Miley Cyrus in Church

By now most of you have heard about the whole Miley Cyrus routine at the VMA awards.  Reactions have been everywhere from shocked to disgusted.  Miley, once the iconic wholesome girl whose poster graced many a tween bedroom wall, now has become the dart board for our moral outrage. 

But I recently saw something much more destructive.  In fact, it’s insidious, meaning that it slowly enters into our systems without us knowing.  And…I saw it at a church. 

Let’s be honest.  Are we really that shocked at the former Hannah Montana’s routine?  Brittney Spears did the same mouseketeer-to-racy singer routine before her.  It’s almost like a tried-and-true formula for kid stars if they want to make it big after puberty.  Sad, yes.  Surprising, no. 

Here’s what concerned me more.  Recently we visited some friends out of state and went to church with them.  In the bulletin I saw an announcement for a women’s group.  In the description of the group’s focus it stated that they wanted to work against our culture’s vision of women as “strident, selfish, sexual, and independent” and teach women to replace this with a biblical view of womanhood. 

My first thought: “strident?  Isn’t that a brand of gum?”  I looked it up.  It means something like loud or boisterous.  Apparently, that’s bad.  Sorry for you extroverts. 

“Selfish”?  Ok, I get that one.

Now here’s the kicker: “sexual.”  That’s bad, right?  This is the insidious lie that gets injected into our systems as Christian teens from well-meaning people.  When listing sins, sex and sexual are thrown in without a thought.  So, not only do we feel that routines like Cyrus’ are dirty, but the fact that we kind of enjoyed it also makes us feel dirty. 

According to the description of this women’s group they were going to discover the true biblical view of womanhood which is non-sexual.  Huh? 

We do ourselves no favors when we shame our sexuality.

Most of us, especially when sexuality is new to your life as a pre-teen and teen, already feel so awkward about it.  Then our Christian environments proceed to shame us for those feelings. 

The Bible is an incredibly sensuous book that, if depicted exactly in film would garner a higher rating than R.  The Song of Solomon is just one example of God’s delight in the beauty of romantic love and its sexual expression.

Like all the greatest things in life, sex can bless, but also harm.  So, yes, God has guidelines for healthy sexual expression.  But beating ourselves up for our sexual nature and criticizing Miley Cyrus do very little to help us discover this. 

At our core, we have desires…and God delights in us at our core.  Believing in that delight has done more to help me follow him than any wagging fingers ever have.