Chapter Nineteen: Let’s Talk About Sex – Sex and Sexuality in Dialogue with Young Christ Believers.

Deconstruction, the Gospel and the Social World of Young People (Part Three)

The rap duo “Salt ’n Pepa” are probably most famous for their rather cheesy pop hit “Push It” (apologies for those who are now humming the tune in their heads). They did, however, have reasonable commercial success with the rather unambiguously titled hit, “Let’s Talk About Sex”. Interestingly, it was all about the unrealistic expectations that (particularly) young girls have about finding the right person because of how sex and sexuality is vaunted in the public media (bearing in mind, this song came out in 1990, long before the social media revolution). It somewhat eerily resonates despite being well over 3 decades old; nonetheless, I wonder how different the emphasis might have been if the song was recorded today. I wonder what the lyrics might have said if the song was recorded in a specifically Christian context today. I will leave that to percolate in your minds as we ruminate together over the need for a mature forum for young people in the church to be able to speak about sex, sexual identity and sexual ethics.

The church’s awkward relationship with sex and sexuality has a complex history. From its near demonisation and association with original sin and the fall to the disastrous (albeit well-meaning) outworking of “purity” culture and its implications, issues of sex and sexuality have always felt like unchartered territory within believing community discourse. There is often a kind of nervous lip service paid to the fact that God created sexuality to be a beautiful aspect of human identity and, indeed, immersion within the Kingdom of God. The unfortunate tendency is then for the conversation to collapse into a “brass tacks” survey of what is and is not sexually permissible with agreements and disagreements over certain areas, tension between conservative and liberal readings both of society and scripture and an almost inevitable sense of dislocation between church administrations and young people trying to navigate their discipleship in a sex-obsessed world.

As we continue to deconstruct the social world of young people and attempt to eavesdrop on their conversations, this reflection is an attempt to consider how we might tidy the platform upon which we have conversations about sex and sexuality with young people in believing community. This is not the place to establish in finite fashion any kind of Christian position on any of the salient issues (except where alluding to such positions makes sense), but rather to ask how we can avoid making these discussions more awkward, meandering and hope-less than they have been historically. If my contextualization sounds bleak, it is not without reason.

I wish to begin by establishing the contours of my analysis; to do so, I want to offer some initial comment on one of the most pervasive elements of Christian purity culture which contributed significantly to how these discussions eventually unfolded. In many ways, it is a sad cautionary tale, but it will go some way towards elaborating the current landscape.

A significant cross section of the “Ex-vangelical” camp arrived there when attempting to negotiate the terrain of sexual identity within church spaces. Many were faced with harsh judgmentalism, ultimatums, bullish insensitivity, minimal understanding and even marginalising sermons purporting to speak generally whilst really aimed at shaming particular individuals. Doctrinal positions notwithstanding, too many young people with questions about everything from gender dysphoria to same-sex attraction, to sexual addiction, to confusion about intimacy boundaries and a whole host of things in between, rather than being treated with compassion, understanding and love, were read the religious riot act and told to “repent or perish”. In an attempt to open a window on discussing these ideas, I wish to do a very brief survey of the experience of Joshua Harris and his wildly popular purity manual, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. The entire experience from start to finish is a test case in the deeply flawed, spiritually insensitive and naively superficial approach to cultivating healthy dialogue about sexual dynamics within the church. I will try as far as possible to limit my commentary to what we can know and be as upfront as possible when expressing an opinion. I say this for, as tawdry a tale as the reception of the book was, I firmly believe everybody’s heart was in the right place, and I wish neither to demonise any of the people involved or suggest that it is a story of the “goodies and the baddies”.

Purity Culture

I have already used the phrase, and it makes sense to provide at least some minimal definition. Joshua Harris was not writing into a social vacuum; rather, he was attempting to provide Christian answers for the pre-existent problem of young people negotiating raging hormones on the one hand, whilst maintaining a mixture of biblical propriety and good church reputation on the other. In many respects, purity culture was the conservative solution to this dichotomy. Alas, I think for many it became a shame fuelled paradigm for, “how to have the strength to say no to things you really want to do, but know you will feel terrible about”!

Hailing primarily from the bowels of American evangelicalism, purity culture was effectively a socially conscious Christian movement aimed at promoting premarital chastity and abstinence particularly amongst young believers and using this as a sounding board for promoting the benefits of the emergent Christian sexual ethic to the unbelieving world.

In his book, Harris encourages young Christians to look beyond our Western culture’s dominant paradigm for developing serial intimate relationships – namely, the process of “dating” – and instead commit to “purposeful singleness”. Romantic relationships, he suggests, should exist only as a means to preparing for marriage—what was commonly called “courting”. Harris avoids that quaint-sounding term in I Kissed Dating Goodbye, but the idea is implicit in his promotion of relationships that emphasise long-term commitment and the supervision of the community of believers over and against traditional dating, which he feels emphasises self-centred emotional and physical satisfaction [Rob Marus, “Kissing Nonsense Goodbye,” Christianity Today 45:8 (2001): 46].

