Originally broadcast March 27, 2009

KIM LAWTON, anchor: A new report from the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality claims that most clergy in the United States are not adequately dealing with sex and gender issues in their congregations. The group says part of the problem lies with theological seminaries which are often not teaching students what they need to know about human sexuality. Judy Valente has our story.

Professor LAUREL SCHNEIDER (Chicago Theological Seminary, teaching class): Sex and sexuality is of course a very significant part of our experience. And I put the question up here, “Is sex divine?”

JUDY VALENTE: Professor Laurel Schneider of Chicago Theological Seminary teaches an evening course in systematic theology. Most of the time, it’s hardly sexy stuff. But this evening the topic is sex. This seminary is one of the few where human sexuality, in all its facets, is openly discussed.

UNIDENTIFIED TRANGENDERED STUDENT: My oldest son right now won’t even talk to me, won’t have anything to do with me. His comment to me was, “God created you as a man and God does not make mistakes.”

UNIDENTIED FEMALE STUDENT: The male who has become a female, that part of you inside that wants — that feels female — that wants to be female, that’s still a part of you. That’s still — God made that too.

VALENTE: Sexual mores have been changing. But how well are seminaries preparing future pastors and rabbis to address these changes? The Religious Institute on Sexual Morality is a nonprofit group that helps promote sexual health in faith communities. The Institute recently studied 36 seminaries across denominational lines. The study found an “overwhelming need” to better educate and prepare future religious leaders in the area of human sexuality.

Dr. KATE OTT (Associate Director, Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing): We see these issues every day and the harm that can be done around sexuality issues — either a kid who’s questioning their orientation, a couple whose marriage is failing. I think when those folks are coming to us in faith communities for real information and for real help, we need to make sure we have the training to be able to address that.

VALENTE: Many pastors say issues such as teen sexual activity and marital infidelity are among the most common topics about which congregation members seek guidance. Yet few seminaries offer courses in sexuality, and fewer still require these courses.

Dr. ALICE HUNT (President, Chicago Theological Seminary): It’s a challenge. It’s controversial. It makes people feel uncomfortable. It makes people feel insecure. So it’s just taking time for schools to come on board with addressing these issues.

Dr. OTT: When seminaries don’t offer the courses, they’re still talking about the issue. They’re just talking about it from silence and from a negative perspective, and seminary students understand that. They hear both messages loud and clear, and we would just prefer that they get a positive, open message rather than a silenced or dismissive message.

VALENTE: Some clergy have criticized the Religious Institute’s report saying seminaries can’t teach everything, that students aren’t there primarily to obtain “how to” skills, but to study biblical texts, to reflect and pray. Dr. Hunt says it’s a legitimate point.

Dr. HUNT: You have to, then, change your whole curriculum. If you want to incorporate issues of human sexuality and race and gender, you have to examine everything you’re teaching in your educational context, and that’s a lot of hard work.

VALENTE: As a result, graduating seminarians are often expected to “learn on the job.” Reverend Lillian Daniel is the senior pastor of First Congregational United Church of Christ in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She recalls one of the few classes at her divinity school where sex was discussed.

Reverend LILLIAN DANIEL (Senior Pastor, First Congregational United Church of Christ, Glen Ellyn, IL): The teacher goes “Never, ever, ever — with anyone in your congregation.” We all thought, “Did we miss the verb? What is it? Go skiing? Go dancing?” I mean, he couldn’t even bring himself to say the word, and that was the extent of the conversation.

VALENTE: And the word would have been?

Rev. DANIEL: Don’t sleep with.

VALENTE: Daniel says seminaries often discuss gender rights, sexual harassment, and how pastors should maintain proper boundaries with their congregation members. But, she says, they rarely train students to deal with the complex, intimate questions congregation members are likely to bring to them.

JENNY GRESKO (Therapist, Central DuPage Pastoral Counseling Center, speaking to group): “We don’t have as much sex as he wants and we have more sex than I want and we’ll never fix this.” That’s a very, very common issue between couples.

