This isn’t news to any practicing orthodox Christians, but
the premise of chapter 9 is that “There is no other area in which orthodox
Christians will have to be as countercultural as in our sexual lives.” Dreher
points out that the concept of sex being limited to within a marriage between
one man and one woman is heresy to the modern world. He also points out that
this all matters so much because our Faith is an incarnational one – it is not
disembodied.
In the early years of Christianity the Christian view of sex
was the women-centric one. The Greco-Roman culture was pornographic and
sexually exploitative, and infusing marriage and marital sexuality with love was
particularly liberating for women. Now the culture has moved back in the other direction,
and the Christian teachings on the subject are marketed as restrictive.
We don’t need to go into the factors that are leading this
regression. Easy divorce, gay rights, and transgenderism are all topics that we
are all very familiar with. They have led the advance of the sexual revolution
and the retreat of Christianity.
Dreher essentially walks a
circle around the problem of the advancing sexual revolution ethic and the
retreat of Christianity, and he explains the various views of congregations and
how their participants react to them.
First is that of progressives who
do not agree with orthodox Christian sexual teaching. He says that “when people
decide that historically normative Christianity is wrong about sex they
typically don’t find a church that endorses their liberal views. They quit
going to church altogether.”
Along the same lines, he also
demonstrates that watering down the message to appeal to Millennials and others
with progressive sexual views doesn’t work. Mainline Protestant sects have
already tried this and they are still in collapse. Even if it did work,
watering down the truth to grow a congregation is to make an idol of community,
which doesn’t get us anywhere.
On another hand, there are
churches that downplay orthodox Christian sexual teachings and focus heavily on
social justice issues instead. I like what Dreher says to this: “Social justice
activism is laudable, but it does not earn you indulgences for sexual sin.”
Bingo.
The other angle is the problem of
boiling down life in Christ to following a moral and ethical code, or “thou-shalt-not”
moralism. This isn’t Christianity, this isn’t a relationship with Jesus. While
it is important to know these boundaries, Christianity goes much deeper than
this and it is a lack of imagination and effort if this is all that is
presented to people. In regard to this, we should probably go into the
distinction between preaching abstinence and preaching chastity, as well as the
great benefit and grace that a life of chastity brings, but I will have to
leave that to somebody more qualified.
While Dreher does offer a couple of concrete solutions that
can help with (though not even begin to solve) this problem, there is one
particular sentence that stood out to me as the crux of the issue. He says that
it is “ludicrous, even cruel” to withhold the church’s message on sexuality out
of fear of bringing it up. Easier said than done. One has to be in pretty deep
friendship with another to be able to discuss these topics, and (at least in
perception) to bring up the topic of sexual sin is to introduce some risk that
the friendship may become strained or fall apart.
Still, something that I recently heard somebody say sticks
with me. He noted that “if we get to the ends of our lives and my family and
friends realize that I had this gift of the Faith and Truth and I refused to
share it with them, how ANGRY are they going to be with me? How much will I
have let them down, on an eternal scale?”
Again, easy to say from behind a computer screen. There is a
reason that I sit in an office and do the administrative work that supports the
evangelistic work at a parish, as opposed to being out on the front lines.
Evangelization is difficult work.
A final thought from the book before we move on to some of
the solutions that Dreher offers: “If Christianity is a true story, then the
story the world tells about sexual freedom is a grand deception. It is fake…we
have to attack the fake in the name of the real.”
Moving on, I’m not sure that “solutions” is really the best
word to describe what Dreher offers with the rest of this chapter, but these
are at least some principles to keep us moving in the right direction in the
fight.
First, parents must be the primary sex educator for their
children. If we don’t do it the culture will, and it will happen earlier than
we think. Some places are teaching gender ideology in kindergarten now. The
accessibility and increasingly uncensored state of media now is also a force
working against us in this battle. We now have to talk about these topics with
our children early and often.
Secondly, the Church has to support unmarried people. It is
easy to lose focus on the single people in the midst of a parish, but they are
in a place that is especially vulnerable to sexual sin, and providing regular
groups or even single-sex group homes to live in as a community can be a great
help.
Though the situation is a little different, we have seen
great fruit come from encouraging men’s and women’s intentional liing houses
that are tied to the parish at the campus ministry where I work. Having the
group of committed Christians around the house all the time, and committing to
regular prayer together, has been a great success. In a university setting this
is obviously a little easier to set up since every person’s housing situation
changes yearly, but it can be done just about anywhere with some planning.
Finally, Dreher suggests keeping smart phones and unmonitored
internet access away from kids. You wouldn’t leave your kid in a room filled
with pornography dvd’s, so why give them a device with easy, immediate access
to all kids of porn and other problematic material?
The peer pressure on this is going to be brutal. Many kids
have smart phones at a young age now, and withholding them from our kids is
going to cause them some problems at school, at the very least with teasing or
something similar, and may make it difficult for them to fit in or find things
in common with other children. I couldn’t agree with this suggestion more,
though. On many levels, I think it is an issue for children to have smart
phones at a young age.
Even if we withhold the phones from our kids, however, the
problem is not eradicated. We have to monitor our children's’ peer groups. As
Malcolm Gladwell once explained, in the battle between nature and nurture our personalities
are more the result of nurture, and the nurturing is not as much that of our family
but that of our friends. If we don’t keep an eye on the kids that our children
are hanging around, we leave the door open for those children to influence ours
in a negative way.
In the end, these steps can only take us so far. We have to
teach our children the connection between love and sex, and we need to provide
them with communities of healthy chastity and purity so that the Christian
sexual ethic can be passed on.
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