Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 923 | What Purity Culture Got Wrong | Guest: Dr. Lina AbuJamra

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

Today we're joined by pediatric ER doctor and founder of Living with Power Ministries Dr. Lina AbuJamra to discuss her book, "Don't Tell Anyone You're Reading This: A Christian Doctor's Thoughts on Sex, Shame, and Other Troublesome Issues." We start off with Lina's story of growing up in Lebanon, going to medical school, and her faith journey. She shares how her upbringing shaped her perspective on dating and how a relationship she had placed hope in didn't work out, leading her to feel betrayed by God. We discuss how she fell into the prosperity gospel of sex and marriage and how God redeemed this. Then, did purity culture fail the church? And what does it mean to walk in sexual purity and holiness, whether you're single, married, or engaged? We talk about the shame and stigma or purity and virginity even within the evangelical world and explain why it's more important than ever in our hypersexualized culture to understand that Jesus is worth facing these issues straight on. --- Timecodes: (02:13) Growing up in Lebanon & moving to the U.S. (15:23) Deconstruction / prosperity gospel (18:59) Purity culture (26:15) 'Old Testament God' & laws (29:25) 'Worse' sexual sins (38:00) Inerrancy of scripture (41:41) Christian leaders' sexual failures / Gen X leaders (56:20) Same sex-attraction (01:03:00) Response to sexual sin --- Today's Sponsors: Good Ranchers — get 10% OFF your box today at GoodRanchers.com – make sure to use code 'ALLIE' when you subscribe. Reliefband — save 20% off plus free shipping at Reliefband.com when you use promo code 'ALLIE'! Pre-Born — Will you help rescue babies' lives? Donate by calling #250 & say keyword 'BABY' or go to Preborn.com/ALLIE. Help us reach Blaze's goal of 70,000 ultrasounds in 2023! CrowdHealth — get your first 6 months for just $99/month. Use promo code 'ALLIE' when you sign up at JoinCrowdHealth.com. --- Relevant Episodes: Ep 908 | Calling Out Cru’s LGBTQ Compromise https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-908-calling-out-crus-lgbtq-compromise/id1359249098?i=1000634953278 Ep 904 | My Response to Andy Stanley's LGBTQ Sermon https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-904-my-response-to-andy-stanleys-lgbtq-sermon/id1359249098?i=1000634183444 Ep 782 | 'Pronoun Hospitality' Is Sin: Rosaria Butterfield’s Confession https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-782-pronoun-hospitality-is-sin-rosaria-butterfields/id1359249098?i=1000607404995 Ep 796 | Former Lesbian Activist Calls “Soft” Christians to Repentance | Guest: Rosaria Butterfield https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-796-former-lesbian-activist-calls-soft-christians/id1359249098?i=1000610921016 --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Did purity culture fail the church? What does it really mean to walk in purity as a Christian? Is it just to be straight? Is it just to not look at porn?

Is it just to be married? What is it? Today we have an expert on this topic. We've got a Christian author and E.R. Dr. Lena Abujama, she is here to talk about her latest book on this subject and to discuss this from the perspective of someone who is 51 and single and who has learned what it really means to walk in sexual purity and holiness before the Lord, whether you are single or dating or engaged or married. It's a really interesting conversation. You'll find that she has a lot to say and she's so

smart that I had to really make sure that I was keeping up with every point that she's making. This is probably an episode that you're going to have to listen to a couple times, just to make sure that you're taking in all of the points that she makes. Before we get started on it, I just wanted to remind you, too, that we've got amazing mugs for sale. These are great for a Christmas gift, or maybe if you're just someone who loves coffee or tea and you want your relatable mug, we've got our do the next right thing. We've also got a raise a respectful ruckus. This is great for our related bro. or are related to bells. Lots of great merch from now until Christmas. It's all 25% off. Go to Alleymerge.com.

You can use promo code Ali 25 for 25% off all of our merch. I also just want to remind you guys, this is our last time that we're filming before the end of the year. We do have new episodes that will be coming out over the next three weeks, but we're not going to have our normal four episode a week cadence going on. The relatable team is going to take break, but we've got some great interviews coming out that you will definitely, that you'll definitely want to catch over this break. And of course, I'll be on Instagram and all that good stuff. All right. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com. Use code Alley at checkout. That's good ranchers.com code Alley.

Lena, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. I really appreciate it. I'm really happy to be here. It feels so Christmassy. Yes, I know. We've got all our decorations. Okay, for people who may not know, can you tell us who you are and what you do? Yeah, the hardest obstacle is saying my last name. It's Abu Jamra. So right away, people want to know where I'm from. And I grew up in Lebanon. I'm Lebanese.

And then I now live in Chicago. My family moved, though, when I was a senior in high school to Green Bay, Wisconsin. So I'm a Midwest girl through and through. I came to Christ. I'm a Christian. I came to Christ as a child, grew up in the church in Lebanon. And an environment very much similar to what an American kid would grow up in church. an American pastor, we were part of the Christian missionary alliance. So I think my upbring

was very much influenced by, let's say, the American church culture. When we moved to, I was a senior in high school when we moved, and I ended up sort of, you know, jumping into, you know, imagine going from Green Bay, you know, from Lebanon to Green Bay and sort of all of that. And within a year of going to high school graduating, made a decision to go to a Christian college, which was sort of a, in some ways, a big deal in my family. My dad was a doctor. And so there was, as a Lebanese, and I think anybody who watches the show who has friends from other cultures, there's a big push to, you know, higher education. And I think a lot of it is because when you grew up in war, Lebanon had a civil war during my upbringing for pretty much my entire

life, there's a sense that the only escape you have is not going to come from government. It's not going to come from, you know, the American dream. Nobody else has that concept. And so really education is the path to getting out of a war-torn country. And so we were very much pushed. My mom was a pharmacist. Interestingly, my mom is a Palestinian refugee from back in the 40s. They moved to Lebanon. And so I didn't really grow up under, my mom was very integrated in the Lebanese way. So I never really understood growing up what she had gone through. But, you know, but she also had been highly educated, even as a, you know, a person who had escaped, you know, their place. And she was the one who came to Christ in college. And so.

So again, very much deeply, my mother converted dramatically. Yeah. And she was immediately deep in the word of God. Okay. So I grew up with an example of a mom who was highly educated. Back in me, remember, I was born in the 70s, and so she was a product of the 60s, but very focused on God's word, very educated, very loving of God's word, very loving of God. I mean, Jesus was became the center of her life.

And so that was sort of the voice in my head growing up, the emphasis of our teaching. So moving to the U.S. from a spiritual perspective, was not hard, but culturally, obviously, a completely different world. So I ended up going to a pre-conservative Christian college. Very conservative. Very. And, you know, primarily because my pastor in Lebanon had gotten a degree there. And my mom had insisted that I applied to one Christian college.

And remember, I'm off the boat. Like, I actually graduated from college early. I was 16 when I graduated from college. Wow. So I did. You're 16 when you graduated from college? Yes. Oh, my goodness.

