How does a Christian make sense of a world where our understanding of sexuality and gender has turned into quicksand underneath our feet?
Here are three (plus one) books I recommend to you to help you engage some of the hardest questions relating to sexuality and gender.
Unwanted by Jay Stringer
Jay Stringer’s Unwanted asks the question, “How do I stop having unwanted sexual desires?” Stringer suggests that the answer to that question is found in healing our childhood sexual trauma.
Stringer says that, “The overwhelmingly standard evangelical response to sexual brokenness has been to address it through the lens of “lust management,” even declaring war against it. This approach has oversimplified and trivialized a far more complex issue within human sexuality.” Such a desire of trying to shut down our lust will never be successful, Stringer believes.
Worse still, what will such a goal get us? “If you ceased striving for a lust-free life, what would you be left with? We can be so preoccupied with filling our lives with something to do rather than trusting that God wants to do something within us. Jesus’ invitation to go to him when we are weary and heavy laden is for our sexual failures, but even more so for the trauma beneath those failures. God looks beyond the outward appearance of unwanted sexual behavior and into the heart of what is driving men and women into captivity.”
Stringer approaches the question of how to navigate our unwanted desires by looking at what exactly those unwanted desires are. Stringer believes that if we look at how our desires are twisted, we will discover how our sexuality was broken when we were children. Stringer says, “If we fail to engage the ways we were sexualized in the past, we leave open the high probability that these patterns will become more pronounced in the future.”
I love the analogy of swimming with sharks Stringer deploys, “Casagrande was asked what in the world he is supposed to do when a great white shark is swimming right at him. He answered that he must do something counterintuitive: swim directly at the shark with the camera. This action seems to trigger a defense mechanism in the shark. “Now they’re like, ‘Wait a second, everything in the ocean swims away from me.’ The reality is that if you don’t act like prey, they won’t treat you like prey.”
Stringer says that the search into our pasts is not to let us off the hook or explain away our current behavior, but to experience healing. He says, “We look to the past not to find excuses for reprehensible behavior but because narrative holds the key to unlocking destructive patterns and implementing all future change.” Every one of our stories includes pain and trauma, but the hope of Christ is the hope of healing.
Stringer wants Christian communities to be places where we can expose our sin and reveal our trauma. A Christian community that shirks at either is a place where healing and sanctification cannot and will not occur. He says, “When a religious community practices shaming, the eradication of desire, and silence, it colludes with the effects of sexual shame and trauma.” This is true in church and in the home. “There is an unspoken rule in many homes and churches that sex is not to be talked about unless the conversation serves to put the fear of God in children about their participation in sex before marriage. Talking about sex solely in the context of prohibition, however, sets a child up for madness. A child needs to hear sex talked about in a way that honors the natural, God-given changes and desires that will accompany them from childhood.”
Our sexuality points to our God-given desire to be loved and to experience intimacy. Stringer reminds us, “When we condemn our God-given desire to be loved and accepted, we should be on high alert for the ways we will trash this longing through shameful behavior.” We were made for love, both God’s and others’. “The gospel tells us that our belovedness will never change according to our wanderings. But our belovedness is intended to change our wanderings.” He later says, “We are born with dignity. Honor and honesty (not blaming or minimizing) both must be addressed within our family systems. Our sexual brokenness is not random.”
Stringer’s Unwanted is loaded with wisdom. He says, “Freedom is an often paradoxical and unexpected path that is found through kindness and curiosity. What would it mean for you to bless instead of curse your body for experiencing what it felt? Will you cry out with agony for how your desire was misused instead of remaining silent in your shame? Honesty and kindness change the human heart. Contempt for arousal and silence in our shame lead to continual pursuit of unwanted sexual behavior.”
I hope that Stringer’s Unwanted becomes a source of hope and healing for many. I think it is one of the most important books on human sexuality that I have read and will immediately become one of my go-to books to help the many who struggle with their sexual desires navigate God’s path to wholeness. I’m so grateful for Jay Stringer and his ministry.
Why Does God Care Who I Sleep With by Sam Allberry
Sam Allberry's Is God Anti-Gay? used to be my go-to entry-level book on engaging the challenging question of why it is that orthodox Christianity maintains what appears to be such an archaic sexual ethic (it’s still a great book!). However, this is my new favorite entry-level book. I've already given away several copies to those struggling with the topic.
