Last month, I received a surprise in my movie review e-mail from Christianity Today. Responding to complaints the magazine shouldn’t review such filth, Mark Moring defended the decision to publish a review for “Sex and the City” by quoting from an essay by Christian writer C.S. Lewis describing the need to empathize with people who aren’t exactly like us.
Focus on the Family’s movie review site carried an apparently less controversial review for SATC. Typical of Focus on the Family, the reviewer recounted the genders, participant count and position of each sexual act depicted on screen, along with a tally of each four-letter word spoken. After watching SATC I found the review more titillating than the movie.
Christianity Today was more discrete.
Not to judge. I consider myself a literary rather than a Christian novelist because I write sex scenes.
Focus on the Family’s reviewer Lindy (Beam) Keffer is evidently a married woman, involved in college ministry, while Christianity Today’s reviewer Camerin Courtney fits the 30-something single woman demographic that watched SATC. Courtney mentioned the series was popular with Christian friends.
Both reviewers used SATC as a soapbox: Keffer to excoriate the negative influence of SATC on young women’s sexuality; Courtney to criticize the lack of Christian ministry to single adults.
“But it was refreshing,” Courtney said “to have a single woman's sexuality acknowledged. In stark contrast, the last time anyone in a Christian setting spoke to the fact that I'm a sexual human being was in a college church group, where I was blithely instructed that ‘true love waits.’ Well, 15 years later, it's still waiting. And it ain't so blithely simple.”
Courtney’s concern is reinforced by Barna polls showing young Christian men leaving the church, abandoning young Christian women to hard choices between lifelong virginity and interfaith marriage. Discomfort about this log in Christianity’s eye, not “filth” per se, probably explained reader complaints.
Focus on the Family and Christianity Today were wise to choose female reviewers for SATC. In writing, as in religion, the surest way to emasculate a man is to portray him as prudish about sex.
Focus on the Family’s movie review site carried an apparently less controversial review for SATC. Typical of Focus on the Family, the reviewer recounted the genders, participant count and position of each sexual act depicted on screen, along with a tally of each four-letter word spoken. After watching SATC I found the review more titillating than the movie.
Christianity Today was more discrete.
Not to judge. I consider myself a literary rather than a Christian novelist because I write sex scenes.
Focus on the Family’s reviewer Lindy (Beam) Keffer is evidently a married woman, involved in college ministry, while Christianity Today’s reviewer Camerin Courtney fits the 30-something single woman demographic that watched SATC. Courtney mentioned the series was popular with Christian friends.
Both reviewers used SATC as a soapbox: Keffer to excoriate the negative influence of SATC on young women’s sexuality; Courtney to criticize the lack of Christian ministry to single adults.
“But it was refreshing,” Courtney said “to have a single woman's sexuality acknowledged. In stark contrast, the last time anyone in a Christian setting spoke to the fact that I'm a sexual human being was in a college church group, where I was blithely instructed that ‘true love waits.’ Well, 15 years later, it's still waiting. And it ain't so blithely simple.”
Courtney’s concern is reinforced by Barna polls showing young Christian men leaving the church, abandoning young Christian women to hard choices between lifelong virginity and interfaith marriage. Discomfort about this log in Christianity’s eye, not “filth” per se, probably explained reader complaints.
Focus on the Family and Christianity Today were wise to choose female reviewers for SATC. In writing, as in religion, the surest way to emasculate a man is to portray him as prudish about sex.
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