Sex Education and the Church

Rare is the pastor who is not called upon to counsel troubled teen-agers, anxious spinsters, guilt-ridden servicemen, and fearful parents about sexual problems. Guilt over masturbation, heavy petting after the youth rally, premarital pregnancies, mixed marriages, quiet separations, crushing divorces, unwanted children—these are common problem areas. Also common is the plaintive response: “If only someone had told me before.…” Should the Church engage in family-life education?

Many churches offer little more in this area than a traditional marriage ceremony and a tidy statement of their view of divorce. While membership classes are often the prerequisite for joining the church family, no such requirements precede the establishment of a Christian family. The Roman Catholic Church has been light-years ahead of Protestants with the Pre-Cana instruction classes for engaged couples.

In the spring of 1961, the North American Conference on Church and Family Life took place, attended by 532 administrators, program directors, and editors from thirty-three denominations. Serious study was given to such matters as early marriage, infidelity, divorce, masturbation, homosexuality, abortion, and family planning. (The proceedings of this conference have been helpfully distilled in the paperback Christians and the Crisis in Sex Morality, by Elizabeth and William Genné.) Since then, a number of the major denominations in the United States have drafted serious studies on the Christian family and related problems. The modern sexual revolution has been accompanied, fortunately, with responsible statements on human sexuality in a Christian context by numerous church bodies (though some have shown muddled thinking on some of the issues). Ministerial groups would do well to provide their communities with study papers on contemporary issues such as abortion and homosexuality; such a project might well replace much ecclesiastical clubmanship and Sunday-school contest oneupmanship.

Sex education is inevitable. From peers or paperbacks, magazines or movies, TV or VD, the corner store or the locker room, our children are collecting information and misinformation, conceptions and misconceptions. Who will give them perspective? Many parents hope to; few are successful. Surveys unanimously document the failure of most parents to instruct their children adequately in the facts of life. Breakdown in parent-child communication by the teen-age years, unresolved personal feelings about sexuality, inadequate terminology, uncomfortable feelings about discussing these matters, plus a history of aborted atempts to lecture on the birds and the bees—hindrances like these stymie many parents. However, most Christian parents are looking for guidance and reassurance in assuming their God-ordained role of bringing their children up under the whole counsel of God (note particularly the excellent study, Parents’ Guide to Christian Conversation About Sex, by E. J. Kolb). Encouragement for improvement rather than censure for past mistakes is now imperative.

The schools have recently begun to assume the responsibility of sex education. Some systems are now operating carefully conceived programs with professional personnel. Many others are just getting their programs off the launching pad. Church efforts should supplement and complement local school programs wherever these are doing well.

Unfortunately, relatively few schools are doing well—or doing anything. The major problem with school programs centers in value orientation. Separation of church and state prohibits the teaching of religious values, and most school programs forbid teachers to moralize with students. The American Medical Association, however, in a brochure on sex education called Facts Aren’t Enough, underscores the inadequacy of programs that do not balance fact with faith (or values). From an institutional standpoint, the Church is in the best position to provide this balance. The Church could provide correct biological information along with a sound spiritual orientation for those children entrusted to its care and nurture.

One tragedy the present generation of parents weathered ought not to be repeated. Part of God’s creative activity involved fashioning the human form into two striking silhouettes. Into one he breathed masculinity; femininity graced the other. The two complemented and augmented each other—physically, spiritually, psychologically, and economically. And, reflecting God’s image of love, their relationship proved to be highly fulfilling and mutually sustaining. God saw that it was very good—and so did they. But who explained our budding sexuality in this context? Our parents? Not for 90 per cent of us. Our school? No, the school could not give religious instruction. Our church? No, sex was a taboo subject there. So who introduced most of us to God’s grand scheme of sexuality? Our peers. Slang terms, racy and ribald stories, smutty pictures, girlie magazines, and puzzling bodily changes—these were our sex education.

