Genesis, we learn about the second great act in the drama of history—the fall into sin. The text tells us that when the first humans disobeyed God, “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves” (Gen. 3:7). Throughout history, many people have concluded from this passage that the original sin was sex. Otherwise, why the reference to loincloths? But that is a misunderstanding of the text.
Genesis says that in our original created state, man and woman were “naked and without shame.” This fascinating phrase means that in a state with no sin, two persons could be completely open and vulnerable to one another without fear or shame. The integration of body and soul was so complete that the body was a full, honest, genuine, undistorted expression of the person. But after the sin of our first parents, this body-person unity was torn apart. God had warned them that if they disobeyed his word, they would “certainly die” (2:17). Though they did not die immediately, they did experience a beginning of the rending of spirit from body. The body could now be used to lie and oppress and advance one’s sinful goals and agendas against another person. The openness expressed by the original nakedness gave way to blame, accusations, fear, and shame. The first couple began to build walls against one another.
Adam and Eve hid not only from one another but also from God (3:8). In fact, the theme of Genesis 3 is that all relationships are disrupted by the fall, including our internal relationship with ourselves (our psycho-physical unity), our relationship with others, our relationship with God, and even our relationship with nature. Nature now opposes the two fundamental human vocations: the call to work (the imagery of “thorns and thistles”) and the call to relationship (the warning of “pain in childbearing”). Harmony in the created order is replaced by alienation.
As a result of the fall, sex has been twisted and distorted to mean many things beside the one-flesh union that is its true purpose. Today it is increasingly difficult to persuade people that any form of sexual behavior is wrong or bad for us. Many Westerners think the significance of any sex act is all in our minds. We decide what sex means in any particular situation. We impose meaning on it by our own interpretation.
But paradoxically, if sex means whatever anyone wants it to mean, then objectively—in itself—it means nothing. It is literally meaningless. A drummer in Austin, Texas, told Rolling Stone that sex is just “a piece of body touching another piece of body.” It is “existentially meaningless.”66
This “anything goes” view of sexuality is robbing our sexual lives of their depth and significance. No wonder many people keep greedily grabbing at more sexual experiences while finding ever less genuine fulfillment.
Redemption: Good News for Bodies
After the world was broken by sin, God did not abandon it. As Adam and Eve left the garden, God promised a Redeemer who would one day set everything right again. This is act three in the drama of history. Because of the fall, “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” But in redemption, “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:22, 21). Not only our souls but also our bodies will be redeemed.
John Paul II wrote a massive Theology of the Body because he recognized that many of today’s pressing moral issues involve the body. He argues that a key part of the Christian message is the healing of the alienation of body and person. He calls it “the redemption of the body,” a phrase that “refers to the reintegration of bodily sexuality and personhood, that is, to the radical ‘personalization’ of masculinity and femininity.”67
That process of personalization can begin even in this life. The apostle Paul ticks off a list of sinful behaviors, including sexual sins, then says, “That is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11, italics added). In other words, you have been liberated from those sinful, destructive patterns of life. The implication is that it is possible even now to begin to live the resurrected life, with a radical reunification of body and person in our sexual lives.
The Bible presents a balanced view of sex that includes the affirmation of the goodness of creation, realism about sin and the fall, and the healing message of redemption.
Churches need to make that message credible by welcoming those who need healing. A grad student of mine, Katrina, told a harrowing story of growing up in a home devastated by alcoholism and sexual abuse. When she reached adulthood, as so often happens, she replayed the same destructive pattern. But when she witnessed her own children repeating the unhealthy cycle yet again, she finally became determined to break out of it. In desperation, she started going to church and converted to Christianity. But did she talk about her painful past at church? Not on your life. She told me, “I am afraid of people finding out how sinful my past was—afraid of being treated as ‘damaged’ or ‘used goods.’”
How tragic that people are afraid to be vulnerable in the very place where they should be finding healing. Even as churches clearly communicate the moral truths of Scripture, they must also become places of refuge for victims of the sexual revolution who have been hurt by its lies.
Roman Slaves and Prostitutes
In his book Unashamed, Lecrae Moore says he was astonished the first time he attended a Christian conference about sex: “The conference speaker said our bodies were valuable. . . . I’d never connected spirituality and sexuality before. And I had never heard someone talk about how valuable I was.”68
Like Lecrae, many people are surprised when they first learn that the biblical sex ethic expresses a high view of the body. People often think of Christians as prudes and Puritans who hold a negative view of the body and its functions, especially sex. For example, a Salon article charged that the real goal of the pro-life movement is to make it harder for women “to have happy, healthy sex lives.”69 But the truth is that Christianity has a much more respectful view of our psycho-sexual identity.
