Blessed Are the Gooners, for Theirs Is the Kingdom of Vice

I saw an exchange online today about nudity in The Pendragon Cycle, and one response stuck with me:

“I’ve seen more skin on daytime soap operas, buddy. This level of prudishness over nakedness is part of why younger Christians end up going into marriage with stunted understandings of intimacy.”

My immediate response was:

Blessed are the gooners, for theirs is the Kingdom of Vice.

Hence the meme.

But underneath the joke, I think there’s something important here worth talking about.

I’m less interested in arguing with this particular guy than I am in talking about the attitude toward sexuality that this brought to mind. I see this kind of thing among conservatives, including Christian conservatives, and it frustrates me.

Come on. It’s just a boob.

Why are you such a prude?

It’s not even that explicit.

Okay.

If Christians are going to have this conversation, then let’s actually have it on Christian terms.

Because I don’t think being bothered by sexualized nudity means you have an unhealthy understanding of sexuality. And I definitely don’t think becoming accustomed to seeing naked people is evidence that you have a healthy one.

At the same time, there’s a real problem buried in this criticism that I don’t want to dismiss:

Young religious people should not be going into marriage with a stunted understanding of sex and intimacy.

Absolutely.

So what should we actually be doing about that?

Christians Should Not Be Sexually Ignorant

Christians shouldn’t enter marriage with a stunted understanding of sexuality.

Neither should Jews.

Young people approaching marriage should understand their bodies. They should understand the opposite sex. They should understand intercourse, reproduction, attraction, sexual desire, pleasure, and the emotional dimensions of intimacy.

If you raise your kids in such a prudish environment that they can’t even talk about sex, that’s not good.

If a kid asks a question and Mom and Dad freak out because we don’t talk about those things, that’s not good.

If a young man or woman gets married without even knowing how sex works because their parents were too embarrassed to teach them, their parents failed them.

There. I’ll go that far.

But the opposite of prudishness isn’t desensitization.

It’s discipleship.

Teach them.

Talk to them.

Answer their questions.

Give them a healthy understanding of sex, desire, bodies and intimacy instead of leaving somebody else to do it for you.

You can raise a kid who knows what sex is, understands how bodies work, understands sexual desire and understands marital intimacy without raising a kid who thinks seeing naked strangers is no big deal.

Those things are not contradictory.

Have You Actually Read the Bible?

Because the Bible certainly isn’t afraid of sex.

Adam and Eve are naked.

Lot’s daughters get their father drunk and sleep with him.

Jacob asks Laban to give him Rachel so that he can “go in unto her.”

Shechem takes Dinah.

Judah mistakes Tamar for a prostitute, negotiates payment for sex, sleeps with her and gets her pregnant.

Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce Joseph.

David commits adultery with Bathsheba.

Amnon rapes Tamar.

Leviticus talks about menstruation and seminal emissions.

Proverbs repeatedly warns young men about adultery and sexual temptation.

And then there’s the Song of Songs.

The Song is erotic.

I’ve read somewhat sanitized Artscroll renderings of the thing and it’s still erotic. It has an effect on me. A man and a woman desire each other. They delight in one another’s bodies.

That’s not a defect in Scripture.

Sexual desire isn’t evil.

The body isn’t evil.

Sex isn’t some dirty little necessity God begrudgingly permitted so humanity wouldn’t die out.

And if you actually read this stuff with your kids, eventually they’re going to ask questions.

Dad, what’s a prostitute?

What does “go in unto her” mean?

What did Shechem do to Dinah?

Why did Tamar do that?

What in the world are these people talking about in Song of Songs?

Good.

Answer them.

Use the opportunity. Teach your kid.

You don’t have to choose between raising children who are ignorant about sex and raising children who are accustomed to seeing strangers naked.

That’s a false choice.

Knowing About Sex Is Not the Same as Watching It

This is where I think people start mixing different things together.

Knowing about sex is one thing.

Teaching someone about sex is another.

Reading something erotic is another.

Looking at sexualized images is another.

Watching actors simulate sex is another.

Pornography is another.

These things overlap, obviously, but they aren’t all the same thing.

A father explaining intercourse to his son isn’t doing the same thing as showing his son a naked actress.

A medical illustration isn’t a topless scene.

Premarital counseling that talks honestly about sexual pleasure isn’t simulated intercourse.

Genesis telling us that two people had sex isn’t a camera lingering on actors’ bodies.

And even Song of Songs producing an erotic response doesn’t mean there are therefore no boundaries around what we should look at.

I can teach my son exactly what breasts are without teaching him that looking at the breasts of women who aren’t his wife should become completely normal.

I can teach him what intercourse is without showing it to him.

I can teach him that sexual desire is good without teaching him that every possible way of stimulating that desire is good.

Knowing about sex and having boundaries around sex are not opposites.

Neither are sexual health and sexual restraint.

Your Kids Are Going to Be Discipled by Somebody

This is where I think parents have an enormous responsibility.

Your kids are going to learn about sex somewhere.

If you refuse to talk about it because it embarrasses you, somebody else will.

Their friends will.

