Why do so many American churches fail to retain their youth? It’s a natural question to ask when many denominations’ demographics begin to resemble those of a nursing home. Looking at my own LCMS, in the past 20 years, our weekly attendance has dropped by half. In the same period, the percentage of 18-29 year-olds has dropped from an already dismal 11% down to a mere 5%, while the proportion of 65+ members has ballooned from 26% up to nearly half. To put it bluntly, half of the LCMS will have died of old age within the next 20 years, and there are hardly any members of child-bearing age who would be capable of replacing those losses. But you cannot understand what happened to our youth without considering fornication.
Fornication and Apostasy
There are, to be sure, other reasons young men & women abandon their faith; but fornication is by far the most significant. Scripture is not only quite clear about it, but marks it as especially bad and something to flee. Christian faith cannot coexist with unrepentant fornication. An undisciplined sex drive, therefore, provides a constant impulse to abandon the Faith.
After all, American culture slams youth with temptation from before they’re even biologically ready for sex. Nearly every piece of media they consume promotes fornication–whether its shown explicitly or simply promotes a “follow your heart and if it feels good, do it” message that primes them for it. Schools teach them how to get around consequences like STD’s and pregnancies which might inhibit them, but schools never broach the permanent consequences of becoming one flesh with someone. What’s more, the lack of any common morality among their peers makes sex readily available to most youths at very young ages.
Even when the stated reason for leaving the faith is something other than fornication, we underestimate the effect it still has. Yes, a sheltered young Christian might go to college and for the first time encounter professors scorning creationism, going on about how mustard seeds aren’t really the smallest seed in the world, or some such attempt to make Christianity seem silly or backward. But most people aren’t inclined to become reddit-tier atheists; and phenomena like the resurgence of paganism or the popularity of astrology make it clear that most people don’t mind having silly or backward spiritual beliefs. But if you can make the prohibitions on fornication seem silly or backward as well, it suddenly becomes a lot more appealing.
How Churches Respond to Fornication
Given such cultural circumstances, it’s unsurprising that most of our youths fornicate. In fact, almost 90% of people in their early 20’s have done so, which is about as much unanimity as Americans can find on anything. From there, a Christian congregation can only do three things:
- They can ignore fornication by means of an unofficial “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy that avoids any unpleasantness in the congregation.
- They can openly minimize Scripture in one manner or another. They can call the prohibitions products of their time, as the liberals do. Or, as is popular among conservative Lutherans, they can adopt a soft antinomianism which functionally dismisses the Law altogether.
- They can actually call sinners to repentance by preaching the whole counsel of God and by seeking to gain their brother through church discipline.
The first two options undermine a church from within, of course. Minimizing God’s Word or treating it as if it doesn’t really matter finishes destroying the faith of the fornicator and takes the faith of the rest of the congregation down with it. But the third option of calling someone to repentance is a dicey proposition these days. It’s quite easy to find a gaggle of people (even self-professing Christians) who will bless and justify one’s lusts, especially if the fornicator is a woman. More often than not, that person will choose the affirmers over Christ. (That doesn’t mean churches shouldn’t do it anyway; it just means it’s not a strategy for retention in this case.)
The fornication problem is also complicated by the fact that youths’ God-given nature deeply desires sex, but modern Christians don’t give them a reasonable path to fulfill it. As I’ve written many times before, conservative Christians will still tell kids that sex belongs only within marriage. However, they also adopt our worldly feminist priorities and tell youth that marriage must wait until after they’ve finished college and established a permanent career. That effectively means telling them marriage must wait 15-20 years, and that they must spend their most fertile and hormonal decades completely celibate. Few really consider how much such a demand wars against our God-given natures and His command to be fruitful and multiply.
Purity culture, of course, created a gaggle of novel customs to try and make that decades-long wait for sex achievable. But by now, it’s rightly recognized as a colossal failure that left a lot of scars on a lot of people. At the end of the day, humans are not made for that kind of delay. There’s a reason that both Jesus and Paul recognize that most people aren’t able to accept being eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. When we tell them to anyway, it should be no surprise that very few actually succeed.