It is not anti-sex, it is pro-body.
We get a clearer picture of the biblical view if we know something of the Greek language in which the New Testament was originally written. For example, in verses such as Galatians 5:21, Paul says Christians should not engage in porneia (which is the root of pornography). Older translations rendered the word “carousing” or “reveling,” which made it sound like the Bible was opposed to simple fun and partying.
Recent translations use the term “fornication” or “sexual immorality.” But those expressions are still far too tame. The word porneia comes from the word meaning “to buy,” and in the polytheistic literature of the day, it meant “prostitution” or “whoring.” And the practice of porneia was at least as dehumanizing then as it is today.
In ancient Rome and Greece, a porne or prostitute was normally a slave. Sex slaves were often physically abused. “Greek vase paintings show men beating them, evidently for fun,” says classicist Sarah Ruden.70 Horace, the leading Roman lyric poet in the age of Augustus, offers recommendations on how to shop for your sex slave. Comparing it to buying a horse, Horace warns that traders know how to hide flaws, so inspect your wares carefully. Herodas, a Greek writer of the third century BC, tells of a pimp who complained that one of his prostitutes had been abused—she was “shredded” and “torn” by a customer who “dragged her, beat her silly.” Still the pimp immediately tries to sell her to a new customer, inviting him to “bruise your goods up any way you want.”71
The essence of porneia, then, “was treating another human being as a thing,” Ruden explains. What Paul’s early readers would have understood is that it is no longer acceptable to treat a person as an object.72 “Put to death” the old life, Paul says, with its porneia and other sins (Col. 3:5). The body is not meant for porneia “but for the Lord” (1 Cor. 6:13).
Bear in mind that this was an era when for a male or female slave to refuse porneia could mean capital punishment. Some of the early martyrs were slaves who proclaimed their freedom in Christ by refusing to sexually service their masters—and were executed for it. Potamiaena was a slave in Alexandria, Egypt, whose master was so angry when she refused his advances that he reported her as a Christian to the prefect. He, in turn, threatened to hand her over to the gladiators to be gang-raped, but she persuaded him to execute her instead by slowly immersing her in boiling pitch. The beauty of her character as she faced death inspired the conversion of several other people, including one of her guards, Basilides, who was likewise martyred.73
Christianity gave people the courage to say no to coercive sex and forced marriages, even if it sometimes meant arrest, imprisonment, and death. As Jones writes, “True consent was a rarity in the world in which Christianity got its start. Christianity, we might say, invented consensual sex when it developed a sex ethic that assumed that God empowers individuals with freedom.”74
From the beginning, Christianity was not traditional; it was radically countercultural.
Sex—“As Spiritual as Preaching”
Undergirding the Bible’s sexual morality is a remarkably high view of creation. When Paul argues against sexual immorality, how does he do it? By denigrating sexual pleasure? No, by elevating the body. “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Should I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never!” (1 Cor. 6:15). Paul’s rationale for sexual morality is that your body has the dignity of being a member of the body of Christ, the locus of his presence on earth.
Paul then says something truly stunning: “Your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit” (v. 19). The temple was sacred space, where people went to meet with God. Astonishingly, this passage is saying that your body is where people will meet God. And other people’s bodies are where you will see God.
Christians need to shake themselves free of the lethargy that settles in after hearing these phrases for years, perhaps since childhood. In their original historical context, these verses were astonishing. In the ancient world, virtually all the major “isms”—Platonism, neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Hindu pantheism—taught a low view of the material world. In these philosophies, salvation was conceived as a complete break between matter and spirit, a flight from the physical world. To make that break, adherents adopted a regimen of asceticism to suppress bodily urges and desires.
As we saw in chapter 1, to some extent even Christians were influenced by asceticism, which led to the sacred/secular split. One of the most revolutionary themes of the Reformation was its rejection of the sacred/secular split and its affirmation of the sacredness of the created world. At the dawn of the Reformation, Martin Luther left the monastery and got married. The former monk married a former nun. With that single act Luther said more than all his words could on the dignity of marriage and the value of family in a biblical worldview.