He argues that dating leads to intimacy, but not to commitment. Intimacy, he says, is rightly a reward of commitment. Harris calls for teens to make friendships in which they practice skills. It was certainly not Harris’ intention to demonise the whole idea of dating which, as he said in an interview with Christianity Today, was a common misconception about the reason, he wrote I Kissed Dating Goodbye in the first place:

<A lot of people think I’m saying don’t date and then just walk up to somebody and say, “Hey, the Lord told me we were supposed to get together.” I’m not saying dating is sinful, and I’m not saying a guy and a girl should never spend time alone together. I’m saying let’s wait until we can be purposeful, so there’s a reason behind our relationship, and we’re not just stirring up passion for the sake of a good time. Other people must assume I’m even against marriage. When they discover I have a wife now, they say, “Oh, you’re married!”—as if I had broken some promise [Joshua Harris, “The Man Who Ignited the Dating Debate,” Christianity Today, 45:8 (2001): 43]>.

I sincerely urge you to watch the following three minute clip:

This will give you some indication of the context surrounding how Harris later reimagined and deconstructed his own position. Roughly a year after the book came out, Harris got married and began serving as a church pastor – a position he held for some 17 years. He later separated and divorced his wife, deciding that he was not living by the standards to which he was calling others, and renounced Christianity. In the process, he arranged with the publisher to stop selling copies of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, pulling remaining copies off shelves, issuing public apologies to everybody who was hurt by the book (which, by all accounts, was a substantial number of people) and making a full length documentary expressing his remorse and explaining his new pathway in life. In an interview with Preston Ulmer, he nobly asserted:

When I realized internally that I wasn’t believing the same way, and I wasn’t having those same convictions, it grated on my soul to be living under the benefits of that [Christianity] when it wasn’t actually the reality. I think I have such a respect for Christianity . . . if it’s real, it needs to be taken seriously and not just played around with [Preston Ulmer, Deconstruct Faith, Discover Jesus: How Questioning Your Religion Can Lead You to a Healthy and Holy God (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2023), 45].

In my own humble opinion, the true tragedy of the story is how someone so young (Harris was just 21 years old when he wrote I Kissed Dating Goodbye) was effectively given the responsibility to carry the weight of this conversation on his back on the basis of this single publication (he wrote several books after this, but none of them were anywhere near as popular). Evangelical leaders across the board saw in Harris’ success a way of propagating a message which they endorsed without giving any consideration to the effects it might have on his own life or on the lives of the legions of people who were invested in his thesis. This was a pathway for a single individual to effectively do the “dirty work” of an evangelical administration desperate to prevent young, unmarried believers from having sex with each other. Whilst it was a gallant move in many ways, and almost certainly the case that more people would have listened to Harris than to some older evangelicals droning on about the imperative value of sexual purity, it was simply an ill considered and naive move which led to considerable devastation. Numerous people complained that they married the wrong person on the basis of Harris’ book and, despite his (admirable) contrition, felt that it was impossible to un-ring the bell.

The broad criticisms of the book, many of which Harris himself admits, are a helpful inroad into processing why so much of our conversation about sex and sexuality with young believers goes awry. In what follows, I want to collate some of these broad-based criticisms of Harris’ book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye and, in each case, use the very same criticism as a launchpad for critique of the modern discourse on sex and sexuality within believing circles. I am not an expert on sex and sexuality, I am not a relationship expert and, as with all my writing on this platform, it is generally not my intention to provide hard and fast conclusions or finite answers for the questions that I am raising. Rather, it is my intention to assist those in the throes of Christ centred deconstruction of the Christian faith, wherever they happen to be on that journey, to assess how we organise discussion platforms for important areas of life.

It is my thesis that much of the impasse we experience in some of these difficult conversations has less to do with the content of the conversation and far more to do with how the discussions are framed, unrealistic expectations of people’s lived experience and attempts to bind people to ideas which have questionable moorings in the biblical text. With that contextual preamble out of the way, let us survey the criticisms of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and how they can help us survey dialogue about sex and sexuality amongst young Christ believers.

