Jon Acuff is a much better writer than I, funnier, and most of the time he is right on as far as the issue is concerned. He's sending out free chapters of his book as he writes them; I recently emailed him to ask for the first two.
Chapter One is entitled "Getting Sex Wrong" and he discusses how the Church's attitude about sex has caused some pretty big problems with how we as Christians think about sex. Acuff puts it quite succinctly:
And when we heard
our parents tell us about [sex], we heard something other than what they were really saying. The reason is that the average person speaks an estimated 150 words a minute but has an inner dialog of around 1,300 words per minute in their head.
So when you tell a teen, “sex before marriage is bad,” that’s not what they hear. Instead, inside their head they hear, “Sex is bad.” When you say those five words, their inner dialog tells them:
“Sex is bad. My parents will be disappointed with me if I have sex. Sex is a sin. Enjoying sex is sinful. God will be mad at me if I have sex. Sex is dangerous. God is against sex. The bible is against sex. If I were good I wouldn’t be so interested in sex. Something is wrong with me, because I think about it a lot. I better keep quiet about that.”
In his first chapter, Acuff challenges us to change the way we think and talk about sex. It's a good thing. God made it. God wants us to enjoy each other, because we are His creation and Creation was made for us to enjoy.
This is one of my pet issues because, as you may have read, I've dealt with the issues of pornography and sex addiction in my life.
"No," you may say. "You can't have. Women don't deal with those issues. Sugar and spice and all that's nice, remember? Women are pure sweet things that need to be protected from the ravages of evil men."
But I've always held that the above statements are horrible lies. They villify men, and give women more credit that we should be given.
Remember the sexual revolution? Okay, if you're one of my readers, you probably don't remember it. But maybe you read about it in a history book. Anyway, it wasn't a bunch of men encouraging women to come out of their shells. It was women. Shouting. Screaming. Wrestling to be set free from the bonds that society had put them in.
Or maybe that the church had put them in.
Acuff contests in his book that maybe the world has taken sex hostage. Maybe it belonged to the church in the first place and when Christians started mistreating it, the world moved in and took it from us. Maybe it's just waiting for us to come get it. Maybe we've forgotten that it was ours to begin with and we've got our kids so scared of it that they can't even admit that they think about it.
And if we can't even talk about it, how can we expect to be able to open up to each other intimately?
