A collegiate website advises young women how to have a “happy hook-up.” Get “clear consent and mutual agreement to engage in sexual acts,” the article recommends. Then “the whole hookup experience will be more positive for everyone involved.”
Glancing at the author’s bio, I was surprised to learn that she is a student at a conservative Christian college.
When even Christian young people are buying into the hook-up culture, it’s clear that traditional ways of teaching biblical morality are no longer effective. Young people don’t only need rules; they need reasons. They need to learn the worldview rationale that makes sense of biblical morality.
Young people today are caught between two contradictory views of sexuality. A modernist view reduces humans to sheer biological organisms driven by impulse and instinct. By contrast, a postmodern view disconnects gender identity from biology, treating it as a social construction, fluid and changing.
As an example, a few years ago California passed a law requiring schools to permit transgender students to use the restroom or locker room of their preferred gender, regardless of their anatomical sex. The new law defined sex as “gender related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth.” Notice the assumption that a person’s sex is “assigned,” as though it were purely arbitrary instead of an anatomical fact.
In short, postmodernism treats physical anatomy as insignificant, inconsequential, and completely irrelevant to gender identity. This is a devastatingly disrespectful view of the physical body.
Christians must make the case that a biblical worldview affirms a much higher view of the body than any secular view. It offers the radically positive teaching of a Creator who actually likes matter because he created it—a God who affirms our material, biological, sexual nature. Whereas secular views are inevitably dehumanizing, Christianity supports a high and holistic view of the human person.
Nancy Pearcey’s latest book is Saving Leonardo, on which this article is based. She is also the author of the best-selling, award-winning Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity. Pearcey currently teaches at Rivendell Sanctuary. Her feature article, “Sex, Lies, and Secularism” on which this post is based appears in the Volume 34, No. 4 issue of the Christian Research Journal (a 6-issue subscription is $39.50). To read the full article, please subscribe or renew your subscription or give a gift subscription
Nancy Pearcy will be joining Hank Hanegraaff on the Bible Answer Man broadcast on August 9, 2011! Tune in at 6PM ET at our website, www.equip.org!
