Sunday, July 06, 2008

The Missing Generation, pt. 2

In the last post I said that the primary reason the Church is missing lots of young adults has little to do with the the mission, theology, or politics of the Church, but much to do with demographics. The economic and social forces that prolong adolescence and delay “settled” adulthood are what keep people from participating in worship. I’m also bracketing my qualms about equating “adulthood” with “settling down.” Some of the most visionary and mature Christian adults I know never settle.

But now I want to backtrack a bit and say that this extended adolescence is also part of what creates friction between unchurched young adults and “The Church.” There are two components to extended adolescence. One is physiological and sexual, and the other is social.* These are related issues, but I want to illustrate them separately.

First, the physiological and sexual. People hit puberty earlier. The research varies, but the most extreme research suggests that the average age of menarche has fallen from age 15 (or even 17 in rural, nutritionally-poor areas) to age 12, with some girls having their first period as early as 8 or 10. The most conservative research suggests that the drop is more modest, perhaps from 13-and-a-half to 12-and-a-half. Regardless, people’s bodies mature earlier and they marry later than they did 100 years ago. If you roll the clock way back, some people estimate that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was just 13 when she was betrothed to Joseph.

Now, if people are maturing earlier and marrying later, they have a longer period of time in which to be sexually active. While Jane Austen’s heroines typically married somewhere between 18 and 21**, the average age of marriage these days is 27 or 28 (as I pointed out in the last post). So the time between when someone begins to sexually mature and the time at which they marry (if they marry at all) can be as long as twenty years.  That’s two decades.

During this time, a human being becomes socialized to their peer group. They begin placing more weight on what their peers think than their families. We encourage this process through factory education, where we isolate persons from those in other age groups, teaching them as a class or cohort, and refer to them as a “generation.” So their primary source of character education comes not from family, not from church, but from their peers.

And media.

Mary Pipher, Carol Gilligan, Jeane Kilbourne, and a number of other feminist psychologists, sociologists, and other researchers have pointed out that this is when girls get socialized to think of themselves as objects, to lose their voice, to develop eating disorders. Although their parents have been telling them from birth that they can do anything, be anyone, and have social equality with men, they are relentlessly educated by the media and by their peer group that their primary value is derived by being sexually attractive and sexually pleasing to men. There is a similar social travesty that happens to boys, but for the purposes of considering extended adolescence and how it impacts what we do as church, it’s easier to see in our culture with girls. What is on the cover of men’s magazines? Women. What’s on the cover of women’s magazines? Women. Women as objects. Women as infantile. Women bound, powerless, and dehumanized.

We dump young teenagers into this environment, and the only advice they hear from the church is “do not have sex.” For 20 years. Oh, and don’t touch yourself. Although the Bible doesn’t say a word about masturbation, it’s assumed that any sexual pleasure you give yourself is wrong and shameful. It’s a theme the popular culture is all too happy to take up with either mocking or shocking. Mocked in movies like American Pie, or expressed as shock when the surgeon general mentions the word.

Imagine yourself as a teenager immersed in this environment. You are told you must suppress all sexual feelings for 20 years. Save yourself for marriage. Yet you know that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce - in fact, it’s likely that your parents are divorced, and one or both of them may be living with a girlfriend or boyfriend. See the problem?

Now, follow me carefully here. I am not talking about premarital sex,*** or pornography, or media culture. I am talking about the church’s credibility. From the beginning of puberty, everyone knows the church is not credible on this issue. We all know it, and nobody says a blessed thing about it. Into this credibility gap we are sold a vision of ideal sexuality, involving all kinds of products ranging from cosmetics to viagra. Sexual fulfillment becomes something you buy, not something that comes from deep intimacy with another human being. We are taught to be immature, and to linger in this state well past “adulthood.” Our extended adolescence is characterized by immature sexual attitudes and sexual anxiety.

By contrast, adulthood is associated with boring and unsexy things: minivans, baby spit-up, balancing checkbooks, paying the bills. Corporate-produced mass culture offers us a choice between this world, and the world of young, idealized, sexualized hipness, and even the most media-savvy of us buy into it.

