August 15, 2022 Show with Dr. David Ayers on “After the Revolution: Sex & the Single Evangelical”

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Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions, and now here's your host,

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Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 15th day of August, 2022, and I'm thrilled to have a first -time guest today.

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Dr. David Ayers is joining us today, professor of sociology and former dean and interim provost at the

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Alva J. Calderwood School of Arts and Letters at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, who holds a

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Ph .D. in sociology from New York University and is the author of Christian Marriage, Experiencing Social Research, and Investigating Social Problems, and has taught courses on marriage and family for more than 30 years.

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Today we're going to be addressing his new book, After the Revolution, Sex and the

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Single Evangelical, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr.

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David Ayers. Well, thank you for having me on. It's nice to be with you. Well, why don't you tell us, first of all, something about your role on the faculty at the

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Grove City College in Pennsylvania. I happen to know that T.

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David Gordon was at least at one point on the faculty. I've interviewed him a number of times, and I know that Dr.

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Carl Truman still is on the faculty there. Why don't you tell us about your position on the faculty and what you teach there.

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Well, I teach sociology. I teach our basic class on family as a social institution, introductory classes, some anthropology classes and theory, and just a lot of core classes related to the discipline.

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But I've been an administrator there since about 2003.

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I was assistant dean and then dean, and then for a year and a half, I was interim provost before returning to the faculty full time.

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So since the end of 2019, I've been committed to really focusing on my scholarship and teaching again full time.

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So that's kind of where I'm at on the faculty. I've been there since 1996.

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I was actually involved in hiring both of the men that you mentioned. And so, in fact, my daughter was

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Carl Truman's assistant at Westminster Seminary when her husband was finishing his

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Master's of Divinity there. Wow. Well, now we have a tradition here.

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Whenever we have a first -time guest on the program, we have that guest give a summary of their salvation testimony.

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That would include the kind of religious atmosphere, if any, they were raised in, and any kind of providential circumstances our sovereign

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Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them.

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And I'd love to hear a summary of your story. Well, I was raised

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Roman Catholic in a divided household. My father was, at best agnostic,

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I think, at least towards the end of his life, he was an atheist who was raised in a

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Church of Christ house, completely rejected that, but he had agreed when he married my mother that we would all be raised

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Roman Catholic. And so, although he never attended church with us or maybe would show up at a baptism or funeral wedding, he wasn't really part of our religious life growing up.

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Mom did see us mass every Sunday. We, you know, dad was as good as his word.

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We, you know, went to Catholic school. I went to Catholic school, should be eighth grade, when we were not overseas.

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When we were overseas, I was in Department of Defense schools. So that was my background.

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Around 14 years old, when I entered the public schools in ninth grade,

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I basically began moving very quickly towards kind of the hippie lifestyle. We didn't call ourselves that, we called ourselves freaks, and...

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People call me that all the time. No, well, to us, the hippies were the unrealistic ones.

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For us, it was just sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And so, really, that was my whole time in high school and into my early adulthood was that lifestyle pretty much, you know, wrecked my life and didn't do a lot of good for a lot of the people around me either.

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About the mid -1970s was when the Jesus movement was in full swing. And ultimately,

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I came to Christ through a charismatic discipleship church. Oddly enough, I'm from Washington, D .C.

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area, but this is in a college town about an hour north of where I'm living now, Edinburgh, Pennsylvania.

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I was up there visiting with a close friend of mine for... A friend of his sister's was getting married.

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He had been put up there by his parents to try to straighten him out, and he brought me up there to kind of keep him company.

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And while I was there, I got saved. So I left home at... I had finished a year of college.

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I left home at 19 to basically make it on my own and be part of this church up in Pennsylvania.

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I was kind of in and out of the faith for a couple of years, really not wanting to just really submit to Christ's lordship.

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And in 1977, I was put under church discipline, and I deserved it.

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And God used that to really bring me to real repentance and faith.

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And so I've... That was my testimony. It was kind of rough. And so I've really been,

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I think, walking with the Lord in a committed way since about the end of 1977.

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I eventually, you know, I worked in factories for several years. I worked for A .J. Hines Corporation as a machine operator in a frozen food plant up near Lake Erie.

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Eventually went back to school, finished, you know, my degree, and went into grad school from there.

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Married a really wonderful Christian woman, and had six kids, and now three sons -in -law.

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One of my sons is getting married next month. I've got six grandchildren, and God's been very good to us.

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Well, praise God. And what led you into the realm of academia, specifically

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Grove City College? Kind of like my salvation. It was a series of accidents. My original goal was to work in a clinical environment with mentally ill populations and things like that.

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I worked in a home for juvenile delinquents full -time while I was in college full -time.

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That was what enabled me to go back to school. And so I kind of was moving in that direction.

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Around the time that I graduated, my wife and I moved to Washington, D .C., where I was going to start graduate school at American University.

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I was accepted there to study psychology at the graduate level. And my goal, again, was to ‑‑

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I was increasingly moving in the direction of wanting to do more research and writing. But that's where I encountered the

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Reagan revolution, what we now would call the Christian right or the new right. Really became interested in more large -scale social phenomena, what was happening to our country, to our civilization as a whole.

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And wanted to understand and focus on people at that level and really be more intentional in the way that I thought through things biblically.

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So I literally, not even realizing at the time that it was actually more left -wing even than psychology was,

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I transferred from the graduate program in psychology at American University to a graduate program in sociology there.

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Had never taken a sociology course in my life, and I thrived.

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By the second semester of that year that I transferred, I was getting a full scholarship.

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And so ‑‑ but my goal at that point was to do applied social research, eventually for Christian organizations operating in and around the

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Washington, D .C. area. You know, people like the Family Research Council, Child and Family Protection Institute, National Right to Life.

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People like that. But I was invited to ‑‑ I was invited by a guy that I met at a conference down there who was teaching at Grove City College to apply for an academic position at Grove City College.

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I had never actually even thought about becoming a college professor. And just wasn't on my radar at all.

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I went through the whole application process. They turned me down. But another ‑‑ but the guy that they hired ended up not working for them and found out about me and hired me instead.

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So they turned me down, offered the job to somebody else. He had a job in the

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New York City area, and he hired me to work for him at the King's College, which at that time was at Briarcliff Manor, New York.

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So that's where I kind of started. And, of course, they wanted me involved in a doctoral program.

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So I was accepted at City University and NYU. I chose NYU. Kind of what

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I've been doing ever since. Praise God. Well, we have as our theme today the theme of your new book,

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After the Revolution, Sex and the Single Evangelical. I want to read an excerpt from Dr.

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Carl Truman's foreword that he has written for this book. A depressing read, but an important one.

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The best arguments for Christian morality are sadly the ruined lives of those who ignore it.

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This book arms pastors and laypeople alike to face what is the most pressing issue of our day.

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That's quite a compelling commendation for this book and obviously has added to it urgency.

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Tell us, with the books that are already available about sexual purity, sexual morality, a

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Christian, and sexuality, we could go on and on with ways to describe this.

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Why is it that you said to yourself, you know, there may be good books out there, and there's a lot of bad books out there, and mediocre books out there, but I think that I need to join the conversation with something of my own in print.

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What was the most compelling factor of you even delving into this subject and writing on it?

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Well, I mean, I had a long -term concern with this and concern with what I was seeing both at the level of the

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Christian colleges, actually seeing the young people up close and seeing it already troublesome by the mid -1980s and just continuing to kind of get worse over time.

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I was watching a lot of lives getting ruined and affected by it, and I was kind of shocked by the, not that there's no differences at all, but that the differences between the world and the professing evangelical churches as a whole, at least, are not that great, certainly not as great as we would like to think that they are.