The term “puritanical” is often used to mean a mindset that is stern, severe, and otherworldly. But in reality the Puritans shared the Reformation view that all of life is sacred. The Puritan preacher William Perkins insisted that sex is as “spiritual” as preaching: “Yea, deeds of matrimony are pure and spiritual . . . and whatsoever is done within the laws of God, though it be wrought by the body . . . yet are they sanctified.”75
Donn Welton summarizes the effects of the Reformation by saying, “Perhaps nothing sets it in contrast to medieval Christendom more than the Reformation’s rejection of its denigration of the body. Within certain moral boundaries, the powers of the body were fully celebrated. Once again the old texts were allowed to sing. ‘I will give thanks to Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made,’ says the Psalmist, who continues, ‘Wonderful are thy works’ (Ps. 139:14).”76
The new attitude applied especially to sex. Medieval theologians had typically interpreted the Song of Solomon allegorically, as speaking of love between God and the soul. Of course, all love reflects divine love on some level. But now the Song could be understood more straightforwardly as a celebration of the delights of sensuous love: “My beloved is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts.” “Your lips drop sweetness as the honeycomb, my bride; milk and honey are under your tongue.” “Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my beloved among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade, and his fruit is sweet to my taste” (Song 1:13; 4:11; 2:3).
The language is rich and poetic. As Christian ethicists Scott Rae and Paul Cox write, “The royal couple in the Song revel in each other’s love, exhibiting a depth of passion that most couples would like to reproduce in their own marriage.”77
The Hebrew language is even more explicit in its sensual descriptions than the English translation lets on. “His body [or member] is like shiny ivory [or an ivory tusk] covered with sapphires” (5:14 EXB). As Old Testament scholar Tremper Longman writes,
The Hebrew is quite erotic, and most translators cannot bring themselves to bring out the obvious meaning. . . . There is no shy, shamed, mechanical movement under the sheets. Rather, the two stand before each other, aroused, feeling no shame, but only joy in each other’s sexuality.78
In Proverbs, the Bible literally commands husbands to be “intoxicated” with their wives’ breasts: “May her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be intoxicated with her love” (Prov. 5:19). In a charming but realistic feature of Old Testament law, a newlywed husband was not to be drafted into the military or any other government service: “If a man has recently married, he must not be sent to war or have any other duty laid on him. For one year he is to be free to stay at home and bring happiness to the wife he has married” (Deut. 24:5). This is an astonishing departure from the low view of women in the surrounding polytheistic cultures. Ancient Jewish law was literally telling husbands their job is to “bring happiness” to their wives.
What about Paul’s words that it is “better to marry than to burn with passion” (1 Cor. 7:9)? This is often interpreted negatively, as though Paul is saying you should get married only if you cannot control yourself. But “burn with passion” is a translation of the Greek word pyroutsthai, which was a metaphor meaning to be “frustrated in love.”79 That is, it implies being passionately in love. The verse should be understood against the backdrop of Roman culture, where sexual passion was not thought to be important for marriage. Most marriages were arranged. Spouses were selected not for love but with an eye to status, money, and legal heirs. For sexual fulfillment, a man sought out slaves and prostitutes.80 The remains at Pompeii reveal a sex-saturated culture full of brothels signposted with erotic frescoes tempting passersby with phrases such as “Hic habitat felicitas” (Here happiness resides) or “Sum tua aere” (I am yours for money).81 What Paul is really saying, then, is that if you find yourself with a passionate attraction to someone, by all means, go ahead and get married. Channel your sexual energy into marriage.
Paul put the sexual genie into the bottle of marriage. By forbidding men to have sex with slaves, prostitutes, or other men, the Bible was saying that all of a man’s erotic desire, affection, and sexual energy should be focused on his wife. That sparked a dramatic social transformation and had an enormous impact in elevating the status of both women and marriage.
What If You’re Single?
At the same time, the Bible does not ignore the single life or treat it as having a lower status than marriage. Today the church is tragically behind the times in addressing the growing number of singles. Paul makes it clear that being single has distinct advantages. Single people can give themselves more wholeheartedly to a calling and a ministry (see 1 Cor. 7). For those with a passion to serve, the laser focus that is possible for singles can be a genuine blessing. It can answer the longing of their hearts to have a deep impact. It frees up their time and emotions to love and serve on a wider arena than married persons, who have a moral obligation to put their family first. The Bible maintains a unique balance by treating both marriage and singleness as equally valid and valuable forms of life and service.