The second component of extended adolescence is social, and it has to do with responsibility and the relative value of your contributions to society. I like to use the illustration of a reality television show that came on PBS several years ago called Frontier House. Three families go to spend several months in Montana, living as the pioneers did. When the kids first begin the adventure, you hear them complain. “What are we going to do for all these weeks? It’s going to be horrible! There’s no television, no cell phones, no video games, no malls.” Over the course of the program, you get to see what they fill their time with. They learn to ride horses. Because they have no mp3 players, they make their own music. Some learn to play the guitar. They milk the cows. The collect the eggs. If they fail in their chores, the family suffers. But the cool thing about the program is that you see the kids absolutely bloom. They grow up.

At the end of the show, they return to their homes. They wander their McMansions like zombies. The modern world sucks the life right out of them. And they say, “there’s nothing to do here but watch television, play video games, and go to the mall.” In Montana, they are useful. They actually contribute to the survival of their family and the flourishing of their community. In the modern world, they become surplus people. They have no social value except as consumers, and they know it. They can do two things - go to school, and buy crap. This is why all media culture is geared toward teenagers, who have the most disposable income and the most time on their hands. They have no other use.

Again, follow me carefully. I’m not arguing that “kids today just need to get a job.” That’s just it. They don’t need to get a job. There’s nothing that depends on them getting a job except some external expectation that they “learn responsibility” or some such dreck. You can’t just give them more chores and drill a work ethic into them. Our society considers them surplus people. They are an economic problem, which is why we need to delay their entry into the workforce for 20 years (during which time, by the way, they aren’t supposed to “do it”). And they know it! On a gut level, the place that tells them they are a fully functional, competent human being who have the skills to survive on their own, they know that they are still children.

And when they act out this anger, frustration, lust, or despair, we blame it on hormones. Or we make up some ridiculous generalization about “kids today.” I say it makes sense when prisoners act like prisoners. 

When these teenagers become young adults, the landscape changes a bit. Now, when you work in a retail store to make money to pay bills, you get to become part of that shallow society. Now you get to sell crap to teenagers. And when you grouse about having a dead-end job, or about your tremendous debt-load, or about the fact that your career has no meaning, or if you demand better, you are vilified by news pundits as belonging to an “entitlement generation.” Why can’t you just shut up and work for The Man, like your grandparents did? Why are you so spoiled? Preachers parrot back this conventional wisdom in pulpits all across America, again losing credibility with young adults.

But I do believe that part of what the church needs to do is to help people grow up. Not just by helping “young adults,” because we have several generations of people who have grown up under this same model who have been educated to be consumers. Nor am I suggesting we all need to move back on the farm or become Amish (though there is something appealing about that). But I do think that part of what is called for is a radical re-visioning of our lifestyle and how we behave as communities together. How do we give teenagers meaningful work? How do we create a community in which “unsettled” young adults can make important contributions to a community’s thriving? 

*(When I use the term “extended adolescence,” I do not mean to denigrate adolescents or to use it as a purely negative term. Donald Joy’s book Bonding: Relationships in the Image of God is where I first grew to like the idea, and I’ve found it to be useful in explaining the way that we simultaneously idolize and infantilize youth. “Adolescence” the way I use it here is a social construction which our media culture uses to educate children to be consumers and to prevent adults from growing up.)

**(I’m not claiming that Jane Austen’s works are reliable estimates of average age of marriage, but it’s a nice reference point to consider. There is some debate about whether these age differences are as extreme as I’m claiming. Regardless, I think it’s pretty significant for the church if 100 years ago, the span of time between when one matured sexually and the time of socially-acceptable sexual experience was shorter than today.)

***(When I’ve talked about this with other church workers, they inevitably get frustrated and ask, “well, what should we do, then - pass out condoms?” This misses the point. I do not seriously think the church should either a) promote earlier marriage or b) encourage sex outside of marriage. But I do think our credibility is at stake if we do not honestly confront the economic forces which impact families and human sexuality.)

