Speaking as one who has been miraculously delivered from a 14-year addiction to at least daily masturbation, I must say that what this country needs so desperately is a sexual counterrevolution.
There will be no renewal of the Judeo-Christian faith in America without a "re-Puritanization" of our sexual ethics. Traditionalists in this country who lament the inexorable advance of the general sexual anarchy in society since the Sixties would do well to consider just how badly they and their brethren have failed to stem the tide of corruption of sexuality within the church.
With levels of porn use (which is typically accompanied by masturbation) at shocking epidemic levels among Christian men (30-50 percent in one recent survey) and even mini-epidemic levels among Christian women (up to 20 percent), how in the world can we expect to witness to the virtue of chastity?
We Christians must take a long, hard look beyond the veneer of these problems to see the root cause: a general lack of faith in the sufficiency of God alone to satisfy our deepest relational needs and longings.
Few single Christians take their relationship with God deep enough in prayer and fasting to seriously consider lifelong celibacy as an option - even though Scripture itself testifies that this is in fact the most blessed lifestyle (St. Paul to the Corinthians). Many if not most young Christians marry at least in part to relieve and contain sexual urges that they're resigned to otherwise going wild.
While this difficulty of celibacy has always existed in the history of the church, it is deeply compounded today by a culture that glamorizes the image at the expense of the substance - a culture that is more at home in the church than we as Christians often realize. Our whole megachurch and Billy Graham crusade-style evangelical Christian culture - for all its value - is not conducive to encouraging young believers to walk slowly and silently with the Lord, as opposed to aggressively pursuing spectacular ministry success that would merit a Christianity Today or Relevant magazine article.
Young Christians have mastered the art of compelling persuasion, powerful worship experiences and spiritual encounters: they have not grasped that true sanctity can only be attained through constant fasting and self-denial of both physical and psychological appetites. And of course, of all these appetites, the desire for sexual intimacy is the crown.
We live in an age where you can get spiritual highs and good feelings from yoga for a monetary fee that seems so much lighter than the moral demands of Christianity. Until Christians figure out how to abandon their feel-good-about-oneself spirituality and replace it with an austere neo-Puritanism, epitomized by a new repression of sexual passions, we will continue to lose ground in the ongoing culture war.
No comments:
Post a Comment