It will be an uphill battle, but the church can and must create a sexual counterculture.
“Don’t you think,” people sometimes ask, “that the pendulum will swing back to traditional values? Won’t people see how bad things have become and return to the good old ways?”
I would like to agree, but I have been listening to the same hopeful question for two decades. As trouble increases, we seem to grow more lethargic rather than more disturbed. Anyway, I doubt the pendulum is an apt metaphor for society. Perhaps more appropriate is a massive ball on a steep slope: It takes a lot of effort to push it uphill, and if you let go for an instant, gravity takes it down.
The ball is rolling downhill fast right now. More kids go to bed with more partners earlier and earlier. Children are born without fathers. Marriages dissolve. A sizable subculture does without marriage at all, and so they sink deeper into poverty and violence. There is more child abuse, sexual and otherwise; more spousal abuse; more sexually transmitted diseases, including one that is invariably fatal; more abortions; more kids bouncing between parents like Ping-Pong balls.
But is America worried? I don’t hear too many alarm bells. Tongues cluck about the terrible trends, but the broad middle class continues rolling with the ball. When a recent study found how deeply children suffer when their parents divorce, every commentator I read emphasized that the study did not mean that people should stay married for the sake of their children.
Even if people were ready to change, could they? It’s hard to push that ball uphill. For example, children who grew up in broken homes almost uniformly vow they will not repeat their parents’ mistakes. But they do repeat them. For whatever reasons, they end up divorcing more frequently than those from intact families. They want to do better, but by themselves they can’t.
Sexual Counterculture
If there is hope in our situation, it is not in clucking tongues. It must come through a counterculture—a disciplined minority that shows a different way by their stubborn adherence to a distinctive pattern of life. We must become a people who are consciously, un-defensively different, and who experience that differentness as a blessing. The church was such a sexual counterculture in the Roman Empire, and it could be again.
The church has been lulled to sleep. For generations, Christian sexual ethics were part of the dominant Western culture. Not everybody lived by those ethics, certainly, but people generally agreed about what was right and wrong. If a husband cheated on his wife, he didn’t say it was the most moral thing he had ever done because for the first time in his life he had been true to himself. He said temptation had gotten the better of him, and everybody agreed it was a shame.
That was a comfortable situation for Christians. It is nice to have your views supported by the culture you live in. But times have changed. Christians now find themselves holding a minority position.
We don’t like to stand out. We don’t like to sound intolerant, hypocritical, or simplistic. So we keep quiet. A long time ago, preachers mentioned sex to thunder against adultery. In the nineties, if preachers mention sex they will say how wonderful and God-given it is. Fine; but can we say something that disagrees with the world view of MTV?
My hobby horse is sex education—not how terrible it is in the schools, but how absent it is in the church. If we have something serious and life-redeeming to say to our children about their sexuality, why aren’t we saying it?
In the churches I know, a kid is lucky to get four sessions on sexuality during junior-high or high-school youth group. The first three weeks are on dating and how to pick your marriage partner, and the last week there is a little talk about what is really going on—one session, maybe two, to counteract a lifetime of NBC. I don’t think anybody could honestly describe that as a serious response to the sexual crisis.
Nearly the same pattern shows itself in the way we prepare couples for marriage. They come to us willingly, asking to be married in church. They are full of idealism and hope. With some notable exceptions, most churches pass over the eager couple with a word of encouragement and a cheerful sigh. This is like sending soldiers out on horses to face tanks. How much suffering comes from our negligence?
Visible Hope
Is there hope that the church will respond seriously to the sexual crisis? Yes, despite everything, there is strong hope. It has, for me, two bases.
One is my faith in the words of Jesus that Satan will be unable to prevail against the church. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the church belongs to God, and he has not abandoned it. God will not allow us to be completely defiled. (1 Cor. 6:18–20 specifies sexual sin as defiling.) At least a remnant will remain, and new life will spring forth.
I have another more earthly reason for hope. Genesis 2:24 spells it out: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.”
These words are not mere inspirational jargon. Rather, they explain a perplexing fact: men and women meet each other, fall in love, and start afresh. They choose the claims of a new, undefined bond over their own flesh and blood. We have all seen it happen. Romeo and Juliet meet again and again, ditching their family prejudices to start something new. This is the very opposite of sociological fatalism. One’s upbringing is not one’s destiny.
These new beginnings are rooted, Genesis says, not in Law but in Creation. You don’t have to tell men and women to bond; they will do it whether you want them to or not, because that is the way God made them.
They may make their new beginnings badly, of course. They can create a marriage of abuse, of dishonesty, ultimately of mutual hatred. Those from “good” families can and will make bad choices—a fact that properly frightens every parent who sends kids off on a date.
But new beginnings work in the opposite way, too. Those from “bad families” also leave and start anew—and that can be a hope for a culture that is speeding downhill. No matter how our culture disintegrates, new bonds will appear amid the chaos.
New Beginnings
How does this relate to the church? It doesn’t, necessarily. These new beginnings happen as often outside the church as inside it.
The church, though, is where many of these new beginnings end up, to be nurtured and encouraged. They end up in the church because the church has something to help their new hope: God’s Word and his Spirit.
Here and there, in a regular flow, I see these new families begin. Joe and Linda, for example, are a couple who have found their way to our church. Both are products of broken marriages. Both are extremely conscious of how that heritage threatens their own marriage. They are determined to do it differently. Unlike other young couples, they take nothing for granted. They are very aware that they are vulnerable.
There will always be Joes and Lindas making new beginnings, and the church will always have a tradition of strong countercultural belief—the gospel. Sooner or later, I am sure, these will coalesce—a new generation who see sexual differentness not as a burden, but as a blessing.
These couples will take the measures needed to strengthen that differentness, to teach it to their children. They will create a sexual counterculture. Then we will have a place to stand as we challenge gravity and stop the runaway ball.
I believe it will happen. But I don’t believe it is happening yet.
I will believe it is happening when I see church people spontaneously organizing themselves to teach sexuality to their children—not passing the job off to the youth director, but insisting that sex education become part of the church curriculum from a very early age.
I will believe it is happening when our AIDS-spooked neighbors discuss the radical possibility of sending their kids to our churches for sex education that is really serious.
I will believe it is happening when couples get married at city hall because they just weren’t serious enough to face First Baptist Church and the marriage preparation they require.
I will believe it is happening when church families stop watching primetime TV.
I will believe it is happening when church “prayer requests” concern sexual and marital issues as often as cancer.
I believe it will happen. I wish I knew when.