VALENTE: As part of a Sunday afternoon series on sexuality, Daniel’s congregation has been examining a variety of issues connected with marriage.

JOE FORTUNATO (Congregant): Sexuality isn’t bad. It’s something that’s a good thing. It’s a gift from God, which is the cliché, but it is a gift from God, and to deal with it honestly and openly is very, very important, I think, to a lot of people here.

Rev. DANIEL: I’m all in favor referring people on to folks with more expertise if they’ve got sort of issues that are ongoing. But a lot of times people come in to see a pastor because they want to tell something one time. Or they just want a reality check. Or they just want some kind of comfort or someone to listen to them. Sometimes it’s almost in the area of a confession. So in those cases, we may be their only stop.

VALENTE: Chicago Theological, a United Church of Christ seminary, received a high rating in the Religious Institute study. But even this school doesn’t require students to study human sexuality. It does, however, offer several sexuality courses. Alice Hunt says the seminary wants its graduates to be able to minister to the “whole person.”

Dr. HUNT: Understanding what your tradition says about human sexuality, being sexually healthy yourself, understanding what religious texts say, being aware of counseling issues, knowing how human development happens with sexuality, being aware of societal constraints and the fear that people face for not being able to fully express who they are — all of those are crucial in becoming a mature minister.

Rev. DANIEL: The problem is it really falls upon the pastor to seek out that knowledge, and if you were somebody who wanted to shut yourself away from this, you really could, and your church could become a place where none of this is able to be talked about.

VALENTE: But there does seem to be a shift in generational attitudes. Today’s young seminarians, who grew up in a more sexually liberal culture, seem eager to address these matters openly.

MARK WINTERS (Student, Chicago Theological Seminary): I think that, generally speaking, younger folks tend to see, for instance, homosexuality as basically a non-issue, whereas older folks come from a different time and a different place where you weren’t as open about sex and sexuality, and I think I would include heterosexuality in that as well as homosexuality, as you alluded to in the question, in terms of cohabitation for heterosexual couples. I think, generally speaking, we are in a more nonjudgmental time, and I consider that a very good thing.

VALENTE: Many pastors would disagree. Nonetheless, questions of gay marriage and whether to ordain gay clergy have moved sexuality issues to the forefront in many churches. Alice Hunt says there is a far more fundamental reason for making sex a topic of discussion.

Dr. HUNT: I hope another imperative is the imperative of God’s love, a kind of radical inclusivity of everything that promotes human flourishing. I hope we’ll take it — a good look at what we need to do to get to the space where we can fully minister to our congregation.

Dr. OTT: Our sexuality is part of our spirituality. We’re embodied beings, and most of our faith traditions believe that God gave us the gift of sexuality, so it has deep theological meaning for us. So I don’t think we can say sexuality isn’t a religious issue. It deeply is a religious issue.

VALENTE: The Religious Institute recently received a grant to help seminaries introduce sexuality courses and provide continuing education classes for those already in ministry. One young seminarian described this as a “coming out time” for sexuality discussions in faith communities. “If sex is a common topic in the Bible,” he asked, “then why shouldn’t it be talked about in churches and seminaries?”

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Judy Valente in Chicago.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, the concerns among observers—and some participants—about the phenomenon of hooking up on many college campuses. You may think this is no one else’s business. But writers and sociologists who have studied what is happening say casual hook-ups can make it more difficult for young people to develop long-term commitments. Judy Valente reports.

JUDY VALENTE: A basement bar near the campus of a major Eastern university Thursday night around 10 p.m. Some of these young people, after having a few drinks — or more than a few — may later become physically intimate in some way, possibly with someone they barely know. It’s called “hooking up,” and it’s not uncommon behavior these days.

Dr. Christian Smith

Dr. CHRISTIAN SMITH (William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology, University of Notre Dame): A lot of universities at 5:00, 5:30—almost every adult has left the campus. I mean literally it’s a small village that’s taken over by 18- to 22-year-olds, and so what they want to do there, they do.

