Theology in the Raw - S9 Ep924: Sexual Abuse, Sexual Brokenness, and the Gospel: Jay Stringer

Episode Date: December 2, 2021

Jay Stringer is is a therapist, author, and speaker who guides men and women to outgrow unwanted sexual behaviors. He’s the author of Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing, a book that is based on Stringer’s groundbreaking research on over 3,800 men and women addressing the key drivers of unwanted sexual behavior, be that the use of pornography, infidelity, or buying sex. If you want to find freedom from sexual brokenness, it begins by identifying the unique reasons that bring you to it. In this episode, Jay and I talk about the source of sexual brokenness--what causes people to watch porn or have an affiar. There are deeper, more complex, issues at work, and until those issues are addressed, we’ll only be putting out the the fires of behavior management. We also talk about the prevalence of sexual abuse--nearly ⅓ of people have been sexually abused and most have not healed from this trauma in healthy ways. This is a huge discipleship issue. And then you have the perpetrators of this sin--perhaps 5-10% of the people we preach to each week are the abusers. Have you ever thought about this? (The ⅓ have...probably every week.) Theology in the Raw Conference - Exiles in Babylon At the Theology in the Raw conference, we will be challenged to think like exiles about race, sexuality, gender, critical race theory, hell, transgender identities, climate change, creation care, American politics, and what it means to love your democratic or republican neighbor as yourself. Different views will be presented. No question is off limits. No political party will be praised. Everyone will be challenged to think. And Jesus will be upheld as supreme. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out Dr. Sprinkle’s website prestonsprinkle.com Stay Up to Date with the Podcast Twitter | @RawTheology Instagram | @TheologyintheRaw If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

This episode is sponsored by the InterVarsity Press Book Drop. The IVP Book Drop is a monthly book club perfect for readers who want to grow spiritually and hear from a diverse range of voices addressing today's most important cultural topics. Okay, so for $10 a month, you get one book sent to you every month, and that includes shipping. They start you off with Esau Macaulay's best-selling book, Reading While Black, and then on the second Monday of every month, a new book will be sent to you. Books written by emerging voices and by well-known figures who are diverse in both ethnicity and gender. I love InterVarsity Press.

They always publish books that are intellectually responsible and yet very readable as well. Many of my guests on Theology in the Raw have published with IVP. So Lamar Hardwick, Sandy Richter, Laurie Krieg, George Ancy, Tish Harrison-Warren, and, and, Preston Sprinkle. You may not know that. Anyway, it's super easy to sign up. Just go to IVPress.com forward slash T-I-T-R. That's IVPress.com forward slash T-I-T-R. Hello, Theology in the Raw listeners.

As you may have noticed, I have finally begun to host various sponsors on this podcast. You know, you've heard some ads that I've given, and I want you to know that I simply will not, I refuse to endorse any kind of product, book, organization that I actually don't believe in. And, you know, we get offers to sponsor all kinds of stuff and we heavily screen everything that comes our way. It has to be something that I believe in. And there's a lot of great stuff out there. So I hope this will be helpful for you as you are thinking about various resources, organizations, programs, or whatever. I will only talk about things that I personally believe in. Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. If you have not signed

up for the Theology in the Raw Exiles in Babylon conference yet, then you need to do so ASAP. Spots are filling up very quickly, much quicker than we had originally anticipated. All the info is at pressandsprinkle.com. And yeah, the conference is March 31st to April 2nd. We're going to be talking about race, politics, sexuality, gender, women, and hell, and lots of interesting topics, and we have an amazing lineup of speakers. I cannot wait for this conference. If you would like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw. Support the show for as little as five bucks a month. That's patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw. My guest today is Jay Stringer, who is a therapist, author, and a speaker who guides men and women to outgrow

unwanted sexual behaviors. He's the author of the highly acclaimed book, Unwanted, How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing. Please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only Jay Stringer. Hi, friends. I'm back here with Jay Stringer. I met Jay a couple years ago. Jay, it's good for you to be on the podcast. I've been wanting to have you on for a long time. I mean, ever since your book came out, we got to hang out for a little bit here in Boise. And man, the work you do is just absolutely insane. I mean, it's incredible. Dan Allender, who I mean, I just read that. I guess I read this when the book came out. But he said – and most people know Dan Allender. I mean, he's like the guru of like counseling on sexual brokenness, it seems like.

