Oh, how we hate to choose.

We want to be thin, but love our ice cream.

We want to be wealthy, but there’s so much cool stuff to buy!

We hate Washington, but, hey, our Congressman is OK.

And so it goes. Not just with us, but with our culture at large.

Just think about how we view, and treat, women.

Cosmopolitan’s headlines are too disgusting to give examples — but the magazine insists that women deserve respect.

We decry sexual harassment, but pornography is the Web’s biggest seller.

We celebrate the innocence of children. Yet as soon as puberty hits, we allow our public schools to teach them about the most debasing sexual acts.

Hugh Hefner dies, and TIME magazine devotes a glossy magazine to him. But TIME constantly covers sexism in the workplace and women’s equality issues.  

Christians Are Guilty Too

A 2016 survey shows that Christians are not immune from the incursions of a sexualized culture. Only about 50 percent of Catholics and Evangelical Protestants believe that “going out to dinner with someone you are attracted to” constitutes cheating. And nearly 40 percent believe that going to a strip club betrays one’s spouse.

The headlines love to report on politicians — for example, former Congressman Anthony Weiner, a Democrat, and former Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, a Republican — who are unfaithful to their spouses (for the most part, these politicians are men who cheat on their wives). But sexual impurity is not only an epidemic in secular society but also in the church.

The notorious website “Ashley Madison,” whose purpose is to enable men and women to commit adultery discretely, has tens of millions of members. And according to a 2014 survey, 25 percent of them are Evangelical Protestants and 23 percent Catholic.

Does this mean that one-quarter of Evangelicals and Catholics are adulterers? No; it means that of the registered adulterers or adultery-seekers on a massive international website, millions are professing Christians.

What does all of this have to do with the sexualization and abuse of women?

People who claim to follow Jesus Christ are to offer light to the world. Instead, too many are following red lights — the districts of sexual sin, whether real or virtual or both.  They are corrupting their minds and shattering their marriages. Those who are unmarried, mostly young men, are polluting their marriage beds before they ever enter them.

Men can’t honor women while objectifying them. A man can’t show professional respect to someone he views as a potential sexual conquest. Fathers can’t abandon their families for other women and expect their sons to be men of moral integrity.

We Have to Choose

There is some good news: Millennials are less prone to divorce than any other segment of the population. The divorce rate among people 25-39 has dropped more than 20 percent since 1990, even as it’s gone up in every older age cohort. We Baby Boomers have a lot to be ashamed of.

Yet here’s a much less pleasant truth: Many younger people are delaying marriage. And up to a quarter of them will never marry at all.

“For many young people across the country, putting off marriage — or even settling down with a partner long term — has become the norm,” reports Gabriela Barkho in The Washington Post. “The average age for first marriage is 27 for women and 29 for men; in urban areas such as New York and Washington, those averages are higher. It seems that everyone has a different answer for why: Blame it on the economy. Or dating apps. Or women’s ability to delay childbearing.”

I’m sure these play a role in the absence of marriage among our youth. But I’ll bet there are a couple more:

The culture of promiscuity. Surveys too numerous to mention indicate that both men and women are having growing numbers of sexual partners. Why? For one thing, a lot of young women feel that unless they surrender sexually, they will be dateless indefinitely. So much for sexual freedom.

The culture of divorce. Why enter into a marriage union when you have seen your own parents tear asunder something God has joined? Why have confidence in the covenant of marriage when it has been violated within one’s own home? Ending marriage in the cases of adultery, abuse, and abandonment might well be justified. But with the advent of “no-fault” divorce laws in all 50 states, we have invited a situation where marital breakup has become cheap and easy.

If we want to be a society that respects and protects women and treats them as persons of equal value with men, we can’t at the same time be a society in which sex is seen as the greatest value of our culture. Where it’s portrayed that way in every kind of media, all the time. Where no-commitment sex is celebrated as the norm even as it dries-up the soul.

Life’s about choices, I’ve always told my kids. Christians need to make and model the right ones if we’re ever going to have the kind of culture we say we want.