How One Youth Pastor Teaches Sexuality to Youth
About two years ago, I met with most of the parents of our youth at our church. The reason I’d gathered them was because of our upcoming youth group series on sexuality, entitled God and My Sexuality. I knew there’d be questions, but I also knew the situation was dire. There’d been a pronounced moral shift in sexual ethics, even amongst churches. While the reasons for this shift are many, I highlighted one in particular:
The first [reason for this shift in the church] is the failure of the church to provide a wholistic sexual ethic that could bear up to the weight of the sexual revolution that has done nothing but pick-up speed. This is not to say that some didn’t try. One such attempt was the “purity movement” championed by many working with youth, the most famous of these being Joshua Harris, whose book I Kissed Dating Goodbye became a central text of this way of thinking. The purity movement emphasized teaching certain practices and concepts that revolved around the necessity of “purity” in sexual relationships, and this purity was defined almost exclusively as a lack of physical contact before marriage. Most of the focus was on waiting until marriage, and the promise often held out was that marital sex was infinitely better than these other, impure options.
There is no need to highlight the recent deconstruction of this type of thinking. Yet what should be pointed out is that an entire generation of Christian teenagers were given a truncated understanding of their sexuality that could not stand up to the attacks being laid against it. The error lay not in that their teachers were trying to hold up the biblical standard as the world went astray, but actually (as Harris himself has admitted[1]) that they taught certain practices and concepts that were not in themselves biblical. It vaulted a very specific (and idealistic) version of marital sexuality as the answer to the sexual problems of the late 20th and early 21stcentury, an answer that does not find itself in the Bible. They were protecting certain culturally conservative norms (such as courting), but not bringing students to see the whole witness of Scripture and Christian history as to their bodies, sexuality, and desire.
According to reliable reports, the murderer responsible for taking the lives of eight women (six of Asian descent) last week may have been influenced by this kind of thinking. David French has written a well-researched analysis of this,but suffice it to say that there seems to have been some form of “purity culture” sexual ethics in the killer’s experience with church. While it’s best not to jump to conclusions, I wanted to give you some insight into how the I and my awesome group of leaders teach sexuality to youth, and maybe some thoughts for you as well.
What is “Purity Culture”?
First, what exactly are we talking about when we talk about “purity culture”? Well, I think the easiest way to understand it is that “purity culture” reinterprets all biblical teaching on sin, grace, and the body in terms of one’s sexual activity. The whole story of salvation becomes a story, not of movement from darkness to light in all things, but primarily in one’s sexuality. The only litmus test of a true Christian becomes, not renewal by the Holy Spirit, but rather one’s spotless sexual history. The “purity culture” way of thinking turns all desire for sex into bad desire (contrary to an entire book of the Old Testament: Song of Songs) and tells young people (predominately young women) that their bodies are dangerous tools of temptation for men. Modesty, rather than becoming a way to honor our bodies in specific contexts, becomes really a way to ensure that men don’t get tempted, and often women are responsible for such weakness in men’s eyes (but see who’s to blame in Matthew 5:28-30!). All this teaching often boils down to women being simultaneously temptations for men and irrevocably tarnished for any sexual mistake.
Like I wrote above, the intentions were often good when this kind of teaching became the norm, but it was (and remains) incredibly harmful in its conclusions. It is a quick jump from teaching youth (without any other caveat) that sex is dangerous to the association of sexual pleasure in marriage as wrong (especially for the wife). It is a quick jump from teaching youth (without any other caveat) that sex is wrong to the association of irrevocable guilt and shame with all past sexual mistakes (which often leads, actually, to more weakness in sexual matters). And most importantly, it is a quick jump from saying that women have to always be aware of men’s weaknesses to the association of women’s bodies with sin and temptation. None of those conclusions are biblical, and it is in their emphases that we’ve seen many problems in Christian couples (an obsession with pornography, abuse of women, sexual disfunction) not diminish but multiply.
What Do We Say Instead?
But we have to say something. Sexuality (as we’ve seen over and over) is powerful. The opposite danger of the “purity culture” teaching is that we’d throw out the baby with the bathwater, and we’d find ourselves affirming what Scripture condemns (calling “evil good and good evil”, Isaiah 5:20). Where do we go?