Oversimplification of the Nature of Relationships

There is something decidedly sincere about the way Joshua Harris reflected on the impact of his book. Indeed, I consider it almost a naive error rather than a gross misjudgement that the thesis of his book – the notion that developing romantic feelings outside the marriage union is somehow inherently selfish – set up something of a false dichotomy. It was speaking theoretically and not fully accounting for the kind of things people consider when deciding if a partner would be compatible, emotionally mature enough or mentally and spiritually ready for a lifelong commitment. To simply say that if you are not ready for marriage, you are not ready for romance simply ran roughshod over the practical reality that, for many, it is exploring precisely this kind of relational experience which helps to navigate the terrain. As I have often bemoaned, too much of our discourse regarding compatibility centres around finding the right person, and too little of it is concerned with becoming the right person, and this is yet another example of that. The social realities of compatibility are far too complex for the kind of reductionist thinking at the heart of Harris’ ideas.

Oversimplifying human sexuality will inevitably make the conversation fraught. (If you are thinking that overcomplicating it can have the same effect, I am tempted to agree, but any complexity arises from lived experience). Young people are subject to a world with diverse sexual identities, relatively rampant sexual libertinism, normalised hypersexuality and a communication highway that ensures no idea remains new or hidden for terribly long. If Christian leaders and teachers flatten the conversation by blandly and uncritically saying there are only two genders, each is connected to one sexual identity, gender dysphoria is sin and any deviation from the above is satanic, some youngsters will be lost to the ether – not because beliefs they hold are necessarily correct, but because they were not heard. It might only be one of the sheep – but we know how Jesus feels about that (Luke 15:4–6). Any sense of religious correctness one might feel making such assertions is surely drowned out by the sense of alienation felt by our youngsters who feel like they cannot even safely speak about the dynamics of their interior world. We require more believers who are educated in the issues, biblically literate, sensitive, compassionate and wise to step forward and facilitate discussion. If a confusing world is made into an unsafe one to wrestle with the confusion, it becomes a terrifying and isolating one.

Blindness to the Politics of Gender

Books like I Kissed Dating Goodbye place an unnatural burden on women. They are the de facto “Jezebels-in-waiting” whose misbehaviours, crop tops, emotionalism, desire to nest and biological clocks are apparently deeply problematic for “men”. Whilst modest clothing and self-control ought to be part of any believers’ socio-religious toolkit, make no mistake: Jesus was quite clear where the burden for temptation into sexual lust lay (Matt. 5:27–30 – lust arises from the male gaze and not the female wardrobe) and a woman’s “desire for her husband” is an element of divine curse, and not a reflection of the ideal (Gen. 3:16). Movement towards the divine ideal requires mutual submission of spouses in the fear of Messiah (Eph. 5:21). Male leadership ought to be grounded in the willingness of men to lead in taking responsibility for how relationships develop and providing the context for genuine affection to mature. Too often it appears grounded in who is qualified to “call the shots”. Purity culture weaponised female sexuality, like it was a trap which might ensnare unsuspecting men. Far too commonly today, men embroiled in sexual scandal in church spaces gaslight, victim blame and deflect responsibility. A 2023 sermon went viral after Pastor Bobby Leonard of Bible Baptist Tabernacle, Monroe in North Carolina, preached that he would exonerate a rapist if his victim wore shorts! In his sermon, he said: “If you dress like that and you get raped and I’m on the jury, he’s gonna go free...I can’t help if you don’t like it, I’m right… a man’s a man”. He apologised after the inevitable backlash, but I fear that such sentiments may not be as alien or fringe as we might like to imagine.

The conversation about sex and sexuality in the church is ostensibly more difficult for women, in my view, for several reasons. Firstly, women tend to outnumber men in the church. Secondly, there is a greater stigma about female sexual freedom than male. Thirdly, the Bible (whether we care to admit or not) was written in a distinctly patriarchal culture. Fourthly, male leadership is promoted in most Christian contexts and debates surround the place and role of women – it is not vice versa. Fifthly, the idealisation of the “female virgin on her wedding night” can be a marginalising paradigm for some women – and Jesus is no less welcoming of women with racy sexual pasts. It is incumbent upon men to ensure that female sexuality is not villainised and touted as a toxin against which men need protection or a virus for which they need either vaccination or antidote. Young believing women are exposed to the same often toxic sexual culture that boys and young men are and need the same (if not more) safety, overseership and lovingkindness. If the questions girls and young women raise regarding sex and sexuality are looked upon with greater suspicion, it will wrongly inhibit dialogue and promote immaturity. This leads into another difficulty in Harris’ thesis.

Vaunting Marriage as Christian Utopia.