It's not that I was so smart. People always want to know how. Lebanese start school a year earlier, but then they end up going to college, like they skip a year. They start as a saw. It's a college. It's the baccalaureate system. It's all a mess. So everyone is a little younger going to college, and I skipped kindergarten. So I can't draw, but it's, you know, but in all of that, I kind of accommodated my mom, but had no intention of going to a Christian college. But really that summer at camp before college, the Lord really dealt very much. I had a very deep encounter with him. I would say I was definitely saved before from a knowledge. You know, you grow up in the church.

It's sort of there's a sense of, I know who Jesus is. I've received him into my heart. I remember asking him into my heart. But something happens when you become of age. I think every person who grows up in a Christian home has to understand sort of beyond, oh, this is my mother's faith or my dad's faith. I really now understand who Jesus is and want to follow him. And I think that was sort of the beginning of what I now consider in my calling,

what I do now, which I ended up going to medical school. And in my fellowship, I went to med school and became a doctor and specialized in pediatrics and then decided to do a fellowship in pediatric emergency medicine. And it was that transition from pediatrics to pediatric ER, where I felt God's call to teach the Bible. And that grew out of a sort of a crisis of faith related to actually dating and marriage concepts. I had been a very good girl growing up. you know, again, I'm Lebanese. We're born and, you know, I grew up in a sort of fundamentalist circle. And though I was not growing up aware of what the purity culture was, is, you know, we certainly grew up with this understanding of the Christian way, which was up until recently, I think

I would say was very obviously sex before marriage was wrong. Right. You know, a man and a woman ought to marry and be together for life, you know, that this was a covenant that God gave. And even though I didn't, expect people who don't follow Jesus to abide by those things. Up until very recently, I would say it was sort of assumed that if you grew up in the church and you gave your life to Christ, whether you did it as a child or later on, that those are basic assumptions that you could gather from reading the Bible. You see? And so that was my background. So I go sort of, I was this obedient child who wanted to do God's will. I had given my life to Christ as a child, kind of dedicated my life at camp, went to a Christian college, and really embraced the teachings of Jesus.

And yet, you know, and we'll get to the content of the book in a second, obviously had some, you know, as a teenager with hormones and all of the things, but really believed by conviction in certain ways of life. And then when I went to residency, that was the first time I dated somebody seriously. And it was a... How old are you by the time you go to residency? I graduated. Good question. I was 20 when I graduated medical school. Okay. But now... Oh my goodness.

I'm still... No, sorry. 24. 24. 20 college, 24 medical school. Okay. You graduated from college when you were 20. I went straight through.

So you graduated high school when you were 16. College 20. Okay. So now, like, it's funny because, you know, my nieces and nephews are in their late teens now, early 20s. And sometimes like family members would be like, oh, they're growing up. They're going to be on their own. Are they able to, like, do a cross country drive. And I'm always like, man, I was seeing patients when I was, you know, 20.

You were pretty much in the throes of things. And so but then fellowship gave me, so I did residency for three years and fellowship for three years. And in residency was my first, I'd say I didn't date much in high school. Understandably, I was young. We moved in college, same. I went to a very strict college. And that was, you know, touted to have pink and blue sidewalks, although it's not true, but that's the rumor. And this is in South Carolina.

This is in South Carolina. They did kind of segregate men and women. And that's what you were talking about. They did. Yes. They did. And yes, it's a well-known college for that. And it won't take long to figure out where I went. But I'm not ashamed of it. Actually, I find it kind of funny with the way that my life has transpired. But in residency, my dad, who again, I grew up in a Lebanese home with a Lebanese father who came to Christ midway through his life. So he was in his early 50s, I think, when he gave his life to Jesus. and he, but whether you were a Christian or not, in our home, you couldn't date until you became a doctor. It was unspoken. It was spoken. It was sort of like, you know, I don't know what would have happened if we did, but none of us tried to, you know, fight that. And so again, that sense of

patriarchal, you know, culture was there, you know. And by the way, a lot of Americans had a similar way back in the 60s and 70s. I think that definitely the Western world is ahead of the Middle Eastern world and some of those, you know, more the way that we think about things now. But nonetheless, I hit the ground running when I started dating. So I literally met a guy, started dating seriously, and got engaged within like a nine-month period. That's fast for someone who hasn't dated a lot before, which, I mean, you hear stories about people who meet and get married like two months later.

It's not that unheard of, but I hadn't dated a lot. And so two weeks before the wedding, we ended the relationship. mutually. But the backdrop of that was that there was this person in my life who was my best friend for 10 years all the way from Christian College that I sort of always assumed I would end up with. And I felt like he always waited for years and whether it was in my mind or not. By the time I got engaged, ended the engagement, realized sort of what I was going on in my own life and heart, he had already moved on, which you can't blame a person. I mean, the person gets engaged in. But it was like, One of those, you know, we all grew up watching romantic comedies and movies and, you know, all those high school movies where the guy eventually, you know, comes around.

And I kept waiting thinking this was God's will for me. What is that? My best friend's wedding. All of them. You can come up with probably 10 of them. That's right. There's so many of them. But the worst part, and I think this is why this is relevant to our conversation today is that I think there is this undertone of what I think at the time, you know, now we look at and go, oh, you were so caught up in a purity culture.

but sort of the sense, even as I ended the engagement and waited on God, I had this sense because I felt like God had spoken to me about certain things, and that was one of them, that God would bring that friendship to marriage. And that ended up messing me up. That was probably my first crisis of faith because he ended up moving on, and I didn't see God fix that, bring him back around, cause us to get married. And I had, and this is the important thing, I had been, quote, unquote, pure.

Now, you could argue what is purity. I had been with a guy, even engaged. We hadn't had crossed any lines of that. I mean, we were physical to the extent that one can be respectably, but I felt like I had honored the Lord to the best of my ability. And so it felt like God had, you know, sort of that lie of the purity culture, which is this concept that if you do your part, God is going to do his and his part being the American dream of Hollywood, marriage, you know, love, all that.

And so I had a crisis of faith in my fellowship in that season where I felt like I couldn't trust God fully. The output of that was that the Lord healed that area and I felt out of it. I started teaching a Bible study and felt called to ministry. And so I started this, this was early 2000, so 23 years ago, and I started this path of doctrine, but also of writing about God and faith. And in that, you know, and I thought, and as many of us who are Christian might think, you know, we are told all things work together for good and, you know, God redeems the past. And for years, I thought like, oh, God was redeeming. Even this broken,

you know, relationship that I thought would amount to something. I thought, well, okay, this broken, God is using it. We always, we humans always want a cause effect, right? And in the Christian world, we are really trained for that. And so we want explanations for everything. And we want to decipher God and decipher him now. And so I sort of started this ministry with this undercurrent of, well, God took away that relationship, but he's now using it in ministry instead. You see?