A few years ago I met a European filmmaker whose job involved traveling around the world to produce Christian documentaries. Though he was blond and attractive, I noticed that he was not wearing a wedding ring.
“I knew from the beginning that this job requires too much travel to allow me to do justice to a wife and family,” he explained. “I decided to remain single so I could pursue this unique form of ministry.” The church needs to find ways to honor and support singles for the distinctive contributions they make. Would the apostle Paul have been able to take his missionary journeys if he’d had a family to take care of? No wonder he talks about the benefits of the celibate life. Singles have an opportunity to be on the front lines of ministry.
The New Testament church was impressed by Jesus’s teaching that there will be no “marrying or giving in marriage” in heaven. If marriage is a symbol and sign of the union of God with his people, then in heaven we will not need the symbol because we will enjoy the reality. From the beginning, the church has borne witness to this eschatological hope by supporting a vocation to the single life.
Some of the early martyrs were women who rejected suitors or arranged marriages in favor of remaining single—an option that was not tolerated by the surrounding culture. Agatha of Syria refused several offers of marriage, especially from a Roman magistrate named Quintilian, who tried to coerce her by denouncing her as a Christian (this was during the persecution of Decius in AD 250–253). When she did not change her mind, she was tortured and eventually died in prison. Agnes of Rome repeatedly refused offers of marriage from high-ranking suitors, until one of them denounced her as a Christian. She was executed during the reign of Diocletian in AD 304. Lucy rejected an arranged marriage in order to devote her life to the Lord and to distribute her fortune to the poor. Her betrothed denounced her as a Christian and she, too, was executed during the Diocletian persecution.82
Those who rejected marriage were announcing that the Christian life of community and service offered a radically different path to meaning and fulfillment. Their model was Jesus himself, who lived a fully human life without sex, romance, or marriage. The lesson is that sex is good, but it should not be made an idol. Sex and marriage should not be elevated to the meaning of life.
Intentional Communities
Perhaps the most oppressive fear for single and divorced people is loneliness. But singles should not be cut off from opportunities to form deep, nourishing, intense, intimate relationships, especially in the church. Jesus himself said, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). For whom? For one’s friends.
In our sexualized culture, we tend to equate sex and intimacy. We do not think people can be fulfilled without a romantic partnership. But most other cultures have had a richer understanding of friendship.
In pre-industrial societies (which includes most of human history), when home industries produced most of the products we now buy from stores, there was always room for another adult in the home—another pair of hands to help with baking bread, churning butter, weaving cloth, planting wheat, milking cows, tending horses, and other chores. Unmarried adults did not face the prospect of coming home at night to an empty apartment. They could be an integral part of an extended household.
Even a generation ago, there was less pressure to marry and greater acceptance of alternatives, such as extended families. My great uncle remained single all his life, sharing a household with his two unmarried sisters—just like Lazarus in Jesus’s day, who shared a household with his sisters Mary and Martha. In many cultures, this is still common. In my neighborhood, Christian refugees from Egypt recently moved in across the street, and the family includes an unmarried aunt living with them.
In earlier ages, the church also took the initiative to create structures for single people to live in community—namely, monasteries and convents. Protestants shut them down because they saw them as an expression of the sacred/secular split. But in the process, they lost something vital that they have not replaced. Monasteries provided recognized group-living situations where single people could experience intimate, committed relationships while practicing ministry.
The challenge today is to create new structural supports for the practice of celibacy—structures that integrate singles into our families and churches again, especially older singles who are often overlooked.83 Some churches have fostered intentional communities (families and singles living in the same apartment complex, for example). In 2016, Christianity Today ran an article on “cohousing,” a growing trend to share housing to overcome endemic isolation and loneliness.84
Finally, Christians need to start their own “Go On a Date” courses for singles who would like to get married but have lost the art of dating. I hear constantly from young adults like my students, who go out in groups but never learn how to spend one-on-one time with a person of the opposite sex. A college student named Mark observes that the church has responded to the sexual revolution “by teaching rules rather than training in social skills.”85 The church should take the lead in teaching practical relationship skills.
Turning Babies into Enemies
Our view of sex has repercussions for our understanding of marriage, family, children, and society. For example, Jennifer Fulwiler is a convert to Catholicism, yet for years after her conversion, she remained in favor of abortion. Why? Her answer gives an invaluable insight into the way many of our secular friends think.