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And this is true across a range of things in family divorce rates and a lot of areas.

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But what I saw was just a massive failure. The books that I saw that were out there, you know, a lot of them focused on scriptures, on trying to communicate scriptural teachings, on techniques, how to maintain chastity or purity or pursue things.

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In other words, there's a lot of good stuff out there. There's a lot of bad stuff out there. But what I didn't see was anything that really tackled the facts head -on, laid it bare, just really what is happening here and getting into the nitty gritty, including some things that are probably so embarrassing

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I wouldn't talk about them in class, but I can lay them out in a book and put them right out there.

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But also bringing to bear not only my own social science data and research, but the social science research as a whole, along with a solid understanding of Christian theology, as an integral tapestry that should inform the way that we think about everything,

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God, the human person, marriage, and sex, and how that all fits in and contributes and failures in those areas contribute to kind of the mess that we're in.

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And also a good eye to social history, particularly the kind of earthy, down -to -earth, honest understanding that we had among the reformers and the

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Puritans, the history of Christian understanding of sex, what the church fathers thought about it, where they got it wrong, some of these kinds of things.

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And to try to bring all that together into a kind of a comprehensive picture of not only what's going on, but why it's going on and how to fix it.

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That kind of avoids gimmicks, you know, rock concerts where people come forward, make pledges and get virginity

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T -shirts and rings and lots of things like that, and focuses on the sufficiency of the scriptures and the normal work of the

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Christian church, as we've always understood it historically, as being the basic set of solutions for what we've got in front of us right now, which is basically to be committed to what

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I call normal Christianity. Now I hope that when anyone from our audience picks up this book and they begin to read

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Dr. Truman's foreword, the first few sentences do not compel them to throw the book across the room or in the trash or in the fireplace, but he begins with some very surprising words for a

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Bible -believing evangelical to read, and perhaps you can explain. He says, Sigmund Freud may have been wrong about many things, but concerning sexual behavior, he was indisputably correct.

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Let's hear more about that. What did he mean by that? Well, sex is very integral to human life and the human person, and it's designed to be.

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And the pull, of course, of sexual lust and sexual desire is an extremely potent and powerful one, and it's an easy thing for people to be driven by and to organize their lives around,

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I think would really be a good part of that. I know Carl and I are very much in agreement in terms of the long -term trajectory of what's happened, which is this whole idea of the rise of the therapeutic self and the notion that the individual and their identity and their consciousness is king, and the rest of us have to affirm and celebrate whatever they believe themselves to be and whatever identity they choose to constitute for themselves.

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But sex is in the very middle of that. But if we go back to the book of Genesis, the first two chapters, sex is in the middle of it there.

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God begins essentially human institutions by uniting Adam to Eve in a sexual relationship through which they were drawn to propagate and to raise offspring for the glory of God and as part of their regency over the planet

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Earth. And so it's very central to what it means.

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Now, the actual subtitle, or actually the title itself, excuse me there, the title itself,

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After the Revolution, obviously from what you said in your own description of yourself regarding your salvation testimony, you come from the hippie or freak movement, and I'm assuming that that would involve some of what you mean by the revolution, the sexual revolution.

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What were some of the pillar elements of the sexual revolution that were antithetical to the scriptures, rebellious against the scriptures, and was there anything that may have even been in harmony with the scriptures?

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Well, I mean, first of all, I guess I would have to say that many of us from my era, the baby boom era, were fortunate in that a lot of what we wanted and maybe even pretended that we had, were not as easily accessible to us as they are now.

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I don't know what life would have been like for most of us if we would have had 24 -7 access to virtually every kind of depravity known to man just on our smartphone, just walking around.

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You know, I think it's a very, very challenging time to live.

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But I think that we believed that ultimately we could live any way that we want and make it work, make it successful, and that in fact the

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Christian moral principles that all of us had been brought up with, even the ones of us that didn't really have religious faith, pretty much,

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I mean, you didn't run into public school teachers who encouraged you, you know, not to be a virgin until you were married and things like that.

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Not for most of my childhood. So we believed that those were restraints, that those were blocking our liberation and freedom, that basically we could somehow manage it, we could somehow make it work, and through some kind of combination of strategies and technology, we could safely engage in all these different things and that they would ultimately make us happier.

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And ultimately the reality was these things destroyed us.

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And they wrecked, you know, the country.

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As part of a book that I'm working on now, I was looking at the year my parents got married in 1947.

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I think the illegitimacy rate in 1947 in terms of percentage of births out of wedlock was around 4%.

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Now it's 40%. Over, roughly 7 out of 10 in the

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African -American community, over half in the Hispanic community, you know, in other words, about a third in the white community, you know, were basically being devastated by these things.

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And that's in spite of things like abortion on demand and all these other things. So what we found is that they didn't work, you know, that these things were soul -destroying.

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They limited and destroyed our personality. They limited us as human beings, and they ultimately brought a great deal of pain and wreckage into our lives, and for many of us, baggage that we're going to carry with us for our whole life.

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Now, obviously, the sexual revolution was primarily based on rebellion against traditional understandings of sexuality that come from the scriptures.

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Some might even call it the Judeo -Christian of sexuality. Was there anything in the minds of those that were,

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I guess, in the limelight of this revolution, those who were looked upon as experts or gurus or spokespeople for sexuality, was there anything that was off -limits in their minds?

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Was there anything wrong that could take place within the realm of sexuality? Or was it anything goes?

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Was that really a consistent motto lived out and proclaimed by those leading this movement?

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Well, I mean, it continued to expand and continued to get worse. I would say, you know, first, you know, certainly, and this remains the limit.

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In fact, in my book, I argue that the only thing that I'm aware of is consent. So obviously, you know, there was a limit of consent.

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Some of the other limitations with regards to various types of perversions and pedophilia and those kinds of things have begun to be chipped at as well, and we're beginning to come up with euphemisms that make them sound acceptable.

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So, for example, people that are minor attracted now are being defended.

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So we began seeing increasingly these boundaries pushed more and more, but really, I think that the statement that used to go around, which was, if it feels good, do it.

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And I think that the little parentheses that people had in their minds when they said that, and I guess you would say the leaders had in their mind was, as long as it doesn't involve doing damage to or forcing, you know, another human being,

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I think was pretty much it. And that was true not only for sexuality, but for drugs and everything else.

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Yeah, I'm sure that most people our age and older can remember the famous song,

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Do It Till You're Satisfied by BT Express. That basically is an anthem for that, isn't it?

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Well, and if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with.

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Right. You know, there was many, many different anthems like that. I remember, too, a lot of our heroes were rock stars.

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In my world, most of the people with their heart of hearts would have loved to have been a rock star, at least have the life of a rock star, a movie star.

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And they were basically able to have access to pretty much anything they wanted in terms of drugs and sex and anything that they wanted.

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And, you know, they paraded that. They bragged about it. I think Jim Morrison of The Doors even,

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I think at one point, was arrested for masturbating. And these were people that we looked up to and admired.

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We wanted to be like them. We dressed like them. We walked like them. We adopted a lot of their expressions.

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And what you began seeing with them, too, is that they would hit a satiation point and continue to push out further and further and further.

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And everything. I think it was David Crosby, I think he's sick now, but David Crosby said that his entire heroin addiction was trying to recapture the feeling of the first time and realizing that he was destroying himself but just really couldn't do it.

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In other words, he was trying to capture a particular kind of experience that just was further and further away from him.

