Newsletter #56
On Hanging Out with Older People and Uncommon Sense about Sexuality
Twelve years ago today, I met the woman who would become my wife. Naturally, today is our “Valentine’s Day.”
And congratulations to Missouri's own Kansas City Chiefs on their Super Bowl victory!
In Good Company
My family visited one of the elderly couples in our church last week. They aren’t only long-time members, but dear friends. They’re the type of surrogate grandparents we’ve come to enjoy since we’re transplants to Missouri.
My son Amos has been walking with greater and greater confidence (and speed) in the last month. But lately, he’s developed a cute, albeit moderately rude habit: swiping senior citizens’ walkers. Having done this for the first time a few weeks ago, he spotted another. And we let him help himself.
This new development happened first a few weeks ago when he was meandering around the church fellowship hall prior to a women’s Bible study. Suddenly he passed by a walker whose owner had set it aside. He grabbed hold of it and began pushing it around. People were thoroughly amused by the whole thing. Obviously, I was too. I snapped quite a few pictures.
I completely understand why he was drawn to it. Compared to him, it’s a large object, and once you start pushing one with wheels, it feels a lot like the other types of toys that kids his age use to assist them in walking or simply moving things around a room.
Probably the best part is how humorous it was to everyone who saw it, including the walker’s owner. Similarly, the second time he did it, our adopted grandparents reacted with glee. Indeed, it’s pretty stinking cute.
As he was pushing it around their home, I said to my wife, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a small child do this before,” to which she responded, “That’s because most kids his age aren’t around as many older people as we are.” Point taken.
Like most churches, ours is a mixture of all age groups. In recent times, we’ve been enjoying a surge of newborns coming into the life of the church. While they aren’t converted and thus not members, let’s call them prospects. But we also have quite a few adults in the 75–85-year-old range. Thankfully, many are vibrant and still active in serving.
Having been here over a decade now, we have aged with these saints. We have also grown quite close to them. We’ve walked with them through joys and sorrows, sickness and death. We’ve seen some retire but continue serving Christ and others. While each situation is different, and some haven’t aged as well as others (physically and/or spiritually), we’re grateful for them. I’m especially grateful to be able to share my family life with them.
It certainly seems that my childhood was characterized by greater interaction with the elderly than many of my contemporaries—and certainly the rising generation. Though I wasn’t a pastor’s kid, I went to a lot of funeral homes. I joined my mother in visiting many widows in our community. Our church had many senior adults, including ones active in teaching, Vacation Bible School, and other ministries. And many of the older people in my family, including my grandparents, generally lived to advanced ages.
These types of experiences are much more implicit than explicit in their formative effects. You don’t self-consciously walk around thinking, “I need to be mindful of the elderly around me because I was surrounded by older people during my childhood.” It’s a much more subtle, internalized type of formation. It comes through in gut-level, instinctual ways. I suppose this, along with trying to be a conscientious person, will more likely make you notice those struggling with a handful of groceries in a parking lot.
It's too soon to know exactly how Amos will envision older adults as he grows older. I suppose another important factor will be how susceptible he is to the world’s messaging about seeing people, especially the elderly, in terms of their social utility, not inherent value. Much of this will fall on my wife and I to provide important, healthy fences on his media consumption. Some of this will depend upon how our church family treats its most vulnerable members. And some of it will no doubt depend on how much of his life is shared in the homes and hearts of senior saints—whose prayers and affection are so valuable to the man he will, God-willing, become.
Wisdom from Unlikely Quarters
In prior newsletters I’ve sometimes mentioned the importance of common grace, a doctrine too many know too little about. Common grace is, depending on who you ask, an outworking of general revelation. God reveals knowledge and bestows blessings in a general way on the entire human race. While this knowledge is insufficient for salvation, and while many blessings correspond to obedience, God still sends rain on the just and unjust alike.
This doctrine has profound implications for many aspects of life and ministry, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how it has been surfacing in analysis of marriage, family, gender, and sexuality issues in the last few years. Nature always gets the final word, even if we’re not always honest in our efforts to interpret it.