A few years ago when a psychologist at a Christian college was discussing a problem with a student following spiritual emphasis week, the undergraduate, only half-facetiously, asked: “When are they going to have sexual emphasis week here?” As the young adult repeats the Lord’s Prayer (“lead us not into temptation”) or reads the Beatitudes (“Blessed are the pure in heart”), he may feel his awakened sexual desires are being pitted against spiritual ideals. This is the place for the Church to provide compassionate counsel. Whether the catechism class is studying the Ten Commandments (“Thou shalt not commit adultery.… Thou shalt not covet”), a Sunday-school class is discussing David and Bathsheba, or the evening youth group is viewing A Man for All Seasons, opportunities abound for value orientation in a Christian philosophy of life. Skillful educators and youth sponsors will not ignore the potential for fruitful dialogue here. Since college or the military, an urban office or a vocational school typically follows a high-school education today, adults must realize that if a young person graduates from high school without having formulated a Christian philosophy of sexual behavior, the pressures of an erotically oriented world are likely to overwhelm him. The search for identity in the adolescent years is accompanied by a search for personal values. When they ask for bread, let us not give them a stone.

Not everyone is convinced, however, that the Church should become involved with family-life education. It is time to consider some of the objections commonly raised.

1. Sex education is the task of the parents. Agreed. But since only about 10 per cent of parents manage to educate their children adequately with a sound Christian ethic intertwined with the facts of reproduction, should not the Church augment parental efforts? It is not a matter of either/or; both parents and Church have a mandate to instruct and to nurture the children entrusted to their care.

2. Sex education is the task of the schools. Increasing emphasis is being given to a kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade program of family-life education in our school systems. If competent teachers are found (no small undertaking), Christians should welcome this aspect of biological, sociological, and psychological education. Dr. Mary Calderone, executive director of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), has been very active in encouraging school systems across the nation to include sex education in their curriculums. In a 1965 survey conducted by the National Education Association, eight out of ten teachers in the United States recommended that sex education become a part of secondary-school curriculum. The corner has been turned. Christians should be—and many are—on the committees of educators planning these programs. Two major problems remain: (1) finding or developing qualified teachers, and (2) the serious limitation imposed on schools in discussing value systems.

3. Sex education in the Church is faddish. Some critics feel that efforts to involve the Church in this currently popular realm are a capricious capitulation to the sexual sensationalism so rampant today. The unfortunate element of truth in this objection points to the negligence and the tardiness of the Church in waiting so long to bring puberty into proper focus. For some twenty centuries Scripture has borne witness to the need for basic instruction and value orientation in human sexuality. Regrettably, secular pressures are forcing the Church to rethink and retool its educational program along lines that should have been normative through the generations.

4. Sex education means sexual experimentation. This common allegation is not supported by the facts and is disputed by the leading family-life educators. As observers of adolescent behavior readily note, considerable experimentation takes place anyway. Discussions of human relationships, of ultimate values, of ego needs and misdeeds, and of Christian principles of behavior tend to have a sobering and salutary effect on teen-agers.

5. Sex education isolates the physical aspects of human sexuality from the total context of responsible love. This is a valid objection if the course offered provides little more than the nomenclature of human anatomy and reproduction (what family-life educators refer to as a “plumbing course”). The sex education we advocate is neither reproduction education, which is impersonal, nor moral indoctrination, which is impractical. The former lacks a framework in which “facts” can be organized; the latter reduces moral principles to moral prudery. Open and tactful discussion, in a Christian frame of reference, of the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual aspects of human reproduction should characterize sex education in the Church.

6. The Church should “stick to preaching the Gospel.” This common objection finds its roots in a rather simplistic notion of precisely what the Gospel is. The Gospel may be likened to an inverted pyramid. Its tip may well point to the “Good News” of personal salvation. But its total impact includes both kerygma (proclamation) and didache (teaching). The proclamation of God’s love made incarnate in Jesus Christ is the Gospel; the teaching of how this love affects every aspect of the Christian’s life is also the Gospel. Any attempt to separate kerygma from didache is a most unfortunate dichotomy. The Gospel of Jesus Christ includes the striking Good News of a truly relevant sexual ethic.

7. There is a lack of qualified teachers to give sex education within the Church. This objection is far more telling when applied to the school instead of the Church. Course instructors are quick to agree that adolescents raise far more moral questions than anatomical ones. Within Church membership are Christian physicians, psychologists, nurses, educators, lawyers, judges, theologians, ministers, and parents; what one church may lack can be supplied by persons from another. The great values of programs of this kind is that Christian physicians or lawyers or psychologists can ground their lectures in Christian values, so that it is not left to the concluding session for the minister to give the series a “religious” twist.

