The Falcon   |   Volume 80, Issue 26

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Bringing sex out of the darkness

Students search for healthy ways to reconcile desire with faith

By MELISSA FORBES, News Editor

Published: March 2, 2005

When Professor of Theology Dr. Rick Steele looks at SPU students, he sees them being pulled in four different directions.

People are maturing sexually earlier than ever before but marrying later, he said, and in the ever-increasing time between the two, they are trapped in an oversexed culture.

Add to that the Christian purity ethic, he said, and the situation becomes nearly impossible.

"People who find their desires going one way and their values the other are stuck," he said. "They're caught, ad they're trying to come to terms with that part of themselves."

The tension of this four-way tug is something that has been addressed in various ways over the years at SPU, from the Ladies' Sex Forum to Dr. Rob Wall's fall lecture on abstinence. But most students, faculty and staff agree that there are no easy answers.

"The law can give us standards, but it does not give us the power to live up to the standards that it sets," Steele said. "Simply quoting the Bible doesn't help the issue because the issue is not what the Bible says. The issue is how we are going to live up to what the Bible says when your body is obstreperous."

But sexual struggles don't occur in a vacuum -- as students are attempting to reconcile their sexuality with their faith, they are doing so on a Christian campus that forbids any sexual activity outside of marriage. And student reactions to this range from relief at having a supportive community to fear of being ostracized if their activities are made public.

Senior Matt Boatman said he knows a lot of people who are sexually active at SPU, but most of them keep it on the down-low -- "There's the tattle factor," he said.

Also serving to keep them quiet, he said, are the social risks.

"There is definitely a stigma between V-club (virginity) and P-club (penetration)," he said.

Sophomore Monica Clements said that it bothered her when she discovered that someone she knew had had oral sex.

"My opinion of them lowered, whether I wanted it to or not," she said.

Steele and others say that some guilt feelings surrounding sexuality are good and appropriate.

"It's a healthy thing to have a conscience, and it's a healthy thing to think of sexual conduct as a morally freighted behavior," he said.

However, he said, guilt can be unhealthy when students beat themselves up over feeling arousal or desire, because God created people as sexual beings.

"While guilt feelings can help us from making mistakes, guilt feelings can also keep us from coming to terms with a part of ourselves that's not going to go away just because it makes us uncomfortable," he said. "Feeling guilty for the human condition is creating a set of fissures in oneself that one cannot repair."

Steele said that there is nothing inherently oppressive about the Christian community having standards for sexual behavior, but that the role of that community should be to help students come to terms with the fact that the rules they are supposed to obey are very difficult to follow when there seems to be no way out.

Seniors Sarah Stephens and Nicola DePaul are two of four members of the Women of Worth theme house, which, they said, often becomes a forum for women to discuss their issues with sexuality.

"God has created certain activities for certain seasons of life -- specifically, sex in marriage," Stephens said. "And yet we believe that a woman is a sexual being before she's married. So, celebrating the gift of sexuality that God has given while honoring the season in which that gift is supposed to be opened is an important priority for us."

DePaul said that one of the most vital parts of walking that line between sexuality and purity is knowing one's reasons for choosing to abstain.

"If there's no point in doing what you're doing, then you're putting yourself through self-discipline with no greater purpose," she said.

Stephens pointed out that not having sex because sex outside of marriage is wrong "only gets you so far."

"Fundamentally, we know that we will sin and that God will forgive us for that sin, so 'it is wrong' sort of becomes bankrupt," she said. "Saving sex because sex is sacred and preserving it for marriage and for the depth of relationship that you hope to have with your husband someday is a much more empowering place to stand."

DePaul said that the theme house tries to emphasize more than just "lust-free living."

"I see that taking something out of your life, but I don't see it putting anything back in," she said. "I think we're more concerned with affirmations, what you add, more than trying to avoid something or keep something out."

Stephens said that the most important thing is for people not to feel isolated in their struggle, even in compromising situations.

"You're never in the heat of the moment with just your boyfriend," she said. "God's there, you're there, and the possibility of a child is there."

"I've known women for whom [God's presence] is the reason they haven't had sex," she said.

Professor of Nursing Dr. Mary Fry says that it can be useful to imagine God's presence in the room.

But, within marriage, she said, "It's okay also to imagine God is polite enough to turn God's back and give you the freedom to be riotously lusty."

Fry has taught SPU's course on human sexuality for almost three decades, and she said she wishes it were required for every SPU student because understanding one's own sexuality is such a vital part of functioning in the world, and many SPU students appear to struggle in this area.

She estimated that in the average class, about half of the students are or have been sexually active, and four or five can't even talk about sex without freezing up.

Neither, she says, is particularly healthy.

She stressed the importance of open communication in a relationship, of being clear about boundaries and not making decisions in the heat of the moment. Sometimes, she said, this involves limiting time spent alone together.

"Healthy relationships where you keep a lid on sexual intimacy and allow the relationship to develop as a whole have much better potential," she said.

And while she said that too often Christians overlook that sex is a "wonderful and positive thing," she also said that she upholds the values of waiting until the wedding night.

"When I look at it, there is a fairly consistent rationale for choosing to abstain until marriage," she said. "I can't come up with a situation where life will end if you don't."

Nurse Jean Brown at the Health Center emphasized that sexual choices aren't just choices about the here and now.

"What is it that you want to give to your mate?" she asked. "That requires some decisions now about what you want later."