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And he continued to go further and further. I believe it was one of the members of the famous band at that time,

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Three Dog Night, who ended up so badly addicted that he lost all his money and ended up a homeless man pushing a shopping cart around.

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Wow. I did not hear that. Oh, yeah, he's rehabilitated now, and I believe he's a

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Christian. But, yeah, that's how bad a lot of these people felt. But, see, we didn't see that.

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You didn't really see all that. You also remember, and this is a little bit later, but Queen and Freddie Mercury really pushing the boundaries on homosexuality and ultimately dying.

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And now, of course, they think they've got that managed, and along comes monkeypox. In other words, nobody's learning.

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They just continue to push those frontiers. But I think the disturbing thing is that I believe that that revolution hit when

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Christianity was becoming more of a cultural capital, that it was increasingly being used up and had lost a lot of its real strength and cultural potency, and in which the theology and the ground on a lot of evangelical churches was becoming thinner and thinner in terms of our understanding of God, our anthropology, our faith, and the sufficiency of Scripture, our understanding of Scripture, and towards what

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I talk about in the book, which is basically moralistic therapeutic deism. You know, you've got a little God.

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People are big. God is little. And he primarily exists to keep me happy.

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And so I think that it was only a matter of time before that revolution penetrated the church, and it has at this point.

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Wow. Well, we're going to our first break right now, and when we return, we're going to enter into God's design for sex and marriage.

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If anybody has a question for David Ayers, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

27:32

USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, and I could well understand why this subject would evoke questions from people who do have personal and private matters they want to ask about.

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And so don't be concerned. We will accept your request to allow you to remain anonymous if it's a personal and private question.

27:56

But if it's a general question, a general question about sex and the scriptures, please at least give your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence.

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Don't go away. We'll be right back with David Ayers. And after the revolution, sex and the single evangelical, right after these messages.

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Please, if you haven't subscribed already, go to ignitedbytheword .org. If you're a parent, a grandparent, an uncle, an aunt, anybody who has young children in your life or even if you want to subscribe as gifts to those that you know who are parents and grandparents and aunts, go to ignitedbytheword .org

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36:54

We are now back with our guest today, Dr. David J. Ayers, author of After the

36:59

Revolution, Sex and the Single Evangelical. Our email address is chrisorenson at gmail .com. If you have a question, give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence.

37:09

Tell us about what you offer in the book in regard to God's design for sex and marriage and maybe you can include in that afterward what, in your opinion, in your estimation from what you have witnessed yourself, from what you have heard in any matter of means, whether it's counseling people or just hearing about the prominent ways where professedly

37:44

Bible -believing Christians are seriously getting things wrong about this issue of sexuality and what the

37:53

Bible has to say about it. Well, you know, I've always felt that if you're going to begin, you begin at the beginning.

37:59

It's like people say, well, where do I get started in the Christian life? Well, where you get started is where you are.

38:06

But the beginning, and I think this is where we've kind of lost it in many respects, but the beginning is in the book of Genesis.

38:17

And if we're not going to have a high and historical understanding of the book of Genesis, first of all, then don't tell me you believe in Jesus Christ, because he refers to the book of Genesis as fact.

38:29

In fact, I like to tell audiences sometimes when Jesus talks about Adam, he's remembering because he was there.

38:41

Wow, what a great way of putting it. You know, I knew that doctrinally and theologically, but I never heard it put that way, believe it or not.

38:50

And I think that's an excellent way to put it. Well, when he was asked about divorce and whether or not a man can divorce his wife for any reason, he immediately went back to Genesis and he lays out the

39:02

Genesis account of the creation of marriage. And of course, God officiated at the very first marriage and human history ends with a wedding.

39:11

It ends with the marriage of the church to its groom,

39:18

Christ. In fact, a friend of mine passed away a few years ago, and he called me up and asked if I would sing at his memorial service, and I said, yeah, what song do you want me to do?

39:29

He said, I want you to do the wedding song by Paul Stuckey. And I said, well, that's a strange one to pick.

39:35

He said, well, he said, I'm going to a wedding. And, you know, that was really profound.

39:41

What we learn in the book of Genesis is that man, male and female, was made in the image of God. In the image of God, he made them.

39:51

He united them and he told them to be fruitful and multiply and to rule over the earth.

39:59

So that, I like to say that he created marriage in an unfallen world, in an unfallen garden.

40:09

But in his eternal wisdom and not only foresight but oversight over all of history and all its details, he also created a provision against the fall.

40:20

He created protection against the fall. And marriage, he united marriage, sex, and children.

40:29

And he put those together and just as man bears the image of God, marriage bears the image of God in unique and very powerful ways.

40:41

The Apostle Paul in Ephesians, going back to the exact same, talks about it being a great mystery.

40:49

He talks about the man and the woman being united as one flesh. And theologians have always understood, both

40:56

Jewish and Christian, that the act that symbolizes and seals that covenant and that one flesh reality, which only exists in marriage.

41:06

It exists in no other human relationship, not parent and child, not the dearest friends.

41:12

Only man and woman are united as one flesh. But the seal and symbol of that is the sexual relationship.

41:20

God constantly talks to his people as a jilted husband or lover, being subjected to the unfaithfulness of those who are supposed to be joined to him in covenant.

41:35

In other words, he is married to his people. And our idolatry, our sinfulness, our rebellion is as adultery.

41:42

And we see in myriads of ways the way that uniting marriage, sex, and children forms the heart of all sound human society.

41:53

You don't need to be a believer to see that. Many unbelievers have pointed out that the faithful monogamous marriage as the place in which children are had and raised is the foundation of all healthy human society.

42:10

And so I also, you know, so that what applies to marriage applies to the sexual relationship.

42:18

Another thing that I think has been less emphasized in Protestant circles and should be emphasized more,

42:24

I talk about it in my book, is that, and especially in my book on Christian marriage, is that it's also, the way that John Paul II put it, as the

42:35

Pope, he said it's an icon of the Trinity. And what that really means is that the

42:40

Trinity is the fruitful union of three persons in one. And under the covenant of God, the man and the woman are united by God, held together by him, and they're united in one flesh, and that is also a fruitful union.

42:57

And as the Trinity brought forth life, marriage brings forth life.

43:03

And so sex cannot be separated from God. It cannot be separated from the spiritual.

43:10

And when we pollute sex and take it lightly, we're taking marriage lightly, and we're taking the creational ordinance of God, the created order, the beautiful order that God wove into the very essence of creation.

43:26

We are taking that, and we are mocking and ruining it. At the same time, it shouldn't surprise us that then the urges associated with that are very powerful ones.

43:36

As Paul said, you know, if you need to have sex, then you need to be married. But first of all, it's got to be the go -to temptation that Satan's going to use, right?

43:51

In other words, what's the number one thing that you see really bring down people all around you?

43:57

What's the big crash and burn of most of the ministers who destroy their churches and their ministry and their pulpits?

44:05

What's the crash and burn of most of the big politicians, most of the big leaders? It's sexual temptation.

44:13

If I was Satan, that would be my go -to in terms of bringing people down and destroying them.

44:21

But it's also at the very heart of marriage, which is at the very heart of human society and God's will for human society.

44:29

It's the very first social institution created by God, and so I'm going to go after that with a vengeance, and I'm going to mock it, and I'm going to pollute it, and I'm going to pervert it, and I'm going to twist it, because that essentially allows you to twist everything else.

44:48

I think that's one of the things that Karl Truman meant when he said that Freud was right, that our sexuality really does lay at the heart of the human.

45:00

And so I think in all those things, that's God's design.