So it sort of justifies the pain in your life. And so for years, I sort of understood this is, now I had the better good, which was I'm given my life to teach the Bible. So they would ask me to do conferences. I would write, start a blog about God eventually. By 2012 or 13, I wrote a book, and the Moody publishers asked me to write it. They asked me to write on singleness. I would have never written on that.

Who wants to spend their life being like a poster child for singles books? And by then I still wasn't dating. I had been engaged a second time and ended the engagement. And so all of this background eventually led to a couple of years after my first book. No, actually, the summer of my first book came out, I ended up having a big debacle in my own church, where by now I was well into my practice in pediatric emergency medicine, and I was leading the woman's ministry at my church. And that church ended up blowing up imploding.

And it was because of abuse of power in leadership. And it was very well known. In Chicago, there's been two big church implosions of recent times. I was at the first, and then I ended up going to the second and both ended up imploding. So I was joke, like, if a pastor saw me walking into their church, like, be careful. I don't know what could happen here.

But really, that church, a breakup. was probably the, it's funny because out of all of the hurt that I felt I had had in my life, two broken engagements, you know, the lost relationship, all of this stuff, that church breakup was probably the most painful event in my life. That was in 2013. And then I ended up writing about it by then, by 2016, 17, maybe 18, my book Fractured Faith came out where I would look back and say, I deconstructed. Now, well, I think, you know, how did I deconstruct? I think you can see even what I've told you my story so far. There was a lot of premises that I had embraced in the Christian faith that were not biblical.

There were a lot of ideas that I had formed about God that were based on the American dream. Right. Would you say it had been influenced by the prosperity gospel? 100%. If I do this, I'm going to reap. 100%. I think I grew up in churches that were 180 degrees opposite of the prosperity gospel in Word. and indeed financially to a certain extent.

But even that, I would say, even that is not true. So that big church that imploded, I think, had heavily bought into the prosperity gospel while teaching against the prosperity message. And I think the purity culture, so when you talk about purity and issues related to sexuality and holiness in the Christian world, I think the greatest lie that the conservative, non-charismatic, evangelical. When you really sum up what is what was the fault of the purity gospel, purity culture, and you can call it the purity gospel, whatever you'll call it, is that it's a heavily prosperity driven message. It is a prosperity gospel. It is. It's basically saying if I

don't have sex before I get married, I'm going to have an amazing husband or if you're a guy and wife and we're going to have an amazing sex life. No one says it, but everybody assumes it. And so so many people who have waited end up getting married and I think have horrible sex lives at the early onset because they've never done it. Everything takes practice. Or even if they have good sex lives after a while, it fizzles as all relationships grow in different ways. And then you sort of wake up and go, you know, did I, did I really marry this person?

And so then you have this crisis of, I mean, we've seen it as in the last 20, 30 years, I'd say, in the church where divorce has become acceptable. I remember growing up, it was a big deal when people divorced. And now it's like, it's nothing. I mean, and I'm not, this isn't an indictment against divorce. Jesus makes space for divorce and, you know, certain times like adultery and anybody even then, I think there should be some valid attempt at, but you're given an out of marriage in that biblically. But it's become where no one even thinks about it anymore. I grew up in what I would call the conservative

purity culture too. And I think that there are some good aspects of it, of course, teaching that you shouldn't have sex before marriage. That was, I just knew. in my head that was stuck in my head. Do not have sex before marriage. But there is more to purity than that. And we stay pure to glorify God, not to just reap a husband when you're 22 years old. 100%. You haven't even, I mean, we haven't even started talking about this most recent. Yeah. 100%. I, the problem with what's happened now in 2023 with purity cultures, you can almost, you can almost not talk about purity anymore in the context of when I say Christianity, I mean evangelicalism and the local church.

Because if you say the word purity, there's this pressure of, especially under millennials and under, to shut you up because it's like, don't talk about purity because they automatically associate that with purity culture. So the word, people want to avoid the word, I find. And so words like virgin is a stigma now. It's a shame. There's more shame in the evangelical world with being a virgin than there is with being sexually active before marriage. In fact, the statistics support that.

So my most recent book... You think in the evangelical world? Yes, I do think so. And I think, well, one person who's written extensively about this is David Ayers. He's one example of many, but he's a professor from Grove City. And in fact, I'm intrigued by his data. And he's put it out there. He has a book out there, but also you can find his work in articles.

I believe, let me just pull it up so I don't, so I don't lie about it. But as an example, this study he did between, he surveyed about 5,000 evangelical Protestant people who consider themselves. You can even say in the fundamentalist background from 2014 to 2018, which I think is relevant because I think sexual promiscuity has expanded from 2015 onward for a number of different reasons. And the type of sexual sin that we talk about in the church has changed in the last five years. But again, for a number of.

of reasons, but he says he found that 89% of men and 92% of women in that context had at least one opposite sex partner in the past five years. Wow. Okay, the 89% of men, 92% of women, that is shocking. Think about that. And then he says as young as 18 to 19 and you'll go over. He looked at, he teaches at the college, a lot of students from a Christian college. And he goes on to say, the gospel coalition has interviewed him.

You can also find his interview there recently. and he also talks about not just that they're sexually active. And once they're sexually active with one partner, then the statistics of them being sexually active with more than three over time is huge. But also the type, what you define as sexual intercourse, they might say, well, I've never had sexual intercourse, but then the openness to oral and anal and other form, he himself says how parents would be horrified

if they understood what that teenage generation and the younger generation would consider acceptable again, while you're still not having sex, so to speak. How does that relate to me? And, you know, because I initially started to write a book that I called, originally it was supposed to be funny, but I initially called it Eggplants and Peaches. It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek.

And then the subtitle was a sexual memoir of a 50-year-old virgin. And it was evident after floating it a little that people couldn't handle, not just people, Christians couldn't, didn't want the association with someone being a 50-year-old virgin. It was a stigma. It was a shame. To this day, I had a lot of moms tell me, they're 20-year-old daughters don't want to be thought of as virgin at 20.

It's like we're living now in a world where it's a bad thing to be a virgin. And yet that, again, growing up, reading the Bible and understanding the Bible, even without big commentaries, I never had trouble in my own life and mind, understanding that there was a certain conduct sexually that if you believe the Bible, you ought to abide by it, right? I mean, there's notions now that when I go speak at colleges now, and I have people who will come up to me and say, man, you know, I had one kid tell me recently at a college that he had come to Christ and he had made a decision to save himself to marriage.

And his father, who claims to be a Christian, challenged him. And it was very horrified by the fact that he wanted to save himself for marriage and said, The Bible doesn't teach that. Show me in the Bible where it says you can't have sex before marriage. So this concept now of you can't have sex before marriage is thought to be purity culture. So now you're right. There is a mix up of thought between what purity is biblically, what holiness is, and why it is asked, you know, why Christ has asked us to pursue that path. And I would say God, but I would even say Christ because I think a lot of people think, well, you know, purity culture is so Old Testament.

and so they want to unhitch all the New Testament. But in fact, it is, it's very much a Christian, I mean, read the red letter words of Jesus. And, you know, you don't even need to get past like chapter 10. You know, you get to the servant of the mount, which is one of the first things that you read about Jesus. And you can see that he holds to very strict, let's say, value. And again, we can dig through that.