The Internet will.

Pornography will.

Social media will.

Television will.

Popular culture will.

Somebody is going to disciple your kids. It ought to be you.

The Torah says:

“And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart; and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.”

—Deuteronomy 6:6–7, JPS

That’s pretty comprehensive.

And before anybody tries to wave that away with Well, that’s the Old Testament—yes.

It is.

It’s your Bible.

The New Testament does not appear out of nowhere as an unrelated religion with an unrelated book. Jesus quotes Torah. He quotes the Prophets. He quotes the Psalms. He teaches from them, argues from them and treats them as Scripture. The New Testament is saturated with the Tanakh.

And in this particular case, Paul certainly doesn’t reverse the principle:

“And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord.”

—Ephesians 6:4, NKJV

Jesus likewise tells his disciples to make disciples:

“teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you”

—Matthew 28:20, NKJV

There’s your one-two punch.

Disciple your kids.

That includes teaching them about sexuality.

Don’t shame them for asking questions.

Don’t lie to them.

Don’t give a six-year-old information appropriate for an eighteen-year-old, but for heaven’s sake, don’t send an eighteen-year-old into marriage with the sexual education of a six-year-old either.

And don’t make the world do your job for you.

“It Happens in Real Life” Doesn’t Mean I Need to Watch It

There’s another argument around “mature” entertainment that I’ve never found very convincing.

Sex is part of real life.

Absolutely.

So is going to the bathroom.

People urinate. People defecate. Women menstruate. People bathe. People undergo intimate medical examinations. Married couples have intensely private conversations. People experience embarrassing and humiliating things that are every bit as real as sex.

Movies leave real things out constantly.

Nobody watches a two-hour movie and says, This is completely unrealistic. That guy never took a dump.

And no, I’m not saying sex and defecation have the same significance.

I’m testing the logic.

“Human beings really do X” does not mean “therefore an audience ought to watch X.”

Sex being part of real life establishes that people should understand sex.

It doesn’t establish that I need to watch actors simulate it.

The actual question is whether some real human experiences should remain intimate rather than being turned into entertainment.

I think some should.

I Want Sex to Remain Potent

And this is probably the biggest thing for me.

I don’t want sexuality to become mundane.

I want it to remain as potent as possible.

That’s not because I hate sex.

It’s almost the exact opposite.

Sexuality is incredibly powerful. The naked body is powerful. Sexual attraction is powerful.

I want to protect that.

So when the response to sexualized nudity is essentially, It’s just a boob. Who cares? I’m not sure why I’m supposed to regard that as a healthier attitude.

If seeing an attractive naked woman in a sexualized context produces lust, Christianity certainly has something to say about that.

But suppose it doesn’t.

Suppose you’ve seen so much sexualized nudity that it doesn’t even register anymore.

Why is that necessarily better?

If repeated exposure to sexualized nudity has made the sight of an attractive naked woman mundane to you, why are you presenting that as evidence of sexual maturity?

Maybe you’ve just gotten used to it.

And I don’t necessarily want to get used to it.

I don’t want the naked body to become visual wallpaper.

I don’t want simulated intercourse to become as unremarkable as watching somebody eat dinner.

I don’t want to train myself to look casually at something that ought to have extraordinary power in its proper context.

And I certainly don’t want to deliberately teach my children to do that.

If it excites you, Christian teaching has something to say about the gaze.

If you’ve consumed so much sexual imagery that it doesn’t affect you anymore, Christian teaching should probably have something to say about that too.

Perhaps intimacy isn’t improved by making intimate things less intimate.

Apparently the Loophole Is a Camera

Christian sexual ethics obviously doesn’t begin and end with whether my body physically touches another person.

The Torah has plenty to say about sexual behavior. Proverbs has plenty to say about sexual temptation. And Jesus rather inconveniently brings the gaze directly into the discussion in the Sermon on the Mount:

“But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

—Matthew 5:28, NKJV

I’m not saying noticing that a woman is attractive means you’ve committed adultery.

I’m saying what we deliberately do with our eyes and our desires obviously matters.

So putting a camera between me and a naked woman can’t, by itself, answer the moral question.

Apparently we’ve discovered the loophole:

Put a camera between you and the naked woman.

Except I don’t think Jesus gave us that loophole.

We still have to ask:

Why is she naked?

Why is the scene framed this way?

Why is the camera lingering here?

What am I being invited to look at?

What response is this supposed to produce in me?

Those seem like perfectly reasonable questions for Christians to ask.

“Soap Operas Show More Skin” Isn’t a Defense

Maybe they do.

So what?

If daytime soap operas show more skin, that establishes:

A is worse than B.

It doesn’t establish:

B is good.

If I object to somebody stealing $100, you haven’t defended him by telling me somebody else stole $10,000.

And saying this doesn’t bother me isn’t a moral argument either.

It tells me your threshold.

It doesn’t tell me whether the thing is good.

Depending on the circumstances, the fact that something doesn’t bother us anymore might be exactly the thing worth examining.

And This Isn’t HBO

This is where The Pendragon Cycle makes this particularly interesting.