This is something I would certainly not lay uniquely at the feet of Joshua Harris; I include it only because his book added fuel to a fire that was already burning out of control. A common complaint amongst critics of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and indeed of the broader Christian ecosystem associated with marital dynamics, is the near veneration of marriage. In my own walk, I certainly experienced a church culture which treated marriage as a “promotion” from singlehood. Whilst there was no official charter demonising singlehood, interpreting it as inferior was virtually unavoidable. Marriage and courtship are rightly celebrated within believing community; they are, after all, the bedrock of family, and God’s people are both His bride and family in various contexts. However, lauding marriage in a fashion that treats Christian singlehood as a second division form of faith and a “condition” from which one must be liberated, or treating singles as if they are lacking some vital aspect of their walk with God or engaged in a retrograde discipleship, is to so woefully misread the Christian narrative that it divests it of power. Juliet Vedral’s article on the Sojourners website, showcasing responses to Harris’ apology following the retraction of his infamous book, contains heart rending testimonies from people who suffered as a result of acting on his advice. I reproduce a couple of them here (Vedral wisely opted to use aliases, so these names are not real) to illustrate the point:

<Morgan shared: “I felt like my not finding a husband in college like you’re supposed to was punishment for the ‘inappropriate’ behaviour I engaged in with someone who was not my boyfriend…

“Martin”, an Anglo-Catholic priest who was raised in a fundamentalist tradition that embraced Harris’ teachings responded, “this idolization of marriage makes people feel incomplete when not in a romantic relationship with the opposite sex. Through the discovery of Catholic moral teaching and research on asceticism and virtue, I now have a much more robust way of thinking about stations of life (chastity amidst celibacy, marriage, or widowhood) and I’m grateful that God honours all stations of life and that people can be complete in any of them!”

One woman in her late 30s commented that attending church had become painful because it was the one place in which she felt the most single. Two other women in their 30s commented that the passivity in both men and women that purity culture encouraged led to their finding husbands outside the church. One man shared that purity culture enabled him to stay in the closet longer, because it helped him justify why he wasn’t dating>.

[See article at: https://sojo.net/articles/opinion/what-happened-after-evangelicals-kissed-dating-goodbye].

If young people desire marriage and family, and to do so is noble, then any discussion about the dynamics of sex and sexuality or relationships is bound to have some impact on how they process the journey towards finding a life partner. However, to actively teach that finding a life partner is what completes someone in the faith, or is, in any sense, the goal of every Christian, is not only a gross misunderstanding of the Kingdom of God and the denigration of the singlehood of both Jesus and Paul, but it places unnatural, unsound and unnecessary pressure on single people. There will inevitably be single people who desire marriage and experience challenges in establishing long lasting romantic bonds for a whole host of (social, developmental, emotional, etc.) reasons. The work of Christian community is to celebrate such people, encourage them that Jesus completes them and be a compassionate listening ear in understanding their needs and desires as they journey towards becoming and finding the right person. Many churches expend huge amounts of energy in marriage seminars, marriage retreats and all manner of pre-arranged get togethers aimed at enhancing the experiences of husbands and wives. The same, if not more energy needs to be channelled into the “single-sphere” to redress the long belated imbalance. Only when this redrawing of the terrain starts to occur will the dialogue amongst young people about the place of marriage be one that bears fruit for God.

Cultures of Shame

Numerous critics of I Kissed Dating Goodbye describe the years of shame and guilt they suffered. Disproportionately, it was women who suffered guilt and shame, often describing how their thinking was shaped to believe that their moral worth was an index of their sexual restraint and their ability to protect men. To experience desire was, for many, something to hide; it was evidence that their bodies were out of control and required constraining. This state of affairs was compounded insofar as several readers, in their exegesis of Harris, abstracted a relatively rigid diet of regulations to follow to remain sexually pure, free from desire and holy. Such a reading of Harris slotted very well within conservative believing communities for whom relatively inflexible, albeit unwritten, rules for church behaviour were embedded in the church culture.

It should scarcely need saying that cultures of shame, fear and guilt stifle conversation. We are embodied beings, we experience the world bodily and we will even experience the world to come bodily. The ideal is that we experience the body without shame, as the author of Genesis writes, “And the man and his wife were both naked, but they were not ashamed” (Gen. 2:25, emphasis added). No mature dialogue about sex, sexuality and relationships can occur when people are made to feel ashamed of the sins of the body (before or after their association with the church), guilty of their perceived shortcomings or afraid of repercussions. Sometimes our theology can have a decidedly gnostic, dualistic flavour; the spirit is good, but the flesh is evil. Lest we forget that the Word became flesh to fully identify with the fleshly beings who were the objects of Divine Love (John 1:14). In the New Testament, flesh is generally always used to express something secondary, although not always something pejorative. Certainly, the flesh is a temporary tent (2 Cor. 5:1–4), subject to constant decay (2 Cor. 4:16), but it is a treasure house for the gospel (2 Cor. 4:7) and a temple of God’s Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19). Sex is not dirty, bodies do not need to be sources of shame and very little learning occurs as a result of guilt. God has created the correct context for sex to be a life affirming act, for bodies to be cherished and for shame to be shown up for the distortion of the human condition it is. As such, teaching from passages such as 1 Cor. 7:4 requires caution and exegetical precision in order not to distort theologies of marriage.