But what he holds Christians to, what he holds humans to is, is undoable. And the whole point was that his sacrifice was needed, right? Because the whole point of the sermon of the Mount is that it's not just the law. It's not just, okay, you can't kill someone. You can't have sex before marriage. You can't hate, you know, on and on the Ten Commandments.

But now he moved it to, if you think it in your mind. Yeah. So are you. Right. So that none of us can read Jesus and go, yeah, you know, I don't think Jesus cared about your sexuality. He had a stricter code than the Old Testament. Right. But the point was that none of us could achieve it.

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed,

you can watch this T-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. It wasn't just that, hey, if you commit adultery, you're an adulterer. It's if you look at a woman lastfully, you are the same as an adult. If you hate someone. Think about how many people have we, quote, quote, murdered. I mean, it's easy to point fingers at people who are sexual sinners in the bad way or. who are murderers and be like, well, I've never done that.

That's such a good point because you do hear a lot, especially from deconstructionists and like people who are considered themselves more progressive, that the Old Testament God cared about the law. And in the New Testament, Jesus didn't care about the law as much in that people sometimes make the mistake of saying the reason why Jesus chastised the Pharisees is because they cared about the law. But what you're saying is that no, is that they didn't care about the law enough. They didn't fully understand that the law was supposed to see all the way to.

down to our hearts. So Jesus actually reemphasized and emphasized further the importance of obedience to God all the way down to the heart level. Yes, and prove that none of us can do that. Right. And because of that, we need him. So he was a fulfillment of the law. And that because then he went to the cross, now the upside of it is you could say, well, great, then if Jesus did the work, then I don't have to do anything. And that's a misunderstanding of grace. That's Paul's premise in Roman 6, where he says, shall I continue to sin that grace me abound? God forbid, right? That's a whole cheap Grace, if you don't read the Bible, Dietrich Bonhoeff, I mean, you can, that does make sense logically. Grace is to compel us to obedience.

And purity out of a belief and a faith that has changed you, not purity as a means to use God to give you the things that you want. You see, there's a difference. It's not that purity is wrong. So fine, you can play around words as we like to do in our culture now. So you don't want to call it purity culture. You can call it holiness. You don't want to call it holiness. You know, you can play it holiness.

words, but the reality is that, you know, what is the will of God in First Thessalonians? Well, it's your sanctification that you abstain from sexual immorality. So now we have, you know, modern, whether you want to call them progressives or not, because it used to just be the progressives. But now, even in the conservative evangelical world, we have people splitting hairs and going, well, the word pornia means this and not that. And why, you know, you don't need a PhD to understand the Bible. Yeah. Like I've talked to people who are Muslims in Lebanon who have given their life to Jesus, who some are illiterate and hear it. And they can still read the Bible and understand

in the New Testament that there is a desire for holiness, let's say, that includes, and that fornication means premarital sex as an example, which again, we've parsed things out so much now over words. We can't even understand each other anymore. Now, how does that, like, okay, these are all pretty, how do we go from deconstruction to my story and being hurt by God? and crisis, you know, understanding God's goodness to, well, I think I wrote the book about sex, which is the reason I'm here. And by the way, I think this conversation about sex is at the forefront of every Christian's mind, but we don't think we're, like, you can look at my book and not under, here's how we want to think about sex in the evangelical world now. Gay sex is wrong.

transgenderism is wrong and and it's so easy to make sexual sin about that that we miss the log in our own eye right and so and so i told you the statistics of you know the kids who are growing up in the church who are sexually active you could argue they may not know the lord yet honestly there's this assumption i mean the whole concept of deconstruction i mean there's this assumption that every kid that grows up in church knows jesus well we don't know that for a fact if you grow up in church and you've received christ and you have a sensitivity of the same thing spirit's in you, reread the Bible, you move to want to live like Jesus would move, and you're coming to the Word of God with the humility.

I think that there's a natural desire to live a certain type of life that is at immense odds with the American culture. And so you look at like, and so it's easy that, but it's been easy in the last few years to make the bad people in the church, let's say, or the bad sinners in the church, the gay community. And so you can even look, if you're a parent, you can even look at your own kids

and be like, well, yeah, they may be having sex with their boyfriend. But at least they're not gay. And they're going to get married next week, so it's okay. Yeah, yeah. But further, further, I don't want to throw stones because you can say, well, what about you?

Again, why am I writing a book about sex? I'm a 51-year-old virgin. Because, again, you go back to what Jesus says. Sex isn't just about an act between a man or woman or two men, whatever you want to define it. Sex is a desire for an emotional connection and sex starts here in the mind.

If it starts in the body, then we're just animals. Animals don't have a soul, so to speak. If you have a dog or a cat, you probably disagree with that. But in general, pets don't, you know, some are smarter than others, but they get through March and if you go to Turkey in March, the cats are in heat. You cannot ask the hotel to shut the cats up.

They are all over the town. they idol, they think of them as gods, and you will hear cats mating in the middle of the night. It's horrifying. That sounds terrible. But they love it because they are like this animal that they've elevated to a point of a god. But they're animals. They just go at it. You know, we're not animals.

Sex is a connection between, again, what God has ordained between a man and a woman in Genesis. And so to talk about sex without understanding the why. Why does a virgin struggle with sexuality, with shame, with, you know, you're a virgin. You shouldn't have any guilt. You haven't broken the law. But again, remember what Jesus says. And Jesus doesn't put these, when he talks about your mind and your heart and what you think, so what a man thinks in his heart. So is he, why, he's not saying, oh, now you got to be perfect.

He's saying, like, I think even Jesus is trying to make the point of, it's a whole, it's, what is it that we worship? and I have observed that in the United States of America at least, I think probably you could argue other countries, but in the U.S., let's stick to that, where I've grown up most of my life since I was 15, we have made of sex an idol. Without it, we cannot be happy. Without great marital sex, it can be a good marriage.

If you're, you know, again, you go back to your virgin, that's the worst thing that could happen to you. What about Jesus? He didn't have sex. He was 33. He died. He was a virgin. Do you see what I'm saying?

So we've sort of confused ourselves. And it used to be that the world, you know, when I say the world, people who don't follow Jesus, let's just do the Christian term would be the world versus the church, right? And so we used to sort of think, well, you know, people who don't believe Jesus. I understand. You know, if I was used to say growing up, if I wasn't a Christian, I would probably live with a guy. It's pragmatically easier for me.

You know what I mean? Like I'm independent. I'm a doctor. I'm ER. You know, come and go as I please all the. But I'm not. I've given my life to Jesus. And in that context, there is a daily decision to be made as to where is the source of my greatest joy.

