2 Reasons You’re Hesitant to Talk to Your Kids About Sex (But Shouldn’t Be)
My guest on the blog is Amy Davison, co-author of Mama Bear Apologetics Guide to Sexuality.* (Check out our online book study!) She's going to clear up two obstacles that keep parents from teaching their kids a biblical worldview of sexuality.
Discipleship is not a word you hear that often outside of the occasional sermon series on the Apostles. In fact, I’m willing to bet an overpriced latte that you’ve never heard your church use it to refer to how we should shepherd our children’s understanding of biblical sexuality. But parents, there is no better way! There’s just a slight problem: the word discipleship is nowhere to be found in the Bible. No really, flip to the index and check, I’ll wait... See what I mean?
Parents often shy away from discipleship because of their aversion to the heavy-handed ways they may have learned about God and sex. It is critical to understand how sexually discipling your kids is different. To do that, we have to address two big elephants in the room when it comes to teaching a biblical sexual ethic.
Repeat after me: I am not indoctrinating my kids.
If you want to stir up the hornet’s nest of social media, tweet about how you’re raising your kids to understand the Christian worldview. It won’t take long before the progressive police shriek, “Indoctrination!” and accuse you of being a Christian Castro in yoga pants. They’re totally wrong of course. (Obviously Castro could never pull off lululemon; and I doubt he ever hid in a closet to eat the last brownie while toddlers clawed like zombies at the door.) They’re panicking because at one point, instead of being taught how to discern good ideas from bad, some parents opted for indoctrination instead.
Indoctrination is when people are manipulated into accepting an idea without being allowed to think critically about whether or not it’s actually true. You just accept it as such.
Think of this like an assembly line of Talking Tina dolls. Each doll rolls across the assembly line and has a voice box with a set recording of a few different phrases sewn into her body. Press her hand and, like magic, Tina says exactly what she was programmed to say, no thinking required.
For some parents, this is the epitome of religious upbringing. Raising kids to ask questions about Christianity was akin to putting them on the short bus to hell, and nobody wants to ride that bus! In the dozens of books Hillary and I have read on Christians who renounced their faith or the traditional understanding of Scripture, nearly all were raised in an indoctrination-style household. There was no discipling; just an implicit understanding that if you lived in this house, you believe what we say, no questions asked.
That isn’t the kind of household anyone wants to grow up in, and it certainly isn’t biblical. Scripture admonishes us to test everything because we are at war with false philosophies (1 Thessalonians 5:21, Colossians 2:8). This is why we are given spiritual armor to use in battle daily—not to be hung above the fireplace as a decoration (Ephesians 6:10-18). Kids are supposed to reason about what Scripture tells them because knowing God intimately with our minds (Hebrew yada) is an act of love and worship (Isaiah 1:18, 1 Peter 3:15, Matthew 22:37). If our home isn’t a safe place for autonomy, discussion, doubts, research and growth, then the Twitter haters have a right to be mad: we’re indoctrinating our kids. We have to take extra care as parents to nurture the faith of our children as an evangelist and not as a stand-in for the Holy Spirit. Trust me, we can’t fill that role.
A Bad Case of “the Fundies”
The second challenge often raised against discipleship is one we’re probably all familiar with: fundamentalism. Fundamentalism grew as a sort of justice league of evangelicals to combat liberal challenges against the supernatural and the “…historicity and truth of Christian doctrine.” Dozens of church leaders from across denominational lines united around upholding and contending for the fundamentals of the faith like the virgin birth, Christ’s divinity and resurrection, creation, and the inerrancy of the original manuscripts.
Things were going well when, around the mid 1920s, some within the fundamentalist camp wanted to kick things up a notch…or ten. If you’ve ever seen the movie "The Waterboy," starring Adam Sandler, you’ll no doubt remember how his mother thought everything was of the devil. This hilarious bit of comedy was a modern poke at the fundamentalist’s view that things like dancing, playing cards, fooz-ball (football), and spicy food was going to damn your soul to hell. To protect the Church meant that the movement had to get militant, and boy did they ever! They combined a strict literal understanding of Scripture with their own standard for how people should act (aka legalism) and would gleefully boil anyone in the proverbial pot of self-righteousness if they happened to deviate from it.