45:06

So I tell students, I say, well, people want to ask me, is this okay, is this okay, is this okay? And my answer is very simple.

45:14

Sex is to take place within a loving covenantal union of one man and one woman who are bound to each other for life.

45:22

And that union is to be between a man and a woman, and anything outside of that is wrong.

45:34

But when you get under the hood and you look at the reasons for that and the reality that reflects it, it's very profound.

45:41

And I'll finish with one other thought. In my book on Christian marriage, I say that, and the scripture that's in my mind, although it refers to something else, is where Paul talks about the treasure hidden in jars of clay.

45:57

We're ordinary people. There's nothing particularly remarkable about us, and yet God has chose to put it and to imbue us with eternal significance and value.

46:09

He has hidden his treasure in jars of clay. The analogy that I use for marriage is that marriage is like a geode.

46:17

You see it in the field, it looks like a potato. It looks like a very plain, unpretentious rock that you would just throw away.

46:24

You wouldn't even bother using it as a garden decoration. Right, right. That being a collector of rocks when

46:30

I was a kid, I know exactly what you're talking about. You had to crack that baby open. And when you crack it open, you see that inside that plain exterior, there is absolutely dazzling wonder, complexity, richness, almost fathomless.

46:49

And some of them, like you could explore the inside of the geode for hours and keep finding new things inside of it.

46:58

And marriage and sex are like that because look at what they point to. So that if I bear witness to Christ, to a watching world in the way that I relate to my wife, shouldn't

47:14

I be saving sex for my wife and reserving sex to my wife and engaging in that relationship in honor with faithfulness and love and high regard?

47:30

In other words, maybe the most powerful witness

47:36

I have to a watching world is how I live as a husband. And hers is how she lives as a wife.

47:42

And our sexual selves are central to that. So again, it's not hard to figure out why

47:49

Lucifer is going to go right after that. It's easy pickings in terms of human desires. And if you pervert and twist that, you attack something that's at the very heart of God's intention for the human race.

48:03

And you're going to end up perverting and twisting everything else in the process. And all we have to do is just watch what's unfolded since Obergefell in 2015 and how quick everything has slid out from there in the matter of gender identity and sexuality to see how quickly, when you strike at the heart, everything else comes apart.

48:24

Well, we have a few questions from listeners. We'll get to one of them before our midway break because we have to go to our midway break momentarily.

48:35

But we have Bobby in Hartsdale, New York, who asks, one of the accusations routinely hurled at evangelicals, and perhaps you could include in that any conservative religious person, by the leftists is that we do not believe in enjoying sex and sexuality.

49:02

We hate sex. But the thing I find absolutely ridiculous about this charge is that Christians and conservative members of other religions tend to have much larger families, which reveals they are likely having a healthy sex life.

49:21

How do you respond to this, what I believe is an absurd accusation by liberals?

49:26

Well, first of all, I mean, it was, I suppose, an accusation that would have worked on some of the church fathers who

49:35

I think pulled aside by a false kind of narcissism and asceticism, and again, many times, having gotten a lot of things right, oftentimes did treat sex as something dirty and wrong and grudgingly allowed.

49:53

I think there's one church father that I quote who said that the only difference between marital sex and adultery is the degree of the illegitimacy.

50:05

And, you know, so they oftentimes taught and believed, and this idea was carried throughout the medieval ages, that the only thing that could justify sex was propagation.

50:15

That, you know, if it wasn't for the creation of children, there would be no justification for sex.

50:22

And, of course, you know, that's a ridiculous idea. First of all, there are very few Christians that think like that anymore.

50:29

Quite the opposite, there are too many Christians now who actually see sex as almost a recreational thing, as almost a right, as kind of withholding sex from people that aren't married or maybe aren't able to get married until they're older is somehow cruel.

50:46

But the other thing is, is that I keep trying to find married

50:51

Christian believers who think like that. Obviously, there are sexual dysfunctions in different marriages that pastors help people with, and sometimes damage and things like that.

51:02

But the fact is, is that Christians, for the most part, who are married have robust sexual lives.

51:09

We're the ones that are continuing to have children and enjoy those children. And the fact is, is that I look high and wide to try to find

51:20

Christians who actually teach that and think that. They're almost taking a very old idea and kind of a caricature of an old idea and applying it against the church.

51:31

And by the way, you know, they used to do that to the Puritans as well. The Puritans had very healthy, robust sexual lives.

51:38

They were oftentimes quite, you know, honest to the point where you'd almost get embarrassed listening to them.

51:44

And in fact, the Catholics during the time of the Puritans accused them of being sexual hedonists because they celebrated sex in marriage so much.

51:53

So that's a caricature and a charge that's been thrown at Christians for a very long time, and it doesn't really have a lot of validity.

52:02

We have an anonymous listener who seems to be pushing back on my statement.

52:08

The anonymous listener says, lots of children is prima facie evidence of a healthy sex life.

52:17

Well, obviously, it's an evidence of a frequent sex life within the confines of marriage.

52:25

But I didn't mean to imply that every single person that has a lot of children is necessarily having a mutually enjoyable sex life.

52:36

You might have husbands that are not seeking to please their wives and not even concerned with that.

52:46

But do you want to respond to our anonymous listener? I mean, was I off base in the way

52:51

I phrased that? I wouldn't say you're off base in how you phrased it, but it's certainly not the only evidence that we have that married

52:58

Christians tend to have healthy sexual lives. For me, at least, in my book,

53:04

Christian Marriage, I dealt more with maritals. The book After the Revolution is more about sex outside of marriage.

53:12

But we have lots of great surveys that ask people things like the frequency of their sex lives.

53:21

Of course, everybody's sex life goes down to a certain degree as they get older. But for the most part, what we see is married

53:29

Christians having sex frequently, and we see that the frequency of their sex is reciprocally associated with the happiness of their marriages.

53:37

We have to go to our midway break. Just remember where you left off there. This is the longer than normal break, folks.

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I need a church in the subject line. That's also the e -mail address where you can send in a question to Dr. David Ayers on our subject today,

01:10:52

After the Revolution, Sex, and a Single Evangelical. And right before the break, you were responding to an anonymous listener who was pushing back on my statement that evangelicals typically have larger families, more children than the average, and that even would include many conservative religions, and the leftist attack is that we hate sex, and I said that the fact that many evangelical homes have more churches than the national average would be a glaring evidence that that is not true, and the listener said, well, just because you have a lot of children doesn't mean you're having a healthy sex life.

01:11:38

So if you want to respond to that. Well, you know, it's an interesting thing that, to the modern mind now, it's very difficult to believe that you could see sex as primarily, well, that you would see sex as essentially spiritual, as essentially woven into covenantal marriage, and into the loving one -flesh relationship that marks covenantal marriage, and also as exhibiting and pointing to higher spiritual things, the way that, as I pointed out earlier,

01:12:14

God constantly talks to the Israelites using very bald sexual language to describe their idolatry, their rebellion.

01:12:23

He describes them as adulterers, as prostitutes, this kind of thing. So the idea is that if we're not okay with pornography, if we're not okay with a lot of nudity, if we're not okay with a lot of public displays, and this kind of thing, that we must somehow hate sex, and it's really kind of the opposite.

01:12:45

We have such a high view of sex. Because of how we see it, that we don't want to see it polluted, destroyed, and demeaned that way.

01:12:55

It kind of points back to C .S. Lewis' statement, you know, we don't want to be playing in a mud puddle when we could be, you know, playing at the sea.

01:13:04

In other words, we want something higher and better than that. And as I was beginning to point out, first of all, we have tons and tons of survey evidence that shows the level of sexual frequency and the relationship between sex and marital happiness, which is a two -way relationship among Christians.

