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Chapter 7: What Do We Have to Learn From, as Well as Teach, Young People about Sex?
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115 Chapter 7 What Do We Have to Learn From, as Well as Teach, Young People about Sex? I agree that the church needs to help kids know how to handle sex, but I don’t see that as a complicated thing. Having sexual intercourse before you’re married is a sin. We need to teach that. Teens need to know that they should say NO. Adult youth group advisor, Church of God1 My priest, the church, my parents would consider me a slut if they knew what I did. . . . I don’t think I’m that different than any other teenager. . . . Like I take my religion seriously, but I can’t agree with NO birth control, NO premarital sex, NO abortion under any circumstances. Female teenager, Roman Catholic Church2 J ust as faith communities have a mandate to promote justice and compassion in all things and strengthen our interpersonal and communal ties as sexual-spiritual persons, so too do they have a responsibility to equip people for the challenges and joys of becoming passionate and principled lovers in the bedroom and beyond. Sexuality encompasses genital sex but refers more expansively to our divinely given desire for physical, emotional, and spiritual embrace and to this amazing capacity we humans enjoy for sustaining intimate relationship. Finding pleasure in an ethical eroticism is a spiritual blessing insofar as it sparks in us a sensuous, embodied desire for right relation with ourselves, other earth creatures, and the earth itself. Throughout our lifetime, then, we find ourselves in an ongoing process of shaping 116 | making love just and reshaping our connections so that they may exhibit genuine respect, consistent care, and true delight. In keeping with this more comprehensive and sex-positive perspective, ethicist James B. Nelson encourages us to appreciate eros as a moral power, nothing less than “our hunger for pleasurable and fulfilling connections.” While he acknowledges that erotic power can become sinfully distorted and that we are capable of doing great harm, especially as patterns of dominance and submission become eroticized, he proposes a grace-filled remedy. “Our hope lies,” he affirms, “in eroticizing patterns of sexual justice and mutuality.” Furthermore, “it is the design of God that truly fulfilling pleasure comes only in such [just and mutually loving] relationships.”3 The good news here is the prospect of life-enhancing relationships that are both pleasurable and ethically principled. n “What we’re teaching is terrible” The bad news is that few faith communities do a decent job of educating youth and others about erotic power, sexual intimacy, and the demands as well as the blessings of the moral life. For the most part, the focus in Christian circles has been on conveying an exclusivist (heterosexual only), restrictive (sex only in marriage), and often punitive message in order to prevent, or at least discourage, sexual activity among adolescents, unmarried adults, and those who are nonheterosexual. At the same time, many church members have discovered that their friends, neighbors, family members, and perhaps they themselves no longer abide by the conventional rules, including restrictions on sex outside marriage, divorce and remarriage, contraception and abortion, and same-sex affiliations. Increasingly Christians find themselves questioning whether the prevailing prohibitions make sense and whether conducting “ethics by taboo” is sufficient. As historian Mark Jordan observes, in much Christian discourse “human sex is usually not about reciprocal love; it is about selfish gratification .”4 Furthermore because of the frequent link Christian theologians have drawn between sex and sin, even married heterosexuals, the “normatively normal,” find that the church fails to provide adequate guidance about intimate matters, much less helps them address the social, as well as personal, implications of a robust justice-love ethic. While the married are often convinced that silence is best (“just say nothing”), the unmarried receive a minimalist and mostly negative message (“just say no”). For Christians, sex continues to be approached as shameful, dangerous, and fearful, and the moral watchwords remain avoidance, control, and containment. In assessing the church’s role in promulgating this kind of fear-based and restrictive sexual morality, ethicist Beverly Wildung Harrison sums up matters this way: “What we’re teaching is terrible. We’re not helping people. In the local church, people are starving for a more mature conversation about how to live in self-affirming, other-affirming, non-hurtful ways. Putting forth a wider framework [about human sexuality and values] and identifying what else we need to learn is part of the work.”5 [18...