Mama Bear Apologetics Guide to Sexuality
Mama Bear Apologetics Guide to Sexuality: Empowering Your Kids to Understand and Live Out God’s Design
By: Hillary Morgan Ferrer
“Our kids are being desensitized, song by song, cartoon by cartoon, numbed to the point where immorality feels like no big deal. We want them to be able to dispense with the false ideas about sexuality that our culture sends their way.”
I recently read ‘Mama Bear Apologetics’ which is a book focused on exposing cultural lies and helping our children become critical thinkers to form and hold onto biblical beliefs. I loved the book and have recommended it so much since then.
When I saw they were putting out a book talking about topics of sexuality specifically, I knew I had to read it.
Both of these books are so essential for parents who want to train up their kids in truth in a world that makes it hard to.
They are books you will want to own and I would almost guarantee that you will reference them more than once in the course of your children’s lives.
I took so many notes on this book! Everything was solid and helpful. I wish I could share it all with you, but I’ll just share bits and pieces and trust that you will go out and buy this for yourselves!
She does a great job of covering a lot of tough topics that are front and center in the world today with both truth and compassion. Mama Bear Apologetics is good about acknowledging the good and filtering out the bad. They are not afraid to point out where the church has gotten things wrong. They are bold to ruffle feathers on any side of an issue if it means speaking truth.
One of the main things she includes in each chapter is how we should love other people. We ‘demolish arguments, not people.’ She calls us to “distinguish the person from the ideology.”
“We don’t have to compromise conviction to show compassion.”
When we talk about things that have become politicized, it’s easy to look past a person’s humanity. But we can’t. A person is an eternal soul, not just a walking version of their ideologies.
Hillary points out that in the past parents have looked to schools or youth pastors to teach their kids about sex. It has often been a subject of taboo in families. She encourages us to stop letting our fears silence us.
“Our kids want us to talk to them about sex.”
If we don’t, they will find their answers elsewhere, and that is probably not a good thing.
Within the umbrella of ‘sexuality’ she covers things like: premarital sex, pornography, same-sex attraction, transgenderism, sex positivity, purity culture, the Genderbread Person curriculum taught in schools, and ultimately what God’s design is for sex and sexuality.
There are a ton of practical examples of how to communicate abut these things with your kids, questions to ask, and things to pray. Plus there are a lot of resources they offer in the back of the book and on their website to aid parents in talking about all these things.
The first part of the book is important because she first explains God’s good design.
“When we tamper with God’s plan for sex, we miscommunicate the truths that God had intended to be seen through the marital union.”
The boundaries he places on sex are good.
“The more important and powerful something is, the more it is usually safeguarded. Why wouldn’t we expect the same to be true about sex?”
She spends time explaining a Christian worldview and how that interacts with our beliefs about sex and sexuality. About how what we do with our bodies matter.
“Our desires don’t change the truth; they just reveal our fallenness. There are people who have sexual proclivities they did not ask for. But even if those desires come naturally through no immediate fault of one’s own, it does not make the desires moral, or in accordance with God’s design or intended purposes.”
And lest we be overwhelmed by it all she reminds us that “We are not responsible for the entire direction of the culture. We are only responsible for what happens in our families.”
Reading this book means that you are taking action to be informed and to be faithful to steward your children in biblical truth and trusting God with it all, knowing he is sovereign and loves our kids more than we do!
I was really surprised by a lot of the statistics she shared, especially within Christian demographics, and the verbatim information from things being taught in schools. The stats on pornography were especially staggering.
For example: “90% of teens, 96% of young adults are neutral, accepting, or encouraging of porn consumptions.”
I am shocked by this. If all you read of this book is the chapter on porn, it would be worth it to understand the implications and effects of porn on people and their relationships. Porn is not harmless or empowering and it’s affecting our kids at an alarmingly young age.
I liked that she emphasized that feelings, though not to be ignored, do not determine reality.
I also liked how she showed that cultural sexual ethics actually uphold gender stereotypes. We need to let our children know that in terms of interests and hobbies and talents, there is a spectrum on what it looks like to be a boy or to be a girl. Gender stereotypes need to be done away with— not the genders themselves.
Even as she shared what is moral and what is God’s design, she does not forget to talk about grace, love, and healing.
Part of the purity culture chapter reveals some of the ways the church communicated to youth in the past (though probably not intentionally) that once they’ve lost their virginity, they are less than, that no one would want them, they are damaged goods.
This is not true. No amount of sexual brokenness can keep you from the love or healing power of God. Wherever you are at while reading this book, it’s never too late to come to Christ for renewal. You’re never too far gone.
