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Soon after PBS broadcast The Lost Children of Rockdale County, Talk magazine devoted a major article to "The Sex Lives of Your Children." Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Lucinda Franks chronicled dozens of teenagers, mostly middle-schoolers, again affluent and well-educated, who "have created a social universe with entirely new rules." They pursue random sex that is casual, mechanical, something to escape to on weekends when, as one 14-year-old boy explained, "the games begin," while their parents avoid seeming "uncool" by interfering or asking too many questions. Gone is the timid, tentative innocence that used to come with being 13 or 14, when the world is there to be explored and one's personality takes shape. With early sexual activity, a black hole opens up, swallowing all normal routines and interests into a preoccupation with one thing: sex.

But the most startling report concerns sexuality in the campus scene. The tour guide of this cultural terrain is a recent graduate of a private liberal arts college, a savvy 24-year-old Jewish woman named Wendy Shalit. In her book A Return to Modesty (now in its sixth printing), she catalogues the fallout of a generation of young adults who exchange sex as easily as their parents shook hands. Sex on campus, Shalit explains, is often about as personal as "two airplanes refueling." Indeed, the phrase is "hooking up." That practice is defined for the uninitiated by the 1997 guide, Sex on Campus: The Naked Truth About the Real Sex Lives of College Students, as the act of "making love" but one in which both parties realize, supposedly, that the liaison is based solely on physical attraction, with no risk of attachment or commitment to either party. "You're under no obligation to date each other or call. & #133; nor should you expect to be called or dated." Hooking up is greatly aided by large quantities of alcohol that help to shed any vestiges of inhibition.

Shalit adds that women are less enthusiastic than men about this arrangement, and guilty of the unpardonable: wanting something more. "Our sexual landscape is already soaked in the language of betrayal before we've even begun," she says. Her book is the passionate plea of an insider to her own generation, calling for a return to sanity and the sanctity of "modesty" and moral relationships.

The story of the sexual practices and attitudes being reported in this generation is a startling one, and it is fair to ask, "Isn't it a different picture among teenagers and singles in the church?" The answer is both yes and no. Singles pastors and youth leaders agree that a strong and growing core of their flocks will commit to sexually pure lifestyles.

But even the sexually pure swim in the same cultural pool, one where their choices meet with incredulity and ridicule, though sometimes with begrudging admiration. Those who find their way out of sexual immorality into the warm confines of the church need significant repair and restoration. Anyone who works closely with teenagers and singles would admit that, when it comes to sexual purity, often there is more of the world in the church than one would hope for.

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July 10 2000, Vol. 44, No. 8