8. There is little guidance available on how to set up such a program. This criticism, valid a decade ago, has now been sidelined by the introduction of various denominational studies and professional guidebooks.

9. It has never been done before.

Let us look now at the other side. Why should the Church sponsor family-life education?

1. The Christian Gospel is God’s “good news” to man, and young people need to hear the good news Christian commitment and Christian ethics bring to sexual behavior.

2. Scripture has much to say about sexual behavior, whether the Church does or not, and Christian education includes family-life education. The candor of the Bible prohibits prudery; it speaks of such matters as circumcision, sterility, menstruation, fornication, adultery, homosexuality, prostitution. Moreover, such parts of the biblical account as the virgin birth of Christ, the infertility of Abraham and Sarah, the adultery of David, circumcision as the sign of the covenant, and Nicodemus’s puzzlement at the idea of being “born again” need clarification.

3. Family-life education courses help to strengthen marriage and establish Christian homes.

4. Just as health measures taken prior to anticipated exposure can lessen resultant injury, advance information about human sexuality can help to prevent catastrophe.

5. When parents promise, through either Christian baptism or infant dedication, to bring their children up “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord,” sexual behavior lies within the scope of their instruction. The Church has a responsibility to assist parents in their total task of Christian nurture.

6. While other social institutions often feel they must skirt moral issues in their sex-education courses the Church is a natural place for such problems to be discussed.

7. Society is asking the Church to inaugurate family-life courses. Physicians, psychiatrists, sociologists, and family-life educators have repeatedly requested that churches begin to offer counsel to young people.

8. The confusing pressures upon our youth for conformity demand that a Christian orientation to human sexuality be discussed with them. Many contemporary illustrations of sexual anarchy and exploitation underscore this confusion (these should be cited for discussion with young people).

9. The Church needs to give firm support, not to suppression and distortion of sexual matters, but to biblical inquiry and ethical direction. Rather than being silent or negative or wistfully permissive about sex, churchmen should desire to proclaim the whole counsel of God in this area as well as in any other.

Christian family-life education is more than sex education; it is character education. Theologically, it assumes that this aspect of God’s good creation is worthy of investigation, clarification, and orientation. Dynamically, it places the physical, emotional, and social aspects of human sexuality in the context of Christian ethics. The call to discipleship and stewardship under the will of God as it relates to human personality and sexual behavior is highly important for the perfecting of this treasure we have in earthen vessels. The individual is viewed, not in isolation, but as his behavior affects other persons and as it prepares him to establish a Christian family.

When a church plans a series of seminars on sex education, specific goals should be kept in mind.

Recommended goals of sex education for parents are:

1. To promote familiarity with the basic biblical principles that should undergird sexual attitudes, sexual behavior, and the family.

2. To promote familiarity with the vocabulary that correctly identifies body parts and body functions.

3. To promote an understanding of the dynamics of communication between generations.

4. To promote an attitude of both openness and sacredness about human sexuality within the home.

5. To assist in resolving sexual tensions and interpersonal conflicts within the family.

6. To promote an understanding of the roles that members of the family should assume.

For sex education among junior-high students, desirable aims are:

1. To develop an appreciation for the wonder of God’s creative process in which each person is created male or female.

2. To promote an understanding of psychosexual development.

3. To provide an accurate vocabulary for discussing sexual growth.

4. To relieve anxieties and fears about individual sexual maturation.

5. To establish respect for persons of the opposite sex.

6. To establish respect for both the divine and the social laws governing sexual behavior.

7. To promote an atmosphere in which questions on human sexuality may be discussed with candor and grace.

And for senior-high students, these goals of sex education are appropriate:

1. To clarify further the physical, emotional, and mental maturation process in which a young person makes the transition through puberty to adulthood.

2. To foster an appreciation for the wisdom of God’s word on sexual behavior and to encourage the student to develop his own moral code in a Christian context.

3. To discuss the dynamic and biblical factors that contribute to a wholesome, happy, Christian home.

4. To establish respect for persons of the opposite sex, with consideration given to personality development, individual anxieties, and dating ethics.

5. To provide adequate knowledge about both normal and abnormal sexual behavior so that the young person may protect himself from the misuses and aberrations of sex.

6. To encourage freedom of discussion in matters of human sexuality.

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