Does Texting Cause Adultery? Relevant Magazine Has The Answer

Here’s an experiment for those of you who are over thirty. The rest of you, sit down and listen; you’ll learn about history.

I want the over thirty crowd to cast your mind back to the bad old days. Way back. I’m talking about all the way back in the late 1990s, when the internet was brand new, referred to as “the information superhighway” and made marvelous squeaky fax machine sounds for five minutes every time you turned it on. We walked to school in the snow uphill both ways back then, as well, but let’s talk about the internet.

If you’re anything like me, then you can easily recall that some people’s very first reaction to “the information superhighway” was terror. They were afraid for the children’s sake. They were afraid that children would get the wrong information– specifically, that they’d get information about sex. They were terrified that children on the internet would talk about sex with other children– or worse, teenagers. Maybe even teenagers from sleazy and lewd places like Amsterdam. There were articles published in every Christian periodical about how you should never let your children get on the internet without a grown-up looking over their shoulder, because the internet had something called “chat rooms,” and “chat rooms” were the lurking places of sleazy and lewd teenagers from Amsterdam who would lure your children into talking about sex. While these people were busy worrying about chat rooms, the sleazy teenagers went and invented internet pornography, which actually is a serious problem, and after that nobody worried about chat rooms again.  But for a couple of years in there, chat rooms were the enemy of choice. The internet was going to make people unchaste.

Do you all remember that time in history? Remember all that panic?

I’ve just found the 2017 equivalent to that: people are frightened about the sexual temptations of texting.

Yes, texting. I’ve just read an article from Relevant Magazine, cautioning married Christians of the moral danger of texting members of the opposite sex. It’s giving me flashbacks to the 90s. I fully expect the author, one Zack Carter who teaches “interpersonal communication” at Taylor University, to have DiCaprio bangs and wear a necktie over a t-shirt. That’s how reminiscent this post is of the late 90s internet morality panic. And this article has been shared over nine thousand times on the internet, so apparently people are worried about texting. Text messages are chat rooms all over again. Except that texting doesn’t just lead children astray; it’s liable to steal away your spouse.

Professor Carter wants to warn his readers that it’s not okay for married people to send text messages to members of the opposite sex. He begins by reminiscing about how he likes to be in his bedroom with the door closed, and then he asks a searching question.

Ask yourself: If you were at home and your spouse was not, would you invite over someone of the opposite sex, to have a conversation in the privacy of your bedroom? Especially in the privacy of your bedroom with the door locked and window shades drawn? Most likely—and hopefully—your answer is a firm, “No!”

But if I were to ask if you regularly texted with the opposite sex, the answer may not be the same.

Well, Professor, that’s because they’re not the same. At all. And it irks me that he doesn’t flesh out his comparison and explain how he believes texting is analogous to having a private conversation in your own bedroom. He just moves on as if it’s obvious. This is just as frustrating as the book on married chastity I once heard of, where the author said “A man’s sex drive is like a drum solo. A woman’s sex drive is like a finely tuned orchestra,” and then moved on without explaining what in the nine hells he was talking about.