Young people exist in an image conscious ecosystem; bodies must look a certain way. Women are pressured to stay slim; male bodies not sculpted in gymnasiums are considered less masculine. Social media followings are amplified the less clothing people wear. There is enough guilt and shame within the broader culture; if the church becomes yet another arena where guilt and shame are used to engender change, critical dialogue amongst young believers will be at best misdirected and, at worst, snuffed out altogether.

Alienating, Belittling or Demonising the LGBTQ+ Community

Although Harris explicitly apologised for the harm that I Kissed Dating Goodbye (and indeed other of his publications) may have caused the LGBTQ+ community, there was certainly no intentional or explicit foregrounding of critique of non-heteronormative sexualities anywhere in the book. To the degree that the book was harmful in any way to the LGBTQ+ community, it is only in the sense that it fanned the flames of purity culture, so completely screening out non-heteronormative sexuality from the conversation that anyone wrestling with their sexual identity would have felt even more excluded. People who identified as LGBTQ+ but also believed in Jesus typically responded to purity culture by asserting that they felt unwelcome, invisible, unable to discuss their experiences honestly and spiritually inferior/morally suspect.

I recently read a very important but somewhat disheartening article by my friend/sister/fellow “Substacker” Nadine Templer outlining the experience of a young adult who unalived themselves because of trauma related to their attempt to reconcile their sexual identity within a believing context. (Please see the article at https://substack.com/@nadinetempler/p-190475078). Routinely, when discussions about marriage, sexuality and relationships emerge from a conservative Christian context, the emphasis is arranged in such a way as to exclude anyone who is same sex attracted. Of course, one may argue that the traditional Christian theological position makes this somewhat inevitable. I will not attempt to wade into the debate about the moral correctness of homosexuality or any non-heteronormative sexuality – that is certainly not what this post is about. However, our young people are living in a world where the evaluation of sexual identity will be front and centre in discussions about how people perceive of Christian discipleship. Young people will make decisions about their faith commitments based on how their community treats, interacts with and speaks about gay people. There will be children of conservative, non-gay affirming faith communities who will be unclear about their sexual identity, come out as gay or stop identifying with their cisgender. Again, the propriety of these positions is not the concern of this post – my concern here is how we equip ourselves and our young people to be able to speak about the issues in an atmosphere of safety. As such, almost irrespective of the theological position one holds, I think the following commentary remains important. Mark Mayfield’s summary captures my initial thoughts perfectly:

Conversations about same-sex attraction, sexual orientation, and gender identity within modern culture and among Christian communities are often marked by division and strife. Arguments include differences in worldview (e.g., Christianity vs. secular humanism) and conflicting interpretations of scientific data. Further, among Christians there are increased disputes about how to accurately interpret Scriptures related to sexuality, including God’s creational intent for gender and relationships. Amid these debates are a growing number of individuals who experience same-sex attraction or identify as a sexual minority and see themselves as Christian or are interested in learning more about a biblical view of sexuality. Many of these individuals suffer inner conflict between desiring to know and honour God while experiencing same-sex attraction or questioning their gender identity. Sadly, in many faith communities these topics are minimized or ignored, leading many individuals to seek information and support from sources outside of the church [Mark Mayfield, The Mental Health Handbook for Ministry: A Practical Guide for Supporting the Church’s Mental and Emotional Well-Being (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2025), 55].

Let me begin with the obvious: Jesus always championed the dignity of the marginalised. If a Christian witnesses a gay person being oppressed, dehumanised or denied dignity in any way, it would seem to me to be axiomatic that Christians have a responsibility to defend that person, whether you agree with their lifestyle or not. One scarcely needs to be a scholar of Christology to affirm this; Jesus’ interactions with tax collectors, the woman caught in adultery or the Samaritan woman ought to give the game away! Even if your denominational tradition or other theological commitments lead you to class minority sexualities as “the enemy”, Jesus is unambiguous about the correct stance towards enemies. Second, nobody wants their identity to be reduced to one aspect of their life. Every human life is a rich tapestry of interwoven elements which make up their identity. My heterosexuality should be no more central to who I am than someone’s homosexuality – it is one factor among many. As such, mature Christians ought to be able to dialogue intelligently with people who hold different convictions about sexual ethics without dehumanising them. Third, doing more listening and less talking will usually help believers to understand the stories and personal narratives of people with minority sexualities and of young people living amidst confusion about them. Listening to understand is always the first step in creating safe space for dialogue (James 1:19). Christ like and compassionate conversation promotes genuine friendship which, in my mind, is the superlative context for difficult conversations where there are moral disagreements. We cannot fix or change people, but we can help create the conditions where the transformative work of the Spirit can flourish. I would add to this, fourthly, that once we pursue this approach, it is likely to become clear that the emphasis we place on sexuality in discussions about morality is very overblown. If Christians, especially conservatives, expended as much energy fighting greed, injustice, poverty, corruption, war-mongering, the abuse of power and violence as they did fighting against minority sexualities then, to quote the great Sam Cooke, “What a wonderful world this would be”! Finally, here, I wish to propose that freeing any discussion about non-heteronormative sexualities from the broader context of the political culture wars will radically enhance the meaningfulness and fruitfulness of the discussion. If our discussions are merely to further the ends of political agendas, on either end of the political spectrum, the conversation becomes needlessly adversarial and it becomes impossible to have a peaceful disagreement – something which all mature adults, religious or otherwise, ought to be able to do. Framing the discussion outside political culture wars allows us to resist mockery and condescension, fear-centred rhetoric, demonisation and conspiracy thinking.

