Sunday School Sex Thought-Crimes

I've gone to church since I was a fetus up until age 19. Every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday morning was spent at church. Now this wasn't so bad when I was a child. I mean, it wasn't extremely often that I'd be hungover on a Sunday morning in my pre-pubescent years so I didn’t have much to gripe about every Sunday morning. Going to church every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday evening for eighteen+ years of my life didn't seem unordinary and it wasn’t that it was relatively easy to do, it just wasn’t relatively harder, or more annoying than any other thing I was expected to do at that age, especially when it was something I’ve always done. (I wont lie, that shit was fun after a while. Do you know that girls go to church? Really pretty girls that might even make-out with you in the church stairwell?) But I didn’t think it was so odd going to church three times a week. You get used to spending that much time in the ‘house of the Lord’ when it's all you've ever known. It was the natural rhythm of how it was. As a matter of fact, I thought it was odd that other kids didn't have to go to church. At first.

As a matter of fact, during my young adult life (age 14-18) I spent virtually every spring break, winter vacation, summer vacation on some church related trip. Now in order to be able to get to go on the trip you had to qualify for it. This meant that you had to go to “Discipleship” on Saturday mornings, participate in the church choir, memorize some bible verses, show up for choir rehearsals, be there Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evenings (as I was already doing anyway). Granted there were some amazing trips – among other things I went skiing in NC, New York, went inside the World Trade Center after all, and sang the national anthem with the choir at an Atlanta Braves game – but a huge majority of these kids, including myself, only tried qualifying in the first place so that they could go on the trip and hang out with girls that (as we understood) had ‘boobies’. (We weren’t sure yet.) We didn’t care much for the ultimate purpose that the church constructed the trip. I don’t blame this on the kids, though. If the church wanted these kids to go on these trips for the right reasons they should try removing the last day of leisure—but even that wouldn’t help much, since I think most parents expected their children to go.

Most of what added to the intrigue of these girls is that the church treated them like sex objects by trying to safeguard them from being treated like sex objects. If by some miracle we ended up being allowed to have co-ed swimming time, the girls would be required to wear a one-piece unitardish bathing suit, which naturally led us to fill in the blanks with our minds. When we were on these trips, the counselors had a big box full of potato sacks (with the bottom cut off) that the girls would have wear around their skirts if the hemline fell above their knees. This only made me sexualize knees at fifteen.









Almost every summer was spent in church camp where it seemed there was no other purpose but to have your sexuality repressed and your natural inclination for sex demonized. I wasn’t even thinking about sex remotely anything close to as much to the amount of times that they brought this up. I only thought about it more after they brought it up. I was usually caught off guard and denying their ludicrous accusations about fornicating. (It's like your parents accusing you at age five of doing crack because you stayed out five minutes past the street lights coming on when all you were really doing was just smoking a little weed for fuck's sake.)



They really knew how to mess with your conscience. (My friend, Jon, got saved at least five times throughout highschool--not kidding.) As if it wasn't enough feeling shame with my body if I were to ever awake with morning wood, they 'encouraged' us to sign these "True Love Waits" cards each and every year, in a parade-like lambs-to-the-slaughter fashion to a cross (appropriately) that was strategically placed right smack dab on top of the stage to suggest this actually was Mount Calvary. They might as well have given me fifteen lashes on the way up. If you didn't sign the 'agreement' and tack it onto the cross, it would have been unheard of. So here we marched, year after year, signed our names in blood (it seems) to keep a personal contract with Jesus that I would resolve to abstain from inserting my junk into another junk until I'm able to like a girl enough to combine my credit score and mortgage payments from the moment thereof. They made you feel dirty for these natural feelings that were inherently within you that made you want to fornicate with any girl that dare show an ankle and wore anything short of a potato sack. I'd liken it to a muslim seeing his bride without her hajib for the first time. "Holy FUCK, BOO. Is that an ear? Bring that shit to papa!"

I remember my friend, Susan telling me that during one of the many classes throughout the day at camp they’d ask the girls if any of them have had sex out of wedlock and to raise their hands if so. Surprisingly, certain girls that didn’t give a fuck thought it would be funny and still raised their hands—almost beamishly proud. I assume the counselors needed to know so that they could specifically say there names as they prayed to God for them, although it was more likely to narc to their parents. There was this one time I was sitting next to this girl I liked during the Sunday evening service and our arms were touching ever so subtlely. Before you could say 'kumbaya my Lord', my youth pastor charged in to the unimaginable atrocious spectacle, grabbed my bible, opened it up to the last page of Luke and the first page of John and said, "Let's keep Luke and John between you two." (I can imagine had he caught me banging her on the pew, he'd have MacGyver'ed a condom from the leather cover.)

Really, I'm obviously over it. I learned a lot. The majority of us first learned about beastiality from our youth pastor, after all. I went home that night, curious to see what sort of atrocity this was, so I looked it up on the net, and damn I didn’t know that kind of creepy, yet fascinatingly awkward shit ever existed. Surely I would have found out about it one day (non-experimentally, of course), but on my own terms on a day when I was al
ready jaded by the concept of sex and my penis wasn’t something to scorn and curse at on a daily basis for existing. I'm getting there though. Keep me in your prayers.