Rine’s description, quoted below, rings true for both my upbringing (where my much-beloved summer camp’s wonderful director nevertheless felt the need to preach his signature sermon “Puppy Love Leads to a Dog’s Life” in the middle of every teen week) and my time among evangelicals. It even tends to cover the spectrum beyond that, wherever one encounters any attitude better than “anything goes.” And don’t get me wrong, this is slightly better than “anything goes”–but, as Rine discovers, not by much:
As I consider my own upbringing and the various “sex talks” I encountered in evangelical church settings over the past twenty years, I realize that the view of marital sex presented there was primarily revisionist. While the ideal of raising a family is ever-present in evangelical culture, discussions about sex itself focused almost exclusively on purity, as well as the intense spiritual bond that sexual intimacy brings to a married couple. Pregnancy was mentioned only in passing and often in negative terms, paraded alongside sexually transmitted diseases as a possible punishment for those who succumb to temptation. But for those who wait, ah! Pleasures abound!
There was little attempt to cultivate an attitude toward sexuality that celebrates its full telos: the bonding of the couple and the incarnation of new life. And there was certainly no discussion of a married couple learning to be responsive to their fertility, even as a guiding principle. To the contrary, the narrative implied that once the “waiting” was over, self-discipline would no longer be necessary. Marriage would be a lifelong pleasure romp. Sex was routinely praised as God’s gift to married couples—a “gift” largely due to its orgasmic, unitive properties, rather than its intrinsic capacity to create life.
(source: What is Marriage to Evangelical Millennials?)
Abandonment of the proper understanding of marriage among many American Christians is a key reason we find it hard, even when we try, to live and plan and teach as we know we ought. Even when we know better, we are constantly made to feel that we are outliers, that we don’t quite “get it.” We are vulnerable to the lie that ours is a holdout position, mere nostalgia for a past nobody wants.
Man and woman were made for God, first, and for each other; and marriage was made to ground and fecundate that reality; its proper fruit is children.
For this reason husbands and wives should take up the burden appointed to them, willingly, in the strength of faith and of that hope which “does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Then let them implore the help of God with unremitting prayer and, most of all, let them draw grace and charity from that unfailing fount which is the Eucharist. If, however, sin still exercises its hold over them, they are not to lose heart. Rather must they, humble and persevering, have recourse to the mercy of God, abundantly bestowed in the Sacrament of Penance. In this way, for sure, they will be able to reach that perfection of married life which the Apostle sets out in these words: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church. . . Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the Church. . . This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church; however, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.”
(source: Humanae Vitae)