Everybody reading this will have their own view of how to interpret the Christian/biblical position on morally appropriate sexual orientation. At one end of the spectrum will be those who say that any kind of sexual expression outside the confines of heterosexual monogamy is a sin which God will punish. At the other end of the spectrum will be those who argue that love is love and that there is no biblical passage which actually condemns homosexuality. There are, to be sure, a myriad of positions in between, with various positions on where acceptance and tolerance becomes a collapse of moral conviction. What I am strongly advocating for here is the maturity needed to balance conviction with compassion. When discussing non-heteronormative sexuality with young Christ believers, who will have gay friends, Trans friends, genderfluid friends and friends whose pronouns do not match their cisgender, loud and inflexible “conviction” is utterly unhelpful. One of the dangers of the illusion of certainty is that it plays on the fears of people who are too nervous, under-qualified, mentally lazy or religiously haughty to engage in complex conversations. Whilst the church is crying out for more people to be informed and educated about these areas, one thing we can all be is compassionate. We can listen without judgment, empathise without compromise and love without conditions.

According to a recent Barna report, more teens today (37%) say their gender and sexuality is an important part of their sense of self, compared with their parents (28%). About a third of teens know someone who is transgender, and the majority (69%) say it is acceptable to be born one gender and to feel like another” [Beth E. Robinson, & Latayne C. Scott, Talking with Teens about Sexuality: Critical Conversations about Social Media, Gender Identity, Same-Sex Attraction, Pornography, Purity, Dating, Etc. (Bloomington, MN: Bethany House, 2021), 156]. Evidently, then, the stakes are high. Christ centred conversation now, will limit reactionary trauma later.

Fuzzy Boundaries Around Consent

Once more, it would be grossly unfair to suggest that Joshua Harris is the only guilty party or even the most culpable party in some of the nebulous ideas which separate consent from assault. Moon and Reger in an important paper outline what they call “benevolent sexism” - a trait they saw as prevalent in a number of the Christian dating and marriage books they analysed, including I Kissed Dating Goodbye. I would advise becoming conversant with the entire paper if these issues are pertinent to you: Sarah Moon & Jo Reger, “You Are Not Your Own”: Rape, Sexual Assault, and Consent in Evangelical Christian Dating Books,” Journal of Integrated Social Sciences 4:1 (2014): 55–74.

For our immediate purposes, consider the following excerpt:

<Each of these books clearly promoted traditional gender roles and sexism. However, almost every author(s) claimed that the ideas they were putting forth were not sexist. An example of this comes from Joshua Harris in I Kissed Dating Goodbye. He writes: This applies specifically to the guys who I believe should be the ones to “make the first move.” Please don’t misunderstand this as a chauvinistic attitude. Men, we’re not to lord anything over girls; that’s the exact opposite of the Christlike servanthood husbands must show their wives. But the Bible clearly defines the importance of a man’s spiritual leadership in marriage (2003, p.196). [Moon & Reger, “You Are Not Your Own,” 63]>.

Whilst certainly not deliberate, Harris and others like him promote the idea that women effectively consign themselves to danger when they question any element of traditional male gender roles and certainly if they dare to step outside them. In his own way, Harris promotes the idea that women should effectively be the property of a male overseer until marriage, when they become the property of their husbands (see Joshua Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye: A New Attitude Towards Relationship and Romance (Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah Books, 2003), 29). Such attitudes can contribute to what have become known as rape acceptance myths - attitudes and beliefs that may contribute to ongoing sexual violence by shifting blame for sexual assault from perpetrators to victims [Moon & Reger, “You Are Not Your Own,” 65–66]. If women are viewed as property, even in the “benevolent” sense of being protected by male others or made to live within rigid gender roles, it can limit agency and even inadvertently become a context where abuse not only happens but is justified and/or explained away. I reiterate my concern over how 1 Cor. 7:4 might be weaponised – especially when men demand sex from their wives. It creates what can appear as the illusion of consent. Paul takes the revolutionary step in 1 Cor. 7:3–6 by making mutuality the standard – any position on sexual activity must be by agreement. Moreover, v.6 clarifies that this is concession and not command from Paul’s vantage point. If husbands bully or coerce their wives into engaging in sexual activity using 1 Cor. 7:3–4 as the proverbial “get out of jail free card”, this is abusive.

