'Naked Truth' about chastity
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ISSUE: 09/13/07 > Features > 'Naked Truth' about chastity
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Chastity – fidelity in one’s sexual behavior. |
Too many churches have spread false messages about sex, author Lauren Winner said at a convo event Aug. 29.
Speaking to a crowded room of students in Neely Dining Hall, Winner shared the premise of her book entitled “Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity.”
Winner, who also wrote “Girl Meets God” and “Mudhouse Sabbath,” has degrees from Cambridge, Columbia and Duke universities. All three of her books are being read in different classes at Belmont this semester. Now in her early thirties, Winner is a professor of Christian spirituality at Duke Divinity School.
Her opening comments at the convo elicited laughter from the crowd.
“This book is not a memoir,” she said, contrasting it with one of her other books. “If I had written a memoir about my experience with chastity, the book would be even shorter than it is.”
Winner became a Christian when she was about 21, but obeying the Bible when it came to sexuality was not one of her first concerns.
Junior PR major Alyssa Stell found Winner’s honesty and bluntness refreshing.
“It is a topic that a lot of people don’t talk straightforwardly about,” Stell said. “Sometimes there’s good reason for that, but I thought she struck a good balance between being appropriate and being real.”
Winner’s sexual behavior did not change when she became a Christian, but soon after that, she was at confession one day when her Anglican priest told her having sex with her boyfriend was sin.
“I’m sure he had said that to me before and others had said that to me before, but somehow in that moment I heard something I had not heard before,” Winner said. “That began a process of giving that area of my life to God and turning away from premarital sex.”
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During that time in her life, friends gave her numerous Christian books about sexual behavior. She said all the books tried to teach good lessons, but they all sounded like they were written in the 19th century.
“They basically made the pursuit of chastity sound easy and fun and obviously rewarding,” Winner said. “That did not square with my experience.”
She decided to write a book that would, on the one hand, offer a conservative theological view of premarital sexuality but, on the other hand, would look honestly about where society is today, what culture says about sex and how young Christians can live out the call to chastity.
The first chapter of “Real Sex” asks the question about whether or not the messages pop culture gives about sex are consistent with the Christian story of sex.
“This proved to be the easiest chapter to write,” Winner said.
She then discussed how Christians talk about sex in the church. In the book, as in her speech, she discussed three messages about sex heard in the church she thinks are false. The first one is often found in youth groups, she said.
“The message you get is the idea that if you have premarital sex or engage in some other problematic sexual behavior, you will wake up the next morning feeling guilty, bereft, lonely, alienated,” Winner said.
Winner thinks that’s inaccurate. She said sometimes a person, after having premarital sex, might feel fine or neutral or happy or “hung over.”
People who use this “emotional scare tactic” are trying to convey the truth that sexual sin is bad and corrodes at a person’s relationship with God and neighbor, but the reality is that the person might not feel the negative effects, Winner said.
“Sin is so powerful and pervasive that everything in us bears the marks of sin and everything in us is created good but has become distorted, including our feelings. Feelings aren’t useless data, but they’re not wholly reliable data either.”
That’s why, Winner said, people need Scripture and Christian community.
Megan Bailey, a junior in the Trevecca/Belmont nursing cooperative, agrees with Winner.
“A lot of times the church absolutely ignores the topic, and that’s a travesty in itself,” Bailey said. “If they don’t ignore it, they do use those scare tactics. The church has a good reason for doing it - keeping the youth out of trouble, but I don’t think they tell the entire story.”
The second message heard in the church, Winner said, is one that makes her particularly angry.
“It’s the idea that although men think about sex every seven seconds, women don’t have sex drives,” she said.
She read two passages from Christian books to illustrate the point and said the picture that emerges from those books, like other Christian literature, is that “teen boys are walking bundles of hormones who exert peer pressure over the girls they date; and for both of them to be chaste, it’s the girl who needs to resist peer pressure. Not that the young woman herself will feel sexual desire – only that she is to restrain the ‘high-octane’ sexual creature.”
This portrait puts up false ideas of masculinity and doesn’t hold the expectation of men to exercise discipline, Winner said. As for the girls, the portrait doesn’t give unmarried women tools they need to discipline the desire they, too, will feel.
“You don’t have to go to an extreme of saying women and men are identical to diagnose that this portrait of differences in men and women sexuality is neither truthful nor helpful,” Winner said.
Junior Christian Leadership major Michael Kuehn has heard some of these messages in churches he’s been to.
“I don’t think any church I’ve experienced has come out and said it that way, but that’s the message they send in the discussions about it,” he said. “Gender lines are drawn subconsciously in the way we talk about it.”
The final message heard in many churches with which Winner disagrees is that premarital sex is unforgivable. Women are given the metaphor of the denuded rose.
“(The church says) you are a rose and if you have sex before you’re married, every time you do, you pluck off one petal of the rose and then you’re eventually going to be left as a thorny stem, and that’s what you have to offer to your husband.”
Again, the church is trying to get at the important truth that there are consequences in engaging in sexual sin, but they’re not communicating the right message, Winner said.
“To say there are consequences, and those consequences may take a very long time to unlearn and undo – that’s very different than saying you are scarred forever,” she said.
Winner said the rose image doesn’t end with the picture of a thorny stem. There’s another chapter. The next chapter is about Jesus being the master gardener who reconstitutes deblossomed roses.
“Without that master gardener piece, the story is false,” she said. “It is false to talk about consequences of sin without talking about the forgiveness of Jesus … We fear to preach forgiveness is to give license. In fact, to preach forgiveness of sex or anything else is to preach the gospel. That is what we ought to be doing when we talk about and practice chastity."