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

The Missing Generation, pt. 1

It is the nature of the Church that it is always in crisis. The current crisis for the Methodist church is that it is aging. Members are dying off at a rate higher than new members are joining. People have rightly pointed out that we need to be about the business of evanglizing, not so much to “keep the church from dying,” but because the statistics indicate that we haven’t been spreading the gospel.

So every book you pick up about church renewal mentions that we are missing a whole generation of Christians between the ages of 18 and 35. “Where are the young adults?” they ask. “What have we done wrong?” Most of these books are full of strong opinions. We haven’t evangelized. We’ve focused too much on evangelism. We aren’t missionally-focused. We’re too missionally-focused. We are not relevant to the culture. We are too relevant to the culture and not relevant to the Bible. We are too judmental. We are too soft. We preach cheap grace. We don’t preach grace enough.

There is some good theology that comes out of these books. I think their authors are sincere, and their criticisms of the church are often justified. But I have appreciated reading Robert Wuthnow’s After the Baby Boomers because Wuthnow has more than strong opinions. He has data.

It turns out that the single greatest predictor of whether someone joins a church or not is if they are married and have children. This has been the case for decades. What has happened in recent years, though, is that people get married later. The average age of marriage is now 27 or 28. The average age of having a first child is now the early 30’s. This means that the functional definition of “adulthood” has shifted. Sociologists point out that thanks to longer life spans and a later average age of marriage, someone can be called a “young adult” until they are 40.

Now, I have serious theological and philosophical problems with some of these implications. Are people who are single not adults? Are childless couples not adults? But my theoretical qualms are irrelevant. The fact is people don’t join a church until they “settle down,” and economic and demographic forces mean people settle down later, if they settle down at all. Most adults will change career directions several times before they retire. They marry later and have children later. Of course these factors affect church attendance.

So I find it a bit frustrating when churches beat themselves up about not attracting young people. This isn’t about theology. It’s about demographics.

Ten years ago, people were pointing out that mainline liberal Protestant churches were declining, but conservative Evangelical churches were not. So, they reasoned, it must have something to do with what they preach. The Evangelical gospel must be more compelling, more true, or better-marketed than the Protestant gospel.

Wuthnow points out that the discrepancy is due almost entirely to socioeconomics. Mainline Protestants tended to be better-educated and have higher incomes. Longer education and higher income correlate with a later average age of marriage. So-called Evangelical churches tended to have members with less education and less income, so their members tended to marry earlier and have more children. In recent years, though, the demographic shift has begun to affect Evangelical churches as well. Guess what? I guess “their” gospel wasn’t better than “ours.”

Of course, I don’t think that Wuthnow’s analysis means that everything is okay, and that churches should rest on their laurels. I think his research points to a broader social problem. We are increasingly isolated from authentic community. Our economic and social system discourages people from deep, life-giving relationships.

Here’s an example. In most other cultures, people are plugged into extended families of support. In fact, it is not uncommon for young adults, when they marry, to move back with their parents into a spare room or an addition on the house. If you go to the Middle East, or South America, or nearly anywhere outside of the United States, you will see this same living strategy. Even in the rural U.S., young adults often move into a trailer on property adjoining their parents’ houses. This facilitates the sharing of resources and labor. But in the U.S., the goal is to get out of your parents’ house as soon as possible. If you are thirty years old and living at home, then you have “failed to launch.” You have not moved into adulthood.

Do you see the paradox? Young adults in the United States are the most adolescent adults in the world. We drag adolescence out longer and longer, and make adulthood more and more unobtainable. As the narrator says in Fight Club, “I feel like a 30 year-old boy.”

Unless the Church is going to advocate early (possibly arranged) marriages and bans birth control, we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with a new social reality. One hundred years ago our society invented adolescence by passing child labor laws and requiring public education. Now we are inventing young adulthood for similar economic reasons. Just as the Church took a hard look at youth ministry in the 1940’s and 50’s, we will have to take a hard look at young adulthood and ask some critical questions about how we do church if we really want them to hear and live the Gospel.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

The Boy Jesus

We don’t know much about Jesus’ childhood. We have the birth narrative, of course, and the story of his parents’ encounter with Simeon and Anna. But we only get one childhood event, from when he was a precocious 12 year-old impressing the scholars in the temple.