Approaches like that adopted by Harris can create unsafe domestic contexts for women and frustrate conversation about sex amongst young believers. Pierce and Kay rightly assert that as “head” of his wife, the husband is commanded to love her—not to exercise leadership or authority over her—however benevolent that might be [Ronald W. Pierce and Elizabeth A. Kay, “Mutuality in Marriage and Singleness: 1 Corinthians 7:1–40,” in R. W. Pierce & C. L. Westfall (Eds.), Discovering Biblical Equality: Biblical, Theological, Cultural & Practical Perspectives (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021), 115]. Harris and his ilk, consciously or not, promote the notion of husband as benevolent dictator, so even though there is an inherent mutuality in sexual union, women’s capacity to consent remains subject to a kind of all-encompassing power of veto which is in male hands. The concern here arises when consent is effectively repackaged as obedience to a biblical text - a wife (or husband for that matter) Can say no to the sexual act without being accused of disobeying 1 Cor. 7:3–6 - which remember Paul issues as concession and not command - for the text calls for agreement. If these ideas become blurry, it opens the door for sexual assault within marriage. Late teenage or early 20-something believers thinking about relationships and possibly marriage need resources for healthy discussion about spousal roles in ways that are sensitive to the differences between genders, but also acknowledge the mutuality and equality demanded by early Christian witness. Failure to do this turns the discussion into one about the balance of spousal power, and unhelpful and misleading assertions about what women are “allowed” to do. For a horrific test-case of the dangerous outworking of this type of thinking, see the case of Eileen Gray and John MacArthur in the articles by the Roys Report and by The Christian Post.

Conclusions and Implications for Christ Centred Deconstruction

If the objective of this post has been basically accomplished, readers should be ruminating over two key propositions. Initially, and perhaps most directly, young people live in a confusingly sex-obsessed world. Christian youngsters in the throes of deconstructing their faith are often not rejecting Jesus (or even Christianity) but attempting to resolve deep tensions between their experience of sexuality (or that of friends and loved ones) and the teaching or culture of the church. They are asking serious critical questions which are often being shut down with pat answers and pre-rehearsed, packaged Christian apologetics. Oftentimes, their questions are existential before they are theological - questions aimed at asking: “Can I belong?” before “What does the Bible say?” To this end, young people might ask questions like, “Why would a loving God create people with same-sex attraction and then forbid it”? “Why should ancient texts determine modern sexual ethics”? “Why is the church preoccupied with sexual sins whilst ignoring others”? “Is it really possible to live a celibate lifestyle”?

Secondly, and perhaps less directly, I hope it is reasonably self-evident that the conversation about sex and sexuality amongst our young people is really one about the safety of institutions, the openness of leaders, Christian commitment to social justice, the church’s willingness and capacity to engage in complex conversations and the question of how believing community can be unified and yet live with tension. In response to these broader concerns emerging from the conversation about sex and sexuality, I would make the following recommendations to those in church leadership and administration.

1. Like David Hume asserted, passion precedes reason. We must resist the temptation to treat the question of sex and sexuality as purely or even primarily theological and understand it as deeply personal. With this in mind, our young people will know that it is them we care about and not creeds, reputations or doctrines. Even our attempts to understand scripture and early Christian history are so we can serve our youngsters in these conversations, help them to have Christlike hearts and equip them to have a robust discipleship. The Sabbath was made for people and not people for the Sabbath!

2. Ensure that our teaching and preaching does not turn sexual ethics into a sacred cow. Sexual ethics are not the centrepiece of Christianity. That title belongs only to the death and resurrection of Jesus. If the importance of a doctrine or idea emerged either from the emphasis placed on it by a biblical author or by the amount of ink spilled on the subject within the biblical text, there is no way that sexual ethics or sexual identity would be prioritised. The reason that we can say, for example, that pneumatology was important to Paul’s teaching in Galatians is because of the specific assertion he made: This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the Spirit by works of the Law, or by hearing with faith (Gal. 3:2, emphasis added). Spirit possession was a priority in Galatians because Paul writes that the only thing he wanted to learn was how the Galatians thought they received the Spirit. This is Paul’s own emphasis, not the emphasis of readers. If I were to guess which subjects in the biblical text had the most written about them, I might guess that love, justice and faith were up there. Anyone surveying the Christian landscape today would think that the Bible was replete with commentary about abortion, homosexuality and the importance of being a nationalist.