Dr. LORI S. WHITE (Vice President for Student Affairs, Southern Methodist University): I think it exists on every college campus. I think this is how students develop relationships with one another on college campuses nationwide.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE STUDENT #1: Hardly any of our friends are in a serious relationship. Most people have, you know, steady hookups, but they would never consider them their boyfriend or their girlfriend.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE STUDENT #1: Most guys love to go out and look for the hookup. I think it’s a lot better than having a relationship, personally.

VALENTE: Why?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE STUDENT #1: Because there’s more excitement. I mean, you don’t really have the monotony of just going out to dinner with same girl or just hanging out with her every single night.

VALENTE: Hooking up can mean anything from kissing to sexual intercourse, or something in between. It comes with no emotional involvement and certainly no commitment. In other words — no strings attached.

Dr. SMITH: I would say the hookup culture is very pervasive. Most young people have to deal with it. It’s around them even if they never hookup. Even if they think it’s immoral, they have friends that are or they know people that are.

VALENTE: Christian Smith is a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame. He’s been studying the emotional and spiritual development of young people from their early teenage years to college age and beyond.

Dr. SMITH: The intimacies of physical involvement and sexual involvement among college-age students these days — they don’t know what it means. They don’t expect much from it. It doesn’t have much significance. It seems to be another form of entertainment that doesn’t have too much attached to it.

VALENTE: What ever happened to dating, to romance? Why is there what some have called “a crisis of courtship”?

SARAH (Student): My mom is always, like, Sarah, you know, I can’t believe you don’t have a boyfriend. You know, college is the time where you can meet your, like, potential husband. But in fact really like not a lot of like dating, traditional courting, goes on.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE STUDENT #1: I went to all-girls school for 13 years. I thought coming here, you know, you’d meet a lot of guys and you, hopefully, you would leave with having a boyfriend. But now I think that, after being here for two years, I think that it’s more about just meeting random people and having fun.

Dr. SMITH: The media has just been more explicit about sex and casual relationships, “Sex and the City”— whatever it might be. Young people have just picked up this is just a normal part of life. It’s no big deal. You just, if someone is attractive to you anything’s fair game as long as both people are consenting.

VALENTE: Laura Sessions Stepp is a journalist who has written about how hooking up impacts the young women who are involved in it, and why they do it in the first place.

LAURA SESSIONS STEPP (Journalist and Author, “Unhooked”): There are several factors. One is the empowerment of women — women feeling like they can do anything a man can do. We’ve seen that in business, and now we see it in their social lives. Their parents have told them relationships can wait. They’re hard. You get emotionally involved with someone—that distracts you from your studies. Put that aside. Go for your career.

VALENTE (to Dr. Smith): Why would a young woman engage in this behavior?

Dr. SMITH: Well, if you ask them they would say it’s fun. They would say it’s pleasurable for a time. I think beneath that there are deeper levels of wanting to be accepted.

VALENTE: Hookups often follow heavy drinking. Laura Sessions Stepp got this letter from a young man who had read her book.

Ms. STEPP (reading from letter): An often-occurring event, at least to me, is a drunk girl throwing herself all over me and frequently asking me to take her home, or similar. But I have found that girls are offended if I do not sleep with them, which is usually the first night I meet them.

VALENTE: The prevalence of the hookup culture may come as news to many people. But is it seriously harming those who participate in it, or is it just another generation sowing its wild oats?

Donna Freitas, now an assistant professor of religion at Boston University, has written about the spiritual and sexual lives of college students.

Professor DONNA FREITAS (Department of Religion, Boston University and Author, “Sex and the Soul,” lecturing students): To have a successful hookup you’re able to shut yourself down emotionally so you do not care when you physically engage with someone in some way —basically you don’t care about it the next day. So that’s a successful hookup.