And he said, your book is without rival the best book on broken sexuality I've ever read. That's a pretty high praise, man. Yeah, I was taken aback by that one too. I was like, did I just read that? Did he write that? That's – man that that's awesome and i mean it's uh it was uh the outreach magazine resource of the year every time i look on amazon which isn't a lot but you know our books kind of overlap a little bit and i'm like dude you're

killing your book is always like i mean it's selling like crazy. Probably better than it has even when it first came out, I would imagine. Yeah, that's been the surprise. It never took off, but it's remained really consistent for the last three, four years. So my publisher has just constantly said they are so pleased with where it's at and just the momentum that it's continued. momentum that it's continued. So I want to let's begin because the subtitle of the book says, you know, your book is based on groundbreaking research on over 3,800 men and women addressing key drivers of unwanted sexual behavior. Can you unpack that study a bit, like explain what this research was? And then I'm sure that'll raise several other questions we can chase down. Yes. I mean, just first off, I want to say thank you for having me

on. It's an honor to be on your podcast and just looking forward to our conversation. So, I mean, I think part of what I would say with regard to the need for research in this area is, I mean, you know this well, that the primary way that Christians tend to address unwanted sexual behavior, which I just define as the use of porn, extramarital affairs, the use of prostitution, is that we have kind of defaulted to just what I refer to as a lust management system. And so that's the bounce your eyes when you're having an inappropriate thought, slap a rubber band around your wrist, get some internet monitoring on your computer if you're continuing to struggle. But as my youth pastor said to me, I had a conversation with him when I was writing this

book, and he said, Jay, when I've been having the same conversation with my accountability partner for 15 years, just something isn't working. So that's the very kind of conservative side. The more progressive side tends to be kind of shame management, right? So the main issue here is if we could just reduce the shame and stigma associated with people's sexual choices, then we're going to lead people into liberation. And all I can say is just, you know, after counseling a lot of people in this realm, that doesn tend to work and so a lot of the approach with regard to my book was I wanted to create something of a third way that instead of overly excusing or overly pathologizing unwanted sexual behaviors I wanted to say like what can we actually learn from these behaviors? So there's a French psychoanalyst

by the name of Lacan. And for Lacan, Lacan would say that everybody has a symptom. And he does this wordplay in French where essentially the symptom is saint homme, which in the French, I'm probably butchering it, but it essentially means holy prophet or holy man. And so for Lacan, every symptom, every behavior that is unwanted is actually a holy prophet that's trying to get your attention. So if I have anxiety or depression, you know, we live in a day that we want to reduce and mitigate depression. So we have medication management, we have, you know, therapy. But what if we looked at depression, not as something that needs to be managed, but as a form of communication that's trying to get our attention about something sad

that we have been through something of just a lot of heartache that we never had words or community to process. And so that sense of behavior is communication. And so long way of saying, you know, with regard to my book is I did a original research study and got about 4,000 men and women to contribute. And we asked just a lot of questions about people's family of origin, their relationship with their mothers, their fathers, about people's family of origin, their relationship with their mothers, their fathers, adverse childhood experiences like sexual abuse, bullying. And then we wanted to know how does the past from someone's sexual behavior, so whether they look at porn, they pursue affairs. And then we asked some even more invasive questions around something

that is just known as the sexual arousal template. And so essentially, like when you go to Google, and you look at porn, what are the websites? What are the themes and pornography that people actually pursue? Or if you had an affair, did it make a difference whether that affair partner was more anonymous or someone that you knew? And so I had a team at New York University handle all the analytics associated with it. And it was remarkable. You know, the thesis that I would kind of articulate is that unwanted sexual behavior could be both shaped and predicted based in the parts of our story that remained unaddressed. And so the, you know, the bell that I keep ringing with regard to this research is

that unwanted sexual behavior is not this life sentence to sexual shame or addiction. It's a roadmap to healing. And so that was the importance of the research is that we actually can kind of begin to see that our family of origin, our past trauma actually shapes and predicts unwanted sexual behavior. And so I think the way that we need to change talking about this is this is not something to be managed, but this is something that we need to listen, we need to study. And this form of sexual brokenness actually provides clues into the healing that God desires for our lives. So unwanted sexual behavior is kind of the symptom of something deeper going on inside. So if all you do is manage that behavior, you're not addressing the core root issue. Is that a simplistic way of summarizing?

