A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [144]
8. See my discussion of the so-called Canaanite woman in Everything Must Change (Nashville, TN: Nelson, 2007), chap. 19.
9. See, for example, 2 Kings 20:18; Isa. 39:7; Esther 1:10; 2:3–15.
10. Ethiopia and Israel had strong connections going back to the liaison between King Solomon and the Ethiopian queen.
11. “No one who has a blemish shall draw near, one who is blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or one who has a broken foot or a broken hand, or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a blemish in his eyes or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles” (Lev. 21:18–20).
12. Speaking of the Jesus movement, a documentary about the Jesus movement in the United States tells a sad story, almost the mirror image of this one: David DiSabatino’s Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher (2008).
13. Margaret Talbot summarized an important 2007 study like this: “Last year, Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, published a startling book called Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers, and he is working on a follow-up that includes a section titled ‘Red Sex, Blue Sex.’ His findings are drawn from a national survey that Regnerus and his colleagues conducted of some thirty-four hundred thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds, and from a comprehensive government study of adolescent health known as Add Health. Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teenagers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teenagers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their ‘sexual début’—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier” (http://www.new yorker.com/reporting/2008/11/03/081103fa_fact_talbot?currentPage=all).
14. I’m not aware of any global data on this subject, but the positive correlation between Christian (as opposed to Muslim) affiliation and HIV/AIDS rates in Africa suggest that we may be dealing with a global Christian (and human and urban) problem, not just a Western Christian one.
15. African American Christians in the United States, for example, have some of the highest divorce rates and highest levels of opposition to homosexuality (http://www.wanderingheretic.com/2007/08/22/evangelical-divorcepremarital-sex-revisited/).
16. See Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993).
17. Thanks to Gareth Higgins, author of How Movies Helped Save My Soul (Orlando, FL: Relevant, 2003), for this important insight.
18. Baptist theologian Miguel A. De La Torre says it well in his groundbreaking new book A Lily Among the Thorns: “Neither the conservative nor the liberal view toward sex in the United States is adequate. Both are rooted in the hyperindividualist U.S. culture…. We need a new way of approaching Christian sexuality” ([San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007], p. xii).
19. Many Catholics would be surprised to learn that St. Thomas Aquinas actually defended the legalization of prostitution in his day. His line of reasoning