Well, the basic outline of the youth leader’s teaching on sexuality is this:
God Lovingly Designed Every Part of Me to Desire Him and Others in the Way that he Commands.
This statement, to us, encapsulates three major points about how the Bible understands human sexuality: (1) God’s loving design of our bodies to “fit” with another, (2) God’s loving design of sexual desire to lead us to intimacy with one another and ultimately him and (3) God’s loving design for the way in which we enact those desires.
1. God lovingly designed my body (down to its sexuality)
We start, not with actions, but with our identity as designed by God (male and female), lovingly created and connected to one another in our bodies as well as our souls (Genesis 1:26-28, 2:24; Song of Songs 7:10). The starting point of the biblical understanding of sexuality is that sex is an integral part of God’s design of bodies, not just of humanity but of all of life. Man and woman are created as different with the intention of fruitful and joyous union, as is the rest of the created world. Christopher West writes:
Open your window, and you might hear the mating cry of the crickets or the birds. Take a walk through the woods and you might hear the love serenade of the croaking tree frog…Every living thing in creation is designed to reproduce. Every plant, every tree, every shrub, every blade of grass tells the story of a seed that found purchase in fertile soil…one has to be blind (or stuck in a flat, 2D vision of things) not to recognize this unending ‘song’ of love and life everywhere.[2]
Human beings thus “fit” in the universe: we are sexual beings designed by God in our very bodies to “be fruitful and multiply.” “Sex,” writes Peter Kreeft, “is something you are, not something you do.” [3] The distinction of male and female is not arbitrary, misogynistic, and merely cultural. It is integral to God’s design. The first thing to teach youth, as far as the Bible is concerned, is that God lovingly created them as sexual beings, and that this is a good thing. This means all bodies, regardless of their biological sex, are equally designed and formed as sexual. It is an integral part of the created world’s design by God. While the fall did indeed radically affect this good design, it in no way destroyed it: God still lovingly designs bodies in this way (Psalm 139:13-14).
2. God lovingly designed my sexual desire
The second point in discussing sexuality has to do with sexual desire. As we’ve said, God created human beings as sexual, and that goes all the way down to their physical, biological sex (male or female). But it is also important to emphasize that, as sexual beings, our sexual desire is also God’s creation. Far too many Christians hold deep in them the teaching that sex is a kind of necessary evil, that sexual pleasure is to be expunged, and that only sexual acts which are the reasoned result of procreative duty are allowed by God. Their own sexual lives are thus marked by the tension of temptation and guilt, by cycles of resistance and feelings of shame. They fall into the age-old trap described by Solomon: “Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant” (Prov. 9:17).
This trap is avoidable by the simple affirmation that our sexual identity, as defined and decided by God, is part of his good design, and that includes sexual desire. Sexual desire finds itself as part of the cosmic story of God desiring to be with his people, and of us desiring him “as a bride adorns herself with her jewels” in anticipation for the wedding day (Isa. 61:10). Marital love is thus seen as a sacred emblem of that union of God with his people, a redemptive relationship in which God’s original design for our sexual souls is re-fashioned and brought into a new beauty.[4]Marriage is now thought of, not as lust insurance, but rather as a beautiful mystery, one in which two people can say:
I am my beloved’s, and [their] desire is for me. (Song of Solomon 7:10).
And when they say that, they point ultimately to that yearning for God that David expresses:
As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? (Ps. 42:1)
Again, the fall has deeply affected us, even down to our sexual desires. More often than not sexual desire is disordered, that is, out of line with God’s command. But, in itself, the desire for sex is as natural for human beings as breathing and eating. God designed it.
3. God lovingly designed the way we enact our sexuality
If you’ve read all that came before with the constant refrain of “yes, but what about…!?”, here’s your answer. The biblical understanding of the rightness or wrongness of a sexual act is primarily reliant on its context. When we read about how God intended sexual desires and sexual bodies to actually be fulfilled in sexual matters, we see that sexual intimacy is exclusively pointed toward male-female marriage (see Genesis 2:24 and Matthew 9:4-6). The “one flesh” of marriage (which is sexual intimacy, among other things) is unique, good, and holy.