Ms. STEPP: The point is not that they’re having sex. Young people have always had sex. Certainly my generation did outside of marriage. That’s not the point. The point is the relationship. What is this teaching them about being in relationship to others?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE STUDENT #2: I think it’s a stage in our lives — just a college stage. But hopefully we’ll mature.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE STUDENT #1: Yeah, we’re just looking to have fun. No regrets.

Dr. SMITH: Young people today draw a very strong line between their fun years and their settling-down years: What happened in my early to mid-20s will stay there, and then I will magically become happy, faithful, committed, monogamous person, and what happened three years ago won’t affect my life in the future. I personally think that that’s quite naïve.

Prof. FREITAS (speaking before audience): One hookup, one hookup, depending on the scenario, depending on where it happens, depending on who finds out, depending on who it’s with and what they say afterwards or who watches it happen, can make or break your college experience. I heard that over and over again, and think about that: one night could make or break your college experience.

VALENTE: But social psychologist Pepper Schwartz, who studied the sexual behavior of students at 11 U.S. campuses, says hooking up doesn’t necessarily cause emotional damage.

Dr. PEPPER SCHWARTZ (Professor of Sociology, University of Washington): I think that when we say people are hurt from hookups, compare that to a situation where every relationship has to be important. He’s the love of your life or vice versa. It breaks up. They get suicidal. They feel terrible about it. That’s a really terrible thing when you’re talking about adolescence and people just maturing. Is it a hookup by its nature? Has it proceeded to an extremely important emotional connection? When it’s over, you know, so be it.

VALENTE: But is it, really?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE STUDENT #1: Well, you know, with the hookup someone’s always going to get attached and so that leads to a little bit of heartbreak for one side. For me, personally, I try not to get too attached at all.

Dr. SMITH: When people are physically intimate, that’s powerful. That affects their emotions in ways they may not be able to control. It impacts on their relationships.

Dr. SCHWARTZ: People go on usually in their early 20s to mid-20s and just say “enough of that,” and then go and look for something more important. It’s not like they’re damaged forever. They do, in fact, make relationships, and they get tired of this. It’s not like they’re now doomed to always have sterile, passing-by sexual relationships that mean nothing.

Laura Sessions Stepp

VALENTE: A woman in her 30s, describing herself as “scarred” by her sexual experiences, wrote this letter.

Ms. STEPP (reading from letter): I think our culture has no idea just what we women feel inside. We put this pressure on them and let them turn from girls to women without any help. It is too much, what we do to our daughters.

VALENTE: What about religion’s role? Do its teachings about individual dignity affect sexual behavior? Donna Freitas found that hooking up is just as common at Catholic universities as at secular schools, but much less so at evangelical schools. Christian Smith says a religious upbringing may deter hooking up, but not always.

Dr. SMITH: There are a lot of young people who just compartmentalize. They completely compartmentalize that, meaning my religious faith is something over there, and how I behave at parties and in my dorm room is just unrelated.

VALENTE: One reason hooking up is as prevalent as it is is that on many campuses administrators long ago gave up seeing themselves as substitute parents or moral police. Lori White is vice president for student affairs at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Dr. WHITE: At the end of the day each individual is responsible for the decisions that he or she makes, and we’re very clear with that when we have initial conversations with students during orientation. So I don’t see myself in any way as a parental figure. I see myself as an educator in helping students through this next phase of their life. I’m just not quite sure where it’s going to go from here. You know, it may well be that we have a counter-revolution, that we get so far out there that people begin to really feel uncomfortable with that and decide that we have really gone too far and that we need to really get back to some of the core values of our grandparents’ generation.

VALENTE: There are hints of reaction. Donna Freitas says students in her study would claim at first that they liked hooking up, only to admit later on that they wished things were different. And it wasn’t just the women.

Prof. FREITAS (speaking before audience): Probably one of most surprising things I got from the study was that men do not like cultures of casual sex. Men do not like hookup culture, and men really love romance but don’t know how to sort of get themselves in situations where it’s OK to be romantic.

