Book Review: Sex and the Vision Thing

To join the conversation on Sex and the Single Christian Girl, or to order a copy, go here. 

Our culture teaches young girls to look at themselves as meat. I could dress that up by using less harsh language, but the dressing-up would be a lie.

From the time they are babies wearing trollop fashions, to the days when they sit in sex education classes that push dangerous contraceptives on them, including the morning after pill, young girls are taught that their first mission in life is to be sexually available and sexually used.

There is some linguistic dressing up of this message. It is termed “liberation” and “women’s rights.” But it’s not. It’s about using social pressure to coerce young girls into sexual behavior that, based on what quite a number of them have told me, they don’t enjoy or find sexually satisfying. It is the old double standard, flipped over and made even more destructive.

Christian girls end up caught in a social and moral conundrum. On the one hand, they hear that sex outside of marriage is a sin. On the other hand, they hear that they have a “right” to use sex the same way that men use it.

This explanation degrades the girls, as well as the boys. Every one has a sex drive. Every one is more than their sex drive. People want things that hooking up not only can’t give, but that hooking up prevents. Things like self-worth, love, commitment, stability and emotional security.

Even Christian parents have fallen into the trap of stripping the security of  a stable home and consistent family interaction from their children’s lives. Divorce destroys basic trust and security in children. Shooting from one activity to the next like a pinball destroys family time and inner peace. I won’t even go into the tsunami of damage that drugs and alcoholism do to children.

It has reached the point that girls who grow up in a stable home with parents who give them love and attention are the ones who are out of step with the culture. They are the girls who seem odd and out of place.

When everyone else is talking trash and getting laid and doing drugs, they’re the wallflowers who spend time in their dorm rooms or at home on Friday nights, wondering what, if anything, it profits them to live lives of purity.

Sex and the Single Christian Girl is written from inside that specific experience for those girls who live it.

The author, Marion Jordan Ellis, lived the life of growing up Christian and then throwing purity over for the hook-up culture. She experienced a radical conversion to Christ and then spent over a decade as a Christian single woman living in purity in a world that disses purity. When she finally met the Christian man who became her husband, she faced the new challenge of maintaining her chastity until she said “I do.”

The thing that sustained her in those years of single chaste living, and that she didn’t have when she slid into the hook-up culture, was vision.

Mrs Ellis makes the important point that a laundry list of “Thou shalt nots” is not enough to give a person the strength they need to follow Christ in our post Christian culture. She applies this directly and specifically to the situation of, as the title says, Sex and the Christian Single Girl. But the idea is equally applicable to all Christian living in a world and society such as ours, that is aggressively hostile to Christian values.

We can’t stand up to the culture by being against it. We have to be for something, and that something must be fueled by a deep and abiding passion. The answer Mrs Ellis offers is not the right answer, it is the only answer.

We are, all of us, beloved Children of the living God. Our lives are not our own. We belong to Him.

And we are worth more than the degrading behaviors that our culture teaches us are not only cool, but necessary and our “right.”

Hook-up sexuality is self-abuse.

It’s that simple.

Drug and alcohol abuse are a living death that, if they aren’t stopped, lead inevitably to a real death.

Divorce is ripping asunder the one flesh of soul and spirit that God has created in Holy Matrimony. It damages our children irrevocably, as well as impoverishing and grieving the husband and wife.

The answer to all this, is, as Mrs Ellis says, that vision thing. We do not see ourselves as the immortal beings of light that we truly are. We do not understand that we are made for eternity in heaven and that our every action in this life either adds to that future or it doesn’t.

Young women are worth more than the value our society has taught them to place on themselves. They are, first of all, Daughters of the King. They belong to Him and to themselves and, once they pass into adulthood, they are answerable to no one else. No one has the “right” to treat them as meat, including and most especially, themselves.

When I was little, I always knew, never doubted, that either one of my parents would die for me. I knew without a shadow or a flicker of doubt that my father would kill or die to protect me and that he would not hesitate about either one.

That is how parents feel and what they do. It is what our Father in heaven has done for us. When Christ hung on that cross at Calvary, that was God, dying to save each one of us. That is, as the Scriptures tell us, “the price” God paid for us.

Young women need to understand this about themselves and never forget it. Their salvation was bought at a great price that only a Father Who loved them would have paid. This culture teaches them that they are meat. But in truth and in fact, they are immortal beings of eternal light; daughters of the living God.

I recommend Sex and the Single Christian Girl to any young woman who is struggling with issues of chastity and self worth in this post Christian world. I also recommend it to parents of daughters who want to teach their girls how to live as the beautiful daughters of God that they are.