If you are married and enjoying the rewards of a sexually fulfilling covenant marriage, then this post will merely be interesting. But if you’re a single adult who finds yourself caught between the convictions of your faith and the desire of your flesh, you will want to linger awhile longer. Abstinence is a major dilemma, but its message isn’t just for minors.

When one’s sexual identity is under construction—say, at age sixteen—abstinence is a much easier sell. We know, of course, that our culture encourages early sexuality, but most adults—Christian or not—agree with the abstinence message, a message that promotes maturity, self-respect, good health, and responsible decisions. The most mature teenagers will recognize these traits as persuasive selling points.

Mosques, cathedrals and synagogues make the most interesting bullies. There they crouch, architectural annoyances flaunting their crosses, spires, and stars at the playground. That glowing white dream castle in Salt Lake City kicks sand in everybody’s face, and Orange County’s Crystal Cathedral thinks it’s God himself. If only these buildings could just leave everybody alone.

Now everybody’s having a fit over the new kid who’s moving in, thanks to the Cordoba Initiative, the proposed Islamic cultural center at Ground Zero. Its controversy stands up there with Justin Bieber as part of The Summer Debate 2010, and its symbolism is far bigger than the acreage it plans to cover. If allowed to play at recess, it will be larger-than-life, the kind of presence that no one will be able to ignore.

Americans love Faith served on a cafeteria tray, served up by magazine interviewers who scoop celebrity conversions into appetizing sound bites for the public to feed on. This week has given them plenty of new dishes.

This month in Rolling Stone magazine, pop-star Katy Perry (who is melting Popsicles from coast to coast this summer) declares that she still believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.  As many know, Perry had a brief stint in Christian music before becoming America’s bubblegum sex princess. But her comments are so tongue-in-cheek that it’s hard to imagine she is taking anything seriously, including the divinity of Christ. In the same interview she belittles her parents’ Pentecostal beliefs (“My dad speaks in tongues and my mother interprets”) and includes extraterrestrials among her beliefs. I say her sarcasm is a very good thing, for if Perry and I share the same faith, then I seriously misinterpreted fidelity to Jesus Christ.

If you want to see what sin looks like in a laboratory—a gorgeous, depressing, cinematic laboratory—then study AMC’s television series Mad Men. Its characters, although trapped in a very specific time and place in American history, reveal the universal way that human vice separates mankind from the divine. The show’s creators expose the massive divide between beauty and ugliness, a spiritual paradox where appearances deceive us on every level.

I find it hard to recommend Mad Men to most people, especially Christians. Its sexual scenes are uncomfortable; its vices are glamorous. I don’t let my children watch it. I watch the characters sin and then sin again with awkward fascination. I am both appalled by the protagonist and instructed by his self-deception. My parents, who met and married in New York City in 1960 and subsequently lived in real life with every cup, necktie, and piece of furniture on the set, would no doubt find the cultural references and costuming to be pitch-perfect. Yet I’m certain they would squirm at the debauchery behind the proper offices of Sterling Cooper. I have yet to recommend it to them.

You love an audience. If you were born since 1985, you’ve always had one. For years now you and your circle of friends have become each other’s micro-paparazzi, watching each other dance in videos, sing solos with ukuleles, write fan fiction, and pose for photo shoots. Andy Warhol, who famously quipped that everyone in the future would be famous for fifteen minutes, was not some cultural prophet like some have suggested. All he needed to do was read about the Greek figure Narcissus who after staring at himself in a pool of water was dying to upload that pose to his Facebook page as soon as he got home. Since 900 BC, I guess, we’ve been needing an audience. 

Now that technology has caught up with our narcissism, I offer some principles that might help guide our pursuit of an audience.

Youth and education often make a summer deal, and it goes something like this: I work hard all year long to make the grades, so for three months I deserve some well-earned hedonism. I’ll lie around some house anywhere the bills are paid, the pantry is full, and the washing machine is free. Before you sign this deal, let me warn you: it’s a lousy trade.