Ms. STEPP: We don’t talk enough about love in this society. We are — it’s somehow become a word that people are afraid to use. But in essence that’s what every one of those young women that I talked to and have written me want — and the young men as well. They want to be loved and to love. And the question they have to ask themselves is, is hooking up the way to get there?

VALENTE: College administrators say parents should not assume it’s too late to talk with their children about sex and relationships, even when they’re in college, and more colleges are engaging in dialogue with students about hooking up. But ultimately it will have to be the students themselves who decide whether there might be a better way.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Judy Valente in Washington.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, a special report on the sexual pressures on pre-teenage girls. Parents, social critics, and many young girls themselves deplore it, but sex sells, so advertisers and entertainers use it to attract audiences. They use it without the regulation or social pressures that once were restraining forces. And they use it without censorship, which hardly anyone favors. Mary Alice Williams reports on the media and the children who are its targets.

MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: They’re sweet. The sexually debasing lyrics they’re mimicking aren’t. Ever since Elvis shimmied his pelvis, parents have worried about protecting their teens from the obscene. This is different. These aren’t 17-year-olds. They’re 11. And these self-confident sixth graders and even their younger siblings are increasingly exposed to torrents of overtly sexual messages by people selling things to preteens.

ALICE (Teenage Girl): It makes me feel like an object and feel really, really weird. And it is not like girls should be like that.

WILLIAMS: The culture tells them something different. They listen to music. Britney Spears made it big wearing a Catholic schoolgirl uniform. Look at her now. Most of BILLBOARD’s top 20 CDs are slapped with “Parental Guidance” stickers. They [kids] do homework on the Internet where there are lots of porn sites. They watch TV. The teen hit DAWSON’S CREEK on the WB alludes to oral sex and masturbation. In prime time, the Kaiser Family Foundation has catalogued an average of five sexual references per hour.

KERRY (Teenage Girl): This sexual stuff you don’t just see on TV. You see it day to day. It happens in middle school. It will happen in high school. You just see it around.

WILLIAMS: Professor Jean Bethke Elshtain is an ethicist with University of Chicago Divinity School.

Dr. JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN (University of Chicago Divinity School): There’s certainly a relationship between the culture and the increase of sex because of the many cultural messages that bombard young people daily.

WILLIAMS: According to studies, more girls than ever before are sexually active before their 15th birthday. One in 12 children has lost his or her virginity by the eighth grade. Almost a fourth of ninth graders have slept with four or more partners.

Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician who treats adolescents only, talks with his teenage patients daily about sexual issues. He says he is seeing more sexually transmitted diseases in younger and younger children and that expectations of sex have changed drastically.

Dr. MICHAEL RICH: What we are seeing now that is different from previous years, I think, is that sex is expected. Sex is part of the normal interaction, day-to-day interaction between boys and girls.

Jerry Della Femina

JERRY DELLA FEMINA (Advertising Executive): This is about as sexy as we get.

WILLIAMS: Advertising agent Jerry Della Femina doesn’t use sex to sell his clients’ products. But he knows why people do.

Mr. DELLA FEMINA: It’s easier to be lewd than to be creative, and people try to get attention, and the one thing that gets attention is sex. Sex sells. People turn around. They look at it.

WILLIAMS: Like many in the industry, he thinks it is up to the parents to monitor what their children see and hear.

Mr. DELLA FEMINA: I believe that it is the parents’ job to provide them with a sense of values so that if they do see something that is off, they are not affected by it.

WILLIAMS: Diane Levin, with the Coalition to Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children, studies the effect of culture on kids’ behavior.

DIANE LEVIN (Coalition to Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children): I have interviewed thousands of parents, and they agree it is their job and they try very hard to do it, but they can’t keep it out of their children’s lives. I resent that I have to struggle with this issue. I think that in the best of all possible worlds we would have a society that is trying to create an environment that helps parents in their job instead of making it harder.