Yeah, very well said. What kind of patterns did you find in the study? I don't know if that's the right question, but were there some patterns that you saw coming up often with people that maybe have been sexually abused or even male-female patterns of difference? Yes. Yeah. Let me give you just a couple big statistics. So we found that this was only true for men, men that had a lack of purpose in their life, meaning they looked back at their life and saw a lot of failure. They didn't quite know where to go with their careers. in life. When a man was struggling with a lack of purpose, he was seven times more likely to increase his use of pornography compared to those who did not struggle with porn. In the sexual abuse category, we found that the most significant users of pornography, so we used a Likert scale of zero to five, and those that answered five on the scale of the extent of pornography use had sexual abuse scores that were nearly 24% higher than those who, you know kind of with trauma and sexual abuse, that will set a template that will shape the trajectory of your entire sexual story. And so just that need of,

you know, just if you've found yourself, you know, struggling with unwanted sexual behavior, but have never addressed kind of that past sexual abuse, I think that's just a clarion call to be able to grieve, to be able to make sense of how did my sexual story become something that was just infused with shame and kind of marred with abuse from a very early age. Another category that I found really fascinating was we looked at, you know, just like classic porn preferences. So let's say that you were a man who looked at pornography that involves someone younger than you, maybe teen or college age porn preferences, or maybe a race that suggested to you some level of subservience. That arousal template could actually be predicted based on three categories. Those people tended to have a very strict father.

They were dealing with a lack of purpose in life, and they had very high levels of shame. And so just basic armchair psychology is that, let's say if you grew up around a father who was very authoritative, very domineering, up around a father who was very authoritative, very domineering. A lot of the core experience of that is you feel a level of powerlessness in your day-to-day experience. And then you end up in a job that you don't really like, a career that you feel like is a dead end. And you're constantly feeling like, I feel so powerless in life. I can't make anything happen. And why is the world of pornography so appealing to those men? Well, it gives you a place where you don't have to fail. You can get exactly what you want. You can establish power, at least in your fantasy, over another human being. And so just again, that clarion call to be able to say, if I'm struggling with something, I need to look

at what is the root cause that's actually driving me to pursue this type of sexual fantasy. And so I think that's the invitation is, you know, how is my present unwanted sexual behavior trying to get my attention about some unresolved pain and difficulties that I'm experiencing? I'm curious. First of all, it's fascinating. I don't know if that's the right word. I mean curious. First of all, that's fascinating. I don't know if that's the right word. I mean, it's a little disturbing and sad because that's like, I mean,

porn itself is disturbing, but if there's also another layer of somebody that has kind of an unhealthy view of power wanting to be in a situation where they have power over another human being or watch another person typically a man dominate another woman like that's there's just layers there that need to be unraveled right i mean that's but but that but identifying that yeah encourage you know it's like wow so there's there's a core thing here that if you address could be the key to freeing people from enslavement.

And have you seen success? What does success look like in your works? I mean, you deal with people all the time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think you put it well, Professor. of you know the porn industry which so often i think 88 percent of all uh popular porn films that have been analyzed have some degree of violence against a human uh and so that level of some of all the research that's been done on like mainstream pornography that sense of you know

the confluence of that level of violence predominantly against women with the confluence of our own personal trauma histories. To me, that's so disturbing. It makes me both want to like scream and rage and also just kind of grieve of, you know, this confluence of trauma, early childhood trauma and violence against other human beings is just such a tragic combination. And so, you know, a lot of the work that I do with men and women and my intensives and kind of counseling is to really invite them to understand, like, what is the story that they are living out of with regard to their unwanted behavior. And so I think a lot about Jesus's words in Matthew 5, 4, of blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. What I find with a lot of people is that they're always asking for forgiveness of their sins, but they have never, very rarely do they ever ask for a level of comfort for the sins that have been done against them. And just as a general rule, it's almost always easier to

