Some Words About Sex (Whoo!) and Trespasser of the Week: Nancy Redd and Her Book of Popos.

A few months ago, I sat with my extended family around the television — jaws open, sacred Sunday after-lunch cobbler barely stirred — gawking at one of those Primetime expose shows. (Yes, Jeremiah, there is trash TV in the pastor’s house. How the heck are you going to spot the devil in the world if you don’t know what it’s wearing?) This time, it was a news-ish topic, the fundamentalist Mormon pre-teen brides.

Well, like all y’all, I’m sure, we just couldn’t believe it. We watched in horror at photos of a prebuescent girl in prairie garb, posing next to a conservatively dressed gentleman roughly fifteen years her senior, (who could have been any friendly deacon we’d ever met). Above them, sign proclaimed “Honeymoon Hideaway” in over-froofed, Barbie-like script. The narrator’s voice, hardened into maturity by forces we didn’t dare imagine, conceded that she had no idea what sex was before her wedding night. She was fourteen years old, and she carried her suitcases into a honeymoon retreat, fully and unequivocally believing that infants came “from heaven.”

During the commercial break, the gasps began to circulate.

Can you imagine?!?! To grow up like that! Believing that! To have no idea how people reproduce, even on your own wedding night. How primitive! How shocking! How…

…how exactly like every other Christian church I’ve ever been in in my life. There, I said it.

We can sit in judgment on the more extreme branches of religion all we like. It’s easy to do, since they’re the only ones that make the news. But do mainstream churches handle the topic of sex education any better?

I know, the easy answer is: “Why would you ask such a thing? The topic of sex does not belong in the church at all, and that’s final.”

Well, I could accept that. Lord knows, I’d be perfectly comfortable with that. In fact, I was, for about the first 13 years or so of my life. No one mentioned the “S” word within 500 yards of a steeple.

But once I entered youth group, sex was just about all our youth leaders wanted to talk about. Those of you who are about my age will remember the time well — the Abstinence Era. I realize it’s been going full steam for several years now, but when I was in high school, it was brand new. Literally, one day my friends and I walked into teenage Sunday School to find our leaders — that well meaning, Ned Flanders-ish bunch that just the week before had shown us how to make Noah’s Ark after popsicle sticks and served up Kool-Aid with abandon — suddenly talking about the importance of virginity. Some of them even offered trying-hard-to-be-G-rated anecdotes about how long they “waited,” while giving little winks to their spouses (the ones who bandaged our knees in Vacation Bible School) across the room.

Can you say, “abundant creepy-crawlies”? No, better yet, is there a leprosy-intensified, plague-level of the creepy-crawlies? Because that’s what those talks gave me.

I was lucky, being in church during that extremely awkward period. My parents were always very forthright when I had questions. Meanwhile, I grew up knowing that many of dad’s congregants regularly brought their children to him to give the “birds and bees” talk, because they hadn’t the slightest clue how to do it. Or maybe they just thought they’d spontaneously combust if they did.

Folks, I’m not here to give a sermon on how sex in church can or should be addressed. I don’t have the faintest. I have only one son right now, and he’s lucky if he makes it out the door every day without shoes on his hands and his diaper on the outside of his clothes. But I do know that when we shun any discussion of a topic with our children for the first decade or so of their lives, and then pummel them with sermons that show that “it” is so dangerous and destructive that a “good” Christian child should avoid it at all costs, we shouldn’t be surprised when it becomes a concept shrouded by feelings of guilt, shame, and fear.

You think those will just magically disappear on the wedding night? Yeah, keep prayin’, sister. Meanwhile, keep on treating the idea of human affection like it’s some rabid minotaur that lives under the church basement. It will bite back, eventually.

On a related note, I’m just bursting with pride at a fellow author (and former Miss America contestant), who has taken a positive step towards demystifying sex in an honest, non-agenda-promoting, no pro-abstinence or anti-abstinence card required, way. This year, Nancy Redd released Body Drama. It’s a pictorial guide to the body designed mostly for a female audience, that answers the age old “Am I Normal” query. It’s well written, honest, and a wonderful alternative to certain magazine and internet pictorials children might otherwise be tempted to seek out to satisfy their curiosity. Because it will be satisfied, one way or the other.

And even if you don’t want her book, please, for the love of Jesus, don’t bring your child to my Dad for “that” talk.

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