That’s the beauty of the cross. We may feel like we’re losing out at first because we are dying to ourselves and dying to our desires that often give us pleasure. God gives us boundaries and we can no longer ‘do whatever we want.’ But we are coming into true freedom. We are gaining an identity that is not shifted by the winds of culture or our feelings. We gain stability, security, unconditional love, belonging, and the purity of Christ transferred to us. We gain life. We gain everything.
Things to Repeat to Your Kids Until They Want to Gag
I wanted to include her list (titled above) of these things because it’s true that we remember maxims pretty well since they are repeated so often. It makes it a great place to start when you don’t know what exactly to say to your children.
You’ll have to read the book to have these fleshed out more.
But it would be great to infuse these truths in our kids from a young age:
What you do with your body matters.
God gave you your body to take care of it.
Sex is the bodily renewal of marital vows.
Authority means leading by serving.
God created everything with a purpose, but there are few limits to what sin can break.
You can say the right thing in the wrong way.
Just because you feel it doesn’t make it true.
Not all change is progress.
What do you mean by that? How did you come to that conclusion? What actually happened?
It’s okay to be normal and it’s okay to be different.
It’s okay to be on the wrong side of history if you’re on the right side of eternity.
Just because it feels good doesn’t make it good for you.
You can’t keep a bird from flying over your head, but you can keep it from making a nest in your hair
Feelings are terrible leaders but great followers.
Neurons that fire together wire together, or You train your brain what you crave.
We are only responsible for what we have been given.
Everyone is suffering, just in different ways.
I’m reminded more and more how sex-obsessed the world is. It has been made an ultimate thing that dictates people’s entire lives and identities. It hurts so many people and causes so much pain and brokenness. Sexual immorality is at the heart of a lot of the problems in this world.
Christians are criticized for a biblical stance on sex, gender, orientation, pornography, and the like, but we can’t allow that to sway us from truth.
This book is bolstering to me as a mom of both boys and girls to know that I don’t stand alone and I don’t stand foolishly. This is the truth God has commanded me to walk in and I am thankful for books like this that help equip me for the task.
I hope this inadequate review is enough to encourage you to pick up the Mama Bear Apologetics books and fight for your children to know truth, to discern lies, and to be confident in God’s design for them.
Relevant Books (she quoted from many of these and I’ve read them all)
What Does the Bible Really Teach about Homosexuality? by Kevin DeYoung
Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay (They talk about queer theory among other critical theories that play into the culture’s view of sexuality and how people communicate about it)
Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier
The Porn Problem by Vaughan Roberts
Gay Girl, Good God by Jackie Hill Perry
Talking Back to Purity Culture by Rachel Joy Welcher (post review in Goodreads…)
What God Has to Say about Our Bodies by Sam Allberry
Born Again This Way by Rachel Gilson
Is God Anti-Gay? by Sam Allberry
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl S. Trueman
Confronting Christianity by Rebecca McLaughlin
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis (I read this before I began reviewing, but it’s pretty insightful in tactics the devil may use to make us question God or engage in sin)
More Quotes:
“Our kids need to understand that chastity is faithfulness in body, mind, and heart; and Satan is going to attack all three.”
“We don’t infuse courage by telling people there is nothing to fear when there is. We infuse courage by reminding them that whatever comes, they can face it head-on with God’s help.”
“There are a lot of crosses to bear… No matter how unfair they are, no matter how inborn the desire is, they do not negate Jesus’s command to carry the cross of Christ.”
“If identity is defined by a person’s psychological state, then we cannot tell people in the midst of depression that they are not worthless. They feel worthless, and according to this definition they are worthless— because that is the relation that has been established by their psychological identification.”
“Our job as Christians is to make disciples, not heterosexuals.”
“It’s only when something doesn’t have any inherent value that you can do whatever you want with it, which turns out to be the skeleton lurking in the closet fo sex-positivity. It encourages you to do whatever you want with whomever you want. The implicit message (that most people don’t pick up on) is that you and your partner(s) have no inherent value worth protecting. Consent can’t provide this value, and neither can pleasure. Sure, sex-positivity may sound like freedom, but in reality, it’s saying that your body and what you do with it don’t matter.”
“He made the pleasures; all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden.”— Screwtape Letters (this is a demon speaking whose Enemy is God)
“Boys are being conditioned to like what they see in porn, and the girls are being conditioned to perform to these boys’ likings.”
“Kids model what they see heroized.”
“We don’t abandon truth because of its abuses. We correct the abuses and stand firm in the truth.”
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