When Christ told us to be in the world, pretty sure this is not what he meant.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. This is Breakpoint.

Last August, Pew Research announced the findings of a new study with a provocative headline.

Half of Christians say casual sex is sometimes or always acceptable. Now, as is the case

with many studies like this, a Christian, at least for the purposes of this study, meant anyone

who identified as one, didn't take into account their orthodox beliefs or degree of commitment.

Even so, the results are pretty disturbing. In particular, what the study reveals about self-identified

evangelicals, that's especially troubling. According to Pew, less than half of evangelicals surveyed

were willing to say that casual sex is never acceptable. 17% said that casual sex was rarely

acceptable. 24% said that it was sometimes so, and 12%, that's 1 and 8, said that casual

sex was always acceptable. Now remember, this is evangelicals talking about casual sex here, or as

the survey defined it, sex between consenting adults, not in a committed romantic relationship.

We're talking about Tinder, the infamous hookup culture here,

that any Christian could find this behavior ever acceptable is pretty astounding. But that more than

a third of evangelicals are fined with occasional promiscuity? Wow. The survey also found that

nearly three and five approve of cohabitation, with two-fifths planning to do it at some point.

Now, at root, what the survey really reveals is a failure of catechesis, or to be more precise,

a failure of the church and the resounding success of cultural forces to catechize the younger generation.

Specifically, churches have failed to teach young people

a true Christian understanding of sexuality and the human body. Now, it's going to sound ridiculous to

some, especially those wounded by or obsessed with purity culture, that churches haven't

catechized people about sexual morality. After all, the popular assumption is that Christians

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