Fueled by my recent trips to Williamsburg and the HBO miniseries John Adams, I am reminded just how hard our early American ancestors worked. To reach into the past is to appreciate simple labor, to see broken backs, to smell the iron forge. I spend very little of my time these days trying to survive, and that’s a shame. I’m an Arts and Humanities kind of gal, someone who likes my heavy lifting in the shape of ideas and conversation, but my admiration of the past might just get me to pick up an axe or salt my own beef.

After centuries of relatively modest declarations of opinions in the public square, the indecent exposure of so many intimate parts is making me uncomfortable. Like a fourteen year-old who accidentally sees his grandmother getting out of the bathtub, just one afternoon of reading the comment boxes of the anonymous public can forever change our perceptions, and not always for the better. It seems that everyone wants to expose his rhetorical opinions in public these days.  

But are the opinions that people share on random comment threads really accurate representations of their true spiritual, political, and moral belief, or does the anonymity of the process encourage everyone to exaggerate—even alter—their deeply held values? Furthermore, if we were to analyze the comments left by fifty strangers, would the order and intensity of those comments begin to shape the conversation in such a way as to draw out the fringe voices and suppress the middle ground? And what if instead of becoming an archeological record of our generation’s true values, the comment threads of millions of people are actually forming the generation’s values? 

The American summer is a child’s season.

It is not designed, it seems, for grownups who associate the smell of sunscreen with skin cancer prevention, or worry about watermelon seeds falling on the carpet. Perhaps our educational system sets the rhythm of our bodies at the time we enter kindergarten, where children, like Pavlov’s dogs, follow their conditional reflexes right to the swimming pool every June 1^st. The impulse to earn A’s or do chores for mother gets squashed like so many blades of grass crushed under the Slip-n-slide.

I thought I was a grownup, but now I’m not so sure. I’ve been a public school teacher for a long time now, and except for the four years preceding kindergarten (when life is one continuous recess), I’ve never missed a summer vacation. But there’s a familiar paradox that hits me right about now every year when my mind and body prepares for the summer shift. Man is not designed for extended vacations, despite what my childish heart years for. The more discretionary time we have, the less we get done. The longer the Honeymoon package to Maui, the more we yearn for home. The more late nights we option, the fewer meaningful hours we have left in the day.

Boys usually get only two cracks at attending their high school prom, and girls not much more. I, on the other hand, am one of the few people who have finally lost count. I started my prom run as a nervous Texas teenager in a hoop skirt before I was promoted to student teacher at the water table in a tiny high school in Missouri. Since then I’ve been the chaperone with the flashlight, the door checker, the dress code enforcer, the clean-up crew, the impromptu romance counselor, the freak dancing monitor, the restroom attendant, and ticket-taker.

My memories of each one are shaped by the themed photo backdrop created in the fantasy-driven imaginations of an eleventh grade committee:  the NYC skyline, a jungle tiki room, an English garden, the red carpet at the Oscars, a Paris boulevard, and even a ghastly pumpkin carriage made of light blue crepe paper, presumably waiting for a bootleg Cinderella.

Even that hideous ogre in Shrek finds love. With no instruction manual except for a donkey-as-therapist and the twists of fate, the guy still manages to create his own fairytale.

Some Christians aren’t so lucky.

Like many children’s picture books, our American marriage myths are often more about pretty illustrations than straight talk. Christian marriages take the folklore even further, promising mythical wedding-night pay-offs in exchange for chastity, or automatic monogamy that comes free with pastor’s signature on the marriage license. But the tales of love often betray us, leaving authentic followers of Christ with a cynicism they weren’t expecting.

The real question is not whether marriages are in trouble (they are). The more important question is whether the Bible’s principles are trustworthy enough to still hold up under the cynical weight of all those broken, banged-up, and unfixable fairytales.  The best answer is not the easy one that we learned at Junior High Camp (God said it, I believe it, that settles it), but the answer that still holds true when the prince has left the story.