The boy Jesus has been fleshed out a bit thanks to recent scholarship on the “Jewishness” of Jesus. A recent twist in this trend has been an interesting discussion about whether it is more appropriate to refer to Jesus as a Jew or a Judean. Rob Bell’s artful teaching-sermons often focus on the Jewish background of the gospels. People eat this stuff up, because for most of their lives they have been served up a Jesus that is context-free, whose pious sayings seem to come out of nowhere. A Jesus without a context, without a childhood in which he learned, is a Jesus without personality. This kind of Jesus, I have argued, is unloveable.

Our culture celebrates and idolizes childhood. Thanks to Sigmund Freud and Charles Dickens, all our biographies of famous people start with their childhood. Who were their parents? What formative events shaped the course of their lives? How did they feel about their mothers? We talk about the inner child, the hierarchy of needs, how people learn to trust, to love, to dream and pursue their ambitions. But childhood in the first century was something else entirely. Children were incomplete persons. They were, some have argued, nobodies. This interpretation makes Jesus’ words about greatness and entering the Kingdom of Heaven more powerful. The disciples ask him who will be greatest in the Kingdom. He says we must become like a child not because children are trusting or innocent (both of which are debatable), but because they are not great. The nobodies are the greatest. When you read it this way, his saying is revolutionary. When you read it the normal way, it’s just sentimental glurge.

And it is at least partially because of this disregard for children, this belief that they should be seen and not heard, that we have almost nothing of Jesus’ childhood.

David Buttrick often said in class that Jesus was not born with a “magic Christian brain.” He did not fall from the sky with an omniscient mind in order to teach Christian doctrine. He was born, educated, and formed by his first-century Jewish context. It was likely while in Nazareth or Capernaum that he learned Hillel’s Golden Rule:

What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Law; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.

Compare that to Jesus’ version from the Sermon on the Mount:

Do to others as you would have them do to you. For this is all the Law and the Prophets.

Christians are often surprised that Jesus did not invent the Golden Rule. We attribute more originality to him because of his special status as the God-Man. But no matter how Divine you believe Jesus was, he was fully human - he learned. He was taught. He absorbed the best teachings of his day.

To me, this image of Jesus not only as teacher, but as learner, is part of what makes him lovable. Even if you have a high Christology, even if you believe Jesus was Fully Divine, the Word of God made Flesh - he had to learn how to talk. He had to learn how to think. He would not have walked around as a four-year-old lecturing his parents without getting spanked for sassing back. He had to learn how to share. He had to learn in what contexts it was unacceptable to pick his nose or break wind. These are the things children have to learn. Nobody - not even God - gets to skip childhood.

Once I heard a little girl ask during a children’s sermon: was Jesus ever spanked? I think that question gets to the heart of a tough theological issue. How human was he? Fully human? Did he screw up? Did he get in trouble? Or was he such a sinless goody-two-shoes that he always upheld the status quo, never fought, never lied, and never hurt anyone else. In other words, was he so good that he never actually had to learn anything?

What is being human, if not learning? Growing? Changing? If Jesus did not experience those things, then can it truly be said that he was fully human?

Christians sense this issue underlying the spanking question. I’ve asked other preachers this question, and they hem and haw. “Well,” they say, “the Bible says he was sinless.” Yes, I reply, but that isn’t the question. The question is, did he get spanked?

I suspect that he did - especially after temple incident when he was 12. He ditched his parents to hang out in the temple for three days. When they found him, he said, “why were you looking for me? Didn’t you know I’d be in my father’s house?” Here in Alabama, we call that sassing back. After hunting frantically for three days, do you think his parents stood for that kind of back-talk? Now, I’ve always maintained that corporal punishment is not the best discipline, and I do not advocate spanking. But I’m guessing that, in their frenzied state, after hearing that kind of lip, Joseph and Mary took him out behind the woodshed. And when their arms grew tired, I bet they took turns.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Why is Church Anti-Boy?

I’ve said before that Raising Cain is one of my favorite books, and the documentary isn’t bad, either.

