I have many guilty pleasures when it comes to TV. Two of them are Glee and Grey's Anatomy. I'm well aware that both these shows 'jumped the shark' years ago. They are formulaic and melodramatic. I'm also fairly certain they are not age-appropriate for the folks who, I assume, comprise a fairly large chunk of their audience - teenage girls.
But I watched them back when they were pretty decent shows, and it just feels wrong to abandon them now that we've come this far. I hope they both die a gracious death soon - not desperately clinging to irrelevance and ever-increasingly bizarre inanity, like two other shows I once guiltily watched, Lost and Alias.
Anyway, assuming that they both still garner a fairly high Nielsen rating - and, thus, people like me and the people I serve with might occasionally watch them - I want to reflect on a recent disturbing story line in both of them. It's an old, old story line (historically old), and while it still holds sway among many faithful Christian folks, I find it more than a little objectionable.
It is the story line that reduces the essence of Christian faith and life to the question of "to do it, or not to do it."
Recently, both these shows have characters who are the most publicly identified people of Christian faith (one male and one female), who have made a vow to Jesus not to have sex before marriage. This vow - not uncommon among people of all ages, but especially among so-called "Evangelical" Christian teenagers - becomes hard to keep when 'ye olde flesh' acts up.
In both shows, within the span of a few short weeks, these characters have made it abundantly clear that to be Christian means to abstain from sex before marriage - and to indulge is, literally, to "lose your faith" or to "break a promise to Jesus."
Don't get me wrong. I do not encourage people, especially teenagers, to have sex before marriage. A healthy debate can occur about what healthy and holy sexuality can and should look like among people who are old enough to want to but who (for any number of reasons) are not yet (and may never be allowed to, or desire to be) married.
That's not the debate I'm interested in right now. Maybe another day. Suffice it to say I am uncomfortable (to say the least) with the hypersexualized culture in which we live - especially as it targets and implicates people at a younger and younger age each year. Especially now that I'm the proud parent of two kids of two different genders, I am not just uncomfortable, I'm terrified about what a "normal" sexual life will look like when my kids are becoming adolescents.
So yeah: I don't want our teenagers having sex any more than you do. And even when they're "adults," I believe - for many reasons, religious and otherwise - that sexuality in its fullness is best expressed within the context of a committed, monogamous, publicly-accountable relationship.
(I'm also well aware that the vast majority of sexual activity does not occur in that context, and I believe it behooves us as a church to live meaningfully within the world as it actually is... but that's a post for another day.)
Be that as it may, I'm convinced there is vast room for diversity of opinion within the Christian family when it comes to the sticky wickets of pre-/extra-marital sexuality, contraception, abortion, sexual identity, etc. What bothers me about these two shows (other than the fact that they currently suck) is the dangerous reduction of the Christian faith that they present in these two sexually conflicted characters.
In short: The boundaries of "faithful" Christian life are in no way, shape, or form determined by a person's decision to engage, or not, in sexual activity outside the context of a legally-recognized relationship. Jesus is not nearly as obsessed with your sex life as our culture would lead you to believe.
This is the kind of reductive thinking that turns Jesus into a hapless pawn in any number of culture war battles. And while we may be able to extrapolate some basic, shared values about Christian sexual ethics from the life and teachings of Jesus (mercy, justice, and faithfulness come to mind...), let us agree that Jesus did not die in order to scare our children into abstinence.
Many faithful Christian people have made so-called "purity pledges" - with mixed results. And while I'm hesitant, for many reasons, to encourage that myself, I in no way mean to dismiss them as "bad" Christians. They're doing their best, just like me (sometimes). I simply discourage the temptation to set these faithful folk apart as "better" Christians than folks who make other choices about coming to terms with sexual identity and activity before marriage.
When we promulgate this kind of reductive thinking, we not only set many of our kids up for failure, guilt, and shame - but we also (and perhaps more importantly) dislocate the power and promise of the Christian narrative. Christianity is not a purity cult (any faithful reading of the gospels reveals that). Christian life is witnessing to the world-changing love of Jesus Christ, poured out - even unto death - so that all of creation might enjoy abundant and eternal life.
So yes, we should talk to our kids about sex. But we are the ones who should talk about it - employing conviction, experience, science, and love - and for the most part, leave Jesus out of it. Except, perhaps, to say this:
"You will have to make many difficult choices as you grow up. Those choices can have wonderful and terrible consequences, and you should be prepared to live with them. But know this: whatever choices you make, Jesus will still love you, choose you, forgive you when you need it, and stick with you - and so will I. Whether we're all overjoyed or disappointed, nothing you do or don't do will change how Jesus feels about you - and the same goes for me."
I wish someone would have told that to Dr April Kepner. Maybe then she would have passed her boards and given us all one less annoying story line to endure.
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