Fulwiler explains that her attitude was shaped by the secular view of sexuality. The literature used in sex education courses, she says, was geared almost exclusively to questions of technique—the “how-tos” of sex and contraception. Rarely did the materials even mention words such as love, marriage, family, or children. “The message I’d heard loud and clear was that the purpose of sex was for pleasure and bonding, that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point of being forgotten about altogether.”86
After years of public school sex education, Fulwiler explains, “I thought of pregnancies that weren’t planned as akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street: something totally unpredictable, undeserved.” She saw abortion as a humane way to protect women from something akin to a natural disaster. “I didn’t want women to have to suffer with these unwanted pregnancies that were so totally out of their control. . . . Babies had become the enemy because of their tendencies to pop out of the blue and ruin everything.”
Babies had become the enemy. Just as in warfare, societies tend to dehumanize the enemy in order to justify killing them.
Even materials written by Christians tend to downplay the connection between sex and babies. After her conversion, Fulwiler and her husband watched a video series on marriage by a nondenominational Christian group. “In the segment called ‘Good Sex’ they did not mention children or babies once. In all the talk about bonding and back rubs and intimacy and staying in shape, the closest they came to connecting sex to the creation of life was to briefly say that couples should discuss the topic of contraception. Sex could not have been more disconnected from the concept of creating life.”87
In a culture that says we have a right to the pleasures of sex, while denying its biological function, many will end up treating babies as the enemy—intruding where they are not wanted or welcome. We cannot address abortion effectively unless we address the secular view of sex. As Fulwiler observes, “A society can respect human life only to the extent that it respects the act that creates human life.”88
G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “Sex is an instinct that produces an institution. . . . That institution is the family; a small state or commonwealth,” which includes economic interdependence, social responsibility, raising children, education, recreation, shared worship, and charity to outsiders. You might picture the institution of the family as a house, Chesterton adds: “Sex is the gate of that house. . . . But the house is very much larger than the gate. There are indeed a certain number of people who like to hang about the gate and never get any further.”89 But most of us would say there is something very shortsighted about just hanging around the gate.
Christianity is farsighted: It offers a fulfilling, multidimensional view of sexuality as the gateway to many other meaningful layers of life.
A little-known fact is that even with sex education programs that treat teen sex as a normal rite of passage, even with the glorification of casual sex in the media, more than half of teens are not having sex. A 2016 report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reveals that nearly 60 percent of high school students today have not engaged in sexual activity—an increase of 28 percent since 1991.90 It’s time for public school sex education courses to start offering positive support to these teens.
Alternative programs do exist. Sexual Risk Avoidance (SRA) programs address the whole person, helping teens to set life goals and develop the skills for reaching them. SRA programs are not abstinence-only programs. They include instruction on contraception, but they “avoid turning sex education classes into condom advocacy sessions.”91 These programs unequivocally encourage teens to wait for sex. Research shows that students are no less likely to use contraception if they do become sexually active, but that they delay sex longer and have fewer partners.
Christian teens need these skills as much as anyone else. A sixteen-year-old girl who had recently lost her virginity wrote on a Christian advice site, “I don’t think sex has anything to do with the fact that you’re married or single. I think it’s a choice each person has to make by asking themselves if they’re prepared for the outcome if something goes wrong.”92 This teen may go to church, but she clearly had absorbed a secular theory of sex as nothing but a pragmatic decision, based on weighing the costs and benefits.
Even more surprising, in a ChristianMingle survey, 61 percent of self-identified Christian singles said they were willing to have casual sex without being in love. Only 23 percent said they would have to be in love. And only 11 percent said they were waiting to have sex until they are married.
On the internet, I once came across an article advising college students how to have a “happy hookup.” The author recommended getting “clear consent and mutual agreement to engage in sexual acts.” Then “the whole hookup experience will be more positive for everyone involved.”
I glanced at the author’s bio, and was surprised to discover that she was a student at a conservative Christian college.93
It’s clear that even in Christian circles, telling young people to “just say no” is not enough. A young woman recently told me, “The main message I got growing up in church was, ‘Don’t get pregnant.’” But a solely negative approach often leads to hypocrisy. Years ago, our family attended a highly respected Bible church until our high school–age son confided that he was deeply unhappy in the youth group. “The kids at church are worse than the kids in my public high school,” he said. “They drink more, they use more bad language, and they’re constantly talking about their sexual relationships.” Yet the church leaders were unaware because the teens were careful to conceal their behavior.