And I think everything, whether it's gay sex or straight sex or marriage or singleness, porn viewers or non-porn viewers will have to decide that day by day by day. You're right with the kind of level of depravity that we see today or just it seems like the modern forms of depravity. that we see, which of course are just, they're kind of repackaged immorality and sin that we've seen all throughout history. I'm talking about gender bending, homosexuality, these things in one way or another have always existed. But they do seem new to our American culture.

And so you're right. There is a temptation, I think, for Christians to say, well, that's real sexual sin. That's real depravity. That's real iniquity. Right. That's real perversion. but lust, a man lusting after a woman, is that really a big deal? You know, an engaged couple sleeping together is that really a big deal?

At least it's not these other things. But you're right. Going back to the word of Jesus, he is saying that it goes all the way down to the heart. And I don't think people could see most people, Christians included, would look at someone who is a 51-year-old virgin Christian and say that it's even possible for you to be in sexual sin. But you're saying that it goes all the way down to the heart and mind. Well, I mean, you can read my book and see that. It is very possible to be in sexual sin.

And I describe it to the nth degree. You could argue why. And I did it intentionally. First of all, by conviction of God, nobody wants to write things that are personal and painful unless you have calling, I'll call it, whether you believe in God or not, there's a sense of calling when you're right. And for the Christian, I think to write about things that might be shameful, you have to, you know, of course, the path to freedom is by dealing with your shame. And I think there's a completely different way of dealing with shame if you follow Jesus or you don't. Everybody has shame.

The question isn't whether we have shame. The question is, what do we do with our shame? Shame came into the world through Adam and Eve. We know that from the Word of God. And so I felt like there's been a lot of books that talk about sex from a, here are the right things and here's, from a sexual ethic perspective, you know, but we know that. Now, granted, in the last few years, I think we act like we don't know it, right? So we have people now saying, well, does the Bible really teach this or that? And I think we've lost the ears of people who aren't in the faith because we pick and choose what we want the Bible to say, wherever you fall in the spectrum of Christianity,

you don't have to be a fundamentalist, you can be a progressive. Like, which I have these discussions amongst us. Which begs the question. I mean, this whole thing, you know, me being here today came out of you, had posted something that Andy Stanley has done. But Andy Stanley is a great example. I mean, he's been a public example of someone who has sort of done that, where you try, which, I mean, I've read enough about him to understand

that he comes from a very similar background to mine in some ways and believes in some ways, again, from what I understand, from recent articles that he wrote, in a biblical, like a straightforward biblical, he said, he believes this is what homosexuality falls under, and this is what, you know, marriage is, and this is what, you know, he's made these statements that I agree with, but yet the way that he presents himself is by sort of questioning the word of God, at least publicly, which is extremely confusing. And so I think somebody put on Twitter recently that I took a picture of, and I felt like was such easy way to sort of follow a pattern that I think has become very common in the evangelical world

today, which is the first step in many discussions when it pertains to how we've changed in our sexual views is we start to question the inerrancy of scripture. And then we go to questioning the authority of scripture, to when we, then we go to sort of, you know, redefining what's right and what's wrong sexually. You know, then you got the, or first you deconstruct, then you go to redefining sexuality. And then you leave the faith. And you almost can see that pattern in many public figures now

that have deconstructed or that have changed their view of what it means to, you know, to be sexually right with God. Let's just say that. And so we've gone from someone who, you know, like Andy Stanley's kind of played it out to the tea.

And he hasn't gone all the way yet. But, you know, there was his series of unhitching the old and the New Testament. And there was, you know, the word of God like doesn't, you know, that's just the word of God, but that's not who God is. Just this morning, I saw a solid voice in Christianity that I respect that is still not celebrity,

but well followed. He's got like 50,000 followers, let's say, and he made the same comment. And I think sometimes what his comment was, was, remember, the word of God isn't God. And so I called him out on it. And I think it's important to sort of follow these discussions. I don't even understand what that means. Well, they're saying what Andy Stanley, I think, did a whole message on. which is basically like God is bigger than his word, so to speak, which you're right.

It's hard to understand it because you are your word, right? I mean, I show up on a show. I say certain things. You can say, well, I think Lena and you make a list of what you think I am based on the things that I say. So if you, so now you go back to do you believe the word of God is God breathed or not? And also Jesus is the low ghost. Jesus is the word of God.

And so, I mean, the word is God. Isn't that what John once says? Yes, but this is then where some of the more progressive Christians would say, well, that's what red letter of Christianity is, which doesn't make sense, again, because thousands, you know, hundreds of years, let's say, of, you know, how the Bible canon came together and all, you know, stuff that, you know, I've studied in college and I've read and makes sense, but I'm not, you know, leave that to the MacArthur's and the Pipers in the world and whoever, you know,

I'm not, but you don't even need to be at that level to understand, like, like, the minute you start to question whether the Word of God is true, I mean, that's ultimately the question. Do you really believe the Word of God is inspired? And do you live under its authority? And if you do, then you have to embrace what it teaches on all things. And Andy Stanley has also called passages about sexual immorality clobber passages, which I think also speaks to the same point that is trying to separate God's word from God himself,

almost trying to take God off the hook for some of the uncomfortable passages that are in there. Yeah, and also to sort of excuse sort of, again, you go back to this. parsing, well, what does pornea really include? Yeah. And so you've got a generation of Christians going, well, the Bible doesn't really teach premarital sex is wrong. Like I wrote this book where I kind of, so back a few months ago, I was about about a year ago, actually, I had heard of yet another.

So we watch Christian leadership. Like this has been the bane of the church's existence. Christian leaders have always failed. It's not new. But it has happened at a more dramatic pace in the last few years, in my opinion. And it's happened with more surprised. faces. It used to be the prosperity leaders would, right? I mean, the TV guys. We grew up, Jim Baker and all those guys, you know, I can't remember all of them, but they were like almost a joke.

You could have SNL skits on them. But now we're hearing about people that we think, like, I mean, Ravi Zacharias is dead now, but I mean, there's a lot, I mean, believe it or not, I believe the stories and from what I can understand. But, but like, that was a shock to the evangelical world, because this was a person that most people held to high regard and respected. And there's been many others who would be in that tier of very sound biblical teachers that would teach what we're talking about, like not make any bones about the fact that the Bible teaches certain things about marriage and sexuality and purity.

And I don't even think even the Ravi Zahiris of the world were teaching the purity culture necessarily. I mean, they were just trying to, you know, what we believed when we were alive, they were trying to teach the truth. And yet, again, there was a secret life. And so a year ago I heard about a worship leader who imploded. Let's just use that word. What is imploding? It's when your life falls apart due to hidden sexual sin.