01:13:26

There are very few sociologists, I think, who would even try to make the case that Christians hate sex, that their marriages tend to be kind of sexually dry and limited.

01:13:38

I think we could also point to lots and lots of teaching materials and sermons and other things going right back to the

01:13:46

Puritans on this issue. We could point to things like the Song of Solomon, very frankly, erotic imagery tied to, you know, the longing that two people have for each other sexually as they're contemplating and anticipating marriage.

01:14:04

We could point to the kind of things we even introduce our children to when we teach them about sex.

01:14:10

Passport to Purity, for example, is something we've used with our kids. Very much celebrates sex in the right context.

01:14:19

The way I somehow often put this to audiences is I say that, you know, degrading sex and recreational sex and taking sex outside of its proper place is kind of like taking a beautiful painting, ripping it out of its frame and turning it into a poster and hanging it into a filthy men's room, as opposed to putting it in the setting that brings out its true beauty, its true richness, its true essence.

01:14:51

And so I can look at the material we were using with our 12-, 13-, and 14 -year -old kids and how we were being taught to teach them about sex.

01:15:01

That completely goes, you know, against this thinking. So, and, you know,

01:15:08

I do premarital counseling. I do about two couples a year typically because of my schedule and other things.

01:15:14

But basically that's very core to all the premarital counseling that I'm aware of and all the premarital counseling that I'm aware of pastors doing.

01:15:22

I've been in charismatic churches, Reformed Baptist churches, Presbyterian churches, congregational churches, you know, all strong Bible -believing churches, with, you know, different wrinkles of theology.

01:15:35

And I've never really encountered this type of teaching that's supposed to be typical for us.

01:15:42

So I'd have to say that while there are certainly problems out there, and, you know, you have people that are married that have dysfunctional sex lives, and it's usually related to other aspects of their marriage or their experience that's been damaged in some ways.

01:15:59

And we seek to try to repair that. But the teaching that I've been exposed to continuously and given myself, and I've been a believer now for 45 years, has been that sex in marriage is good, it's necessary, it should be regular, rich, mutually enjoyable, and all is under a canopy of love.

01:16:21

So we just don't really see that as a common feature. It seems to be something that people just say without any real evidence.

01:16:32

Yeah, one of the evidences to bolster what you are saying is that I have seen documentaries that included interviews with serial killers, and many serial killers started down the wrong path by becoming addicted to pornography.

01:16:53

And one of the things they inevitably all say is that an overexposure to illicit sexual images made them bored with normal sexuality.

01:17:07

So it goes right along with what you're saying, that when it's kept to the confines of monogamy in marriage, it can be even more pleasurable.

01:17:22

Well, in fact, a lot of the dysfunction that we see in the sexual lives of married people, and what

01:17:29

I oftentimes have to confront and at least ask about and address in premarital counseling is the effects of pornography.

01:17:36

And in fact, social scientists are now talking about a decline, a sharp decline in sexual activity.

01:17:46

What I've seen in the research I've been doing recently, and I'm publishing some on right now, is that in fact that decline has been most among the non -religious, the so -called religious nones.

01:17:58

And when you look at hardcore social science, I'm talking about liberal, secular social scientists trying to analyze why there's been this decline in sexual activity.

01:18:09

One of the main reasons is because of the growth of pornography, video game obsessions, increasingly violent and brutal sexual practices that flow out of that, and what one author

01:18:21

I quoted recently called, quote, non -partnered sexual relationships. In other words, they literally become so hooked on pornography that they're more attracted by images than by real humans.

01:18:33

And that's a pretty good example about something that's really wonderful and God -given being destroyed. The scriptures talk about idolatry as being like a broken cistern, right?

01:18:45

You fill it with water, but by the time you put it up to your lips, the water's leaked out of the bottom and it's dry.

01:18:51

And you try to fill it up again, and it's dry again. And that's what sin does. It, in fact, diminishes and takes away, in fact, quite the opposite of the charge that's been laid.

01:19:04

And again, where we're seeing dysfunction, it's usually because of poor marital practices and oftentimes because of damage caused by pornography.

01:19:12

We have Ronald in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, New York.

01:19:20

And Ronald says, in the beginning of the program, Chris Arnzen quoted from Carl Truman's Forward, and it began with saying that the book was depressing.

01:19:36

What are the most depressing elements of this book that would be an urgent call for change, obviously, in the minds of evangelicals and even repentants?

01:19:49

Well, I start the book by really looking, by starting on a high note, by looking at God's design for sex as it's embedded in the book of Genesis, as it was understood by Christ and the apostles, as it was designed to originally be and all the beauty and richness that that entails.

01:20:11

But then in Chapter 2, I go into the different movements culturally that have basically taken us away from that.

01:20:19

The exaltation of self, relativization of truth, and all these other kinds of things that have essentially made man his own

01:20:27

God, and in which we think that we can create something better than what God has created, and we demand that others celebrate that.

01:20:35

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 really get into the statistics. Chapter 3 deals with beliefs, and Chapters 4 and 5 deal with activity or action, and they actually look at evangelicals versus other religious groups versus nuns in terms of beliefs and practices, and that's really depressing, because I get into the real nitty -gritty details, and that includes not only intercourse outside of marriage, but all the other things that people are doing.

01:21:05

Cohabitation, anal and oral sex, a lot of very destructive types of sexual practices, and the degree to which those things are actually happening among people who are professing evangelicals, less so among those who are more committed to the local church, but still disturbingly high numbers even there, disturbingly high rates of abortion and so forth.

01:21:27

And then in Chapter 6, I look at the way that the cultural shifts that I describe in Chapter 2 have had their counterpart in the

01:21:38

Christian church in the way that our theology and the way that we think about reality, our worldview, has essentially been warped.

01:21:46

And I think that those are the ones that can be pretty rough going, but are necessary. A pastor friend of mine said, you know, you have the law and then the gospel, and the law is the indictment of our sin, the true exposure of our real nature before God.

01:22:02

And that's bad news. But then I begin addressing the good news, which is that what are the causes for these things, and what can we begin doing to turn those things around?

01:22:14

So those are the kind of things that I think people might find depressing, but as Carl pointed out, really necessary if we're going to not only understand our current situation, but be motivated to begin addressing it.

01:22:28

But I think the hope is that addressing it involves returning to Christianity, to basically normal Christianity, a high view of Scripture, a high view of the local church, walking out the means of grace daily with our brethren in Christ, forgiving and being forgiven, walking through the process of sanctification, failing and getting back up again by God's grace, and addressing our sin and just moving forward in that way.

01:22:55

And I think the hope is that there's not a quick fix, but the fix is really a recommitment to Christianity as Christians have always, as sound

01:23:09

Christianity has always understood, which is sinners walking alongside other sinners, seeking to grow and glorify

01:23:16

God by the power of the Holy Spirit under the direction of the teaching of Scriptures, you know, and living out our lives as people who are set free and washed clean by the blood of Christ.

01:23:28

Amen. We have another anonymous questioner who is saying something very relevant to something that you just said.

01:23:38

I have always heard from fellow evangelicals that everything is permissible sexually in the marriage bed unless you are bringing about physical harm to your partner, doing something or demanding something of your partner that your partner does not want to participate in, or if it's something overtly satanic.

01:24:10

Is there any boundaries in your opinion when it comes to married couples bringing each other pleasure in the marriage bed?

01:24:18

Well, you know, that's something I wrestle with. I know in R .C.

