Tag Archives: marriage

Schools, sex, and degradation: losing the sacred

If you are the parent of a middle or high school student, consider posting this to any and all of their social media accounts. It may help them and may help their friends who read it.

We live in a world that no longer sends mixed messages about sex. Our world sends one message about sex: it is for anyone, any time, any where, without boundaries. Anything goes, any one is fair game, victims–if they even exist–are irrelevant.

For many if not most, sex is not sacred. It is not holy. It is not seen as special. It is not seen as a blessing of marriage. It is animalistic.

Too often sex is an expression of violence, not love; power, not kindness; aggression, not gentleness.


Girls in middle and high school are increasingly victimized by boys and young men whose erroneously developed view of females has been substantially shaped by pornography. Writing out of concern for his own young daughters, Cole Moreton helps explain this pervasive behavior, currently being acted out in British schools:

“Never before has girlhood been under such a sustained assault – from ads, alcohol marketing, girls’ magazines, sexually explicit TV programmes and the hard pornography that is regularly accessed in so many teenager’s bedrooms,” says the psychologist Steve Biddulph, currently touring the country to promote a book called Raising Girls.

[Boys] are under pressure too, being led to believe that girls will look and behave like porn stars. Our children are becoming victims of pornification.

“It is usually girls who are on the receiving end of some pretty degrading stuff,” says Claire Perry MP, who has just been appointed David Cameron’s special adviser on the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood. “We’ve got young girls being asked to write their names on their boobs and send pictures. Parents would be really shocked to know this is happening in pretty much every school in the country. Our children are growing up in a very sexualised world.”

And it is not just in the Old Country. A 2010-2011 survey of American middle and high school students revealed

48 percent of students in grades 7-12 experienced some form of sexual harassment in person or electronically via texting, email and social media, according to a major national survey being released Monday by the American Association of University Women.
The harassers often thought they were being funny, but the consequences for their targets can be wrenching, according to the survey. Nearly a third of the victims said the harassment made them feel sick to their stomach, affected their study habits or fueled reluctance to go to school at all.

Ongoing investigations in a Steubenville, Ohio rape case reveals high school behavior as perverse as anything a movie writer could concoct after a week of binge-drinking.

Critics say football’s dominance in the town makes them suspicious that authorities have been lax in investigating allegations involving Big Red players last August, when a 16-year-old West Virginia girl was allegedly carried, unconscious, from one teen party to another and sexually assaulted.
[…]
Two players were arrested and charged with the crime, but many locals think there were other players involved. Some social media activists have posted images, purportedly from the parties, that depict players who have not been charged with a crime. One video, of a now-former player joking about the girl’s condition and treatment, caused worldwide outrage when it went viral a few weeks ago.

The New Yorker adds, “What emerged was terrifying: rumor had it that she’d been repeatedly sexually assaulted at several parties, publicly dragged from house to house, unconscious, as a ‘joke.'”

We have, in large part, allowed society to explain the mechanics of sex, define the meaning of sex and erase the boundaries of sex. Its sacredness questioned, disbelieved and mocked. Unlike stray dogs in the yard where a bucket of water might separate, students grab smartphones and celebrate. Again from Moreton:

Kamal, a boy in the same [grade], says: “Say I got a girlfriend, I would ask her to write my name on her breast and then send it to me and then I would upload it on to Facebook or Bebo or something like that.” The profile picture on his phone, seen by everyone to whom he sends messages, is an image of his girlfriend’s cleavage. Some of the boys at his school have explicit images of up to 30 different girls on their phone. They swap them like we used to swap football cards. If they fancy a girl, they send her a picture of their genitals. As one teenage girl said after the report came out, sending pictures of your body parts is “the new flirting”.

Recall Moreton’s article which gets at the truth: girls are under a sustained assault, an assault that began in Eden and has not slowed. Consider this idiocy from one Missouri school:

when one 13-year-old girl in Missouri reported being harassed about her breast size, her mother called the school district to put an end to her daughter’s humiliation.

