Leaving Sundays: Ebony Exodus - On Sex

This is an interesting chapter. While I agree with the author that the Black church does not have a healthy viewpoint on sexuality, I don't think society has a healthy viewpoint on sex either. Men and women have become reduced to sexual organs.

Black women especially are hyper sexualized and reduced to sex objects by the greater society.

This has led to so many problems between Black men and Black women. There needs to be some different teaching on every single level.

The author Candace Gorham cites statistics about Black women having more diseases, abortions, the highest rate of unplanned pregnancies, and being the majority of single unwed mothers.

I can remember quite a few of the teenaged girls getting pregnant at church. There wasn't any stigma or shame with it because it had become normalized. There was and also a lack of higher expectations that people should be married so that they could build strong families.

There was little to no  practical information and teaching for why you should not be sleeping around and having babies with everyone in town.

I look back now and I'm surprised at the lack of teaching that went on. It's no wonder it's all an even bigger mess now.

I do think it's interesting that Black women are the most religious and yet they have the worst statistics when it comes to family life. I have gone on record as saying that I don't think the Black church helps facilitate healthy marriages and families.

The majority of these churches are made up of lonely and miserable single Black women that find solace in church.. In one book that I read last year a gentleman shared that he doesn't think Black churches mind that black men aren't in the pews.

I agree with this gentleman’s viewpoint because church for many of these women is a coping mechanism and used to anesthetize their problems which would include dysfunctional relationships with men.

A woman named Stephanie who was interviewed thinks it's all about money

“Take single motherhood for example. You know the Bible speaks against they but the preachers would never ever bring that up because they knew that the church was made up of about 70 to 80 percent women and a good half of them were single mothers. It was their money that was coming into the church. He would not talk about the men who walked out of their kids’ lives because he was afraid of stepping on people's toes.”

Sex Education

According to this book, 33% of religious people get their sex education information from pornography. Sex therapists will tell you that the overexposure to porn is becoming an issue in relationships so if church wants people to have a healthy view of sex, then the church should do more teaching on sex and not from a “keep your legs closed perspective”.

There are bigger issues at stake such as people using sex as a coping mechanism. They should also focus on people who sleep around because they feel like they have nothing else going on or anything else of worth to share with people.

This is a big problem amongst men. Just like people don't compulsively eat because they're really hungry, people don’t sleep around because they just really love sex.  They are trying to fill voids but the church does not like to talk about such deep issues like this because then people would start asking questions that they would not be prepared to answer or take us down the rabbit hole of getting to the root of why there are so many single and lonely women with no men in sight!