01:24:26

Sproul's book on marriage, he dedicates quite a bit of space to sex and sexuality, which again, by the way, would be more evidence of a major Christian leader as a very positive view of marital sex, a regular and enjoyable part of marriage.

01:24:41

And he basically makes that same argument, that anything is permissible that's accessible to both parties and that isn't harmful, that isn't directly satanic or degrading.

01:24:52

Of course, that would include any use of pornography or any of these types of things to enhance pleasure, you know, this kind of thing.

01:25:03

I'd want to be careful with that because, you know,

01:25:08

I'd have to ask about certain kind of fetishes and other things that might be just overtly perverted, but at least not in our minds directly.

01:25:17

And that ultimately, the point of sex is the coming together of the man and the wife in a procreative act.

01:25:28

And does that mean that other forms of pleasuring are acceptable? I would say yes. But if, for example, a man needs to dress in a woman's clothes to experience sexual pleasure,

01:25:42

I would say there's something deeply wrong with that. That would also be including a violation of Scripture because the

01:25:50

Scripture forbids that. That's exactly right. This is the same thing as the Scripture forbids lusting after other people, which any use of pornography would involve.

01:26:02

I encourage people to be very careful about books designed to help them enhance their sexual lives, that those books should be written from the standpoint of covenantal marriage being honored.

01:26:16

So, for example, there are literally books out there that encourage people to engage in acts that are normally associated with homosexuality.

01:26:25

Wow. You mean from a Christian point of view? No. But if, for example, you go into a self -help area of a bookstore, you'll actually find that kind of stuff.

01:26:38

I'm really uncomfortable with any things designed to help people sexually that, for example, that actually use pictures of people having sex and things like that.

01:26:49

Right. That would, again, be a violation of the Scriptures because of lusting after someone other than your marriage partner.

01:26:56

Yes. But I would say that, yeah, there's wide latitude involved there. Now, of course, it's really easy to fall into thinking that you should be allowed to do whatever makes you happy and that the other person should accede to that even if they find it degrading, distasteful, and humiliating.

01:27:16

And that's simply not true. Whatever we can't forego out of love for our marriage partner is essentially using them as an instrument for our own satisfaction.

01:27:29

And if we really understand that sexuality is something that we live out in love towards the other person and in a way that the marriage bed is truly being honored in the way that's described in the epistles,

01:27:46

I think that gives us wide latitude. I do think, then, that discretion is needed.

01:27:53

I guess that's kind of a vague way of putting it, but I think that's discretion.

01:27:59

One of the ideas that I know many of my conservative Catholic friends still have is that any sex that's not directly procreative in nature, in other words, anything other than vaginal intercourse, that's not foreplay leading up to vaginal intercourse, and I hate to be that explicit, but is immoral and wrong, and I don't believe that that's true.

01:28:21

Yes, that's, I think, one of the reasons why they are so committed to prohibit contraceptives.

01:28:31

But there are a growing number of conservative and reformed Christians that actually prohibit those as well.

01:28:41

We have, let's see, we have

01:28:47

CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, and CJ asks, the subtitle

01:28:55

Sex and the Single Evangelical is implying, I'm assuming, that you deal a lot in the book with challenges that the single evangelicals of the 21st century may have in regard to sexual purity that generations before have not faced, even though, obviously, there has always been a problem with lust since the dawn of time.

01:29:20

But what specifically do you address when it regards to the single evangelical in your book?

01:29:26

Well, these are challenging times. First of all, again, a lot of our evangelicals are not really getting a full -orbed, good, strong, full

01:29:39

Christian theology, you know, that we are God's creatures, that he made us, that we live in his world according to his design, that our happiness is really intricately related to living in harmony with the order that he has created.

01:29:53

So, first of all, one of the challenges that we face is just a lot of easy believism, a lot of relativism, a lot of moralistic, therapeutic deism, a kind of thin theology that really does not help us to orient ourselves rightly to God and to reality more generally, period.

01:30:14

We're also just in a sex -saturated culture, and it's been that way for a long time.

01:30:20

And it's gotten worse over time, so the temptations and the messaging are pouring in from all over.

01:30:29

And, you know, really, the elimination of shame associated with sexual promiscuity is a huge challenge.

01:30:40

The fact is that 60 or 70 years ago, a profligate man could expect to pay a real price, socially and so forth, for his actions.

01:30:56

Now, you know, Bill Clinton could be elected to a second term in office despite hard -core evidence that he'd engaged in some fairly heinous extramarital sexual activities.

01:31:11

You know, that would not have, you know, we know that Eisenhower, for example, cheated on his wife, but he probably wouldn't have made it through the presidency if those facts had been known at the time.

01:31:23

Wow, I think I'm hearing that for the first time. I don't think I've ever heard that before, about Eisenhower.

01:31:29

He had an affair with his driver in England. I'm assuming a woman. Yes, he has.

01:31:35

Okay. But what I mean is that a lot of the external restraints and breaks are no longer there.

01:31:46

You know, in fact, quite the opposite. Now, in some ways, people are more made ashamed of the fact that you've reached a particular age and you're still a virgin, and you're supposed to hide that from people, that kind of thing.

01:31:58

So, you know, in every way, we have sexual temptations, you know, pouring in at a much higher level than they were.

01:32:08

Access to sexual relationships outside of marriage, including pornography, you know, widely available and rampant.

01:32:16

Very little shame or public breaks associated with it. And so, you know, these are really particularly challenging times.

01:32:25

In a sense, we're asking, and even in the church, a lot of believers kind of turn a blind eye to this stuff.

01:32:33

So in calling people towards biblical chastity, biblical fidelity, sexual fidelity, we're asking them to do something because God calls them to it and to live with honor before God without a lot of external restraints and even a lot of really external admiration and support for choosing to live that way.

01:32:56

In fact, quite the contrary, it's now become, our good has become evil spoken of. And so I tell parents all the time, especially when they're older like I am,

01:33:07

I'm a baby boom era kind of a guy, we need to really come alongside our young people because they're facing pressures and temptations and possibilities with very little restraint that we couldn't even, you know, that didn't come close to the kind of things that we had accessible to us.

01:33:29

I really don't know what the 13, 12, 13, 14 -year -olds would have been like back in the late 1960s and 70s that I went to school with if all this was available to us, if the education system was teaching what it's teaching now.

01:33:46

You know, these are just very, very challenging times. And so what I like to say is that we, and I think

01:33:52

I say this somewhere in the book, we need to combine our idealism with realism and recognize that we're going to be facing more problems along these lines than people in the past did.

01:34:03

And we need to come alongside people laterally from side to side, compassionately, center to center, recognizing just how difficult things have become without excuse.

01:34:16

We have a question from Robert in Westchester County who says,

01:34:25

I have always thought it a very positive and healthy thing for parents to appropriately demonstrate romantic behavior in front of their children without obviously being perverse or overtly sexual.

01:34:43

But at the same time, showing an affection romantically for their children to observe, for them to recognize how deeply in love the parents are with one another, and to develop healthy attitudes for themselves when they one day become married, if that is

01:35:03

God's will for them not to remain single. What is your opinion on that? I think that's true.

01:35:08

I mean, it needs to be appropriate, but our children, and they need to be witnessing the full spectrum of that, which includes, by the way, seeing that we sin against each other and we forgive.

01:35:23

And basically seeing that kind of affection in the lives of their parents is really important because then they recognize what good marriages really look like.

01:35:38

And if there's something that I remember from the past, and I think about when I was a kid, it was that oftentimes parents did not feel comfortable showing that kind of affection to each other in front of the kids.