face your own sin than it is to begin to study the patterns and the ways that sin has been used against you. And so that's the importance of this work is that if you don't build a bridge between your present unwanted sexual behavior and your past trauma, you are going to continue to fight the same battle without really understanding the core war that you're in. And so, you know, what we learned from a lot of research that's been done in this realm is that, you know, people who struggle with unwanted sexual behaviors tend to come from two types of family systems, either like a very rigid family or a very disengaged family. And so a rigid family basically has a lot of rules, lots of regulations, just kind of that sense of like your family name might mean something in your town. And so you need to be able to just kind of keep

up the appearances. You don't really feel like you are free. If you get a bad grade, if you act out in any way, you're going to get some level of shame. It could be a level of corporal punishment. And so what I always say about kind of rigid family homes is that creates kind of just fertile territory for anger to emerge in the life of someone. And then the other family system is a disengaged family. And so that's that sense of, you know, when care is overlooked, that if you think back to, for me, I think of middle school as just a prototype of hell. Just when I think about my own bullying, when I think about the nicknames that were given to me. But just that sense of when you came home from school, did you have a mother, a father, a caregiver that was actually attuned to some of the heartache in your life? Or did you just kind

of learn, I am mostly on my own when it comes to things that are difficult. And so what I say about kind of disengaged family homes is that creates fertile territory for lust to emerge because you realize that intimacy, connection are not going to be found within the family system. You're going to need to leave it in order to go and find it. And so when I think about kind of the role of porn and affairs, like what do they promise? Well, they appeal to people who have unaddressed lust and anger, right? And so that sense of what does porn offer?

Come unto me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Well, what does Jesus offer? Essentially the same thing. Come unto me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. But simultaneously, one of the things that we really need to begin articulating is that one of the reasons why we pursue porn is because it gives us a place to be able to play out some unaddressed anger in our lives. So whether we are angry with our spouse, whether we are angry with the current president, whether we are angry with some childhood trauma that we have been through, part of the appeal to porn is that I can reduce another human being to be subservient to me,

wherein the rest of my life, I really don't have that power. But I think what is, you know, what does Jesus also offer? You know, he says, when you come to me, you bring your anger, you bring your unaddressed trauma, you bring that level of curse that you feel like you're under. And I have nailed it to the cross. And so there is no pain, there's no trauma, There's no curse that has not been fully addressed within the atonement. And so I think that's really, you know, I think porn and Jesus both deeply appeal to the human heart. And I think that's what Jesus is inviting us into is that we have hearts that are full of adultery. We also have hearts that are full of murder. also have hearts that are full of murder. And I think that's the big question of our age is where are you going to go with adulterous hearts, with murderous hearts, with a lot of trauma that has

never been addressed. And so to me, that's just the thing that I keep coming back to with regard to the gospel is that it allows me to bring my heartache, and it also allows me to bring a lot of the anger, a lot of the rage that I don't know what to do with in life. I've got so many questions as you're talking, but one of the... I'm curious about percentages. I've heard some really startling percentages of people who have been through some kind of sexual abuse situation, something like 20 to 30%. Is that of maybe women? I think it's a little lower for men, but do you maybe in your study or just in general, like, is it that high or? Yeah, it is that high. Yeah. I mean, I think depending on the research that you're looking

at, it can be about one in three women, one in four women will have some experience of the sexual assault, sexual abuse by the time they reach 18. And some of the stats for men kind of range between one in six to one in 10. Those are a lot of the classic paper and pencil tests with regard to, you know, did anyone, you know, have sex with you without your consent? Were you ever touched? And so a lot of the, you know, when you begin, let me back up by just saying like a lot of the, you know, a lot of the studies that have been done in this realm do not always include something like the introduction of pornography. Right. And so, you know, when you are a young child, did you give your consent to wanting to see porn? someone touched them, the way that someone made a passive comment about their particular body that they have lived with day in and day out. Yeah. So Preston, can I pause that for a second? Sure. Or is this live? I just, I was not articulating. No, that's fine. That's fine. No, no, it's just a conversation. Can I go back to the beginning?

