Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 08:2 (Fall 2003)
Article: Cultural Commentary: Television Sex: Too Boring for Christians
Author: Russell D. Moore

CBMW 8:2 (Fall 03) p. 66

Cultural Commentary:
Television Sex: Too Boring for Christians1

Russell D. Moore

Assistant Professor of Christian Theology,
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Louisville, Kentucky

Never has network television been so explicitly sexualized. Never has television sex been so promoted and packaged for commercial consumption. And there is at least one reason why orthodox Christians should turn off the televisions — the sex is too boring for us.

Some NBC television executive thought he’d found the Holy Grail of Nielsen ratings. Since American culture is so sexualized, why not just organize a situation comedy around the gimmick of pushing the sexual envelope as far as possible, as many times as possible in a 22 minute segment. And so NBC advertised endlessly the new situation comedy Coupling highlighting the sexual vocabulary and bedroom scenes of the actors. This comedy might be decadent, and it might be inappropriate, but one would think that it would at least be sexy. Not according to USA Today television critic Robert Bianco. According to the newspaper, Coupling “tackles the subject of sex with all the single-minded fervor of a Soviet tractor documentary, and with just as much allure.” Much the same could be said of the rest of the vast wasteland of the flickering screen.

But it is not only this television season that has managed to make sex boring. Psychologists tell us that pornography addiction is an accelerating cycle of the addict trying to find a “high” in images more explicit than the ones he now considers “boring” and mundane. In fact, Slate magazine now reports that the fad in Japan is pornography without humans-computerized animated characters acting out the most violent and anti-social sexual fantasies with alien-like creatures. Why? Pornographic sex-of the human sort-has grown boring. The same trend extends even to the most sexualized of all demographic groups-teenagers. When I was in junior high school, a group of boys would laugh and wink while reading the King James Version of Song of Solomon. Now, just a few years later, boys like us stare blankly at the ceiling while comprehensive sex education teachers explain every conceivable detail of human anatomy and sex technique. It is just, well, boring.

This is where the church has an explanation-and a glorious alternative-that we have been too hesitant, or too ignorant, to reveal to the watching world. Evangelical Christians in particular have too often adopted the culture’s view of sex-and so evangelical Christians wind up with sex lives just as boring as that of our neighbors. And so we publish advice manuals on contorted techniques and marit...