We cannot avoid her; this gross, scarlet mother of harlots, presiding
with cynical lust over the affairs of men. Babylon the Great. City without
Shame. Her blasphemies and adulteries pollute the whole earth!
Today, with the explosion of information technology there is no escape from this Babylonian culture that we call 'the world'. Newspapers, magazines, videos, radio and television ensure the encounter takes place, not in pagan temples but in the sanctity of our own homes. The choice is plain; let Babylon into your lives or lose touch with what is happening in the real world. Only those who wish totally to withdraw can hope to remain unaffected by its all-pervasive influence.
But escapism is not a valid option for our teenage children – or for us parents. So we must take on the world; and in no area of life is the ensuing conflict of values more real than in the realm of sexual beliefs and practices.
For the past four decades, the Mother of Harlots has revelled in promoting the indulgence of everything that is sexually perverse and decadent. As a result, we raise our children in a society that is sexually more confused than probably any previous generation.
Are they homosexual or heterosexual, or something in between? Should they sleep around? Do condoms really protect you from AIDS? Who wants 'safe sex', anyway? Masturbation is good for you, but pornography is sexist. Unless you're a woman Ä then female erotica is liberating! But what's the difference? Both forms of literature are aimed unambiguously at the groin and both are exploitative. Sex before marriage is apparently essential to finding out if you are compatible. But why marry at all? Unwanted babies can be killed before they're born, but child abusers should be brought to book. Why this inconsistency?
John expressed something of the current confusion in his poem Innocence.
Ah, little
girl so sweet,
Play innocent in the street,
You'll grow up soon.
And then they'll teach you what to do.
Who are you?
A female form
Designed for men;
But why?
A woman's touch
is far more kind.
Let us open up your mind,
Explore the taboos of the past;
Be not afraid;
For God is dead.
At last!
And your friend,
The little
boy.
He'll grow up, too.
Confused.
He must not be a chauvinist!
Perhaps he's
gay?
Many are;
Or so they say.
Find out;
Come out; cry out.
The Church won't mind;
They rather like the other kind!
But hedge
your bets,
You might be straight.
Just as well to copulate
With those of other sex than you.
Leisure,
pleasure,
Lots of fun;
Sex is good for anyone.
Condoms keep you safe from AIDS,
And all the other nasty things
That give
promiscuous sex a sting.
At least,
That's what the experts say;
And no one's taught
A better way!
It's tempting to press the panic button at this point. How are
our children to cope with all this? What can we do to protect them? It appears
a daunting task and one from which we may well wish to flee.
But better to face the foe than to pretend the foe doesn't exist. And that, sadly, is the trouble with many Christian parents. Sex is a taboo subject, a constant source of embarrassment to them. So much so that some are too embarrassed even to admit that they are embarrassed! It's an attitude which is no help to our children. Ostriches may know a lot about sand but they are poor guides for crossing the desert.
A young man approached John at a teenagers' conference with this typical cry. He said 'I'm in a terrible mess. If you saw me at home, I'm a good Christian boy, but on the inside I'm a sex maniac. But I can't talk to my parents about it.'
There was nothing abnormal about this lad. He certainly wasn't a sex maniac! But he was wrestling with normal teenage desires in a world that had plunged him into a personal battle between his Christian beliefs and the provocation of Babylon. He felt ill equipped to fight it. The real tragedy was his inability to communicate the problem to his parents – and that was mostly their fault.
This embarrassed silence, this implication that sex is impolite and unclean, can have devastating effects. The young woman from a good Christian home may optimistically enter upon marriage only to find that she is sexually frigid because of an unconscious shame engendered by her parent's negative attitudes. It could ruin the marriage.
The opposite can also happen. A church leader's daughter gets pregnant by her boyfriend. Why? Because she rebelled against her parent's prudery and lack of understanding. Or a son becomes a wild donkey at college because he doesn't want the patently inhibited sex life he perceives his parents to have.
However difficult we may find it, we must face the issues square on with our kids. They need intelligent guidance from us if they are to find their way through the sexual minefield.
Secular society has been far from afraid to talk about the subject. Books, television documentaries, sex education lessons, magazines, all ensure that no aspect of human sexual behaviour is left untouched. As a result, our children probably know more than we do about 'the facts of life'.
Unfortunately, what the world does so well, it also does so wrongly. Sex is taught as something you do when you fancy it, like eating ice cream or going to the pictures. Most modern sex education is divorced from Christian ideas of chastity, covenant love and marital faithfulness. Technique has replaced trust, contraception is more important than commitment, satisfying the libido substitutes for sustaining love.
And this is no accident. Those who influence the ideas and
practices of men and women in society have quite deliberately rejected the
Christian way. In fact, most sex education today is based upon the assumption
that the church (and therefore God) is the cause of all the trouble in the past
and true liberation is found by positively rejecting its standards. In the next
part we’ll look at why this is.