Yeah. Well, I think you're on the right. The beginning of sexual abuse. No, I think you're hitting it on the head, really. I mean, just understanding what abuse, just the whole concept of abuse. That's what I was going to do. Yeah. So yeah, maybe unpack that. Can I go back to that? When you talk about abuse, what we classify as abuse. When you talk about abuse, what would classify as abuse?

Yeah. So, you know, when we think about sexual abuse, at least when I was growing up, whenever I heard that phrase, the image that came up was like, you know, some who have experienced sexual abuse are abused by someone in a relationship of trust to their family. Wow. And so that's more than likely that's a neighbor, a mother, a father, a babysitter. And so trust is always the paradoxical foundation of abuse. And so what ends up happening, I think this is the importance of the research that's been done with regard to rigid and disengaged families, is that about 77% of people struggling with unwanted sexual behavior report coming from a family that was very rigid. 87% of people struggling with unwanted sexual

behavior come from a very disengaged family. And so just that sense of, you know, when an abuser is first beginning to interact with their victim, they're not just going right to genital abuse. What they're doing is they want that person to be seen. They want them to kind of feel like they are understood. And so they might kind of make, you know, just a sense of the amount of clients that have talked to me about like, you know, my babysitter brought over a Nintendo or let me watch MTV when my family would never allow it. And just that sense of like, they were able, their abuser was able to read the family system well, and they began to offer them experiences of connection, of delight, of being able to experience things that they had never experienced before. someone is like a level of oxytocin, which is bonding. And so when you're first in that experience, someone who wants to play with you, someone who wants to show you attention that you are hungry for, everything in your body says, yes, yes, yes, yes. Everything about this is so lovely. It's so good. It's so good to be able to have water in the desert that I have been growing up within. But then as the

abuse begins to continue, they might introduce you to porn. They might begin to introduce you to a body part that you have never seen before. And so every abuser is fundamentally working for the pleasure of the person that they're abusing. And that's really often hard for people to understand because we think of abuse as just this egregious act, which it is. But that grooming process that I think has become more popularized, that's really that sense of we want to give that person an experience of pleasure, an experience of delight, an experience of attunement that they're really, really hungry for. And then you begin to feel a level of dopamine. You feel pleasure. You feel motivation for that.

And then the abuser, after they have shown you this, have begun to kind of increase the level of abuse against you. They might ask for your secrecy. They might say, this is just our secret. Don't tell anyone. Or they might make an overt threat that if anyone finds out about what we've been doing, it's the end of your family. It's the end of your reputation, something along those lines. And then the aftermath of all that you experience, you feel a lot of shame and a lot of numbness with regard to that. And so abuse just creates that really tragic cocktail of, I experienced oxytocin and connection with someone. I'm also experiencing a level of pleasure, but then I also have cortisol, adrenaline, neuroadrenaline going through my system. And that's really the tragedy that happens within childhood sexual abuse is that your sexual template just becomes infused with

a desire for connection, desire for pleasure, but also stress and cortisol and shame. And so if that's your childhood template of sex, well, as an adult, you're not going to feel terribly alive unless you're remixing a particular behavior that allows you to feel all those original neurochemicals. And so that's the madness of abuse is that it creates a template that we keep trying to repeat and reenact without any understanding that that's what we're actually doing. Here's what's disturbing to me is, I mean, if you take those percentages, that's a good portion of the population. Like I'm just, okay, here, let's just say I'm a pastor. I'm pastoring a thousand people. I'm looking out at my congregation. So we're saying like, let's just say a third of the people I'm preaching to have been through all the stuff you're talking about. And I love how you unpack just the complexity of it all. Is it a really small percentage of that third that has actually dealt with all this and healed as much as they can in a

healthy way? Like, would you say that's a, most people are walking around with this kind of trauma just in their bodies, like, and they're just somehow getting through life? I mean, is that, that's shocking. I mean, there's an urgency here. Like, how can I preach another sermon on anything but this? You know, like, because I mean, do your devotion, read the Bible and let's do all these things we're supposed to do as disciples. And yet there's like, there's, how do I say? I mean, there's like a cog in the engine of discipleship that's just going to prevent us from flourishing as Christians if we don't first deal with this really horrific thing that so many people have dealt with. And then here's another question that I have. And I've never heard anybody actually talk about this.