3. Be upfront about the places where the church has erred. Even a cursory reading of our past makes clear that the church has often been on the wrong side of history. Again, irrespective of one’s position on homosexuality, the church has had a horrid history of dehumanising and cruel treatment of the LGBTQ+ community. With respect to slavery, women’s rights and a whole host of other issues of social justice, the Church has not only been lackadaisical in resistance, but complicit in oppression. Better that we admit it and learn from our mistakes, than deny it and repeat them. Young people are very sensitive to fake attempts to look pristine. The Gen-Z mantra, “Keep it real”, does not come from nowhere!

4. Ensure that the conversation about sex and sexuality is couched in a broader vision of the Kingdom of God, of human flourishing and of new creation. The Christian story is the beautiful narrative of God’s relationship with his creation. Marriage, family, sex and sexual identity are all part of that broader story. If they are abstracted from that story, the temptation is simply to hand young people a list of do’s and don’ts - regulations for membership of a community which translates as an ecclesiological straitjacket.

5. Encourage the youngsters that they are not alone. Old, young or otherwise, we are all wrestling with the challenges involved in following Jesus. None of us has a hotline to heaven, none of us has a stainless record of attempting to follow Christ and no one’s sins and failures are ultimately worse than anyone else’s. The kinds of questions floating around young people’s social universe can feel confronting and isolating. Those who lead in Christian community and those mature members of the church must get alongside these young people and encourage them that their questions are welcomed, and that the answers are not – whether veiled or explicit – attempts to condemn.

Needless to say, the above is not an exhaustive checklist, but it may well have purchase for thoughtful deconstructors open to experiencing Jesus in their journey. As the Barna report above implies, it is already the case that our young people must show up in a world which presents a bewildering smorgasbord of sexual ideologies and identities. These are challenging enough to negotiate - attempting to negotiate them and remain faithful to Jesus presents unique challenges, and our aptness to help young believers make sense of it all is a direct index of our capacity to engage spiritually and compassionately with their questions and curiosities with as little presumption and judgment as possible.

I am fairly convinced that Joshua Harris tried to do something good; I also happen to think that he was too young to shoulder the burden of the evangelical church’s attempt to ratify a universally applicable sexual ethic that could simply be handed out like a users’ manual. His experience is a cautionary tale in how biblical exegesis, social engagement, the pursuit of justice, awareness of contemporary trends and listening to voices from the margins must come together in ways that are humble, compassionate, Christ led and Spirit filled if we are to truly serve congregations and particularly young members of congregations. The failure of those around Harris to ensure that this was the case is, in my view, what ultimately led to I Kissed Dating Goodbye leaving the trail of destruction in its wake which it did. However, this is what Joshua Harris wrote on his website:

<I saw my book had many flaws. In my effort to set a high standard, the book emphasized practices like avoiding dating and kissing before marriage and concepts like “giving your heart away”—things that are not found in the Bible. I see now that, in trying to warn people about the pitfalls of dating, the book instilled fear in many readers. Fear of making mistakes. Fear of having their hearts broken. Fear of failing to live up to an ideal. Fear of their own sexuality. The book also gave the impression that following a specific methodology for relationships would guarantee a “happily ever after”—a perfect marriage, a great sex life, and a life free of relational pain. But life doesn’t work that way, and these outcomes are not promised in scripture. For those who read my book and were misdirected or hurt by it, I want to say this clearly: I am sincerely sorry. I never intended to hurt anyone with what I wrote. I know my apology doesn’t change anything for you, and I know it comes too late. But I want you to hear me: I regret any way that my ideas restricted you, hurt you, or gave you a wrong view of yourself, of God, your sexuality, or your relationships. I wish I had seen it sooner>.

This is not just a cautionary tale about a book with a faulty thesis. It is a cautionary tale about the need for constant and engaged critical evaluation of the Christian faith. It would be difficult to read Harris’ confession and apology or watch his documentary renouncing his ideas, taking ownership for the problems he caused and explaining his new spiritual path and conclude that he is anything but sincere. This is why ongoing conversation is so necessary. Sincerity is no guarantee of truth (1 Cor. 4:4), truth is not always embedded in what is familiar and familiarity has a habit of breeding contempt. We need to be in dialogue – young people who believe in Jesus need to be a part of that dialogue knowing that their voices, values and viewpoints are honoured, valued and respected within the broader community. They need to know that their trust is sacrosanct, their hearts are safe and their confessions will not be given in evidence against them. So, let’s talk about sex – and sexuality, and singlehood and marriage and relationships and parenting. Let’s talk about sexual otherness and divorce, and loveless marriages, and heartbreak and barrenness and loss; and in all this, let’s talk about love. Let’s talk honestly, fearlessly and faithfully - because that’s what love does.