The Biblical Prescription
But there is a solution to the fornication problem, and it’s one specifically spelled out in Scripture:
“Because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. Now as a concession, not a command, I say this. I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single, as I am. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion.”
1 Corinthians 7:2-9
People will debate over how common the gift for celibacy really is, how it can be acquired, whether vows are appropriate, etc. But none of these quibbles really matter to the current conversation. Scripture is quite clear that those who cannot exercise self-control should marry. And if 90% of youth fornicate, then 90% don’t actually exercise self-control. And if 90% cannot exercise self-control, then 90% should marry.
Following this part of God’s Word is something that’s been missing from American churches’ response to the sexual revolution. Christian parents & churches need to allow, encourage, and facilitate marriage by one’s early 20’s. It wasn’t too long ago that this expectation was completely normal, but our wicked culture has made it taboo. Satan has taught us to hate and fear young marriages. But where God’s Word speaks, the Christian Church is bound to defy the wicked culture that surrounds Her. Where the world makes following God’s Word difficult, the Church must help find paths through the wilderness.
The Hurdle to Solving Fornication
Early marriage does make one extremely unpopular demand, however: Christians must abandon our idolatry of college–especially for young women who generally do not need to financially support a household. The world tells us that a college degree is non-negotiable. God tells us no such thing. He tells us to be prudent and productive, but He does not insist on any four-year program.
Most people (of either sex) don’t really need college. Even in terms of earthly mammon, its price has inflated beyond reason, and its returns continue to diminish in every respect. Not to mention all the ways such a morally toxic environment can be a snare to one’s souls. And no, most Christian colleges aren’t really any better in that respect. They largely model their secular counterparts in every practical way, and so they largely produce the same results.
What about for the relative few who actually would benefit from college? Well, the elites don’t want you to know this, but married people can study; they just need support from their families as they do so. Yes, a marriage does negatively impact financial aid. But only having one spouse in college positively impacts the amount of material support available to them–so long as parents are as willing to invest in their daughter’s godly marriage as they are to invest in her godless indoctrination.
Removing the college stumbling block solves a lot of problems for marriage-minded families. There’s more time for youth in local congregations to couple when we don’t scatter them across the country at 18, seldom to return. There’s more opportunity for parents to help facilitate marriages when the dating pool doesn’t consist of anonymous people from across the globe whom they only meet after they’ve been fornicating with their children for 6 months. And when you aren’t pouring all of a family’s resources–present and future–into college, there’s a lot more money available to assist new families as they begin life together.
At the same time, it removes an absolutely massive source of temptation. It allows our youth to fulfill their God-given natures chastely instead of telling them to deny themselves for worldly reasons and then blaming God for it. It also helps prevent the breakup of church communities. When you send your children to the other side of the continent for college and career, odds are that they won’t be rejoining the congregation even if they don’t apostatize. Our congregations are our children’s inheritance just as much as our estates are. You cannot expect investment when you treat churches as completely replaceable for the sake of money.
Face Your Fears
Young marriage is doable, but it hinges on adopting adopt God’s priorities, not the world’s. It is also scary. Conservative Christians are the only ones who even recognize that there’s a problem, but being creative and trying new approaches to solve it terrify us. We only like fighting the battles of the past because those are the “safe” battles mom told us its ok to fight. Likewise, whichever churches go down the road of encouraging young marriage will be standing tall in the midst of a crowd of people prostrating themselves to the Spirit of the Age. They will be noticed and hated. That, too, is something that naturally provokes fear.
So as you pray for your children and for our churches, pray also that God would give us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control. Yes, there is a risk in change. Yes, the world extracts a price from the godly. But when you look and see the near-certainty that your congregations will go extinct and that your children will lose themselves in sin, you will notice that nothing is riskier than simply going on as before.
