The Gospel According to Sex Ed
Photo by Jamez Picard on Unsplash
“How do I tell my parents I’m not a virgin?”
I read this question on an index card one Sunday evening in late September. I was standing with two other adults in the basement of my church, in a room filled with ugly couches, fidget toys, and a lone (but well-used) foosball table. We were debriefing our first sex education workshop and doing our best to decipher the responses –all in middle school handwriting – stuffed into our anonymous question box. Reading through the box we found this question: “How do I tell my parents I’m not a virgin?”
That was the first time I co-facilitated an Our Whole Lives workshop. Our Whole Lives (OWL) is a comprehensive sexuality education program centering values of self worth, sexual health, responsibility, justice, and inclusivity. The program’s curriculum intentionally includes topics excluded from traditional sex education classes including sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, consent, unintended pregnancy options, and safer sex. OWL is fact-based and age-appropriate, and emphasizes connections between curriculum topics and participants’ personal values.
Our Whole Lives is a secular program with optional faith-based components, co-created by the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association. I am facilitating this program in my role as a religious educator: I’m the Children, Youth, & Families Coordinator for Spirit of St. Stephen’s Catholic Community. Three of the four other facilitators, while not church staff, are active members of Christian congregations, while the fifth facilitator is not religious. Of the 19 youth in the cohort, I’d guess that approximately half attend church regularly and the other half do not attend church or are not religious.
The question I shared above, “How do I tell my parents I’m not a virgin?” was asked after the very first workshop. I can’t help but wonder: how long was this kid carrying this question around? Who else had they asked? Who else had they not asked? Was their sexual experience consensual or mutual? Do they want to tell their parents or do they feel that they have to tell their parents? Their question, so promptly dropped in our highly decorated Question Box, prompted many questions of my own.
In my intensive OWL facilitator training, my facilitators often said, “OWL is lifesaving work.” The first few times they said it I brushed it off – it felt like they were selling me something. But the further we got into the curriculum, and the more I thought about my own (lack of) sex education, I found myself starting to agree with them.
It’s medically lifesaving: we’re teaching these kids about contraception, STIs, and options for unintended pregnancy, all of which have long-term impacts on health, safety, and ultimately life expectancy.
It’s psychologically lifesaving: we’re celebrating, affirming, and taking seriously queer and trans identities, we’re using our youth’s (sometimes changing) pronouns, and we’re promoting healthy body image, all of which support good mental health and reduce suicidality.
It’s relationally lifesaving: our kids learn that these five adult facilitators are caring, supportive, and value their growth. Child psychology teaches us that when young people engage and trust multiple safe and healthy adults they are more likely to recover from Adverse Childhood Experiences and will have better medical, social, and economic outcomes.
One story, in particular, brings this home for me. One young person in our OWL cohort, an eighth grader, is processing some serious sexual violence while navigating their newfound trans identity. Shortly into our OWL cohort, this participant began exhibiting disruptive behaviors. Our facilitators had several conversations with them about their behavior, none of which went particularly well. One week, this participant didn’t come back.
We learned the next day that they missed OWL because they had been (re-)admitted to the psychiatric hospital. All five of us facilitators wrote them a card expressing our care and letting them know we missed them.
When the student returned to OWL, we gave them the card. While I hadn’t thought much of the card, they seemed genuinely surprised and really touched, albeit in an awkward 13-year-old kind of way, to receive it. I learned later from their mom that they kept that card in the very center of their bedroom floor, walking carefully around it and clearing a spot for it, making sure they could see it at all times. In addition, their mom told us, OWL was the only place they were going besides therapy. Every Sunday, she told me, her kid spent two hours getting ready for OWL. I was shocked. This kid, who cussed us out and threw pens at their classmates, was impacted so powerfully by us and by the OWL program? I’m a believer: comprehensive sex education is lifesaving work.
I believe, too, that comprehensive sex education is faithful work. In fact, at least some level of sex ed is required to understand important aspects of the Christian faith and Scriptures. We can’t understand the significance of Mary’s virginity or Jesus’ divine conception if we don’t know what virginity is or how pregnancy usually begins. We can’t understand the significance of Sara’s or Elizabeth’s geriatric pregnancies if we don’t have an understanding of menopause. We can’t understand the significance of circumcision – a major topic of both the Hebrew Bible and the Epistles – if we don’t know what a foreskin is or how it is connected to the rest of a penis. In a pretty basic sense, sex education is religious education.
But beyond the basics, comprehensive sex education is faithful work because it is the Gospel; it is the good news. It’s good news that we all deserve respectful, consensual, enjoyable sexual experiences – if we want sexual experiences at all. It’s good news that we are created queer and trans and aromantic, all holy and whole identities. It’s good news for everyone, created in God’s image. It’s good news that our bodies are good and sacred at any size and in any shape, no matter what people on the internet try to sell us. This – comprehensive sexuality education – is good news, for all of us, and maybe especially for our youth.
My experience teaching sex education to middle schoolers isn’t all goosebumps and theology. It is, in large part, complaints about what we are (and aren’t) offering for snack, hard-hitting questions like “is lava wet?”, kids stubbornly overheating in pink fleece snuggies, a shocking number of broken rubix cubes, and, perhaps most middle school of all, the desire to have an end-of-year celebratory ice cream cake featuring a photo of one of our facilitators surrounded by Pride flags.
Especially right now, with the massive disruption of years of COVID, as churches face shrinking populations of children, youth, and families, sex education is not only faith formation but also evangelization. I’m not saying I’m trying to grow our congregation by pressuring our non-religious OWL families to join – although I certainly wouldn’t turn them away. Rather, I’m saying that everything worth keeping about our faith, everything inclusive and nourishing and curious, everything true and refreshing and full, is reflected in good, comprehensive sex education. It is a gift to draw on the resources of our churches, so rich in values, rituals, and relationships, and to share those resources in the form of sex education with the young people and parents who so urgently seek them.
Maybe that is the best news of all: that we, churches, are able, are equipped, and are ready – or can quickly become so – to offer relevant, engaging, and truly lifesaving resources to our wider communities. Comprehensive sexuality education IS Good News. Are we ready to share it?