Okay, one third. What about all the oppressors? That's a high percentage. Let's just say the average person has abused three different people, so maybe that brings the percentage down to maybe 8-10%. So as I look out at my 1,000 people in the congregation, I'm looking at 50-100 abusers? Well, no, they're not the church.

Of course they're the church. They're probably more... Help me get my mind... Am I even thinking along the right path here? Because that's – No, I just need to preach it louder. I mean absolutely. Yeah, I mean you're articulating something that I wish every seminary would address. Every pastoral training would begin to engage.

every pastoral training would begin to engage. I mean, I lead a training program for pastors and therapists, just kind of that union notion that no leader can take anyone further than they have been themselves. And it's disturbing how few experiences any seminarians have with regard to processing their own sexual story or knowing how to address sexual abuse within people in their congregations. So I think everything that you said just needs to be, you know, rewinded, you know, 15, 20 seconds, and then just keep playing that three or four times until you can feel the urgency and the anger of what in the world are we doing? If there's that much trauma, that much heartache in our congregations, how are we not addressing that? And so that could be an unwanted sexual behavior like porn,

but also something that's known as hypoactive sexual arousal. So just a sense of like, I don't feel like I can have any sexual arousal, or I feel like I look at my marriage and I can't find any desire for my partner. I mean, I think that there's very clear marital dynamics that need to be worked through first. But a lot of times that can be a response to childhood sexual abuse, right? So if I experienced a level of pleasure and desire for my abuser, which is so often the case, so many of my clients say my abuser was a better leader, was a better attuned caregiver than anyone that I have ever met. I mean,

they knew how to read me well. And so then that sense of like my desire for my abuser, my desire for sex or to be touched, betrayed me. And so that must mean that my desire and my body are bad, which then sets up so much debris around making sexual choices in the future because you live with something of a civil war of desire within your own body. And so I think that's, you know, it's wreaking havoc within marriages, within pornography use and why people are driven to those things. And so, you know, I think about, you know, like a passage like 2 Samuel 13, the rape of Tamar, needs to be preached in terms of what happens within a family system and how do family systems promote a cover-up. Or just even like Genesis 16, where Hagar is basically mistreated by Sarai. Some scholars would say that that is definitely an assault, but it could even be a form of a sexual assault that's perpetrated against Hagar. So there's an assault that happens in the first family of our faith, and this teenage Egyptian slave ends up in the wilderness, and that's where

God shows up to ask her questions, right? Like, where do you come from? And where are you going? And so I think that's what we need to be able to do within the church is to provide categories for those two questions to emerge for people. Like, where do you come from in life? Like, yeah, sure, you were born in Seattle or New York City. Sure, your dad was a pastor or, you know, your dad was in the military, but like, where are you actually from? What are the stories that have shaped the trajectory of your life? And where is it that you want to go with this one wild, beautiful life that you've been given? And so, yeah, I would love to be trained and equip people for just the sexual brokenness that exists within our congregations.

I mean, you're a professional. This is what you do. I would imagine there's not a whole lot of J-stringers out there waiting to be called upon in our churches. Like part of me is almost nervous. Like there's probably a lot of pastors listening. They're like, where do I begin? Like, I'm not,

this isn't, I'm nervous about, you know, like saying something that I don't know what I'm talking about or like, how do I even take the next step? I mean, what, what would that next step be if there is a pastor saying, oh my gosh,

like this is an area of discipleship that I haven't even really thought too deeply about what, what would be the next step? I mean, well, I think we need to go upstream on the issue and we need to kind of understand that we do not understand sex as one of the primary places of discipleship in our life. And so we don't have, you know, a good theology of sex.

So, I mean, I think of when I think of like a seven word theology of sex would be like, God loves sex and God loves you. And if we can kind of understand that God is the author and the designer of all sexual pleasure, I mean, God designed the penis, the clitoris, which for the clitoris has essentially no other purpose except for sexual pleasure. clitoris has essentially no other purpose except for sexual pleasure. Why did God do that? Well, God cares about pleasure, but we come from so much church history that basically makes sex something that is wrong, that is bad, especially sexual pleasure for the sake of pleasure and arousal as something that is just very taboo. And so I think part of what we need to understand is that,