There’s an interesting scene in the documentary of a kindergarten class taught by a progressive teacher who allows the children plenty of self-determination in classroom governance. At one point, the kids share stories. One of the boys tells a story in which a villain gets killed.

The teacher asks the class what they think of the story. Some of the outspoken girls don’t like the fact that the villain gets killed. The class takes a vote and makes a new rule: in stories, characters cannot die. They can only faint.

The boy who told the story seems to deflate. Another boy complains that if characters can only faint, there’s hardly any story to tell.

Michael Thompson makes the point in the documentary that although there has been plenty of research on how boys have an unfair advantage in co-ed classrooms, education isn’t exactly fair to boys, either. They are required to sit and be still to learn, even when their bodies are telling them to wrestle, tumble, and move. They are therefore disproportionately diagnosed with ADD and medicated simply for being boys. They are punished when they share their rich and often violent fantasies.

Likewise in church our main way of doing ministry is sitting around and talking about our feelings. It’s not that boys don’t have feelings, or that they don’t need to be emotionally intelligent - on the contrary, Thompson demonstrates that boys have a complex emotional life. But instead of celebrating boys’ natural aggressiveness and physicality, we pathologize it and moralize against it. Violence is bad. Killing is bad. If you like fantasizing about those things, you are bad.

So I have little patience for critics of video games. Hand-wringing about Halo’s violence seems to me to be another classroom rule directed toward men and boys which says, “we can’t have any killing - only fainting.”

Some people argue that playing Halo in church is selling out or pandering to our violent culture. I believe we play into our violent culture’s hands when we alienate boys. We completely lose credibility with them when we act as if they don’t have the capacity to tell fantasy from reality. So instead they check out from church and check into corporate culture which will validate their sense of masculinity, and will tell them what it means to be a man.

Boys need to play soldier, and cops and robbers, and pirates and ninjas. If the church were truly concerned about reducing the level of violence in our culture, it might begin by addressing poverty, or the images of women in advertising, or, I don’t know, the war in Iraq. Scapegoating video games is a cheap way to avoid the more controversial and systemic sources of violence in American culture.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

My Rules

My Dad pointed out that the following story is a lot like the parable of the two sons.

One thing our 4-year-old offspring has been doing recently is responding to requests to take a bath or go to bed with, “I’m never going to take a bath,” or “I’m never going to bed.” The spousal unit responds, “would you like to have a regular bath or a bubble bath?” To which he responds, “A bubble bath.”

So after brushing teeth, she told him it was time for bed, and he said, “I’m never going to bed.”
And she said, “pick out three stories,” which he did. Then he said, “Okay, these are my rules: I’m never going to bed, I’m never taking a bath, I can eat whatever I want.” Then he paused.

She didn’t say anything, so he continued, “You don’t like my rules because you haven’t tried them. You should try my rules. You might like them.”

Monday, August 27, 2007

From the Mouths of Babes

So my spousal unit is reading The Peace Book by Todd Parr to our four year-old son, and I hear this exchange:
Spousal Unit: Peace is having enough pizza in the world for everyone.
Offspring: Even the bad people?
Spoual Unit: Yes, even the bad people.
Offspring: So they will learn to be nice?
Spousal Unit: Yes, so that they will learn to be nice.
...
Spousal Unit: Peace is being free.
Offspring: I like being free.
...

And then there’s this one from yesterday:
We are in the car, and the windshield wipers are going - just enough - to make a high-pitched whine that drives me crazy. I’ve teased the Spousal Unit about the fact that I’m more annoyed by audio clutter, and she’s more annoyed by visual clutter. So as the windshield wipers go screek, screek, screek, I’m clutching the arm rest and wincing. Eventually I start laughing and I tell her the windshield wipers are making me insane, and from the seat in the back the Offspring rolls his eyes and says:
“Daddy, take a deep breath.”

Monday, March 26, 2007

The Education of Shelby Knox - Mini-review

One of the books I consider essential reading for anyone interested in saving Western Civilization is Revivng Ophelia, by Mary Pipher. Watching the documentary The Education of Shelby Knox is even more powerful if you have Ophelia in mind.

