Forbidden Fruit

"Regnerus does an excellent job of combining large-scale survey results with vivid interviews to provide a comprehensive portrayal of how sexuality and religion are related in the lives of American adolescents. The book shows how sexuality and religion interact in complex and sometimes surprising ways. It addressses important topics few other books on either sexuality or religion in adolescence have addressed, such as masturbation and Internet pornography. Anyone interested in the lives of today's young Americans should read this book."--Jefferey Jensen Arnett, an author of Emerging Adulthood: The Widing Road from the Late Teens through the Twenties. "Forbidden Fruit is an iconoclastic book that shatters the sexual pieties of the religious right and the secular left. Mark Regnerus shows that churches and Christian parents--especially evangelical ones--have failed to steer their kids clear of sex because they hold out no compelling vision of the sexual good life. But he also shows that the secular life's faith in 'healthy' teen sex is chimerical: acolescents who have had sex look worse on all the outcomes that scholars and parents care about. This important book is bound to get parents, pastors, and scholars talking"--W. Bradford Wilcox, author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands "I've waited for this book my entire ministry. It used to be that only skeptics and mystics noticed the interplay between sexuality in young people--but Regnerus confronts the parallels head-on as a sociologist, and dares the church to do the same. Forget 'forbidden': Forbidden Fruit should be required reading for anyone who loves young people."--Kenda Creasy Dean, parent, professor, and author of Practicing Passion: Youth and the Quest for a Passionate Church