Are there older Christian women challenging younger Christian women to stop cheating on their husbands? One of my hopes for 2009 is to go one year, just one year, without hearing of a Christian 20-or-30-something-year-old wife who is cheating.

Of course, not all young women cheat, and plenty of cheating men have hurt women.  But over the past 10 years, several young couples I’ve personally known have had theirmarriages end because of the wife’s infidelity. Oddly enough, none of the guys I’ve known have committed adultery. It seems that ”sex in the suburbs” is a new trend among young Christian women.

Is this the result of feminism breaching the church such that equality with men means sinning against men in the stereotypical ways that men have sinned against women? Is this the result of a divorce culture or women with unhealed “daddy issues?”

I’ve been talking to ministry leaders from around the nation and many have noted the same trend. No one can seen to put their finger on the root of the problem. Are women reacting to fact that the evangelical church generally raises boys to be passive? While it’s true that passive, ”nice guys” make great boyfriends because they are often servile and easy manipulated, passive men become the sad husbands that many women eventually grow to resent.

I wish I had less anecdotal, personal data other than the dozen or so couples I know of, as well as from discussions with others, but I don’t hear women being challenged about their sexual fidelity in marriage. Why is this? Why do Christian men need “accountability groups” and women simply need “fellowship” or “support” groups?

I have a seminary-graduated friend in the South who has walked through so many women-initiated adultery cases with his friends that he’s confessed to struggling with misogyny and absolute cynicism about the possibility of a woman being faithful.

Some might sarcastically suggest that maybe, in the future, the groom’s Mom needs to show the potential daughter-in-law her gun collection during a conversation about how much she would hate to see her son get hurt. What gives?

Here’s an interesting take on Eliot Spitzer’s behavior from evolutionary biologist David P. Barash, who argues that it is natural for men, especially successful men, to seek multiple sexual partners, as “they are responding to the biological pressures that whisper within men.” But …

Some readers may bridle at this characterization of Homo sapiens as EPC [extra-pair copulations]-inclined, but the evidence is overwhelming. That doesn’t justify adultery, by either sex, especially because human beings — even those burdened by a Y chromosome and suffering from testosterone poisoning — are presumed capable of exercising control over their impulses. Especially if, via wedding vows, they have promised to do so. After all, “doing what comes naturally” is what nonhuman animals do. People, most of us like to think, have the unique capacity to act contrary to their biologically given inclinations. Maybe, in fact, it is what makes us human.

Wow. An evolutionary biologist takes a moral stance on sexual behavior in the L.A. Times. Praise God!

On his Consumed blog, Owen Strachan adds:

Men have been attempting to control themselves (to follow Barash’s moral guidance) for millenia, and we can all see where that’s gotten us. No, we must have the Holy Spirit living inside of us, willing us away from Internet ads and tv shows and stray glances at the mall and extended consideration and appraisal of other men’s spouses and meditation on past objects of lust and spending time alone with women who are not our spouses and so much more. We must have the Spirit, men, and we must strive for holiness, both personally and in the embrace of the local church. It is a difficult thing to be a monogamous man, armed with a sinful nature and existing in a sex-saturated world, but we can resist temptation. We’ve got to fight for holiness, we’ve got to prize Christ and find our joy in obeying Him and turning away from the world, and we’ve got to celebrate marriage and cultivate happy, romantic marriages. Only then will we avoid Mr. Spitzer’s mistake; only then will we avoid his tragedy.

HT: Justin Taylor