There have been many non-Christian, non-religious efforts to make sense of our current predicament in the West, especially on gender and sexuality. For example, much of the serious push-back against transgenderism, especially in terms of so-called treatment of minors, has come from social workers, psychologists, and other medical professionals without a particular ideological dog in the hunt. Thank God when people start to see the insanity of what our lost world enables, promotes, and celebrates.
Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution is recent, serious, non-religious effort to expose the great harm that bad ideas about sex have caused women. Perry’s book is brief, biting, sober, and well-researched. She takes aim at some of the underlying assumptions of modern feminism that have not led to women’s happiness and well-being. She then explores more specific problems, such as pornography, prostitution, sexual violence, attacks on marriage and motherhood, and perhaps most powerfully, myths about consent.
It’s hard for me to know where to begin and end in sharing about this book. While some of Perry’s analysis is rooted in findings from evolutionary theory, a creationist like me has a hard time not ‘amening’ much of what she says. Indeed, I suspect many of the book’s critics will dismiss her as an unrepentant traditionalist, trying to take women back to the nineteenth century. Far from it. Perry is generally on board with much of what came of the earlier women’s rights movements. And regrettably, she doesn’t go far enough. But I’d remind the reader, she isn’t writing a Christian take on marriage or womanhood. She is, however, a younger, intelligent mother who has offered a powerful correction to at least some of the extreme edges and blatant lies associated with modern feminism.
Without more fully summarizing or analyzing the book, let me conclude with some really choice excerpts:
On How We Got Here:
The sociologist Max Weber described the ‘disenchantment’ of the natural world that resulted from the Enlightenment, as the ascendance of rationality stripped away the sense of magic that this ‘enchanted garden’ had once held for pre-modern people. In much the same way, sex has been disenchanted in the post-1960s West, leaving us with a society that (ostensibly) believers that sex means nothing.
Sexual disenchantment is a natural consequence of the liberal privileging of freedom over all other values, because, if you want to be utterly free, you have to take aim at any kind of social restrictions that limit you, particularly the belief that sex has some unique, intangible value – some specialness that is difficult to rationalise.
On the Meaning of Sex:
Liberal feminism incorporates sexual disenchantment as an article of faith, insisting that it is a good thing that sex is now regarded as without inherent value in the post-sexual revolution era. But, in practice, liberal feminist women do not generally behave as if they believe in the truth of sexual disenchantment. Almost no one does.
On the Problem of Sexual Violence:
Even if you accept the liberal feminist claim that it is possible for someone to truly and meaningfully consent to being strangled by their sexual partner, you are still faced with the problem of how the law is supposed to differentiate between consensual and non-consensual instances of sexual violence.
On the Problems of Prostitution or “Sex Work”:
The whole point of paid sex is that it must be paid for. It is not mutually desired by both parties – one party is there unwillingly, in exchange for money, or sometimes other goods such as drugs, food or shelter. The person being paid must ignore her own lack of sexual desire, or even her bone-deep revulsion.
And I assure readers, there are plenty more gems where those came from.
Follow-Up:
I’ve written some above about Louise Perry’s recent and important book on feminism and the sexual revolution. This dovetails with some of the themes I explored in my remarks in a seminar given last summer. In case you missed that months ago, see those remarks here.
Currently Reading:
J.D. O’Donnell, Handbook for Deacons
Quote of the Week:
If you value freedom above all else, then you must reject motherhood, since this is a state of being that limits a woman’s freedom in almost every possible way – not only during pregnancy but also for the rest of her life, since she will always have obligations to her children, and they will always have obligations to her. It’s a connection that is only ever severed in the most dire circumstances.
Louise Perry in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
Parting Shot:
The recent earthquake in Türkiye (Turkey) is a sobering reminder to pray for the advance of the Gospel and the strength of the church in Muslim-majority regions. Pray for Turks, Syrians, and other peoples affected.