We’re not talking about HBO.

We’re talking about a production from Daily Wire.

Daily Wire deliberately built an audience among people dissatisfied with mainstream cultural institutions. And The Pendragon Cycle itself has been promoted in explicitly Christian terms. Jeremy Boreing has talked about Lawhead’s work presenting a “visceral, masculine Christianity.”

So yes, I think that matters.

I don’t expect HBO to represent my values.

Why would I?

But if I’m financially supporting an alternative institution precisely because I think it represents an alternative to mainstream culture, I’m going to notice when that institution starts adopting some of the same standards.

And this gets at something much larger than this particular TV show.

You cannot outsource discernment.

Not to Hollywood.

Not to HBO.

Not to Netflix.

Not to your political party.

Not to a Christian publisher.

Not to your favorite conservative commentator.

And not to the conservative streaming company you pay because you think it shares your values.

There’s a much older warning about placing our trust in human authorities:

“Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.”

—Psalm 146:3, JPS

That’s not just about kings.

Don’t hand another human being or institution responsibility for your judgment just because you trust their banner.

That doesn’t mean Daily Wire is evil.

It doesn’t mean everything they produce is equivalent to HBO.

It means nobody gets to inherit your judgment because you’ve decided they’re on your side.

Sorry, buttercup.

You have to exercise your own discernment. You have to do the work.

Disciple your own kids.

Exercise your own discernment.

Don’t hand either responsibility to somebody else just because they’re wearing your team’s jersey.

And This Is Historically Weird

I want to be careful here, because erotic media itself is not new.

People have been making erotic art for thousands of years.

What’s historically extraordinary is the realism, privacy, scale, availability and ubiquity of what we have now.

Photography comes along in the nineteenth century and almost immediately gets used for erotic imagery.

Then moving pictures.

Then magazines.

Home video.

Cable.

The Internet.

Streaming.

Smartphones.

For most of human history, you could not reach into your pocket, pull out a little rectangle and privately summon realistic moving images of naked strangers doing sexual things whenever you wanted.

That is weird.

Historically speaking, we are the experiment.

And yet people before us somehow knew what sex was.

People got married.

People had children.

People understood sexual desire.

Premodern people also weren’t necessarily living in some hermetically sealed bubble of sexual ignorance. Lots of people lived close to agriculture. They saw animals mate. They saw pregnancy and birth. Families often lived with far less privacy than modern Americans do.

Christians have been marrying for two thousand years.

Human beings have been marrying for vastly longer.

They did not require ubiquitous audiovisual access to strangers’ bodies in order to understand intimacy.

So I don’t accept the idea that becoming accustomed to seeing more naked bodies is somehow a necessary step toward a healthier understanding of sex.

Maybe the opposite is true.

I Don’t Want Christians to Have Less Sexuality

I want them to have more meaningful sexuality.

I don’t want prudishness.

I don’t want kids who think sex is dirty.

I don’t want newlyweds who are terrified of each other’s bodies.

I don’t want husbands and wives who can’t talk to each other about what they want.

I don’t want people ashamed because they experience sexual desire.

Again:

Read Song of Songs.

My argument isn’t:

Bodies are dirty.

It’s:

Bodies matter.

It isn’t:

Sex is shameful.

It’s:

Sex means something.

It isn’t:

Sexual desire is disgusting.

It’s:

Sexual desire is powerful.

And because it’s powerful, I want it directed where it belongs.

I don’t think the goal of sexual maturity is becoming a person who can consume more and more sexual imagery without flinching.

I want sexuality to be powerful where it belongs.

Restrained where it doesn’t.

Intimate where intimacy is appropriate.

And not progressively diluted into another category of disposable entertainment.

There’s a middle ground between ignorance and desensitization.

It’s discipleship.

So Teach Your Kids About Sex

Please.

Teach them the names of their body parts.

Answer their embarrassing questions.

As they grow, explain attraction.

Explain desire.

Explain intercourse.

Explain reproduction.

Explain pleasure.

Explain consent.

Explain marriage.

Explain why sexuality can produce tremendous joy and tremendous suffering.

Read the uncomfortable parts of Scripture.

Let your kids ask uncomfortable questions.

Let Song of Songs be erotic.

Prepare them for marriage.

Don’t teach them that sexual desire is evil.

But teach them that the fact that a desire is natural doesn’t mean every possible way of satisfying or stimulating that desire is therefore good.

Disciple your kids.

Don’t leave the world to do it for you.

And when they become adults, hopefully they’ll understand that they have to exercise their own discernment too.

If our sons and daughters arrive at the marriage bed ignorant, embarrassed, frightened and completely unprepared for sex, we have failed them.

But the answer isn’t to make intimate things less intimate.

The answer isn’t to make naked bodies mundane.

And the goal isn’t to get to the point where we can watch another naked body and congratulate ourselves that it doesn’t bother us anymore.

I want something better than prudishness.

And I want something better than desensitization.

I want our children to understand sexuality, respect its power, and preserve its potency.

That’s not a stunted understanding of intimacy.

I think that’s part of what intimacy means.