Why Conservative Anabaptists Need to Acknowledge the Sexual Struggles of Their Communities

Some might ask, “Do we as Conservative Anabaptists need to wake up to the reality of significant numbers of our people struggling with unwanted sexual behavior?”

Yes, I believe so.

I believe that us older men don’t understand the magnitude of this problem among our people. We blindly hope that it isn’t a big issue among us because it wasn’t as easy to access pornography when we were young. When we were young the only way to access pornography was to go to a drug store late at night and hope that no one that knew us would see what we were buying, right? And what could we buy? Only still photographs, right?

Now it is possible from the privacy of our homes and behind closed doors or in an outdoor getaway with internet access to download onto mobile devices not only photographs, but graphic videos of every explicit sexual scene imaginable! How sad!

Those of us who grew up before the days of the Internet (mid-1990s) and the advent of the smartphone (since 2007) don’t understand how pervasive these issues are among us. We hope that by not talking about it we can keep it from happening. Actually it would be much better to make talking about this unwanted sexual behavior a talk-able subject so that those who struggle will know that it is OK to look for help and that they won’t be rejected because of their struggle with pornography, masturbation, and more.

The question is not “if” my son or daughter will be exposed to this content, but rather “when.”

We must engage in helpful conversations so that our children will feel free to come to us when these exposures happen.

Jeriah Mast and the CAM scandal exposed our religious pride, didn’t it? We have tended to think that ‘our people’ would never stoop to such degrading practices. But obviously we can — and when we blindly assume that it couldn’t happen among us we actually make it easier for sexual sin to happen and keep on happening!

We need brave men who will enter this arena and courageously tell their stories so that younger men and teenagers will dare to look for and find help for themselves. May it be so!

The statistics that are often quoted among Evangelical Christians is that at least 60% of Christian men surveyed struggle with unwanted sexual behavior at least monthly. Sadly that isn't much different from the statistics of unchurched men. See extensive 2016 report from the Barna Group: https://www.barna.com/the-porn-phenomenon/.

I don’t know of any reliable statistics of the level of entrapment in unwanted sexual behavior for Conservative Anabaptists. I don’t dare hope that Conservative Anabaptist statistics are significantly lower than that of evangelical Christians. But for the sake of argument, what if our Conservative Anabaptist statistics were just one third of the currently accepted statistic of Christians who struggle with unwanted sexual behavior? That would still be 20% — wouldn’t it? That would mean that at least 2 out of 10 brothers in my church could easily be struggling with this “eternal destiny issue”!

We can’t “look the other way,” pretend that unwanted sexual behavior is not much of an issue among us, can we?

Can we hope that it “goes away” by ignoring it?

What about these brothers among us who are already trapped? What about the people who are even now becoming trapped because they don’t know how to stop the addiction that is so quickly happening to them? Shouldn’t we reach out to them? Shouldn’t we do everything we can to make it easy for “these little ones” (Matthew 18:6) to come forward and find help without us adding more shame? I certainly don’t want to be guilty of ‘causing these little ones to sin’ through my lack of courage to face and talk about these uncomfortable situations, do you?