The school’s first response? The only way for the bullying to stop was for her daughter to undergo breast reduction surgery.

The problem, in the mind of this school employee, is not bullying or sexual harassment. The problem is obviously the girl’s breasts. If they were smaller all the fellows could get back to trigonometry. Or, more likely, underwater basket weaving. When victims are blamed, abusers are empowered. Take that to the bank.

The effects of hormones, sinfulness, alcohol and callousness make any middle or high school party suspect–off or on campus. By “suspect” I mean 100 percent off limits, especially for believers. These instances are not about reaching people with the gospel where they are; it is about protecting girls from unknowingly ingesting a date-rape-drug spiked drink. Parents who ignore this border on being brain dead. (My apologies to the brain dead for the insult.)

The effects of always available, easily accessible pornography cannot be overstated. Pornography is itself a fantasy; there is nothing real about it from the arranged scenarios to body parts. Porn, at its core, is about women saying “yes” to any sexual encounter, and meaning “yes” even when they say “no.” Everyone looks happy, everyone looks like they have had a good time.

This porn problem goes right into the hallways, classrooms and bathrooms in schools every day. These addictions sustain such a powerful grip some boys say they cannot go to sleep without watching porn. You really think this stays behind the bedroom door?

If you are a middle or high school student reading this understand: you are growing up in a culture that, for the most part, treats sex with disrespect. Since you are a sexual being (by God’s design) you may suffer disrespect as well. That which was designed to be intimate and personal is open and displayed. In this, sex is degraded to be much less that God designed it to be.

The sexual wholeness of our beings far, far surpasses the physical coupling of bodies. Animals can do that; animals regularly do that. You are not an animal; you are a person for whom there are emotional consequences to every act. A person for whom Jesus Christ died and was raised.

What has been one effect of this hyper-sexualization?

A recent report in USAToday, conducted by Market Tools Inc., found 42% of single men and women over the age of 21 would not date a virgin.

Stop and let that sink in for a while. Nearly half of single young adults would not date a person they knew to have no sexual experience.

Further results may reveal why: 44% of women and 63% of men had already had one-night stands. Nearly 1/3 said they’ve had sex by the third date, and forty-six percent by the sixth date. That means almost one in three single adults surveyed go to a movie on Friday, to dinner on Monday and to bed on Tuesday. Another 15 or so percent wait all the way until the following weekend before hopping in the sack.

Alley-cats everywhere salute you.

Young ladies, hear me: you are not an object to be pawed, groped, leered at, assaulted, abused, attacked, or sexualized. You need not give up your body and yourself to please any guy until a pastor or judge has pronounced you as married. Even if that guy gets what he wants, he will still not have what he needs. It is not your fault when parents, police, pastors or school administrators do not come to your defense. You bear the image of God and are worthy of respect.

Young men, hear me: God did not design you to be an aggressor, gawker, abuser, user, or predator. You show manliness at no greater point than when you stand on the side of victims, not when you join running train on them. Real men show restraint. Do not be afraid to swim firmly against the cultural tides for the sake of the gospel.

(Yes, I’m aware of role reversal. Sometimes girls are aggressors and boys are victims. In the realm of sexuality in American schools, however, girls seems to be suffering the most.)

Parents, you must be vigilant. Talk to your kids about bullying and harassment, and protect them. Have very frank discussions with teachers and administrators at their schools. But, most of all, teach them the sacredness of sex and sexuality from the biblical perspective. Model it for them. And pray for them without ceasing.

Jesus Christ, marriage and sex

In a day when fewer people have a biblical understanding of marriage than ever before these reminders are apropos. Marriage is not simply a social arrangement as we in the West have come to understand it. It is not merely a means by which the state garners more little potential taxpayers or soldiers. It is not a man and woman who decide to live together. It is not two people of the same sex who decide to unite and call it “marriage.”

It is a holy institution that has probably endured as much violence from Christ’s followers as from Christ’s enemies. Yet, it remains what it is.

