Mark Regenerus has drawn together a comprehensive survey of the state of sexuality in contemporary America. The portrait he presents, as you can imagine, is not a pleasant one for anyone who takes Christian sexual virtue seriously. Yet you can’t argue with the facts. And Regenerus certainly has the facts. His stats are drawn from three surveys conducted over the last six years, the most comprehensive being a 2014 survey of 15,000 Americans between the ages of 18 and 60.
Full disclosure: I am a pastor. We who are engaged in the cure of embodied souls will learn most from the quotations sprinkled liberally throughout the book. These are gleaned from actual 90 – 120 minute interviews his team conducted with 100 people averaging 27 years of age from communities representing a cross section of America. These quotations bleakly trace what amounts to the “death of Eros,” as Regenerus himself noted in a recent First Things article. (October 2017)
What, you ask, is “cheap sex?” “Sex is cheap if women expect little In return for it and men do not have to supply much time, attention, resources, recognition, or fidelity in order to experience it.” (28)
In many ways Dr. Regenerus is in dialog throughout his book with a major sociological study of sex done a quarter century ago. Anthony Giddens in his “The Transformation of Intimacy” (1992) was an early pioneer in documenting the decimation of sex achieved by the sexual revolution, making it “fully autonomous.” With pleasure as its goal, sex had become an “art form” (7)
It was Giddens who first identified the new paradigm for sex as “confluent love” – continually in flux and actively contingent upon mutual pleasure, supplanting the older ideal of “romantic love” which was viewed as a deep “soul mate” bond. (9)
I found the book simultaneously tragically discouraging and profoundly helpful. You don’t get published by Oxford University Press, after all, without doing your homework. In this book you have 215 pages of solid research, statistically validated and extensively footnoted. In mind-numbing detail you have spelled out for you an active snapshot of sexuality (of all stripes) in America today. And if you care for people you’d better realize that what happens in their sexual lives is profoundly a part of their spiritual lives. In fact, before sex is a moral issue, it is deeply spiritual. In the union of man and woman in holy marriage we have an earthly depiction of the union of Christ and His Bride the church. Every person lives out their first vocation as male or female, whether single or married. Therefore spiritual care always has sexual implications.
The book is worth wading through just to get a better understanding of the extent of the porn tsunami that engulfs our society, undermining sexuality and marriage. According to Regenerus, 46 percent of American men under age 40 use porn weekly and 25% of them stared at it yesterday or today. The toll it takes on relationships is unfathomable:
“…the quality of porn-and-masturbation may well have reached a level significant enough to satisfy many men, such that the pursuit of real sex with real women-heretofore considered worth it in comparison with masturbation seems no longer a benefit worth the costs of wooing. Fake sex is closer to real sex than ever before, and the dopamine hit along the way extends foreplay. Now men can ogle and stare at the women they (almost) have sex with. They ejaculate at her, rather than in her. They may not declare virtual sex great sex, but they may conclude that it’s ‘good enough.’” (128)
At the end of his book Regenerus predicts some trends based on his research. He provides eight educated guesses for the future based on his documentation of the phenomenon of the “Genital Life,” as he calls it. They are bleak, as you can imagine.
But they are not hopeless. “…the Genital Life we are adopting,” Regenerus writes, “is misanthropic, anti-woman, and not sustainable. The exchange relationship, on the other hand, is old. It is deeply human. It fosters love when navigated judiciously. And it remains the historic heartbeat, and the very grammar, of human community and social reproduction.” (215)
Conjugal love is different than “confluent love.” It is based not on mutual consent, but on total union in which husband and wife give their bodies (and minds and spirits) to each other completely for their mutual joy and help and the procreation of children. Married love is not about what I get, but what I give. Sex is not cheap. “With my body I thee worship,” the husband vows to his wife, in Bishop Cranmer’s time-honored rite.
In preaching, catechesis, and the care of souls pastors have the joyful privilege to teach what it means to be man and woman in Christ—to live chastely and faithfully within the calling to be male or female. Abstinence apart from marriage and faithfulness within it is not the impossible dream nor is it some weird Christian hangup. It is a blessed reality for all who are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection. Rather than the Genital Life, the baptismal life is daily dying to sin and rising to righteousness in order to love and serve the neighbor, offering their bodies as living sacrifices to God, holy and acceptable through faith in Christ Jesus.
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