This is a movie about an adolescent girl’s education into the world of activism and politics when she helps lead a campaign for comprehensive sex education in Lubbock, Texas. Lubbock has an abstinence-only policy, a strong religiously conservative demographic, as well as one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country. It reminds me of Alabama.

It’s a great discussion starter for conversations about religion and public policy. There are several clips that I will probably use in the future in Sunday school classes and discussion settings. At one point, a local preacher makes the point that “Christianity is the most intolerant religion in the world,” - a rhetorical device intended to shift the conversation from tolerance to faithfulness. It’s a pretty stupid statement, actually. If it is true (which it isn’t), what does that have to do with public policy?

Although I think the movie does a pretty decent job of respecting Shelby’s own faith, I think it shouldn’t have been too difficult to find a non-fundamentalist perspective somewhere in Lubbock. It’s telling that the only Christian voices in the movie (besides Shelby’s) are non-denominational and parachurch voices. Are there no Episcopalians in Lubbock? No Disciples of Christ, no Methodists? Or did the directors leave these interactions out of the picture to highlight Shelby’s own struggle with her faith? As if she alone, unique among Christians, struggles between faithfulness to scripture and belief in democratic ideals?

The best part of the documentary, I thought, is that it shows a supportive Christian family. Sure, there are clearly places where her parents are uncomfortable with her activist stance, and they wish she would do something less political. But, by and large, they support their daughter doing something of significance that is meaningful to her. If you’ve read Ophelia, you know what I’m talking about. For some reason, according to Pipher, religiously conservative dads seem to be better at empowering their daughters and easing their transition to womanhood, on average, than others. This is pretty shocking to most liberal folks concerned with empowering young girls to become healthy outspoken women. But in watching this movie, you can see how this works.

I also think it’s important to note that part of her ability to be outspoken on the issue of sex education was the fact that she had taken the True Love Waits pledge. If she had not, her abstinence-only accusers would have been able to use it as ammunition against her. It reminded me of Paul telling the Corinthians that though he had freedom through Christ, he would not exercise it lest it hurt his message. If she had been advocating comprehensive sex ed from a position of sexual freedom, then her accuser in the Family Values Coalition would have had a moral leg to stand on when he tried to shame her for her activism. But when she pointed out that she was able to be an activist precisely because of her pledge to abstinence, because “not every teenager has a strong faith and a supportive family,” he was himself shamed into silence. I think this is part of what Jesus meant when he said, “your righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees.”

Liberal activists need to take notes. If you want to persuade conservative fundamentalist Christians to your cause, you will need a stronger faith, you will need to do more than tithe, you will need to know more scripture, you will need to devote yourself more fully to God than they do. You must be able to be more holy than the holier-than-thous. And if this seems unfair, or too much of a burden, you need to ask yourself what you believe in. The vast majority of people believe what they believe because it fits their lifestyle. If you are an activist, you need to be able to show that you are willing to sacrifice your own personal freedom to advance your beliefs. You have to love the cause more than your lifestyle. 

Monday, January 24, 2005

Sex and the Bible

(This is a repost from my old blog - 11-04-07. It’s seed material for a project I’m referring to as Your Vulgar Bible.)

So when was the last time you heard a great sermon on the Song of Songs? Yeah. Me Neither.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how absolutely prudish we get when it comes to talking about sexuality in the church. No, I’m not advocating for more “sexual liberation” or whatever. I mean simply talking about what the Bible actually says about sex and sexuality, gender differences, and so on.

Let me start with a story.

Have you ever read the book of Ruth? I remember in a 3-6th grade Sunday school class and learning about Ruth. I remember the Sunday school teachers - two middle-aged, wonderful, loving women, who must have been saints to put up with me - telling us the highlights of the story. They told us about how Ruth pledged her loyalty to Naomi, saying, “I will go wherever you go. Your people will be my people. Your god will be my god.” And I remember thinking, “so what?”

And then I remember the big climax of the story. She and Naomi meet Boaz. He’s kind to her. It’s clear where this is headed. Naomi arranges a marriage between the two of them. There’s this strange ritual of first-refusal involving sandals and the purchase of a field. I remember thinking that this story was just plain weird.