However, she said she tries to focus more on helping students make choices than placing guilt or blame.

She said, "I want students to make healthy choices (about sex), not choices that will make things a whole lot worse," such as unprotected sex.

Brown said that SPU has its share of students with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), many of which were contracted because of a condom breaking or failure to use one altogether.

Reasons she hears for students' not using condoms: "I wasn't prepared;" "it just happened;" "I don't know how;" "if I plan on it and have protection, then I am a bad person."

Brown said that sometimes female students come in asking about pregnancy termination because they are so afraid of people finding out that they are pregnant.

But Brown doesn't want the prevailing attitudes about what students should and shouldn't be doing to stop them from coming to the health center when they have health problems that need to be addressed.

"I want them to see this as a safe place," she said. "Because it is."

She said that the health center sometimes receives complaints from conservative factions about the Planned Parenthood information that they keep in the waiting room, and she emphasized that the brochures are there for more than just the students who are breaking the rules.

"We have a lot of married students at this school," she said.

"I don't want to perpetuate the attitude at this school that all sex is a bad thing," she said. "I'm not saying that all sex is a good thing, but people need to be making informed choices and not base them in outdated attitudes."

Jen Hutchings, director of the student counseling center, said she sees a lot of students at the counseling center who are uneducated in basic sexual knowledge.

"There's a lot they don't know abut basic health information," she said. "They are afraid to ask. I think that a lot of them feel that even talking about it is wrong. They feel like any type of even reading about sexuality or body mechanics is wrong."

She emphasized that talking and asking questions about sex is not wrong, and is in fact an important way for students to sort out how they feel about the issue.

Former SPU Residence Hall Ministry Coordinator Laura Lympus said she has seen "a lot of darkness" surrounding sexual issues on the SPU campus, although she said that in recent years people have been more open to speaking about them.

"We're not in a Christian culture that has made that very safe," she said. "There's a lot of fear."

Lympus herself tries to be very open about her sexual past, in the hopes that it will show students that even grave mistakes can be overcome with the help of God's grace.

Lympus had multiple sexual partners as a teenager. She described a double life, helping lead the youth group on one hand and sleeping with non-Christian boys on the other. One day, she said, she realized how divided her life was and decided to stop.

"When I married my husband, I hadn't had sex in 10 years," she said.

She said that her husband was fully accepting of her history when they got married, and that she would never have dated someone for whom her past mistakes were a problem.

But, she said, not everyone recovers from mistakes as well as she has.

"I've talked to people that sort of believe, 'Well, I've screwed up. I might as well keep screwing up," she said. "I've also talked to people that are, 'I've already screwed up, so no guy's ever really going to want to marry me.'"

"Oh my gosh, there is so much grace and forgiveness," she said.

She encourages students who are struggling with sexual issues to talk about them with someone they trust, and said that she is always available for that purpose.

She also said that some of the problems students have with sexuality arise from using it as the sole basis for purity.

"I feel the purity word is pushing so many buttons," she said. "I think the definition of purity is a feeling of righteousness before God and being able to stand before God, as much as any of us can, as blameless as possible."

Steele said that purity is the state of the human heart where one knows one's own human dignity and the human dignity of others.

"Honoring human dignity is understanding that sex is a volatile part of human life and that one ought not to trivialize it or treat it as innocent recreation or as a morally neutral thing," he said.

He believes that people who have been raised with a strong purity ethic often feel that once they have lost their innocence they have often lost their decency, and this can lead to a cycle of desperation, loathing and hostility toward oneself and the opposite sex.

Even if someone has "slipped" and had sex, he said, this does not make him or her irredeemably depraved. Rather, he recommends that people in that situation ask themselves what they have learned, what made them vulnerable and how they can keep from making the same mistake again.

"It is not an all-clear to me that simply being abstinent guarantees that you are pure," he said, "and it is also not clear to me that having failed to be abstinent, it is impossible for you ever to regain your purity."

"Purity is a matter of the heart," he said. "Abstinence is a matter of the body. To think that purity is generated by abstinence is to oversimplify the reality of our sexual nature."

'There's very little forgiveness'

Cassandra, who didn't give her real name because she didn't want people to find out about her sexual activities, didn't have intercourse with her last boyfriend, but she came "really close."

"It's really hard being in a long term relationship without going that far," she said.

But, she said, how far she's gone is way past the line of what she is comfortable with. And that bothers her, not only for the guilt and unhappiness she felt regarding her faith, but also because of how it affected the relationship.

"We fought a lot," she said. "We were both kind of upset about how far we'd gone, and it just put an emotional strain on the relationship."

The couple, who had planned to get married in the long run, eventually broke up, and Cassandra says she doesn't want to get into such a situation in the future.

"My ideal is still the same," she said. "And I'm obviously not going that far again until we're actually engaged or married."

'We were both kind of upset.'

Dave didn't want to give his real name, but it wasn't his own reputation he was concerned about. While he wouldn't mind people knowing about his activities, he said, his long-term girlfriend also attends SPU, and he wouldn't want her to face the social stereotyping that might ensue from having her sex life made public.

"There's very little forgiveness on this campus when it comes to sexual activity," he said.

He said that while he justifies his sexual activity because he plans to marry his girlfriend, he goes through occasional periods of guilt during which he prays for forgiveness and plans to stop - but it is generally not long before he is back to his old ways.

"I'm not saying that sex outside of marriage is not a sin," he said. "But I still do it, just like I have done many things throughout my life that were sins."

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