Sam Allberry's Why Does God Care Who I Sleep With? is less than 150 pages and is not only theologically sound, but also empathetic.
So, why does God care who we sleep with? Because he cares about us. God gives us sex for a purpose: for our joy and also to point us back to himself. Allberry takes us to Genesis 1 and 2 where we learn that God's first purpose for sex is procreation (Gen 1:28) and his second purpose is to create a oneness between husband and wife (Gen 2:23-24).
Why is sex confined to marriage? Because it is made to be covenantal and self-giving. It is God's good gift to us that points us back to God's covenantal, self-giving love to us. Allberry explains that, “If this is the case— that sex is fundamentally about giving, and about giving our whole self to someone— then having sex with someone without the intention of giving them this is actually a form of taking. It is theft."
What is our culture's vision of sex? It is the inverse of this: it is about us satisfying our desires, about us receiving, about personal fulfillment.
Allberry does a great job of framing the Christian vision not just as countercultural today, but countercultural in a Roman and ancient context as well. The Christian vision is a vision that grants us the full humanity, the full God-imaging that the purposes for us. This is why the Christian sexual ethic isn't just about what we do, it goes further: what we think. Allberry says, “This is what lust does. It reduces how we see others, and in the process dehumanises us. We become those who see less and less of the humanity in others.”
Sexuality and gender issues remain significant stumbling blocks for our culture. On the one hand, without the work of the Spirit and an understanding of the upside-down nature of the gospel, we shouldn't expect the world to understand a Christian sexual ethic. On the other hand, we need people like Sam Allberry who provide winsome and thoughtful apologetics for Christian sexual ethics. Christians ought not rail against the culture's shifting sexual mores because we are afraid or hateful. We speak a different vision of sexuality, because God has a different vision of sexuality. If we trust our Creator and Savior, then we can trust him with our sexuality as well. Even here God offers us good news. I highly commend Why Does God Care Who I Sleep With? to you.
Rethinking Sexuality by Juli Slattery
Juli Slattery is a Christian counselor who specializes in sexuality. In Rethinking Sexuality, Slattery wants to put forward a clear and positive apologetic for a Christian and gospel-focused understanding of our sexuality. Her book is clear and focuses on the basics of the conversation. It would be particularly helpful for a parent of a pre-teen or early teenager to walk through with their son or daughter.
Slattery says, "Our sexuality is a tremendous gift from God. However, we rarely see it as a gift because it has been so twisted and tainted in our personal experiences and our culture. There is perhaps no aspect of humanity that represents more pain and shame than sexuality." Slattery believes that the culture's dominant voice in the realm of sexuality has muted the Christian voice. She wants the church and Christian parents to reclaim that ground. We need gospel-centered sexual discipleship.
Slattery says that "What you think about sex begins with what you believe about God." She says that we need to clearly articulate a new vision of what love is. We also need to understand that God created our sexuality to point to the gospel. From the start, God's creation of us was for the purpose of demonstrating his love for the church.
It is no surprise, then, that the Enemy attacks our sexuality with such ferocity. If Satan can get us to believe lies about who God is, what love is, and what the purpose of our sexuality is, then he can make fast work of our relationship with God. Slattery demonstrates this with this powerful mental picture from Russel Moore: "No one is more pro-choice than the devil on the way into the abortion clinic, and no one is more pro-life than the devil on the way out of the abortion clinic."
Slattery dives into the challenges of sexual discipleship: "1) Our natural selves versus our spiritual selves: We want to honor God, yet we are drawn toward selfish pursuits. 2) Our public selves versus our private selves: We believe that revealing our secrets will ruin our testimony. 3) Love versus truth: We feel as if we must choose between biblical truth and Jesus's love." The Christian's journey isn't about self-fulfillment or about being true to ourselves, but trusting our hearts with God.
Slattery's book isn't ground-breaking, but it is a solid primer for any Christian asking the question, "how does my sexuality relate to my relationship with God?" I think that this would be a particularly helpful book for teens and young adults trying to make sense of why God makes the sexual prohibitions he does in the Bible. There is more that I wish Slattery would have delved into, but I appreciated how grounded and focused on the core message she remained.
You may also appreciate:
Why God Makes Sense In A World That Doesn’t by Gavin Ortlund
Photo by Marvin Kuhn on Unsplash
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