Very few other issues have the capacity to stoke the fire in the belly of a culture warrior more than sex education.

On the one hand, the Affordable Care Act has granted significant funds to Planned Parenthood in order to “educate” teens on the subject.  On the other hand, abstinence-favourable curricula are coming increasingly under attack from Planned Parenthood and other progressive pressure groups for allegedly being value-laden, misleading, and ineffective.  This is an issue with respect to which, as a parent and as a husband, I feel increasingly left in the cold, particularly after another story about abstinence-only sex education being stricken down by a Canadian state school board in Edmonton.

Our society definitely needs a widespread and activist education about a number of topics related to education in the body.  Our abortion, out-of-wedlock birth, and divorce rates are objectionable to say the least, and sex education is one of the tools we have to implement against these evils.  Furthermore, our culture and media inundate us with sexual imagery and unrealistic expectations of sex, largely in the service of selling us consumer durables that we don’t need.  We are increasingly taught that sexual gratification is a right (and a rite of passage) rather than a gift, and this conceit appears to be producing massive distortions in the way in which men and women of all ages relate to each other.  Rising rates of divorce, domestic abuse, rape, and “rape culture” are all results of this distortion.  Implemented correctly, sex education could be, while obviously not a cure-all, a great weapon against these social ills.

Even so, the objections against the way that sex education is done are well-grounded, grievous, and many. Liberal and feminist groups (like Planned Parenthood, or like the firm that brought the case in Edmonton) rail against abstinence-only programs, but their own preferred programs are generally little better. Often, what the standard liberal and feminist groups want to see put in place is bare-bones and minimalistic: in essence, a series of plumbing lessons, lessons on STDs, standards of consent, and tips on the uses of contraception.  At other times, such programs amount to a form of indoctrination into ideologically-driven views of sexual liberation and the normalization of unhealthy, exploitative, and fringe sexual behaviours; these programs self-justify under the uncritical panglossian view to the effect that “the kids will be doing it anyway, so they may as well do it safely.”

Because I do not subscribe to the similarly-expressed views on which gun violence is inevitable, or on which systemic poverty and starvation are inevitable, I very much sympathize with the conservative (and specifically Roman Catholic) objections to the way that sex education in public schools, using public funds, is carried out in practice, for precisely the same reasons that I object to union-bashing, anti-poor economic policies with supply-side glosses, and unthinking opposition to reasonable forms of gun control. Not all sex is morally right, just as not all wages are morally right, and not all gun use is morally right.  In each case, a minimum moral standard must be upheld for the sake of spiritual and physical human flourishing.  In the case of wages, that minimum moral standard is the living wage—enough so that the poorest worker can, through 8 hours of his own daily work, provide decently and adequately for himself and his family.  In the case of guns, that minimum moral standard is their adequate registration, their safe storage, and their use purely for defensive and hunting purposes.  In the case of unions, that minimum moral standard is their power parity in collective bargaining with the entrenched interests of capital.  And in the case of sex, that minimum moral standard is marriage: sacramental, mutually-upbuilding, perpetual, complementary, and open to procreation.

But both the mainstream American conservative and the mainstream American liberal views on sex education are sorely lacking, largely because neither one has a particularly firm grounding in humanistic inquiry.  Both conservatives and liberals bring their own unexamined, value-laden assumptions to the table when discussing sex education.

The mainstream liberal view is broadly informed by the assumption that the individual pursuit of pleasure is an irreducible and inherent good, and that both individuals and the society benefit from granting the individual as broad a field of sanction in the pursuit of that pleasure as possible, removing wherever necessary the constraints of law, custom, gender roles, received social expectations, and so on.

The mainstream conservative view is broadly informed by the assumption that the norm of the nuclear family, upheld and regimented by traditional gender roles, is the inherent good that benefits both individuals and the society.

Both views of sexual education flow from anthropologies that students should be taught to interrogate and evaluate through humanistic study, through the lens of what it means to be human.

Being Christian, it strikes me that the first-order assumption that we have to make about “what it means to be human” is that we are fundamentally confused about what is good for us.  We do have faculties of reasoning toward the good.  But these faculties are darkened by self-interest, by fear, by pride, and by the awareness of the omnipresent and impending reality of death, such that we do not always choose what is good for us but rather choose to commit acts destructive of ourselves and others.  The promise of Christianity, though, is that we are not meant for death: Our lives do have an end and a purpose beyond their allotted earthly span.  It is to this end and to this purpose that we should orient ourselves, however much we can and inevitably will fail in so doing.