01:35:53

They were oftentimes very restrained, and that was especially true in the lives of my grandparents.

01:36:02

And that kind of restraint, I think, is appropriate in public settings. I'm not really sure about husbands and wives passionately making out on a subway or something like that.

01:36:15

And, in fact, that just makes people around you uncomfortable. But for them to see a warm embrace and kissing and that we can sit and hold hands while we watch television and that we enjoy each other's company and that even as we get older and our bodies deteriorate in various ways, that we still love each other and find each other attractive,

01:36:42

I think that's very important. I also think that, and I tell parents this all the time, we need to talk.

01:36:50

I think children need to be taught about sex and understand God's design for sex, including asking hard questions earlier rather than later in the current situation.

01:37:04

I think that 50 years ago you could wait until maybe a kid was 14 or 15 to have that talk with them.

01:37:12

But they're being saturated with this stuff from all the wrong places now. So, again, my wife and I found the

01:37:19

Passport to Purity to be a very great way to have those discussions with our kids. Now, can you explain that in more detail?

01:37:26

Because I have not heard of this Passport to Purity. Can you tell me about it? That is,

01:37:32

I can't remember the man's first name, but it's a couple called the Raines, R -A -I -N -E -S.

01:37:39

And I know in other people, a lot of parents who found this to be very helpful. But it's basically walks through sex for young children and really gets into the nitty -gritty of it, all within the context of marriage and God's design.

01:37:55

And it's designed for parents to do with their children. And what my wife and I did is that she,

01:38:03

I guess I was grateful because we have six kids, four girls and two boys. So each of my sons,

01:38:11

I took them out for an entire day. You know, boys, they don't like to just sit and talk to you, right?

01:38:18

They like to be doing something with you. You have a conversation while you're doing something together, fishing or hunting or washing a car.

01:38:27

But we went out and spent a day together. We listened to the CDs together, talked about what was there, opened things up for questions, took them out for each a really nice lunch while we continued to talk about the matter further and basically spent about eight or nine hours just heart -to -heart talking honestly about sex, making sure that they understood everything that was appropriate at their age to understand, answering questions about really nitty -gritty, honest things like masturbation and things like that.

01:39:00

And then, you know, that kind of helped to open things up. Like it's okay for you to talk to your mom and dad about these.

01:39:06

And we had to find that right point for each of our kids.

01:39:11

And for the girls, it was younger than for the boys. And for one of my sons, it was younger than for the other son just because, you know, they're each individuals and they were ready for it at different points in time.

01:39:23

But we made sure that whatever they had heard, you know, that we were willing to discuss anything with them face -to -face and just opened it up.

01:39:35

And it was remarkably helpful. And, again, that's another one of those things that really kind of puts a dagger in the idea that Christians typically have a negative view of sex because this stuff is very explicit but also very beautiful and, you know, very

01:39:52

God -honoring in the way that they approached it. We have a question that I'm going to ask you, and I'll have you answer it when we return from our very brief final break.

01:40:03

The question is from B .B. in Cobb -Merlin County, Pennsylvania, who says that non -Christians will frequently advise people to live with someone before they marry because it's the best way to determine whether they are compatible.

01:40:23

Obviously, we have from the inerrant God -breathed scriptures a prohibition of this that we can warn them about.

01:40:32

But if they don't care about what the scriptures teach, is there any other way of demonstrating that this is not a good idea?

01:40:41

And, of course, you and I believe in the sufficiency of scripture, so there may not need to be any other way of warning.

01:40:48

But I'll have you answer that when we come back. This is going to be a brief break. Don't go away. We'll be right back with more of David Ayers right after these messages.

01:40:58

James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries here, excited to announce that my longtime friend

01:41:17

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01:41:22

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01:41:29

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01:41:40

Just Thinking podcast. To register, visit g3min .org. That's g3min .org.

01:41:47

And click on Events. Your registration will include a ticket to the Museum of the Bible nearby the conference venue in Washington, D .C.

01:41:55

So join me and Chris Arnzen September 15th through the 17th in Washington, D .C.

01:42:01

to the G3 Ministries regional conference. Register now before they run out of seats at g3min .org.

01:42:07

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royaldiadem .com. We are back with David Ayers, and David, before the break, someone was asking whether or not you have an answer, other than a clear command of scripture, of course, that living together is not a good and healthy and advisable way for people to basically test out their relationship to see if they're compatible for a permanent commitment in marriage.

01:45:11

Yeah, I mean, I've studied and taught on that since 1986.

01:45:19

And what social scientists agree on virtually unanimously is that cohabitation before marriage, people who live together before they get married are significantly more likely to get divorced than people who don't.

01:45:35

There was some thought that as it became real common and that it wasn't associated with people who had a lot of other risk factors that led to divorce, that it would no longer be true, but that has really not held up.

01:45:50

And there are a lot of reasons for it, but the statistics on it are horrible. There's a really interesting piece that just came out,

01:45:58

Institute for Family Studies by a conservative Roman Catholic sociologist who's world famous, his name is

01:46:04

W. Bradford Wilcox, and it's called The Surprising Case for Marrying Young.

01:46:09

It's very easy to find on the Internet. He points out that people that marry young are less likely to get divorced than people who marry later but cohabit first.

01:46:20

Wow. And a lot of times, of course, cohabitation is associated with our trend towards later and later marriage.

01:46:27

I also cover it thoroughly in a Christianity Today piece. It was actually on the cover of Christianity Today, March 2021.

01:46:36

And I also did a piece for Institute for Family Studies, just run my name and Institute for Family Studies, on evangelicals and cohabitation.

01:46:45

I deal with it in detail on the book we're talking about today. I also deal with it in detail in the book on Christian Marriage, A Comprehensive Introduction.

01:46:54

But the bottom line is that people who live together before they get married aren't doing the things they really should be doing because they think that they're actually learning about marriage by living together.

01:47:04

But living together experientially is more like dating, but people aren't really going home.

01:47:10

And, in fact, when I looked at cohabitors, people who claim to be evangelicals but are cohabiting, in the

01:47:17

National Survey for Family Growth, most of them are not heading for marriage, and about 8 out of 10 of them end up breaking up, either before or after getting married.

01:47:27

Frequently, one partner thinks they're heading for marriage, the other one doesn't. And the fact is that cohabitation really hasn't worked well at all.

01:47:38

And even in countries where it's become extremely normalized, like Sweden, it's still associated with poor outcomes, and it's especially associated with poor outcomes for the children.

01:47:49

Some of the best things I've seen on it is by the lead author that comes to my mind who's most associated with this.

01:47:57

His name is Scott Stanley. I write for Institute for Family Studies frequently.

01:48:03

So does he. And he also works with a woman named Galena Rhodes. And he's done a lot of research on that, and his research is called

01:48:14

Sliding or Deciding. And what he basically points out is that cohabiting couples tend to kind of slide into marriage without really kind of thinking about it.

01:48:24

They start living together, and then they kind of reach a conclusion, while we're living together, everybody expects us to get married, so I guess we should.

01:48:33

Whereas people who aren't living together really go through the process of assessing that relationship and really looking at it seriously and deciding whether or not they should get married, as opposed to simply sliding into marriage.

01:48:50

So, in fact, the bare -naked statistics on cohabitation aren't really good at all.

01:48:56

They're as likely to be raising children as married couples are. About 40 percent of them are. Oftentimes they're children from previous relationships.

01:49:05

And Andrew Cherlin, who's a secular liberal sociologist, very famous in the family area, he talks about the marriage merry -go -round, and now he talks about the cohabitation merry -go -round.

