By Dr. Pat Fagan.
All men and women and children thrive on love. It is the great source of sacrifice, joy, hope, energy, good health, courage and determination to live life to the fullest. But love --- which is easy for everyone to talk about --- is not enduring or possible without chastity or purity sustaining and protecting it.
All data, be it mathematics, physics, chemistry, or biology need context and framework to be interpreted and understood. The experience of life (the idiosyncratic data we all report from our experience) needs context and framework to be understood. Great religions and philosophical frameworks have been constructed over millennia to give such meaning. The most all-encompassing of these is Christ’s framework. He is either the greatest man who ever lived or the greatest charlatan, given his claim to be God. I go for the greatest who ever lived --- given the fruit He has borne and the fruit of the lives of those who follow Him most closely.
On matters sexual He was radical and changed the sexual paradigm forever for humanity. There are least three ways He flagged this change … revealing man more fully to himself as it were.
He said “There is no divorce” among those who believe in Him. Those baptized into the family of the Trinity cannot divorce, once fully joined, because the Trinity does not “do division”. Unity is Their essence. How did his apostles react to this? “In that case it is better not to get married.”
He heightened the bar still more with “You cannot look at a woman lustfully, but you have already committed adultery with her in your heart.” And when he lists sins (seemingly in order of gravity) murder comes first and adultery just behind it. (More murders are caused by adultery than anything else, so being in the #2 spot might make sense).
He heightened the bar still more with “celibacy for the kingdom” for the few who can take it.
One could sum up all this teaching pithily: His followers are all called to celibacy… a few for life… the majority until they are married. And even then, the difference is not as great as it seems. The celibate Christian “gives up” all persons of the opposite sex. The married give up all but one.
Thus, the virtue of chastity is central to Christian life and was one of the most obvious markers of the early Christians compared to those “pagans” around them.
Christian sexual education and formation is all about forming men and women who can live this way as adults. Among many of its benefits, this way gives mature adults the probability of the greatest and most enjoyable and most frequent enjoyment of the sexual! The poor youth of today are sold a “pig in a poke” with modern sex ed. Sure they “enjoy” it while young (though the data indicates many are depressed by it), but they are washed up and even disinterested by the time they are in their thirties just as mature Christian adults are coming “into their own” a few years into marriage.
So, the Christian understanding of sexuality is superior in its human fruits (stable marriage, happier, healthier children, and better sexual enjoyment, greater income, health, education, longevity and happiness). The sex ed needed to pull this off is totally different from that pushed by the secularists, e.g. in Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the Left’s experimental counties which constantly “pushes the envelope” so that they figure out how to promote the next stage across the nation.
Furthermore, this form of sexual education and formation, is far superior in all its outcomes than anything the Left can show. The differences in outcomes are so huge the argument for the Left’s sex-ed cannot be based on outcomes and they avoid such comparisons like the plague.
It is here the hearts and minds (and sexuality) of our children are shaped. It is here the growth or collapse of society is forged.
This battle area is the fight to the death or to life: the death of society or the life of our families and futures. Politics and policies are fine, and that work must be done, especially the work of preserving our freedoms to have our own form of sexual education (the superior one) for our children ---- but the most fundamental work is at the level of the school: in the classroom and in the home. It is here the hearts and minds (and sexuality) of our children are shaped. It is here the growth or collapse of society is forged.
The real men are those who step up to the plate on this, and take the education of their boys back into the home, while their wives take over the sexual education of their daughters. It is very late in the game but not too late! Many are beginning to realize the depth of the revolution that has overtaken America, for the good of the child, the future of all nations.
Dr. Pat Fagan has been a grade school and college teacher, a therapist specializing in child, family and marital issues, executive director of a small think tank, a Senate staffer, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Family and Social Policy at HHS under President George Herbert Bush, a Senior Fellow of Family and Culture at the Heritage Foundation, and founder and Director of the Marriage and Religion Research Initiative (www.MARRI.us ) first at Family Research Council, now at The Catholic University of America. The thread of continuity has been a pursuit of ways to help the family thrive. He is publisher and editor of Marripedia.org, and the weekly Faith and Family Findings, and has authored over thirty synthesis papers and has commissioned from others dozens of original research projects in marriage, family, child development and religious practice. His work has appeared in or covered by Time Magazine, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Globe and Mail, USA Today, and The Guardian. He and his wife Theresa have eight children and thirteen grandchildren.
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