But what does this have to do with sex education? Quite a lot, actually.

First, the unquestioned assumption that unlimited sexual pleasure is a universally valid end in human life, something to which all human beings should aspire, is an assumption in serious need of critical examination, as is the assumption that individual sexual liberation from received social mores is the proper means of pursuing it.  For one thing: Do we observe that the people who have lived particularly hedonistic lives dedicated to the pursuit of their own sexual pleasure are, in fact, happy and well-adjusted people, satisfied with their own lives? They may indeed say that they are.  But the reality of death—the constraints of sexually-transmitted disease, of the passions and psychological entanglements that invariably accompany sex, of the social battle of the sexes, and of the deteriorating effects of ageing on ability and satisfaction—severely limits, to say the least, the usefulness of the assumption that individual sexual liberation is an unqualified good.  Yes, cheap divorce, contraception, pharmaceuticals, ever more exacting standards of consent, and well-intentioned attempts to create a more "communicative" culture around sex are all ways in which a society adopting nominalist political axioms attempts to transcend or perform end-runs around this reality.  But in the end, the tragedy still exists.  The limits still apply.  The attempts to do away with them leave long-term social problems in their wake.

Is it therefore necessary for the critical Christian to adopt the conservative assumptions about the nuclear family and fixed gender roles? In truth, there are some highly tempting aspects to the conservative worldview, not least of which is the concern for past and future generations that enters the moral calculus: A genuine concern about how to provide the best holistic outcomes for children underlies opposition to divorce and non-traditional family structures.  And the idea that husbands and wives should have complementary social roles and readily-available conventional means of fulfilling their obligations to each other and their offspring is likewise an appealing one in an age defined by the abdication of individual marital and parental responsibilities.

But it troubles me as a Christian with a philosophical background that the conservative worldview also comes too easily to rest in what are essentially materialistic or pagan assumptions about human nature and the ends of human life.  Many non-Christian conservatives (and sadly not just a few Christian ones) revert not to Christian assumptions in their defense of home and hearth, marriage and the nuclear family, but to the axioms of social consequentialism, functionalism, positivism, social Darwinism, evolutionary psychology, and even more atavistic 19th-century racialist ideologies.  But the end result is the same reduction of the human being to mere organism and organs: the flip-side of the very kind of thinking that undergirds the plumbing lessons and tired liberationist bromides that mainstream sex-ed very rarely transcends.

What we desperately need, rather than this binary fight over sex-ed, is relationship-ed; that is to say, education in what marriage is, how it enlightens and sanctifies the erotic urge (which is, at its very best, a kenotic one—an emptying of the self for the needs of the other), and how it is oriented to the ethical ends and meanings of the human person in his and her entire depth.  We need, moreover, a thorough overhaul of our educational culture, rethinking how we teach the humanities, and how we engage with young people’s grounded, networked, relational—and, yes, sexual—lives: an approach that the flat materialism and panglossian resignation of our current curriculum doesn’t even approximate.  Furthermore, abstinence-favorable sex-ed reformers shouldn’t be angling to replace it with any other kind of materialism, whether based on evolutionary psychology, functionalism, or consequentialism.

Instead, we ought to engage students’ imaginations and consciences with interlocutors from literature, philosophy, and Scripture.  (There is certainly no shortage of subject matter—the Song of Songs and Shakespeare’s Sonnets seem like the obvious places to start.)  We ought to explore what sort of life it is that students want to build for themselves, and how they can not only acknowledge what they find as true but also make themselves “true” to it.

In any event, these fights over sex-ed disguise the ethical lacuna at the core of secular education.  We train students to be adding-machines, tool-operators, and consumers, interchangeable cogs in the ship of state and the clockworks of commerce.  But since education in all forms ought to be preparation and practice in some form of excellence—a powerful athlete, a talented musician, a brave soldier, an industrious worker, a reflective citizen, an obedient child, a loving and faithful spouse, a caring parent—we should demand far more of the education in our bodies than merely “what cogs go where.”