He had had an affair. And the difference between that story was that this is a person I knew from my old church. And I knew well enough to know that he while, like this was a person who, and I think, again, the mind-boggling thing, even with the Ravi Zacharias, is that the sexual sin was happening while they were leading in a way that was impacted. a lot of lives. You could argue Carl Lentz was that for a while. I mean, whether you're like them or not, I mean, his church was

booming. I remember watching him thinking, man, he has such a great way of expressing the gospel, communicating. And it made you want to go to church. And what Christian would say that was a bad thing? I wanted to receive Jesus when I heard and preach, right? It didn't harm that he was very good looking. But, you know,

but there was this life. And so this person, the worship leader, was writing songs that moved us. And yet there was this hidden secret. And I, this is what prompted me to write to the degrees. I felt like we can all talk as much as we want to about the rules. You can book in the Bible say, well, these are the rules. Okay, it's not the rules. It's a life. But let's just say, you can write a book and say, well, these verses say this and these verses say that. And you can get online and you could make it all up here. But the problem

we have isn't up here in our head. It's here in our hearts. And I felt at that point, that was when I, I, sort of, my agent went to church where this person was most recently. So he had left the imploding church, went to the other church so that this person was there. And so he, I had confirmed that this was indeed true and that was, because

you know, not everything you read on social media is true. But I had heard about it through social media and then I heard about it in fact. And I was grieved and I was grieved, but then I was convicted because I realized that I myself had dealt with some sexual sin ongoing in my life and which I again write about in excruciating painful detail, but intentionally, because I felt like that's the problem

that I was seeing and why I think the millennials and under are correct to be disillusioned with the way that we talk about sex. First, back my generation, what do you call me? I'm a Gen X. We were the ones who fell pride to the purity culture. And so now we were all disillusioned because we're like, oh, our marriages are bad and our sex lives are bad and we're not married and we thought that we would be married. And so, you know, and then you sort of, like you're hurting when that happens.

I mean, you could talk about it intellectually, but really this is a human. There's a human in their house who at Christmas don't have anywhere to go. You know what I mean? Like they're lonely. They're watching all the Hallmark movies. Everybody's marrying and having their great love story. And you're assuming that you're the only one who's not. And then you've got the marriage who are going like, oh, I'm stuck with this man the rest of my life.

And he doesn't even know how to approach me. And I'm not an animal. He like, I have a patient tell me their spouses have sex with them while they're sleeping. And you can be like, well, they're married. No, that's rape. And you're like, what is happening to our world? You know, and so you sort of have this big question in your mind as like the Gen X are sort of, I think we were sort of the beginning of the problem in a way.

And then because of we were disillusioned, and of course we see it because most of the deconstructioning people are sort of in that Gen X slash millennial, maybe more millennial generation. But the millennials, remember, were taught by who? They were brought up by who? By the Gen Xers. And so all this false teaching in a sense that we had embraced of the rules, the fundamentalism has hurt the millennials who now kind of go like, man, I don't even respect the leaders because look, there's Ravi who had the secret life and there's this person, that person, and no one ever, to my, I mean, very few people, I don't think it's non-existent,

but very few people have talked openly about their struggles in this area of sexual sin to the degree that I think can help others. and when the ones who do talk, it's always, again, I'm going to stereotype, but it's always that 18 to 30-year-old man who struggles with porn, who, you know, ends up getting help however you want, whether they get, you know, go to celebrate recovery or, and they all sort of hush, you know, they're all talk about it in their small group. Everybody knows what do in our small group. They're talking about their sexual sin. And then, and it's hush-hush, but then once they get delivered, they go, oh, yeah, you see my problem. Now I'm married,

and everything is great. And yet, you look at the statistics in marriage of how many people watch porn in marriage and how many marriages are ending up in divorce and even masturbation in marriage and you go, man, it's not healthy in marriages. And then so, so you have a problem that doesn't really go away that when it's talked about, it's always in a, I've been there, done that and I'm no longer that. Even the stories of like I used to be gay and I'm no longer gay now I'm married, you know, like we laud these stories. They're not that many of them, but the ones that are there were like, oh, look at her, look at him, amazing. God saved them. They changed them. And yet, you know, like few, some, I mean, I've heard, you know, some who still say they struggle. And then when they admit that,

they get crucified by the conservatives. And so very few people are talking about sexual struggle, a, outside of the gay issues, because it's like almost, again, you go back to that's bad, this is good, you know, sort of you've made the line. Like, it's okay. If you have, you know, heterosexual sin is okay compared to homosexual sin. So you can lust against them, you know, if you're a woman against a man, a man against woman, but don't lust against someone who's same sex. And yet we've, we, that we've landed Christians in 2023 in a, in a, world that is highly sexualized in every way all the time, everywhere you look. We are in that right now. I mean, the average age that a child sees porn is 11, according to Barna. 95% of kids have

seen porn by age 14. Okay, that's shocking when you really think about those statistics. You go, oh, how did they see it casually? I don't know, but I know it hooks people on. And so it's easy to then make sexual sin about, oh, you watch porn, you don't. But it's not that simple, is it? Because we're not even talking about just porn. What is porn? Is Game of Thrones porn? Or is there a story that makes it less porn than something where you're just watching people who are just X, X, X, X, you know, do you know what I mean? Is it porn if you read it or is it only porn if you watch it? Right. And so you can get into this dark world of, and so then how does a person wake up one day, a leader teaching the Bible, worship songs? How can we watch that person?

wake up one day and implode. Well, it didn't happen overnight. It happened over years of patterns of sexual sin. I do think that we look at sexual sin as just looking at the XXX, you know, porn online, but something that I thought about a lot and that has in the past, I didn't think about, but I think about high school and college and even after reading certain books, even some Christian romance books like redeeming love and things like that, that may not have been called. classified as technical porn. Maybe it wasn't graphic, but it was making my heart lust after something that I did not have. And at the time, you know, in high school and college before marriage, I could not have. And made me fixate on, okay, well, as soon as I'm able to have sex in marriage,

then I'll be happy. Then I won't have to struggle with this anymore. Then I'll be sin free, at least in this category and this part of my life. And I won't have to worry about sexual sin or anything ever again. That is kind of how it feels. And going back to kind of what you said about how we were raised, well, if you pray for your husband, if you don't have sex, if you wear this purity ring, if you say true love waits, then you will not only get married when you're 22 years old, but your sex life will be perfect. And there's nothing to sex we hear in marriage, except for just being married and being married, that everything will come to. together perfectly. And that's just not necessarily true. Yes. And I 100% agree with you. And I'd even

push and say the second layer of the problem is that when people who have tried to resolve it, like let's pick on like Sheila Gregor for a minute, they want to resolve it by saying, I think the focus is often still on the act, not on the heart. And so, you know, then the problem is, well, the guy, you know, does, da, nah, you're in a patriarchal system. You're in a patriarchal system. You don't, you know, you're supposed, you know, you've believed a lie that you're just supposed to, like, roll over and, you know, because that's what the conservatives teach. But it's still, the focus is still on, well, you're not happy in your, you know, because you're not serving the guy. So, like, the progressives will critique the conservatives as you're believing something wrong. It's, it's about a mutualness.