you know, God has created sex to be one of the primary places where we begin to understand just how committed God is to our pleasure, to our salvation. And if we can understand that sexual, our sexuality, our sexual arousal is just a place that we really need to be able to understand God's presence, God's kindness in our lives. I just don't think that we see it as a place of spiritual formation. I don't think we see it as something that we can thank God for the gift of our sexuality. I think we usually see it as something that's wrong, something pathological. And so, you know, a lot of times when it comes to Christians addressing sex, I kind of compare it to trying to learn how to cook. But instead of

teaching people how to cook and how to enjoy food, we just teach them about food poisoning in terms of you could die from salmonella, you could die from this. But we don't create any imagination around what is good God is, again, the author and the designer of sex and sexuality, and therefore is fully aware of the power and the passion and even some of the dread that can accompany sexuality. So I think if we can begin to kind of think about what are the books, what are the studies, what are the teachings? What can we say from the pulpit? What can we say within small groups? How can we not make sexuality just a basement issue for people that struggle with addiction, but really invite people to an imagination around why has God created sex? And what is sex really intended to offer us? Do you have a favorite resource, like a book that articulates a Christian vision for sexuality, like sexual flourishing or however you want to put it? Any of Preston Sprinkle's books.

I mean, Julie Slattery is the one that kind of coined that phrase, at least the one that I first heard it from her in terms of, you know, sex as an area of discipleship. So her book, Rethinking Sexuality, is a really good place to start. And I recently had a conversation with a pastor around this for their church. And part of what he said is that we're going to read Julie Slattery's book, uh, you know, for the first three, four months. And we're just going to be processing that within small groups is to kind of get a vision of what is sex and sexuality all about. And then we're going to move to my book unwanted to be able to address like, how does broken sexuality function and how can we understand the brokenness in our lives as this roadmap to healing? And so I think we just, we need to begin talking about it

a lot more frequently, just both in terms of what is good and holy and beautiful about sex. And because evil cannot destroy the glory of God, it goes after that which most reflects God's glory, which is you and I and our sexuality. And so I think we need to be able to have a context and a framework to begin to work through how has evil sought to steal, to kill, to destroy something of what God has made very good with regard to sex. made very good with regard to sex. That's good. It's actually on my list.

I've got several book ideas. I always say, probably like you, I have several book ideas and not enough time. I think having a book that combines all this practical stuff we're talking about with some really robust theological backbone, with a up-to-date cultural awareness like usually books do one at one or the other you know like i'm looking at my book you know stanley grins sexual ethics or the meaning of sex or you know there's these kind of more academic stuff that yeah grins is so good yeah it's so good yeah but i but hard i don't yeah it's it's i don't know it's it's it needs some like you know updating some you know more like uh maybe more conversational language frankness you know um and then some of the other ones that are more popular level i'm like oh man

but there's a lot going on in genesis 2 that needs to be kind of defended and unpacked you know and and so i don't know that that would be something on my to-do list to kind of get like like a a guide for sexual flourishing for you know the 21st century or something like that i don't know uh anyway i i know you're sure you're we're almost out of time here i i do want to ask a question about pedophilia um because it seems like for lack of better terms aberrant sexual behavior you know we'll take porn you know you have like just normal you have like you know let's just go all the way back like playboy and then like normal porn where it's kind of like you know not normal porn but you know it's like then that moves to more you

know violent and domination and bdsm stuff and then it seems like that can lead to – it just like it keeps leading to more and more aberrations of God's design for sex. And pedophilia would be, I guess, in that category. Are you seeing an increase in pedophiliac desires, I guess, or whatever, given just how porn and hentai porn and other things are just kind of like, so just not slowing down. Yeah, yeah. I mean, when you think about I mean, just even what you just referenced with regard to hentai porn, this was like a surprise to me. Hentai porn was the number two search for term at least a year ago, two years ago. And, you know, if you're not familiar with it, it's, you know, Japanese anime type porn. And the theme there is kind of sexy innocence.

