Posted on 05/04/2021 7:31:02 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Recently, researchers at State University of New York determined that descendants of immigrants to the United States typically lost the ability to speak their mother tongue by the third generation. Something similar, but far more serious, seems to be happening with Christians in an increasingly post-Christian culture. Each successive generation is losing the understanding of, not to mention the will to live by, Christian sexual morality.
Two years ago, a Pew Research survey found that half of American Christians think casual sex is “sometimes or always” morally acceptable. The slight silver-lining in that survey was that evangelical Protestants were by far the least likely group to express acceptance of casual sex.
Unfortunately, a new analysis calls into question just how committed the children of evangelicals are to Christian teaching in this area. These numbers reflect a larger trend among evangelicals. With each generation, American evangelicals increasingly adopt the attitudes of the wider culture toward sex and marriage. This time, the behavior in question wasn’t casual sex, but cohabitation.
In 2019, Pew Research reported that a majority – 58 percent – of white evangelicals said cohabitation is acceptable if a couple plans to marry. Views on cohabitation become noticeably less Christian among younger respondents. As early as 2012, the General Social Survey found that over 40 percent of evangelicals in their 20s agreed that cohabitation is acceptable even if a couple has no express plans to marry. And, earlier this month, David Ayers at the Institute for Family Studies found that nearly half of evangelical Protestants aged 15-22 who were not currently cohabiting or married, said that they would probably or definitely cohabit in the future.
Still, as dismaying as the attitudes of young evangelicals are toward sex, behavior is what most effectively erodes the Christian norm. Among those ages 23-44 who had already cohabited, a whopping 65 percent indicated they would likely or definitely do so again.
An important caveat, as is typically the case with these kinds of surveys, is that religious commitment makes quite a difference. Young evangelicals who attended church at least twice a month before the pandemic were the least likely to approve of “shacking up.” Yet, even they were a minority for their age group. Across all groups analyzed by Ayers, cohabitation had become, as he put in an article at Christianity Today, “a new norm.”
How can this cultural assimilation be slowed? How can the next generation be convinced of the sacredness of marriage, as a norm worth preserving and living? Again, the experience of immigrants offers an analogy. Research by one immigrant grad student at the University of Alberta found that “speaking the [native] language regularly at home” is the crucial first step in passing the mother-tongue from parent to child.
That may sound simple, and it is. The word for passing on moral values and behavior through regular instruction in the faith by parents and pastors is catechesis. The kind of catechesis necessary for this cultural moment not only involves the “what” of biblical morality, but the “why” and the living out of the “how.” According to Ayers, the lack of a reason given for God’s rules is a key factor behind young evangelicals drifting into behaviors common in the wider culture.
Whenever I teach worldview to students, I like to draw a triangle with three levels. Worldview is at the foundation of the triangle, values is at the middle level, and behavior is at the top. The idea is that one should evaluate what is true and good, build values from that, and allow that evaluation to shape behavior. Today, however, too many Christians live “upside down.” They unthinkingly embrace behaviors common in our culture, those behaviors shape their values, and they end up with an ultimately non-Christian worldview.
We need to approach teaching the next generation, especially when it comes to areas where the Christian vision is so different than the “new normal” in a “bottom-up” way. We must teach what is true about male and female, sex, and family, offering the what and the why. From there, we can work cultivate a strong set of values, by talking openly about what they are and by living them out together. Only from there will countercultural behavior blossom.
For any parents, grandparents, teachers, or pastors who want to see the next generation follow Christ in this culture, catechesis isn’t optional. Today, the Christian view of sex and marriage is like a foreign language, and the wider culture is actively catechizing them.
John Stonestreet is the President of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and co-host with Eric Metaxas of Breakpoint, the Christian worldview radio program founded by the late Chuck Colson. He is co-author of A Practical Guide to Culture, A Student's Guide to Culture and Restoring All Things.
Be an example to your children......live your faith......pray, pray, pray.....
.....’Train up a child the way he should go;
Even when he’s old he will not depart from it’
Proverbs 13:24
The great ‘falling away’?
Interesting article. It’s part of the general subject, of how the secular culture influences otherwise devout religious people.
I’ve heard that the divorce rate for Christians is similar to the divorce rate for everyone. Perhaps many Christians have the same views of marriage that the mainstream culture has. And among such ideas are, that there’s no real reason to get married in the first place. And such attitudes will lead to cohabitation.
Sorry. ‘Christian ——-anything‘ and ‘new norm’
How is that Christian? New norm? What is the meaning of ‘christian’ in this case?
