The story of sex

I was asked recently to come preach evangelistically for a university-aged audience, and I was given the topic ‘Free for sex or living in bondage?’ I’ll tell you straight up that it wasn’t the easiest evangelistic talk I’ve ever had to prepare!

How do you say something sensible about a biblical understanding of sex, and something worthwhile about the grace and kindness of God in the death and resurrection of Jesus, in the same talk while maintaining people’s interest and not speaking for too long?

Over the coming few posts, I want to talk about the process I went through in thinking about what to say; reflect on some of the things it made me think about; and ask for your feedback so that I can make the talk better in the future.

The first challenge was to work out how to communicate that the world’s position on sex, which claims to be about liberation, is actually a message that leads to bondage. And that’s what started me thinking about what and how the world communicates about sex. I realized that a key part of the talk was being able to tell the western world’s story of sex in a way that made sense to people who were listening. I ended up trying to tell the story in a number of ways, which will come to in future posts. But I started by trying to tell the secular story of sex.

So here’s the couple of paragraphs from the introduction to my talk about the modern western story of sex. What would you have said? What would you change to make it more accessible? Is this a fair representation of our world’s thinking about sex?

In our modern western culture, there’s a story about sex. It goes something like this.

Up until the 1950s, our world was dominated by a cruel, religious picture of life. We lived in a world where a few influential people used God as an excuse to tell us what to do. And that world was a world where women were barefoot and pregnant, and where sex was secret and shameful, and somehow wrong. Power was abused by the ruling elite, who often led a life of sexual double standards, telling other people how to control their sex lives while enjoying their mistresses on the side. Or worse, they abused those in their care.

But the free love revolution of the 60s, the invention of the contraceptive pill and the realization that we can all make up our own minds has finally freed us from the shackles of sexual repression. We now live in a wonderful world where experimentation is good, and being stuck with one person is bad (unless that’s what you really decide you want to do)—a world where porn is fun, and where we have been freed from those uptight days of being frightened of the naked human body, which is such a wonderful thing—a thing to be admired and desired and enjoyed.

We have moved as a society from bondage—a bondage imposed by religion and the church—to liberation from the claustrophobic confines of sexual prudery. And how good is it? It’s very, very good.

So here’s your chance to pull it to pieces. What else do I need to say? What would make the story sound like the story our world is telling about sex?