This is rooted, not in a suspicion of bodies, but rather in an appreciation of their great value in God’s sight. One of the biggest problems with pornography, for example, is not that it shows you something which is essentially bad (sex), but that it turns bad what was meant to be a good. In other words, it degrades the holiness and honor of human bodies (again, especially women’s bodies) in sacred relationship to one another. It takes what is sacred (and therefore private) and makes it profane. It’s the sexual equivalent of touching the ark of covenant without permission: it dirties what was designed to be a great gift (see Paul’s analogy in 1st Corinthians 6:18-20).
This is where the “morals” come into play. And the primary moral for how to navigate sexual matters is one which the church has used as foundational for centuries: chastity. Chastity, unlike the purity movement, is “the virtue that both expresses and preserves the dignity of what is a genuine and surpassing good: the dignity of the human person in sexual matters.”[5] While the purity movement implicitly taught that bodies were at best suspicious and at worst just bad (especially when it came to women’s bodies, yet again!), the virtue of chastity is really just a following of Paul’s command to treat all bodies with “holiness and honor” (1 Thessalonians 4:4). It recognizes that God has designed, not just our sexuality, but the way in which that sexuality is actualized. It is the teaching that our base impulses, especially when it comes to sexuality, are not neutral but need to be transformed by that design shown in Scripture.
In this way of thinking, the rightness or wrongness of sexual acts is determined, not by their essential nature, but by the way they are engaged in. People go wrong when they seek the wrong kind of intimacy (sexual) at the wrong time, wrong place, with the wrong person, in the wrong way. Pornography is wrong because it is sexual acts engaged in the wrong place (open to many) with the wrong person (someone other than one’s spouse). Sex before marriage is wrong because it is sexual acts engaged at the wrong time (before marriage) with the wrong person (someone other than one’s spouse). Same-sex acts are wrong because they are sexual acts engaged with the wrong person (someone of the same sex).[6]These acts are wrong because they go against the essential design, honor, and holiness of the body; they take what is good and degrade, dilute, or misuse it. This is where you discuss issues such as gender dysphoria, same-sex attraction, LGBTQAI+, and sexual promiscuity, power dynamics, sexual abuse, etc.
Fallen bodies and Hope of Redemption
When it comes to discussing sexual issues with youth, the above sexual framework is crucial. Only once you see that you are a sexual being, that your yearning is designed ultimately for God, and that you find yourself in a sexual universe, can you talk about the reality of brokenness in intelligible ways. To first talk about a broken image without constructing a vision of it as a whole is like dropping someone in the middle of the sea with no compass nor map and saying to them “at least you have a boat!” They have no idea where they are going.
When youth (and all people) see their sexual lives as part of God’s design, there is not only a clearer vision but also a greater hope. For Jesus took on a body. He came in the likeness of “sinful flesh” (Romans 8:3) to condemn sin in the flesh and bring the promise of redemption to our bodies. He himself has a body and biological sex. And when his body was raised on the third day it was to us a promise that these fallen sexual bodies can experience healing, that as we await his return, we wait with hope that God’s good design will be to us again an easy way, a clear path, beautiful, fruitful, and joyous. Our sexual mistakes are not eternal, all-encompassing. God’s cleansing, healing, transforming grace is.
[1] Joshua Harris, “A Statement on I Kissed Dating Goodbye.”, https://joshharris.com/statement/. Harris has also renounced his Christian faith.
[2] Christopher West, Fill These Hearts: God, Sex, and the Universal Longing (New York: Image, 2012) 87-88.
[3] Peter Kreeft, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven: But Never Dreamed of Asking! (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), Kindle Version, Loc. 1427.
[4] Something should be said here about celibates. Celibates often experience a closer reality of this yearning than those who are married via the sublimation of their sexual desires and the conscious choice to direct their hearts toward God. The language about the covenantal-marital relationship that God has with his people becomes especially significant in this point.
[5] ReinHard Hütter, “Pornography and Acedia,” First Things (April 2012, 45-49), 47, emphasis added.
[6] All these ethical decisions also include discussions of culpability, that is, of who is actually primarily responsible for the act and therefore incurring the most guilt. In many circumstances, it is both parties, but in many others (sexual assault, rape, abuse, other acts of sexual violence etc.) the culpability is entirely the offenders. It is not the victim’s fault that these acts were engaged in these ways. The victims do not bear responsibility for the acts.
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