People need to wrap their minds around the idea that becoming one flesh, having sex, excluding perverted acts like homosexuality (which is always sin), is always either becoming husband and wife or adultery.
Consider that all the ceremony (not celebration and feasting, that’s separate from things like exchanging vows and is much earlier) was added later, and even as late as the Patriarch period we expressly see no ceremony at all with, for example Isaac and Rebekah (in that case not even a celebration is spoken of).
When it’s a man and a woman who aren’t married it’s them becoming one flesh. It matters not one jot that two young people thought they were just having sex. There is no just to it. No wild oats that somehow don’t count. Just people not understanding what Scripture says.
And, being married in God’s eyes, they profane and commit adultery afterwards.
Likewise when people divorce for a cause besides the cause permitted and subsequently remarry.
Our civilization went off the rails where marriage is concerned long before it seemed to have done so.
What is the meaning of ‘christian’ in this case?It means they "identify" as Christian. Just as for example Caitlyn might "identify" as female.
“Christian sexual morality”
Based on what?
Pedophile Priests protected by the Vatican?
“Gay Marriage” spouting Lesbian Pastors?
Prosperity Gospel Ho Chasers?
Better that I live my life, and you live yours.
Better version of Christian Cohabitation.
Multiple generations living in the same huge house or on the same large piece of land.
Work as a team, pool resources.
We’ve got enough land to build a couple more small houses and we have two kids that know they can build here if they choose.
Maybe but it’s still sin.
Ya. Meaningless.
None of those things are consistent with Christian sexual morality.
“Better that I live my life, and you live yours.”
That’s what all the people you cited think, too.
“Based on what?”
Scripture, which condemns all of what you cited.
Here’s another angle on this issue:
Cohabiting people in their 20s (and afterwards) are often operating under the mistaken impression that they are EFFECTIVELY married, and that, emotionally, at least, they are entitled to fidelity, monogamy, and childbearing.
This is, of course, false. There ARE really 50 ways to leave your lover.
Even our ridiculously easy divorces are a lot harder than just heading down the road.
A government stamp on marriage has been devalued by dozens of government policies. And now that homos are doing it, it is turning into a mockery.
One of the biggest mistakes I have ever made, was having premarital sex with my first husband. In my spiritually muddled head, I reasoned that I had to marry him, even though I knew I didn’t love him, though I had thought I did when I started dating him. As I walked down the aisle, the LORD was speaking to my heart, “Don’t marry him”, but I was afraid what people would think! My only excuse was my youth (barely 18), but that really wasn’t an excuse, because I KNEW marrying him was wrong. I harmed both of us, and finally divorced him after 25 miserable years.
I did NOT make the same mistake with my second husband. To those who say, “What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder”, I will say, it isn’t God who joins some together.
As to those who say that if you’ve had sex, you’re joined together, and married in the eyes of God, I say there is more to being married than the sex act, and though with a virgin, there is a tiny bit of blood, which realistically, could be referred to as making a covenant, obviously, that doesn’t make one married. It never occurred to me, as a 17 year old, that girls who had had sex with more than one boy, (which I hadn’t) obviously weren’t intended to marry each one. If I’d had a modicum of common sense, I would have been able to walk away, though the complicating factor was that my groom was so desperately “in love” with me, I thought he would harm himself if I backed out. How mixed up is that?
This post is more philosophical than in relation to anyone’s experience. Your experiences included.
We live in the backwash of the sexual revolution where licentiousness reigns. Where once it was the prurient that scandalized and titillated now prudery and what the unbounded deem to be sexual repression that horrify and scandalize many. To even suggest, for example, that homosexual acts should be illegal is now seen as, as another forumite said in another thread, “sick”.
But the fruit of this excess is become rampant, till people are unable to even accept basic biological knowledge as valid.
Were their abuses from the prudish old ways?
Well, at least self control, as an aspect of reason, is a “master” that you or I can choose. Passion, otoh, descends effortlessly into madness, restrained only by hints in society of what is not yet popular or popular to champion, and is a far more terrible slave driver ... one people cannot choose, for how does someone argue against something irrational unless they are equipped to deny their own emotional tyrant?
That there is anything between the extremes of a society honoring self control and one ultimately given to madness it may be a mere illusion, one where some things simply aren’t fashionable enough for people to begin to champion them. And such illusions are not real, being inherently transient states in society, for indeed it may be impossible, as Scripture says, to take fire into your bosom without get burned.
So if the choice must be between what many see as prudery and what ultimately will become madness (if our culture’s direction is any indication) it should be obvious which extreme I think is the better option.
I agree. We should desire to please God, rather than man.
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