If every locker room and restroom and after-school boys’ club is going to become a place where our sons will face someone who has openly declared (and been affirmed in) his intent to commit sexual sin, where is the relief? Where is his freedom—if only for an hour or so—from the sexual fog that permeates our world?

At ages 4, almost 5, and 6, my three sons are already more sexually aware than I’d like them to be. They encounter sexually-charged material at, quite literally, every turn. Regularly, we travel a certain highway; around one corner looms a billboard featuring a larger-than-life photo of an exotic dancer.

My boys, each like a miniature Odysseus strapped to his car seat, cover their eyes with chubby fingers and shout to one another: “Don’t look at the girl with no pants on!”

As I watch my small sons, their rapid growth marked in pencil on our door frame, I know that when they are 10, and almost 11, and 12, the challenge of parenting boys in a hyper-sexual culture will not have gone away.

My newsfeed in recent days buzzed with fresh critiques: a sexualized Superbowl; provocative children’s book covers; and a modesty directive from the Grammy Awards, requesting that private parts at the event be “adequately covered.” (Which quote I will not link, as the celebrity photos illustrating this story are not, actually, adequately covered.)

What kind of defense can Christian parents mount against the scatter-shot of immodesty, promiscuity, pornography, homosexuality?

For boys particularly, temptations to lust abound. And have always abounded. Wherever people go, they take their own sinful hearts with them. Solomon’s fatherly instructions to sons in Proverbs 5 are a timeless warning.

But boys of a previous generation have also had relatively safe places, de-sexualized zones, if you will, where the focus was on a simple blessing called friendship. Opportunities for boys to simply be together: shoot hoops, defeat a game, build a robot. Arenas free from sexual tension.

And such de-sexualized zones are shrinking.

Last week, when the Boy Scouts of America flirted with revoking their policy against admitting gay members, they struck one more blow to boyhood. In May, the BSA plans to vote on the issue. If they open the door to professing homosexuals, a sexual dimension will also walk in.

I suspect such inclusion is inevitable. And, if every locker room and restroom and after-school boys’ club is going to become a place where our sons will face someone who has openly declared (and been affirmed in) his intent to commit sexual sin, where is the relief? Where is his freedom—if only for an hour or so—from the sexual fog that permeates our world?

When homosexuality is recognized and accepted in a group, every individual can then be assessed in sexual terms. This means, of course, that boys can become the object of lust and temptation by other boys. But it also means that “straight” boys will be pressured to make some kind of sexual declaration, and perhaps to validate their heterosexuality with sexual acts.

Anthony Esolen makes this point in a 2005 article for Touchstone magazine, “A Requiem for Friendship: Why Boys Will Not Be Boys & Other Consequences of the Sexual Revolution.” He writes that boys seeking to avoid being suspected of homosexuality now shoulder a burden of proof. In order to show himself a heterosexual man “the single incontrovertible sign that the boy can now seize on is that he has “done it” with a girl, and the earlier and more regularly and publicly he does it, the safer and surer he will feel.”

When our culture allows and encourages some boys to define themselves by their sexuality, we force all of our boys to constantly account for a sexual dimension.

In response, we Christian parents must teach the shockingly counter-cultural directive of Paul to Timothy: “Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity.” (1 Timothy 5:1-2)

It’s not about sex. Those other boys? They are your brothers. Those girls? They are your sisters.

Sadly, we will also have to prepare our sons for ridicule, persecution. Their godly actions may prove nothing to a group of peers intent on pinpointing their sexual identity.

The de-sexualized zones are shrinking. As a result, deep, non-sexual, same-gender friendships suffer.

Our sons will be hard-pressed to find relationships with other boys that are not suspected of homosexuality or, from another perspective, that are seen as something valuable apart from sexual potential.

Legalizing same-sex marriage has the same effect. The authors of What is Marriage? Man and Woman, a Defense write:

Misunderstandings about marriage will also speed our society’s drought of deep friendship, with special harm to the unmarried. The state will have defined marriage mainly by degree or intensity— as offering the most of what makes any relationship valuable: shared emotion and experience. It will thus become less acceptable to seek (and harder to find) emotional and spiritual intimacy in nonmarital friendships. These will come to be seen as not different from marriage (and thus distinctively appealing) but simply as less (p 9).

This will undoubtedly also be the experience of our sons in groups where homosexual relationships are affirmed. There will be an additional stratification of friendships. Some boys will be “boyfriends” and some will be merely “friends.” The boys who are simply friends or teammates or fellow club members will have the value of their uncomplicated connection diminished.

In response, we parents will have to emphasize that friendship is not less. As Albert Mohler writes in Desire and Deceit: The Real Cost of the New Sexual Tolerance, “The friendships shared among boys and young men allowed them to come together around common interests and activities and to channel their natural curiosity and energy into participation in share activities.”

The responsibility for upholding the value of such friendships falls on parents. The BSA and the school districts and the athletic clubs are not going to help us. In order for our children to embrace friendship, Christian parents must model it for them and show them its value.

We will need to tell them the story of David and Jonathan, not as a historical oddity but as a pattern for godly men.

And we will need to model this ourselves: dads will need to cultivate friendships with other men, and moms with other women. We will need to narrate for our children the blessings of that kind of mutual affection. We will need to highlight how “iron sharpens iron” and how “if they fall, one will lift up his companion.” (Prov. 27:17, Eccl. 4:10)

We may need to facilitate boy-only projects, with the aim of allowing boys to labor together, especially in the context of kingdom service. We may decide to have some single-gender Sunday school classes or youth groups.

We will also need—as godly parents have always done, but now even more so—to supervise and guard the friendships of our children. We will need to closely monitor ungodly influences, equip our children to respond to them, and not be so naïve as to think that a group of boys can simply and always be boys.

There is much to be done. De-sexualized zones are shrinking, and boyhood friendships are dying. We Christian parents, by our example and encouragement, must work to make sure they do not become extinct.

Megan Hill is a PCA pastor’s wife and regular contributor to The Aquila Report. She writes a blog about ministry life at Sunday Women. [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]