Here’s one part that really flummoxed me. Ruth goes to him while he is “cheerful with wine,” and she lays down at his feet. And there, in our Sunday school handout, there was a cartoonish drawing of a European-looking woman kneeling down at his feet, with a smile on her face, while he startles, wakes up and gapes at her. This, we were supposed to infer, was some sort of ancient ritual proposal of marriage. Boaz was apparently very honored with this bizarre act of submission. He thanked her for this “service.” I wrote it off. Just one more weird ancient ritual that has nothing to do with me.

It wasn’t until college that I got it. We were studying Chaucer, I think, and we heard about how “feet” and “hands” have always been euphemisms for genitals. The next time I heard a reference to the book of Ruth, it clicked.

My initial reaction? Anger. I was angry at the cartoonist who drew the picture of Ruth. I was angry at my Sunday school teachers. I was angry at church and all the oblivious Christians who read from their Bibles with the same enthusiasm and excitement as they would read Care and Cleaning of Your New Vacuum Cleaner. Nobody had told me this was a story about sex. In fact, it seemed like there was a vast conspiracy to cover up the fact.

I don’t know what I should have expected. Certainly not a pornographic cartoon of Ruth “servicing” Boaz some other way. The author leaves the act up to the imagination, anyway. And I certainly don’t expect Christians who believe the Bible is an instruction manual, or a map, or a divinely-inspired version of Life’s Little Instruction Book to hear these stories as anything other than examples of how we are supposed to behave. So over time, my anger and frustration have mellowed somewhat. But it still doesn’t change the fact that I felt lied to. And we continue to lie by omission and by obfuscation.

Ever tried to have a conversation with a Christian about circumcision? They have no clue. Folks, we are talking about removing the foreskin of a man’s
penis. The Hebrew Bible even takes the chance to yuk it up a few times at pagan expense. David was to collect a small mountain of foreskins. Dinah’s brothers used the procedure as a strategy for revenge. It was a symbol of conversion and the covenant, as well as a symbol of domination and of sexuality. The Bible talks about it frequently. Do we? Nope. Occasionally it gets a little air time when we read about “circumcision of the heart,” but even then it is an oblique reference. We only mention it to spiritualize it.

Again, I was in college and seminary before I understood that “pillar” was a reference to a stone phallus. That “prostitutes” were often pagan priestesses. Apparently this knowledge is too wonderful for high school students to
know.

Why is this important? Because many authors of the Bible were aware that we have a tendency to worship sex and death. The stories of God’s calling Abe and Sarah, letting barren women become pregnant, working through humanity’s sexual desires, all of them incorporate sexuality into a larger drama that depicts God as the God not only of fertility, but of creation, redemption, and judgment. There is no fertility god but Elohim, the God of hosts. Haven’t you ever prayed about your sex life? Whose name often gets called out when people make love?

And we who are charged with teaching people about the Bible, we allow the perception that God is anti-sex. No wonder those whose faces are thrust into commodified sex every day suspect that the church has nothing relevant to say to them. It’s like Sex and the City vs. Pie in the Sky. Give me the former any day.

It is especially frustrating living, as we do, in a pagan culture which calls itself Christian. We still have prostitutes (many of whom are celebrities - high priests and preistesses of fertility) who earn money for their temples (the culture industries) by selling their bodies. We sacrifice children on the altar of these gods and goddesses. What else do you call Abercrombie and Fitch’s marketing thong underwear to 7 year olds? We teach young women they can be anything and do anything they want, as long as they try to be exactly the consumers we want them to be - as long as their chief value comes from being sexually attractive.