But I think it's deeper than that. And I think, and I do agree with you. I think every single person, meaning single not married, thinks that their problem will go away when they're married. And yet most leaders who have imploded. are not single, they're married. Do you ever think about that? Yeah. And so even the book, like, you know, the book is not meant for singles or marries.

It's for both. The book isn't meant for porn watchers. It's really, it's about, though. Every chapter addresses a why. I am really more, I mean, when I see patients, so I'm an ER doctor and that's my, like I did pediatric ER, but my mind is ER, 100% through and through. And when I see a problem, you can treat the symptoms until you're blue in the face. And you can, you know, again, tell people, eat this, don't eat this, don't eat.

that it's the why that motivates people. It's the why that helps them understand why they're doing what they're doing. Everyone knows if I stop smoking, I won't get cancer. But tell that to a smoker. I had a patient yesterday who wanted me to call in an inhaler. And she couldn't get, we have so many limit on refills in our company, which is legitimate for an online company. And I said, you know, he passed that. She said, she goes, I need an inhaler every time I smoke. I said, I'm sure even told this before, have you considered and she filled in the blacks? Yes, I'm not going to stop smoking. And like you could tell them, like, stop smoking.

She knows. She's not a matter of not knowing. I think there's plentiful couples in the church who are not married right now who are living together. Some will even tell you we don't share a bed. That's BS. And by the way, I think there's a lot of married couples who are not sharing beds, which I, again, call me naive.

And I'm not naive. I'm a stinking ER doctor. Like, I've heard it all. I'm Lebanese. I have spent my life in war-torn areas. I've ministered with Syrian refugees. I've heard every story. I'm not naive.

And yet, I was, I've been surprised at how many Christian couples don't sleep in the same bed. And they blame it on snoring, on, on, on, I can't sleep as well. And I don't know. I mean, I, again, that's another conversation. But the point of it is how then, I mean, the whole point of marriage is to build intimacy, connectivity. The whole point of, why do single struggle? why did I struggle? Why have I, why do I struggle with my sex life? Because I think the lies to say, well, you're not, you're not a sex life. That was an aha moment for me in therapy. In the last five,

four years I've been going to a therapist started with when I left the church and felt such an emptiness in terms of understanding what had happened. And I think, and I think therapy is becoming more popular for a lot of reasons. And it's a good thing. By the way, I don't think it's bad. Just be careful who you choose for a therapist. It's going to impact the way that you think. But I think part of the reason why therapies become important is that we have lost that we used to have communities right but the church I mean look at the nuns no one's going to church people are deconstructing like I mean I know some statistics that people are coming back to church I don't think that's true because I know all my I have tons of friends who still believe the Bible still do Bible studies so listens to podcast they're listening to your show but they just like if they go to church it's just a mere like

we can't not go because our kids but you're like so you don't have a place at church anymore where you can sit with an older woman, let's say, and say, here's what I'm struggling with. They're very hard to find those relationships. And I can't just blame the church for it. I mean, this is a cultural thing. We're rushed. We have no margin. We can barely fit everything in. We barely have time for God, let alone other people. And so who do you talk to when you're hurting? I mean, how do you get through life if you don't have, if you're single, which 52% of the church is single? Think about that. 52% percent of our culture, the same statistics are in the church, outside of church. So everything is interrelated. So when you write a book about sex, you can't just be like, well, this is just a book about sex.

It's a book about everything. It's about what drives us to fill a void in our life, whether we do it by starting an affair with someone, whether we do it by indulging in same-sex thing. I mean, we'll start a whole other can of worms. I talk about same-sex attraction in the book. And I talk about it in that. I think there's a generation.

And by the way, and I have to be cautious in this, only in the reality of the world we're living in. And also my understanding of my, I have a lot of friends that are same-sex. They call themselves gay and lesbian. in the world that I, they're not Christians, they're in the world that I live in, in the ER world. And, you know, if you're in the world now,

you have a lot of people who are, I mean, this is the statistics in our world. So I want to be careful, but I believe with all my heart that there's a generation of Christians growing up, now claiming to be gay, who simply don't understand this battle with lust. I don't think that there's enough taught on that, in that. Think about it.

You've got, whatever, The average age that kids are watching porn is 11. 95% of 14-year-olds are watching porn. You can, and a woman in particular, studies show that you will be same-sex attracted if you watch porn. It's hormonal. Women are driven by story. I have not heard that. You can't, you're not gay.

I don't believe you're gay simply because you have a sexual thought towards another person of the same sex. This is what our culture has taught us. If you have a feeling of sin, what we call sin, it is your reality. It is your identity. Rosariya Butterfield was on your show recently. She's a good friend of mine. She talks a lot about that in her new book and explains it immensely well. But I think this idea that what is a freeing reality.

I just want to like stop right there that your feelings. And Christopher, you want to talks about this too. Yes. Your feelings. One way or the other. They're not your identity. Yes. They don't have to determine your reality.

They don't have to determine your future. If you're in Christ, that means your feelings do not own you. You're not a slave to them. Correct. And when you're in Christ and you're constantly struggling with whatever sin, but now we're talking in a context of sexual sin and let's say specifically with same sex, which we count as the worst, like Christians count as the worst. Although I don't know. Now it's a toss-up between trans treasurism.

You know, like whatever flavor of that. It used to be back in the 70s, it was divorced, right? I mean, it goes up and down. But now it's this. But when you're living in sin and you can't overcome it, because you haven't dug deep to understand why you keep going back to a pattern, it's easy to start to wonder, am I even a Christian? Why isn't God changing me?

You don't even have, you know, we talk about, you know, all of the, the era of when people were going, when people who had same-sex attraction in the church who were sent, conversion, what do you call it? Conversion therapy? Yeah. And the critique of it and then all of this discussion. That's what they call it anyway. But forget about the gay community.

Let's talk about, like, if you're straight. and like I am and you decide, Lord, I want to be holy. I don't want to, you know, masturbate or I don't want to watch this or do this or sleep with my boyfriend or girl. You know, whatever, you have these decisions and you pray and you ask God and you go to a small group and maybe you're even yours ahead of me. I didn't never felt comfortable talking about these things in small groups. I'm more of an introvert.

It just felt too much. But let's say you're not that person and you're the guy who constantly comes and says, okay, pray for me. I'm having sex with my, you know, with my fiancee and I want to stop because it's an honor. to God, but you keep falling, you keep falling, you keep falling. You know, it's like, it's so easy then to say, well, what can God do if you can't help me in this? Do you see where it can become a crisis of faith? So it just never surprised me that I wrote about sexuality after I wrote about deconstruction. Because I think, and by the way, many who have deconstructed have very shortly after their

deconstruction had some, let's call it, sexual skeleton in the closet. Now, they no longer call it a sexual skeleton because they deconstructed and they're no longer holding to a biblical or view, which takes me back to that thing, inerrancy, authority, sexual, you know, it's like it follows suit then. And, and even like, I mean, I've watched, you know, I mean, it's, you know, I grew up in the era, you know, I could staying goodbye, Joshua Harris, but you even watch him and his family and, and without, you know, reading between the lines too much, but you can even read between the lines. I read his wife's biography and, and it's clear that they have some, what Christians would consider skeletons in their closet. You, you

You can see that across the board. And I think it's dangerous when we change our view of who God is and what his word says to accommodate our struggle with understanding how to deal with difficult, especially sexual relationships in our lives. And that's what I think the church has done. And what I've tried to do is, A, use myself as an example because that's all I can account for is I know who I am and I know what I've struggled with.