And so they want to kind of create almost childlike figures, but that have adult body parts. And so just that sense of the, you know, the, you know, we want to be able to see more and more innocence. We want to see something degraded there. And so I think any time you have just, that's been a lot of the crackdowns on Pornhub and a lot of the major is that there is no age verification on those sites. There's no consent with so much of what actually goes up onto the internet. And so for a lot of people, you just don't know what you're looking at. And that's so much, I mean, you named it really well. Sometimes within compulsive behavior,

the compulsion of yesterday is not the same as the compulsion of tomorrow. I need more. So it may have been okay to see someone that was a teenager or a college student, but I actually need to keep pushing it in order to see someone even younger violated at an even deeper level. And so I think that's, I mean, I think it's a huge category for our culture to begin to step into is that, you know, I think that this is part

of the sexual revolution is that we've once idealized the body. We've wanted to liberate it. And I think anytime you move from any level of idealization psychologically, what is going to follow next is some level of devaluing of the body, devaluing of what is sacred, what is good. And so just, I forget who originally said it, but there are no sacred and secular places. There's only sacred and desecrated. And so I think that that's so much of what's happening within our society is that we are desecrating innocence. We are desecrating beauty for our own perversions. And so I don't work with people struggling with pedophilia or those who have been arrested for it. There's usually kind of court-ordered treatment for people who struggle with that

and have been caught doing so. But I can tell you, I would say just good men and women are working through with regard to, you know, I saw something, I had a dream about this, or even when I was holding my daughter in my lap, just kind of sexual thoughts that began to enter in that I wanted no place of, but I didn't know what to do with them. And so I think those are just some of, you know, what's really important in our world today is that we have places to be able to talk through the sexual desires, the sexual arousals that don't make sense to us. And that's, you know, just part of the tension that we feel is that we don't want to ever normalize something that is tragic, that is

degrading, but we also need to create communities where people can process through, you know, a desire for an affair, a desire or something that they saw on the internet that they don't know how to necessarily walk through. And so I think that's part of the tension of how do we create communities where people are able to process some of the heartache and difficulties that they've been through. Real quick, a couple more minutes. Linda, you got to go. Can you just tell us just briefly about your three-day intensives or if people want more coaching training through you?

What do you do? How can people get a hold of you? So I run a training program for leaders just to basically do this work, to get into their own sexual story so that they are more equipped to be able to lead others through this area. So I run that. It's called an unwanted guide training. I also do individual intensives for men and women struggling with unwanted sexual behavior, hypoarousal, or betrayal trauma,

and then have a lot of resources, whether that's a workbook, an online course, an assessment to really help people get a sense of what is the why that's driving their behavior. So yeah, something for everybody, depending on where you are in this journey. And it's j-stringer.com is that where everything's at okay yeah it is the the other j stringer that is out there is a british uh crime

fiction novelist who beat you know published his books before okay i was around and so he he has all the websites uh for j stringer. So people have asked me, are you writing crime fiction now? Yes, I am. No, but we should team up. A guy who writes about sex and sexual brokenness and crime fiction. Yeah, you should combine the two. I think we need to co-author a book with Jay Stringer and Jay Stringer just to really confuse people. Well, Jay, again, the book is unwanted.

I would just highly recommend everybody, really, anybody out there listening needs to read this book. And then check out Jay's website with all these other – I'm on it right now, and you've got a lot of – you've got blogs, you have talks, you have all kinds of stuff here. So thanks so much, Jay, for coming on. Man, if you ever want to come back on again, we have so much more to talk about. So just let me know.

We should do it again. I know you're a busy guy, but I mean, yeah, there's... No, let's do it. Okay. Sounds good. All right. No, it would be great to connect again. And I mean, I just, I so appreciate you hosting this conversation and just, I mean, the connections that you're making around, I mean, just basic math and percentages and that application around what does this mean for the church? And, you know, I think it's just, there's so many things that we just accept as commonplace. But for you to kind of sound the alarm and just do the percentages, I mean, seeing a congregation of a thousand people and imagining 300 people today, uh, just disturbed me. And it,

it, it quickens me to be able to want to do more work and yeah, really enter these themes, these stories and these dynamics that we need to enter. So appreciate you. Well, thanks for taking the lead on this, man.

It's not an easy conversation. And yeah, I just wish we could multiply you times a thousand and stuff you in every church around the country but um yeah in the meantime pick up jay's book check it out and go from there check out the book all right man hey thanks for coming on the show appreciate it yeah bye Yep. Bye-bye.