Dr. Jean Bethke Elshtain

Dr. ELSHTAIN: At one point in time in this culture, the assumption was that families and churches and schools, and even the wider culture, reinforced one another in helping to sustain children through a period of growing up. And I think that coherence has broken down.

STEPHANIE (Teenage Girl): The sixth graders learned how to do something they are not supposed to do. And it is called “giving booty.”

RACHAEL (Teenage Girl): The girl like gets in front of the guy and the guy is behind her.

CASEY (Teenage Girl): It’s like — I just don’t really want to tell you.

WILLIAMS: Like them, the majority of preteens don’t engage in sexual behavior, but they are aware of what they see around them. Sixth graders know about a concept many of their parents hadn’t heard of till college: oral sex. SEVENTEEN Magazine says 55 percent of teens have engaged in oral sex.

ALICE: According to a lot of people, it keeps you a virgin.

LEA (Teenage Girl): Because it is kind of like having sex, but you are not really doing anything and you can’t have a baby, and they don’t think there is any consequences.

Ms. LEVIN (referring to an ad): Her breasts look like they are about 50 percent of her weight.

WILLIAMS: Using sex to sell products starts early.

Ms. LEVIN: What they are seeing right now is a sexual relationship between males and females that is totally objectified — the sexuality that you see is not in the context of relationships. It is not in the context of caring and feeling. I am very worried about where this is going to lead. There is a whole set of problems that has to do with the relationships males and females are going to develop with each other.

Diane Levin

WILLIAMS: What messages are you getting about who you are supposed to be?

CASEY: Perfect — big boobs, hips, a strong stomach, you know, pretty face, no zits.

SARAH (Teenage Girl): So basically stuff that is on the outside. Not on the inside.

WILLIAMS: It’s how these children should be developing on the inside that concerns ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain.

Dr. ELSHTAIN: To the extent that your time is devoted to engaging in these kinds of activities, it’s taken away from other sorts of possibilities at very crucial ages for young people, when they’re learning how to be to the kinds of adults that they’re going to become.

WILLIAMS: How did it get this far? Television producers, advertisers, movie producers, magazine editors outdoing each other for the big sell — with almost no limits imposed on them.

Ms. LEVIN: The entertainment industry is unethical in its practice of marketing sex and violence to children. They will use whatever techniques they can to capture the attention of an audience so they will be interested and engaged and hopefully buy what is being marketed.

RACHAEL: Everyone has something, you know, that is not perfect about them. So I think that magazines, TV shows should stop putting that message out to everybody.

WILLIAMS: Can you legislate the images coming at our children? Jerry Della Femina doesn’t think so.

Mr. DELLA FEMINA: I don’t like that this is the way we are going as a nation. It is time to censor these people. I don’t want to be part of that.

Dr. ELSHTAIN: People have to get licenses to broadcast. So it seems to me that there’s some way, without in any way moving into real censorship, there are ways that you could set up certain guidelines.

Ms. LEVIN: One of the reasons it is so important that government play some role in regulating and setting standards is that once it becomes a level playing field for the whole industry, then it will help the whole industry become more ethical.

Dr. ELSHTAIN: We have the responsibility to affirm that which is worthy and good about our culture. And there’s so much to affirm. We also have the responsibility to say no, and I think we have to do both in equal measure and find some balance between them.

CASEY: It does rub off on you a lot of times, and it makes you feel that this is the way that you are supposed to be and that guys will like you because you have big boobs, and then after a while you think that it is normal.

WILLIAMS: Perhaps normal to adults too, to the extent that they are increasingly desensitized to the saturation of sexual messages and squeamish about talking with their children. Sex education is left to the schools, which are restricted from teaching the realities of oral sex and doing “booty.” But our children are still learning and absorbing values from what they see around them. I’m Mary Alice Williams for RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY in New York.

ABERNETHY: We tried to get comments from people in the TV, magazine, and record businesses who are using sex to sell, but their spokespeople all declined.