And I've tried and I want to be God honoring. but if I can't, and it took me a long time in therapy before I was able to sit with my therapist to say, I'm really struggling with this. And even by the time she read the book, there were things I wrote about that I hadn't verbally said. It's easier to write about things. That's why people like the journal.

But I sometimes tell people, I know not everybody can afford to therapists. Just learn from me then. I paid the money. Learn because it's not rocket science. But you can't. I watched, by the way, I watched Glenn and Doyle do that, which was the leading voice,

which by the way, I would be, I would love to know the percentage of Bible believing, Protestant, conservative, fundamentalist, whatever you want to call them, people who follow her and love her. It's high. Oh, it is. We talk about Glenn in a good bit. I wrote about her a lot in my book, too, because of that. I've read it. But her most recent book, it's fascinating because she does what, I don't know if you can read

her book as a Christian, and I don't know that I picked up on it the first read. I read it again because I was writing on this topic. And I, by the way, I think she's a brilliant writer. Yeah, she's definitely compelling. And the more brilliant you are in communicating sometimes, the easier it is to try to kind of convey confidence. Yeah. Which is also like blind, like you have to be so discerning. But she talks about Eve and shame.

And she lods Eve for taking the fruit. She says, that's a sign of power. That's her inner Cheetah, whatever you want. The point of it is. And I'd say it. I mean, you see, but you see, but you. could point fingers at her and say, how did she come to that conclusion? That's the whole premise of the fall. That's what sets the story of scripture. You don't have to believe in Christ. Like it's not

mandatory. In fact, Jesus didn't just, he said, he told people often, do not go home and think about it. Like this is a big call. You cannot count the cost, count the cost. Are you going to be able to die daily? If not, like, you're not going to do it alone, but there has to be a weighing of what it means to follow Jesus. It will affect every part of your life. He's not a means to an end. He's not your secret to making, becoming a celebrity. He's not a person who helps you become an influencer. This has been the Achilles heel of every pastor. Is this lie that we've believed that we somehow are more valuable if we have more followers. And it builds on that. And so it's easy to point fingers at Glennon and say, well, how does she believe that? And we all have become guilty in someone

for former fashion and to some of us to more minor degrees and more major degrees of sort of doing the same thing where we just reinterpret scripture. And I do agree with you that we are doing it at a much more alarmingly fast rate in the last few years. And I think obviously social media some of it because you have this vortex where people voice opinions and then if you're popular and you're saying well, then it just takes a life of its own. And because I believe it's true that I think, I forget who, the guy who, there's a guy who wrote a book called Beholding. What's his name? Strayhan Coleman, I think he said it in one of his devotionals.

I think he's right that apathy is no longer our greatest evil in this culture. It's distraction. And what are we distracted? Why are Christians so weak anymore? Because you're not reading God's Word. And again, you go back to, well, God's word is not God. I experience them in nature. Well, no, you don't.

The word is what you just said. It's Logos. So how do you, can you discern truth from lies if you're not in the word of God? And so it's easy to think, well, he has 100,000 followers. You must know what he's talking about. Yeah. Right. And then you kind of go, and then meanwhile, you're living with all these skeletons in your closet kind of going.

I hope this doesn't come back to get me someday. But you never quite develop the intimate relationship that Jesus wants to have with you, to give you this fullness, this joy, this perspective of what matters in life. Yeah. Marriage is not our highest good. Marriage is good, but it's not the highest good. A good marital sex life is great, but that's not mandatory to be happy in life. There are many people who've never married, many who have had bad marriages who are utterly joyful and happy in life.

That's the other thing. We split the happiness is different than joy. Well, who wants to just be joyful? I want to be happy and joyful. I mean, we are so good at teasing that out. But ultimately, either Jesus is worth giving everything for or he's not. But we have in the United States a man-made religion called Christianity that puts me at the center and Jesus as my genie in the bottle. And we can say that that's all the prosperity people,

but really we do it in every level of Christianity. It's the American way. If I work hard enough, eventually I'll reap the fruit. And it might work, you know, when you see the immigrants who come from my place of birth and others, and why do people are trying to cross the border in the South? Because there is such, they're not trying to cross the border to Canada. Of course, they have to get through the U.S.,

but they could, I mean, they could find other countries. They're not going to Argentina. Why do they want to come here? Yeah. Because here we know that if you work hard and you, you know, try the best you can, you will reap a fruit eventually. It's true. You do. And that's not necessarily true in Christianity. Many have died young and unexplainable deaths and have suffered tremendously for the gospel. And I don't know why we think it wouldn't. Maybe our suffering for the

gospel, it may not be that we get put in jail or beat up, but maybe us is to be canceled. Why is that such a big deal? Yeah. Or to wait for something and to hope for something. that you don't receive in this life. Yeah. And by the way, that's the thing. You may not get canceled. At least if you're getting canceled, you go, well, it's worth it, right?

Because you go, well, I'm suffering for Jesus. It almost feels like the means are justifying the ends, you know. But what if nothing happens? What if you don't get married? And you never have sex. And you do divergent. Oh, my gosh.

How? What? You know, think about it. Like, it's like, but why? So now you go back to, well, why? Why do we constantly hunger? Why? Why are pastors falling?

Why? Look at the cherry fall of tobacco. I remember when I remember when I started during COVID I was listening to. There were so many podcasts about him. It's like, oh, my gosh. And now they say, well, now he says, I'm not really a Christian, maybe.

I don't know, is he is. I don't know, the junior guy. I hope he is. I hope that the Lord's at work in his life. I pray that he is. But that was so like, how did we become that? Yeah, we get hung up on that one thing. Yeah.

Gosh, there's so much more I could ask you. And so much more we could talk about. But we hit an hour. We're at an hour. Yes. Yes, yes, gosh, you had so much to say, and that was so great. Your book is don't tell anyone you're reading this, a Christian doctor's thoughts on sex, shame, and other troublesome issues. And we're going to link it in the description of this episode, and we'll have your social media handles and things like that so people can follow you. This is one that you're going to have to listen to twice, I think, to go back and to make sure that you hear all the points that she made so interesting. And I appreciate your perspective so much. Is there any last word that you want to. to give us. You know, I've been lately signing all my books, Jesus is worth it all. Honestly, if I had one last thing to say is that Jesus is indeed worth at all. If you want freedom,

you chase him. And you'll find that he's been waiting for you. He's the one chasing us. Yes, amen. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. Hey, this is Steve Deast. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this Steve Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.