XXX CHURCH

i was trained to shame my sexuality

the cult i grew up in was hyper-fixated on sex, specifically NOT having it. if you are married, you can have all the sex you want with your partner. “wives, submit to your husbands,” after all.

our obsession was with abstinence.

otherwise, everything about sex was shameful and sinful. masturbation, pornography, hot-and-heavy hollywood sex scenes, observing another’s naked body, even being alone with the opposite sex were all on the table to be forbidden, restricted, repressed.

youth group

in youth group at least once a month the pastor would preach about purity, abstinence, and sexual immorality. we were read bible passages on the judgment and consequences people received for their wickedness. it was a weekly abstinence training course. we learned that there were three primary consequences to having sex: pregnancy, STDs, and god’s disappointment. if we had sex, we were defiling the bodies that were supposed to be saved for our wife or husband.

girls got it particularly bad when it came to purity - they were taught to believe they were a delicate flower that could be crushed by a single sexual encounter and permanently tainted. their story is for them to tell and there should be volumes on the subject. guys were asked not to deflower girls but there wasn’t much of a physical symbol for how the guys bodies would be ruined other than disease. god’s punishment for premarital sex was STDs in this life and eternal punishment in the next- that is if you didn’t also get someone knocked up.

i was taught that all STD’s are lifelong, incurable, untreatable, and excruciating. the only way to prevent STD’s is to not have sex. you have to keep in mind, evangelical homeschoolers like me learned the biblical account of creation in the front of their “biology” textbooks and the proceeding pages are of questionable accuracy, so i was mostly flying blind in the science department.

reflecting on this, it’s easy to see why i would become an athiest who wants nothing to do with children. when they said pregnancy was punishment, i believed them. it rang true in my being. this all conflicted with the teaching that god’s entire reason to make the universe was to have a relationship with humans. my entire upbringing asked me to pick between sexual desires and my true human nature with the belief in a god who is always watching, waiting to punish me for my impurity via pregnancy or infection or eternal damnation or all three.

small group

after the pastor’s message we would break off into “small groups,” a term any bible thumping kid knows well, to discuss which aspects of our walk with god we struggled with. this conversation was about two things: partying and porn. guys were paired off in groups of 5 or so with an “older” man (sometimes as young as 19) leading the conversation. this was often a time for the older man to tell tales of his pre-salvation days when he was living it up. he would revel in the details, telling us how bad he used to be. often he would forget to hide the smile. maybe he didn’t notice he was drooling as he relived his reckless youth to his small group of reckless youth.

after feeling like he’d thoroughly impressed his group of adolescent, hormonal boys, he would enlighten us on how thankful he was jesus saved him and how we should never do any of the bad stuff he did when he was our age. i took it so seriously. i earnestly hoped i could remain pure and god would be pleased with me. i believed following the desires of the body was only for the wicked. however, in the back of my mind was a voice i attempted to stifle, doubting the charade, worried about a lackluster future.

am i really destined to be like this sad man who clings to and misses the “glory days” of his teens? this man for whom the only authorized sex to be found is with his annoying, ugly wife who cringes at his advances?

accountability partners

then there were the accountability partners.

we would meet and confess how much we masturbated and promise each other we would try our best to stop. we would pray together begging for god’s forgiveness and strength over our evil bodies.

a particularly impactful accountability partner i had was my girlfriend’s most recent ex who she was still madly in love with. we met with our advisor, a man in his late 20s who would later serve a prison sentence with multiple felony charges for the molestation and rape of minors. he would pick up the other boy and i, take us to youth group or dinner, and drop us off at home afterwards. in the car was where i remember the longest discussions of our specific masturbation habits and the strategies we would use to enforce restrictions on ourselves. nothing explicit happened with me. maybe he could sense the rage i carried or i wasn’t his type. i don’t know the other boys experience.

i had close relationships with two other men who would later be charged informally with grooming, molestation, and statutory rape. what happened to these men? they moved on to lead new youth groups in other states.

who signs up to police the ravenous sexual desire of pubescent children? is it any surprise that the men who volunteered to discuss pornography and masturbation habits with teenagers for free, multiple times a week, are later found guilty of betraying their professed ideals in the bodies of teenage boys and girls in their youth groups?

XXX church

for boys who struggled particularly bad with pornography consumption, there was hope. they could sign up for xxx church, a software that would alert their youth pastor anytime they went to a website that had sexual content. it would send an email with a URL and detailed description of the flagged content. my guilt, fear of god, and shame were strong enough to keep me offline in no need of surveillance. however, many of my friends lacking a sufficiently guilty conscience were monitored by this surveillance software and caught repeatedly.

no, it’s not an iranian or taliban website. you can check it out for yourself. it’s still alive and active: XXX CHURCH

i’ve often wondered if this was a kink for some of my leaders and XXX church was just a streamlined way for them to find better porn, outsourcing the dirty work to their youth who would sift and sort the internet for free.

sex ed

from my church, i learned that every sexual thought, act, and desire put me in debt to god almighty. i was to hide - to be ashamed of my lust, cravings, and even touching my own body in a pleasurable way. from secular culture, i learned my job was to be good at sex, making her cum over and over or i was a failure. the messages were confusing to say the least.

left to my own devices, i sought out information on what sex actually was, what a vagina was, how basic reproduction worked. before finding the internet, i was taught that reproduction was a thing that happens between a man and a woman and it’s a sacred miracle from god. there are only a few things more evil than the intentional misleading of children.

for most of my childhood, i literally believed my own theory that pregnancy was something god made happen when a man and woman kissed on their wedding day. he decided how many kids they would have at that moment. when you’re only taught NOT to have sex and that you will get life-altering std’s, pregnancy, and eternal damnation, it’s not super clear what sex is good for.

i was homeschooled so a majority of my sex ed, other than the internet, came from friends, movies, and the little porn i had seen. my only formal “sex ed” was at 16 when my mother sat me and my brothers down to make sure we knew what contraception was. bless her for that. she was doing her best to raise three teenage boys in the absence of our late father. i can only imagine she was terrified we would get someone pregnant.

superstition

looking back, i feel lucky to find myself with a relatively healthy relationship to sex. i didn’t end up with any sex or porn addictions. abuse-based and child pornography have their highest consumption rates in the bible belt so that could’ve easily been my thing. instead, it only took a decade of adult experiences and thousands of dollars of therapy to build a healthy sense of sexuality.

abstinence culture stems from an old-world superstition where magic and animism ruled. if you piss off the gods, they will kill your crops, send rain when you need sun, kill your first born, and maybe even send a plague of frogs.

it is mind blowing to me that we still live in a world where people think there is a god who made the entire cosmos exclusively for human existence and has a great deal of interest in what we do with our genitalia.

i’m grateful the anti-porn message stuck, even if the reason wasn’t real.

but my god, there must be a better way to teach children about sex.

“We have no way to quantify the damage done by telling tens of millions of children that masturbation will make them blind, or that impure thoughts will lead to an eternity of torment, or that members of other faiths including members of their own families will burn, or that

venereal disease will result from kisses. Nor can we hope to quantify the damage done by holy instructors who rammed home these lies and accompanied them with floggings and rapes and public humiliations. Some of those who "rest in unvisited tombs" may have contributed to the good of the world, but those who preached hatred and fear and guilt and who ruined innumerable childhoods should have been thankful that the hell they preached was only one among their wicked falsifications, and that they were not sent to rot there.” - christopher hitchens, god is not great

what your sex-ed experience was like? i would love to hear from you in the comments.