Young people require more than rules; they need reasons to make sense of the rules. They desperately need a worldview rationale to counter the “no big deal” view of sexuality all around them, from movies to music lyrics to sex education materials.
Imagine a child taught a “no big deal” view of food. That food is just about pleasure. That it does not matter what you eat as long as it feels good. That food is a strictly private matter and no one can judge whether any particular food is good or bad for you. That you might not like broccoli, but that’s okay because what’s good for me may not be good for you. It’s all a matter of personal preference. If a child hears this script his entire life, he will believe it and eat a steady diet of cookies, pizza, and ice cream—and then have no idea why his body is not healthy. The child has been given no tools to understand the connection between food and the biological facts of nutrition. He needs information to understand what his body actually needs to thrive.
In the same way, young people are not being given the tools to understand the connection between sex and what the whole person needs to thrive. Sex is not merely a matter of private preference, any more than food is. Young people need information on how sex relates to an objective moral order.
A 2017 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report found that teens who abstain from sex are also more likely to engage in a wide range of other healthy behaviors, from eating breakfast to exercising to getting enough sleep. They are also less likely to smoke, use drugs, suffer depression, or report dating violence. Why do healthy behaviors tend to cluster in this way? Researchers do not know. But in the words of Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family, “Our children should know there’s very compelling scientific evidence . . . showing how saving the precious gift of their sexuality for the safe harbor of marriage is nothing about old-time moralism or unhealthy sexual repression. Just the opposite is true.”94 It is part of an overall pattern of healthy and life-giving choices.
It is not enough for churches to teach the biblical rules of behavior as so many “dos and don’ts.” They need to break out of in-house jargon and learn to speak the language that young people are absorbing from the postmodern culture around them. They need to explain why a secular worldview is ultimately dehumanizing and unfulfilling. And they must make a persuasive case that biblical morality is both rationally compelling and personally attractive—that it expresses a higher, more positive view of the human person than any competing morality.
Dear Student: A “Real Sex Week”
How can we educate people in a more wholistic and biblical view of sex? One university student took things into her own hands. Sade Patterson, president of Students for Life at the University of New Mexico, grew concerned after the school joined other universities in holding a “sex week.” Workshops featured titles like “How to be a Gentleman and Still Get Laid” and “How to Have a Successful Threesome.” Erotic performers were invited, with names like “Dirty Lola” and the “Pussy Posse.” Organizers walked around dressed in genitalia costumes to “do away with the shame” associated with sex.
“The pattern of objectification and a lack of responsibility became evident,” Patterson writes. “It was clear organizers had an agenda—teach my peers that anything goes, and there are no consequences.”
Patterson decided to host what she called a “Real Sex Week.” Here is her description: “We began with a workshop discussing the male and female body, the biology behind intercourse, and how the act of sex affects our minds and relationships, linking humans chemically, and contrasting the notion that one-night stands have no impact on women’s psyches.” The university-sponsored sex week had assured students that abortion has no lasting harmful effects, but “the women who attended our seminars were indeed in pain from their choice to abort, and received forgiveness and healing through the night filled with tears, hugs and words of encouragement.”95
Pregnant students were connected to support groups. As Patterson explains, “When a woman becomes pregnant while still in school, the two major pressures she faces are to drop out or have an abortion. Not enough men and women are empowered and supported to continue their education and parenthood.” Patterson speaks from experience, having become pregnant herself while a student. More than twenty organizations set up tables offering information on health clinics, pregnancy centers, parenting programs, child care assistance, counselors, sexual assault awareness, and more.
Radical students did not appreciate Patterson’s new version of sex week. A student group promoting abortion (Alliance for Reproductive Justice) stirred up opposition, teaming with Planned Parenthood and an organization selling sex toys (Self Serve Sexuality Resource Center). They tore down Patterson’s promotional posters, set up competing pro-abortion sessions, denounced the event as “homophobic,” and demanded that the university president shut it down. They set up tables in front of events to dissuade students from attending. They dressed up in their genitalia costumes again and handed out condoms.96
But Patterson persisted, convinced of the need to offer an alternative to the culture of promiscuity on campus. Countering the body/person divide, she said, “Our biology actually points to being in a monogamous relationship.”97
Today the sexual revolution has gone even further, not only tearing apart body from person but also separating the body from our internal sense of gender identity and sexual desire. The two-story dichotomy is at the root of theories that defend and justify homosexual practice. In the next chapter, we learn how we can become equipped to respond more effectively.