I have lots of questions here, but I’ll restrict myself to just one: How do singles figure into Young’s sex sermon series? In every interview clip I’ve seen, Young emphasizes that the challenge is just for married people, and the Times says Young’s advice to singles has amounted to: “I don’t know, try eating chocolate cake.”
When I was a young, unmarried Christian, “try eating chocolate cake” is not far from the vision of sexuality I was given. When I married, I discovered a host of Christian teaching on sexuality, some of it quite beautiful, profound, and pragmatic. But in the years after I became a Christian and before I married, my experiences of Christian teaching on sex were much like what I worry singles at Fellowship Church are experiencing now: Sex is for married people, and if you’re not yet old enough or fortunate enough to be married…wow, that sucks.Â
Lauren Winner’s Real Sex is the only Christian book I know of that explicitly and comprehensively addresses non-marital sexuality. There, she says that Christian teaching on sexuality ought to be part of a larger vision of embodiment–whether single or married, sexually active or chaste, we ought to be learning how to be in our bodies in ways that glorify God and fully express our createdness. That’s a nice start, but I wonder what else single Christians are hearing from their ministers? Does anyone know? Is Ed Young speaking to this during his series? Is anyone speaking to it? What is the Christian vision of sexuality for singles?Â
Update: I wanted to highlight this comment posted below by Al Hsu. He helpfully mentions his book on Christian singlehood as an additional resource.Â
This is a symptom of a larger (evangelical) problem of overemphasizing marriage to the exclusion of singles. In the early church, it was actually considered more spiritual to be single than to be married, because marriage was seen as “worldly” and a concession to the flesh. The Protestant Reformation flipped this and said that marriage and family was normative and elevated marriage over singleness. A more biblical balance is that marriage and singleness are equal gifts and equally valid ways of living. If Christians really understood this and believed this, it would help us have more constructive things to say than “eat chocolate cake.”
(My book Singles at the Crossroads has a chapter on singleness and sexuality. Not nearly as comprehensive as Lauren Winner’s Real Sex, but I hope it’s at least somewhat helpful!)
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