At the same time, our Christian church preaches asceticism and support of a cultural structure which feeds the problem. Kids hit puberty at age 10, and the average age of marriage is now 27. Our solution? Promise rings. Yes, you have to go 17 years without sex, during your prime reproductive years. And, by the way, don’t touch yourself. I mean, it may be okay if you do, but we fire people if they talk about it. It’s better if you are ashamed and guilty about it. Meanwhile, the pagan temples produce movies like American Pie

What would it mean to acknowledge the God of creation and redemption as the God of sex and fertility? Why do we not tell the real story of Ruth? Or Esther? Or the Most Sublime of Songs? Are we so afraid that kids are going to say, “well, if Ruth did it, it must be okay to have non-penetrative sex outside marriage.” (By the way, they already do say those things). Would this story not make a great sermon to a church who consistently expresses outrage at young women who get pregnant in order to escape their home life? Here’s a story about a woman who takes control of her desperate situation by using the one thing left to her. And guess what? She was a foreigner. A pagan, someone for whom switching religious loyalty was as natural a decision as following her mother-in-law, whom she loved. And guess what else? She was David’s grandmother. That’s right. KingDavid.

Is there a possibility that we could conceive of a sexual ethics that would take into account the actual stories in the Bible? I don’t mean a return to 700 B.C.  I’m not exactly sure what such a sexual ethics would look like. Something beyond our normal categories of conservative and liberal, I think. We might have to rethink right and wrong with regard to the social injustices that we impose on people. Maybe sex before marriage is not quite as wrong as, say, creating an extended form of adolescence that lasts until you are thirty years old. I’m not advocating premarital sex, or starter marriages, or any of the other failed strategies we have developed so that we can maintain our economic and cultural perversions.

Look, one of the most dynamic groups in my congregation are the young adults. Most of them are single. Most of them are struggling with sexuality and purity and the choices they make in light of the faith they have been raised in. It doesn’t work. The Bible belt has more teen pregnancy than other region of the country. But we do not get taught, in the Bible belt, what the Bible actually says. We teach kids that Ruth lay down at Boaz’s feet. His literal feet. The ones with toes on them. Is it any wonder that so many also believe women are to be under men’s feet in political and social terms as well? Is it any wonder that, in spite of their religious beliefs, they make poor sexual and relational choices? Jesus says “woe to anyone who makes one of these little ones stumble.” Our system is one giant stumbling block.

What would it be like if we taught young women that they have other sexual choices available to them? What if we gave them power over their own destinies and futures, the way Ruth and Naomi took charge of theirs? What if we taught that sexual pleasure, like food and wine, is not bad, but that like food and wine can be misused and, like them, can destroy or enhance our lives? What if we had communities of sharing and of giving that made abortion irrelevant, because all babies would be born into a loving extended family?

Look, I am really, really, really suspicious of theologies of the erotic. I think they would often set up a God of sex and fertility in place of the God who creates, sustains, and redeems. I think it is vital that we don’t get too syncretic. I believe theologians often import pagan values from our sexualized culture, baptize them, and call them Christian. Nor do I think that we should speak too formally about “God’s good gift,” and make it so pure and holy and ideal that it becomes an idol in a different sense. But what I find when I read the Song of Songs or the book of Ruth is a God who acts in concert with human sexual desire, sometimes blessing it, sometimes frustrating it.

Nor do I know how to work this out in practice. I was thinking earlier, for the new worship service, that it would be cool at some point to have a man and a woman read the Song of Songs as a drama. I pictured two stools behind two screens, backlit, so you could see the actors’ shadows. They would alternate between the man’s part and the woman’s part, and they would use a translation that didn’t pull any punches. You know what? I wimped out. It’s too erotic. I felt bad about wimping out until I turned to Eugene Peterson’s translation in The Message and I found that he, too, wimped out. He goes with the less sexual translation whenever he can (compare with the NASB or Darby’s translation).

I don’t blame him. It’s too much. The whole ambiguous door-knocking/coitus interruptus thing is just difficult to speak without blushing. And, amusingly, the woman isn’t completely undressed in his translation. She’s wearing a nightgown. Probably flannel. And I bet she has those very unsexy flip-flop slippers with the fuzzy tops. And she’s wearing rollers in her hair. Yeah, that’s safer. You might even get away with reading that in church. No chance of anyone’s feet getting aroused when they hear that.
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Update

(1/14/2006): There’s a follow-up post on sex in the Bible here, and a link to an excellent Google answer about premarital sex here. I wish that the author had mentioned the example of Ruth!

Also, for how the Bible deals with “vulgar” subjects, you might want to read this post.
Updated again 10/21/2006