Fundies' kids didn’t have it any easier than their indoctrinated playmates. If you grew up under this influence, sex was what separated the good boys and girls from the bad. It was a trap waiting to snare sweet and innocent Christians. If you were a girl, you might have even been told your body was that trap. So you better put on another sweater or your future spouse will be passed off to someone more worthy. The problem with fundamentalism is that it uses the premarital bed (or the back of your boyfriend's Nissan) as the gateway to the cross. Sure kids may have made it down the aisle with their purity rings still shining, but the anxiety that followed them made faithfulness feel worse than if they had actually sinned. As a result, many went on their honeymoons and left the church behind them for good.
Worth the Fight
Joe Lewis once said that everyone has a plan until they get hit, and the church is no different. They tried to have a plan, but between hyper-fundamentalism, the fall-out of purity culture, and the at times graceless response to LGBTQ issues, the church has taken more than its share of hits. As Dr. Juli Slattery points out, the problem isn't that the spiritual battle defending biblical sexuality isn’t worth having, it’s that the church doesn’t know how to fight.(1) And the fall-out isn’t pretty.
Pew Research Journal conducted a survey on views regarding sexuality and found that 57% of Christians believed premarital sex in a committed relationship was fine, while 50% said that hookups (sleeping with someone you aren’t committed to) was no biggie!(2) According to one study, upwards of 80% of unmarried evangelicals between 18-29 have had sex(3) while 54% of Christians think homosexuality should be accepted rather than discouraged by the church.
We parents aren’t doing much better. Many of us grew up in a “don’t ask-don’t tell”(4) household when it came to discussing sex, and we’ve happily carried on the tradition with our kids. For some of us, the silence is rooted in fear. We’re afraid that if we talk about sex then our kids will want sex. What teen wouldn’t want to after hearing about how good it can feel? And boobs are involved too?! Nope. It’s best to keep that little subject out of sight and out of mind.
Perhaps you are only now shaking off the weight of toxic sexual messages that were piled upon your teenage shoulders. The last thing you want is for your children to feel the same guilt and shame you did. For others, we just don’t know what to say. Heck, we don’t even understand how the biblical sexual worldview is a critical aspect in our own walk with Jesus, let alone how to explain it to our kids.(5) Instead, we rely on middle school health class, your kid’s friends, and snap-tok apps to do the leg-work for us.
Church, can we come together for a moment and acknowledge a hard truth? This isn’t working. Not because there’s something wrong with God’s design; it's how we’re teaching it (or not teaching it) that’s the problem. When we speak God’s word without grace we don’t only sound like a clanging gong, we club a few people with it in the process. When we don’t address sin, we lose our saltiness and the Gospel loses its power. We need both grace and truth to effectively reach the wounded. We have to talk about sexuality because too many are being led astray by false teachers.(6)
Mamas and Papas, we have to do our part too. Our kids want us to talk to them about sex. No really, they do. When the Power to Decide campaign surveyed thousands of students, do you know who teens aged 12-15 overwhelmingly said had the most influence on their sexual decisions? Parents. Do you know who also won the influence race with teens aged 16-19? Parents.(7) Don’t let their perpetual AirPods use or eye rolls fool you; our kids are listening. Let’s get some learning. Let’s start talking.
Want to learn more? Grab your copy of Mama Bear Apologetics Guide to Sexuality* or join the online book study starting this January! You can also learn more from Amy Davison and her co-author Hillary Morgan Ferrer at www.mamabearapologetics.com.
*This is an affiliate link. AI may earn referral fees from qualifying purchases.
1) Slattery, Juli Rethinking Sexuality (New York: Multnomah, 2018) Pg. 31
2) https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/31/half-of-u-s-christians-say-casual-sex-between-consenting-adults-is-sometimes-or-always-acceptable/
3) https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/10/01/study-finds-majority-of-young-evangelicals-have-premarital-sex/?sh=2af7de01739d
4) This is more commonly known within the branches of the military as a policy regarding homosexuality among troops, but it applies here too.
5) Dr. Slattery makes this point as well in Rethinking Sexuality pg. 24.
6) This was never more obvious than reading Nadia-Bolz Weber’s book Shameless.
7) 54% of teens ages 12-15 said their parents held the most sway. This shrunk to 32% during the 16-19 years with their friends gaining ground at 28%. It wasn’t until college that kids started choosing their friends over us for advice. Still, we’re ahead! Best take advantage of that lead folks! https://powertodecide.org/what-we-do/information/resource-library/parent-power-october-2016-survey-says
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