01:49:20

And it's increasingly, it's really hard on the kids. But the statement, what

01:49:27

I tell students all the time is this, the statement that cohabitation improves the quality of your marriage, that it's actually a good idea to live together before marriage, is just plain false.

01:49:38

There's no social scientist who can actually make that argument statistically.

01:49:44

The question then is why do cohabitating people break up more, and then there's a lot of arguments and a lot of oftentimes complex statistical analysis that goes into looking at that relationship and whether or not that's going to continue into the future and this kind of thing.

01:50:00

But the bottom line is it's basically a myth. The best way to prepare for marriage is to apply biblical criteria to potential mates and then to really go through good, solid premarital counseling and only move forward with a marriage that really seems solid and makes sense.

01:50:23

The best preparation for marriage is good, solid premarital counseling and being grounded in the scriptures.

01:50:30

It is not living with, you know, I'll tell a quick story here. I ran into one of my former students a few years ago, and she said,

01:50:45

Dr. Ayers, I did what you said we shouldn't do. I moved in with a guy who weren't married. I remember you told us not to do that.

01:50:51

You explained what would happen if we did that. And now, you know, we're going to get married, and I at least want us to get premarital counseling.

01:51:01

Well, her husband -to -be pulled out of premarital counseling. Then he pulled out of the marriage, leaving her with a child to raise on her own.

01:51:10

And, you know, I bumped into her, and we sat together, and I talked with her, and she said, you know, it happened just the way you warned that it would.

01:51:17

And, of course, you know, we have to be compassionate about that. And the main thing is to help her where she was at that moment.

01:51:27

But what the statistics that I dig into demonstrate, and, again, I talk about this in the

01:51:33

Christianity Today article, is that most evangelical Christian young people now are literally planning on living together or they're at least open to it.

01:51:42

And, in fact, most evangelical couples will now live together before they get married.

01:51:50

Most evangelical couples? Most evangelical couples. Wow. If you look at people 45 and under in the

01:51:59

National Survey for Family Growth, which is huge, it's like 7 ,000 to 8 ,000 women and about 6 ,000 men every two years, done by the

01:52:07

Center for Disease Control. And what I found there was that if you look at the number that are currently living together or have lived with someone out of wedlock, most evangelicals now live with somebody before they get married.

01:52:22

Most of them that are living with somebody right now, it's not definitely heading towards marriage in most of those relationships.

01:52:29

They have a series of questions in the National Survey for Family Growth on first cohabitation.

01:52:35

Most first cohabitations break up. And what sociologists especially agree on is that serial cohabitation is deadly to subsequent marriage.

01:52:46

And that's why we view it in premarital counseling as a risk factor. It's one of the things I ask about and delve into, and I confront some of the problems and so forth.

01:52:58

If I discover in premarital counseling that one or both of them have lived together outside of wedlock or they're currently living together out of wedlock,

01:53:06

I address that as a risk factor and try to unwind it and encourage repentance. And for the

01:53:15

Christianity Today article, I actually did focus groups with pastors. I mean, I interviewed several pastors, not technically a focus group.

01:53:24

It is a rampant problem in the church. I've talked to pastors who told me that cohabitation is so common in their evangelical churches now that they have stopped doing weddings because they feel they have to challenge their cohabitation, but then the parents or friends get upset with them.

01:53:42

A couple gets upset with them. And so it's a huge issue in the church right now. But one of the biggest lies is, well, it's not really biblical, but given the prevalence of divorce, it's a good idea to do this.

01:53:54

No, given the prevalence of divorce, it's a good idea to be very intentional in choosing a mate, to be very intentional in pursuing biblical chastity, and to be very intentional in getting good, solid premarital counseling from a godly, experienced person.

01:54:13

That's what you do to build a strong marriage. Cohabitation is a bad idea, and it's a risk factor.

01:54:24

Now, just very quickly before we conclude, what you said may scare people who were living together before they were saved.

01:54:34

They get saved. They realize that they cannot continue a sexual involvement until they are married.

01:54:44

They may separate, and hopefully they would for a season until they're married.

01:54:50

If they have children from their union before they were married, is there more of a responsibility for them to get married because of the fact that they have children, or is it still an option, do you think, for them not to be married, especially if they come up with the excuse that they've heard the statistic that if you live together before you're married, you're more likely going to get divorced than otherwise, so maybe we shouldn't get married.

01:55:24

You know what I'm saying here? Sure. Well, you know, I can't tell you how many pastors

01:55:29

I've had that come who are trying to help a couple that they're dealing with in precisely those situations.

01:55:37

People also living in really high -cost areas, elderly people who maybe are widowers, and if they get married, they'll get creamed in terms of their pensions or taxes or things like that, and it requires a great deal of discretion.

01:55:53

There's not a kind of a one -size -fits -all answer because a lot of times we meet people in the midst of these situations, and we have to start where they are, and it can be very difficult.

01:56:07

So, for example, there was one couple that wanted to get married. They were living together. They already had two children.

01:56:14

The pastor reached out to me and said, What should we do? I said, Well, you should ask them. They can't move apart. They need to take care of their kids, but you should ask them to refrain from sexual relationships for six to eight weeks while they undergo intense premarital counseling, and really, you know, because there's going to be a lot of issues in this relationship that you want to get out of the way before marriage, and the parents were really upset about that.

01:56:37

They pushed for the wedding to go through right away, and then after they were married, it came to light that the groom was a heroin addict, and so now all of a sudden they're dealing with a heroin addiction after recently getting married while they're trying to raise two kids, and none of that, you know, the church was not in a position to really address that before they got married, but in premarital counseling, that would have been brought forward and dealt with, and what the outcome of that would be, you know,

01:57:10

I don't know, but the problem is, of course, we're now reaching out into a very damaged church and into a very damaged culture, and we have to start with the damage that we have in front of us, and it requires a great deal of compassion and wisdom, and I've probably talked to five or six pastors in the last year alone who found themselves dealing with cohabiting situations that were very complex and thorny.

01:57:39

When the couple wanted to move forward and get married, they wanted to do it right, and there were significant barriers and issues that had been created as a result of the life that they were living, and the answer was different, and different pastors have different approaches to how they counsel couples in that situation, and that Christian Today article is really helpful because you actually have, you know,

01:58:03

I have pastors there that I'm interviewing talking about the different problems that they've confronted and the different approaches that they've used, all of whom are committed to the

01:58:13

Scriptures and are dealing with couples who really want to walk right with God and fix things according to the

01:58:20

Scriptures, and it's interesting. It also kind of helps, again, I mean, I use this word a lot, but it helps to build our compassion because we don't want to bring this on them like some kind of a mallet without any concern for the practical realities of their situation, their children, and other things like that, but this is the situation in which we find ourselves.

01:58:43

Well, we are out of time, and I want to make sure that our listeners have the website for Grove City College, where my guest serves on the faculty.

01:58:55

The website is gcc .edu, gcc .edu. Don't forget, if you want to purchase

01:59:02

After the Revolution, Sex, and the Single Evangelical, which is published by Lexham Press, go to cvbbs .com,

01:59:13

who sponsored this program, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com.

01:59:18

And by the way, every single person who submitted a question today for my guest, if you give me your full mailing address, you have won a free copy of After the

01:59:30

Revolution, Sex, and the Single Evangelical by David J. Ayers. I want to thank you so much for being such a superb guest today,

01:59:39

Dr. Ayers. I look forward to your return to the program. I want to thank everybody who listened, especially those who submitted questions, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

01:59:50

Savior than you are a sinner. That's wonderful advice. Amen.