Response to "Marriage and Premarital Sex: Christianity Today’s Village Green" by Matthew Lee Anderson

**This is a response to "Marriage and Premarital Sex: Christianity Today’s Village Green" by Matthew Lee Anderson (MereOrthodoxy.com)**

Matthew Lee Anderson wrote:
Mark Regnerus’ answer to non-merital sex is, not surprisingly, the most compelling. The best way for young people to avoid non-marital sex (as he rightly identifies it) is for them to get married. It’s a shocking idea, I know, but the more you think about it, the more sense it’s going to make. Trust me.

LOL. The first thing that popped into my head was the Christian classic "I Kissed Dating Goodbye." Somebody gave me that book while I was in my late teens and I summarily round-filed it. It wasn't until I was married that I reopened the book and found some great concepts therein. The irony was not lost on me.

I see extramarital sex as a symptom, not the true problem itself. If we continue to try and just treat the symptom, the problem will only effuse sin in other ways. The problem is a lack of good relationship modelling, a lack of community (family) support, and a lack of intentional accountability.

To combine thoughts from Winner (I have not read the book but read the reviews / summary) and Regnerus, my thoughts are three:
1. First, we need to present a compelling picture of Biblical marriage to youth- by example.
2. We need to communicate what God has intended for marriage and sex, and finally
3. We need to give youth some good leaders (including parents) that they can be vulnerable with and accountable to (by their own choice).

As Christians, we know that God wants the BEST for us in every area, including sexuality. We know that the World's idea of sexuality is trash and a hollow shadow of the richness that God designed.
(As someone once put it, "Yes, God is trying to take something from you. He's trying to give you a feast and take away your dirty sandwich!")
We need to STOP skirting sex-talk and we need to preach about how wonderful God intended sex to be. We need to take ownership of this topic back from the world. We need to talk about it from a young age - right now the World is winning the race to present its ideas about sex to children's minds.

Secondly, after having presented youth with something to hope for, we need to encompass them with a compassionate and yet perceptive and bold community that looks out for them (cf Matthew 10:16). The community needs to span age ranges and needs to be able to talk about sex. It needs to be able to listen to a teenager scream at the top of their lungs "I WANT TO HAVE SEX RIGHT NOW!!!!!!"
If youth have a community that will let them express how they are truly feeling, and will even give them the tools with which to express those feelings (words, art, music, what have you), it will give the community a chance to reach into young relationships and offer suitable defences that will protect youth from actions they would later regret. The key is that, with youth, you can not prescribe restrictions and walk away. You need to involve them and aid them, and ultimately leave the informed choice up to them. But finally, just like any other part of the Christian life, youthful uncommitted relationships with hormones raging will certainly have much poorer outcomes when conducted in isolation than when they exist in a supportive community ecosystem.

I would like to see a survey or some statistics about whether people who married young regretted it, or whether they were more incompatible with their mates over the long term than those who waited until later in life (when, presumably, they were more stabilized in who they were, and therefore there were less surprises for their mate.) I look into the past and see people marrying at much younger ages (12? 14?). Did it work well then? Certainly, the tradition of marrying young lasted a long time. It seems it's only recently that we've taken on this trend of marrying later in life, well past the time in life when hormones rage at full boil. If Christian adults can find ways to help (sexually-struggling) Christians successfully marry at a younger age, while keeping in mind that people change markedly from say age 18-25, then we certainly should. Perhaps one way of achieving this is to drop the huge costs of big weddings off our radar. I seriously doubt there's a correlation between cost-of-wedding and marital success! ;)

To add one more thing, I know a woman who only ever seriously dated one man before marrying, and she is so pleased that she never had to go through the many great heartbreaks of dating-as-usual. I believe her route was much better than my experience of serious dating and serious heartbreak. While it's obviously hard to prescribe, I think that we need to encourage youth to look critically at their potential mates. We certainly need to empower them to be able to say after few low-risk dates "This isn't what I was hoping for. This isn't everything God has for me. Goodbye." We need to empower youth with a positive self-image - that is - we need to ensure that they know how Father looks at them: passionately and full of pride (Matthew 3:17). What I'm saying is this: when youth stand firmly on their footing with God, they are much less likely to go looking for a mate that will prop them up in dysfunctional ways, and they will much less need to fill their gaping spiritual emptiness with the salve of sexuality. With a positive image, they will look lightly on failed dating trials and heavily on choosing a life partner, not vice versa.

I'd love to see more on this issue - it's simply terrible to pass on the dead-end message to hormone-infused youth "wait until you've graduated from university and then you can address those hormones, if you're lucky."