“That’s the way they’re doing it now.”  This is the response we very frequently get from fellow Presbyterians when we mention our displeasure with heterosexual couples living as married folks before they are married, often even before they are openly engaged. One study reported that more than 50% of persons in their twenties approve of living together unmarried. Another study reported that half of all twenty-something females have had more than 4 sexual partners. The figure for males is 7. The situation with current teenagers is more alarming. Plainly sexual chaos reigns. 

Is PCUSA addressing this widespread fornication? Is our church openly striving to strengthen marriages and to hold Christian marriage as an ideal? We have not found PCUSA statements or actions that say even that marriage is the “preferred” locus for coitus. The majority report to the 203 General Assembly (1991), which was not adopted but was distributed to presbyteries for study, certainly blest the so-called “sexual revolution of the past quarter century.” That report should be valued for its emphasis on truly loving sexual relationships, but without public guidelines sexual relationships have become passing recreation. A campus minister expressed it by saying, “there is no script.”

We recommend the book by Lauren F. Winner, Real Sex: the Naked Truth about Chastity (2005). She was an orthodox Jew who chronicled her growth into becoming an Episcopalian in a memoir Girl Meets God.  As her Christian faith developed, her view of sex deepened. Last we heard, she was on the faculty of Duke Divinity School and lecturing widely.

She records her promiscuous life which began at age 15. But her life was not very different from many Christians whom she met on university campuses. She reports their moral confusion and their seeking guidance. Responding to a student’s question, ”How far can I go with my boyfriend?” Winner writes: “Answering her student’s question required first answering a host of larger questions: Who created us, and for what ends? What is God’s creational intent? What are we made for? Our bodies and how we inhabit  them point to the order of creation. God made us for sex within marriage; this is what the Reformed tradition would call a creational law.” (p.41)

We have selected a few quotations from Real Sex in an attempt to suggest her Christian vision of God’s gift of sexuality.

  “In my attempts to live chastely, prayer has been key. It may sound hokey, but I have   prayed regularly that God would reshape my heart and my desires so that I would want the things He wants for me. And every day, I have prayed about sexuality when praying the line from the Lord’s prayer, Lead us not into temptation. Of course “temptation” doesn’t refer just to sex, but for most unmarried Christians, sex is right up there on the list of temptations worth avoiding.” (p.23)

 “As theologian David McCarthy argues in his provocative book Sex and Love in the Home, a Christian ethics of sex, love, and marriage needs to reconceive sex and love as practices that  exist only within the basic prosaic rhythms of house and home: candlelight, long-stemmed roses, and lingerie can’t sustain love, but domestic economies can….Love, sex, and marriage, to partake in their transcendent mission of revealing God’s grace, must embrace life’s decidedly untranscendent  daily goings-on.” (p.81)

(For unmarried couples) “Denying any physical expression of love seems to me to edge toward the Gnostic….Rather the point is to discern, with your community, what behaviors can protect the body and God’s created sexual intent.” (p.107)

Winner and her fiance decided that kissing was their appropriate physical expression. In making this decision they were guided by a “very married pastor” whom they trusted. As part of a Christian community “we were participating in a holy discipline, not making an individual choice.” (p.107)  “and perhaps a little disciplined sexuality might itself be  good preparation for marriage, for the week when your wife has a urinary tract infection, or the few months after your husband’s father dies, and sex is not in the cards, but maybe some kissing is.” (p.107)

A few quotations can only hint at the depth of Winner’s thinking. Her focus is on Christians who are in their early adulthood. But promiscuity in our society begins in early teenage. Teenage Girls, published by Zondervan in 2006, is a useful Christian resource. These statistics are shocking. Number of females (listed by grade level) who report having four or more sex partners: ninth grade 6.4%,  tenth grade 8.8%, eleventh grade 13.4%, twelfth grade 17.9%. Thirty percent of 15-17 year old girls had given oral sex to a male. Thirty-eight percent had received oral sex from a male. By age 18 seventy percent of girls reported having had vaginal intercourse. (By age 22-24 the number rises to 92%, and 32% have had anal sex.)

Plainly the so-called “sexual revolution of the past quarter century” has led to sexual chaos. Our local churches and our national PCUSA  are called to pray, to think Biblically and to act creatively and with vigor to address this widespread sexual sin. We must offer our youth (and ourselves) a Christian community that supports a “life lived inside the contours of God’s law (that) humanizes us and makes us beautiful. It makes us creatures living well in the created order. It gives us opportunity to become who we are meant to be.” (Winner p.42) To God Be the Glory!

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