The following quotes are from the book, Who is This Man: The Unpredictable Impact of the Inescapable Jesus by John Ortberg. I highly recommend it.

In the ancient world, sexuality was celebrated as a means of procreation and as an appetite to be gratified, much like appetites for food and drink. Greek physicians often diagnosed women with “hysteria,” which comes from the Greek word for “uterus,” a condition they said was caused by a wandering uterus. They said hysteria could be cured by intercourse. The Roman physician Rufus prescribed sex to adolescents as a cure for melancholia, epilepsy, and headaches. One imagines he had a thriving practice.

[…]

The gods had little to say about marriage. The rules for a public cult in Pergamum demanded a day’s interval after sex with one’s wife but two days after sex with someone else’s wife. Zeus’s sexual history (one writer describes him as “the ultimate player”) did not suggest that restraint was an Olympian virtue. The silence of the gods about sex also led to a very different world of sexuality and children. Particularly in Greek culture, sexual relationships between adult men and younger boys, often between ages twelve and sixteen, were taken for granted. The Roman emperor Commodus is said to have had three hundred young boys available for sex. The Christian writer Tatian said that Romans “consider pederasty to be particularly privileged and try to round up herds of boys like herds of grazing mares.”

[…]

Slave girls were made available for sexual purposes at the decision of the paterfamilias. Freeborn girls were often married by their families as early as possible: A study based on inscriptions indicated that 20 percent of pagan girls were married before the age of thirteen (in the Christian community it was about a third of that)
[…]

Marriage, Jesus was saying, is not at its heart just an economic or social institution. It is a God-directed covenant that reflects the human capacity for self-transcendence and community. It is a joining of spirit and flesh. It does not serve the state; it precedes the state.

[…]

Jesus connects marriage to creation. In Genesis God is making creation good by separating: he separates the light from the darkness, the dry land from the sea, the heavens from the earth. But now, with the man and the woman, he takes what was separate and joins them. And so Jesus says what God has joined let man not separate.

[…]

Walter Wangerin wrote, “Marriage begins with a promise.” A man and a woman stand in a church or a chapel or a backyard before each other, before witnesses, and before almighty God. They make a vow. They say a promise. They give their word. That’s what a marriage is built on. A promise freely offered, fully embraced, joyfully witnessed, painstakingly kept —that’s what makes a marriage. Sometimes people will say: “I don’t need a piece of paper.” It was never about the paper. In Jesus’ day they didn’t have paper. It’s about the promise: “as long as we both shall live.”

[…]

In the ancient world, one’s primary loyalty was to parents. But the man and the woman are to leave their parents to create a new primary loyalty—a union, and their union with each other is to be expressed through sexual intimacy, one flesh. In other words, sex is kind of a sacrament. It is an outward sign that points to an inward reality, to a spiritual state.

[…]

In a broader way, something like this went on in the ancient world. For Greco-Roman culture, the idea of reserving sexual intimacy wasn’t quaint and old-fashioned; it was new and revolutionary. As a whole, it never did get established terribly well. And to this day, no one I know doesn’t struggle with it. But the framework that Jesus taught—the idea that marriage is a covenant relationship between and man and a woman, that sex has a spiritual component, that fidelity is a quality to be prized in men as well as women, that children are to be protected rather than exploited sexually — would come to shape our world.

[…]

In the book of Hebrews, the eleventh chapter is called the Hall of Faith, and great heroes in the Bible—Noah, Abraham, Moses, Gideon, and David — are all listed there. Then there is this comment, “By faith the prostitute Rahab, because she welcomed the spies, was not killed.” The writer does not mention anybody else’s occupation — not David the king, or Samuel the priest, or Abraham the rancher, or Gideon the judge. Why Rahab’s? Grace. The same Jesus who was a magnet for sexual sinners who had flunked marriage was the same Jesus who redefined what a marriage could be. “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” More marriages have been performed, more wedding vows have been made, more nuptial blessings have been asked in his name than any other.

All quotes taken from Chapter 11: The Truly Old-Fashioned Marriage.
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