As youth ministry workers, we have an amazing opportunity to quench students’ thirst for intimacy through deep relationships with God and others. Because our culture is ill-equipped to provide true intimacy, a door is opened for us to reach the souls of today’s youth.
Perhaps no society in history has ever had our skill in producing commodities efficiently and marketing them effectively. But when it comes to intimacy, which is our primary need as humans created for relationships with God and one another, marketing skills tend to destroy the very thing they’re selling.
A Pimped Generation
According to a 2007 report from the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, virtually every form of media promotes the imposition of unhealthy sexuality on young children. As a result, girls today are finding their value in their sexual appeal and seeing themselves as objects for others’ sexual use. Study after study demonstrated that “frequent exposure to media images that sexualize girls and women affects how girls conceptualize femininity and sexuality.”
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It should be no surprise that girls are increasingly engaging in sexual experimentation, bisexual behavior, pornography and identifying appearance as their source of value. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the number of women reporting a same-gender sexual experience has tripled in only a decade, with much of that gain among women in their teens and 20s.
Teens today are experiencing rampant confusion about what it means to become a man or woman. Thirty years ago, young adults waited on average until they were 20 to label themselves as gay or lesbian. Over the last few years, it has dropped dramatically to only 13 years of age.
According to the National Research Council, the adult industry admits that 20-30 percent of Internet pornography traffic is from children. More than 80 percent of adolescents have been exposed multiple times to hardcore material.
They’re inundated with messages that push a materialistic, sexual worldview. In place of true intimacy, porn teaches them to objectify others as sexual objects rather than seeing them as precious human beings. Sitcom sexuality teaches them that sex is merely a physical act, perhaps expressing affection or maybe just for recreation, but certainly with no real effect on the human soul. Students desperately pursue intimacy through sex, but never seem to find what they’re longing for.
The Call of True Intimacy
Our youth may be highly sexualized, but the sex they’ve been sold is a pale shadow of the real intimacy humans can experience. How do you turn intimacy and relationship into a commodity? By draining it of all meaning, all sanctity, all depth. Deep relationship can only be sold once it has been flattened into nothingness.
This cultural steamrolling of intimacy crosses over from sexuality into our conceptions of gender. Maleness and femaleness are no longer seen as precious aspects of our beings, inestimable gifts from God to His creations, but are now the incidental leftovers of blind evolutionary processes. All that remain are odd gender stereotypes and sexual organs that can be manipulated for pleasure.