My Story: Pastor David Hatton
My wife and I wedded in 1971, and twelve children later we found that it really isn’t “cheaper by the dozen.” But shortly after our marriage, I was shocked to find that I still had strong attractions to certain members of the opposite sex. As disconcerting as this was to both of us (for I did confess this to my dear bride), it launched me into a liberating understanding of sexual chastity which eventually turned into a talk called “The Dance of the Sexes.” After evolving over many years of giving it in church youth groups and Christian camps, it was finally recorded and is now available on DVD (free).
Another mental dimension of chaste freedom, that followed this relational discovery in “The Dance of the Sexes,” was my surprising anatomical discovery in the routine work of nursing. I was amazed and very relieved to find that my exposure to the nude bodies of female patients did not bring the inevitable response in me that society and my church had led me to expect. Seeing the nakedness of the opposite sex was supposed to be sexually stimulating and dangerously lustful. Having accepted that kind of teaching all my life as Gospel truth, I had no logical explanation for my non-sexual reaction to the female nudity frequently seen in my job. I could not reconcile this contradictory division between what my upbringing taught and what I was consistently experiencing as frank reality. Illogically, I tried to accept both as true, and this double-mindedness persisted for almost 25 years.
Finally, a resolution came. While doing internet research on breastfeeding, hoping to find resource links to supplement my own web page on “Labor & Delivery Tips,” I found a wonderful website on breasts. It had information about breastfeeding, breast health, breast acceptance, and breast emancipation. I had never heard of that last category. Breast emancipation was basically about liberating the female breast from its dysfunctional “sexualization” in our culture. The goal was to bring the bare female chest to the same level of familiarity and social acceptance as the bare male chest. I was certainly in favor of public breastfeeding, and such a policy would indeed eliminate the difficulties nursing moms faced with it in America. Our culture shamefully exploits the bodies of women in general, focusing on their breasts in particular as sexual objects. Even though I knew this “sexualization” of the breast was wrong, I felt unable to link to such radical information. But upon really studying the arguments, I found it impossible to dispute the claims that supported this idea. They were urging that society learn to see and treat the human body as wholesome and decent, not something lewd or obscene. I was totally surprised. I was forced to admit that this reasoning explained and validated my many years of experience with nudity in the hospital, which was something I myself had never been able to do.
This information led me into many more hours of extensive study about the whole phenomenon of human nakedness. My subsequent research forever changed my viewpoint about the decency of our bodies, with or without our cultural clothing. It gave me insight about why pornography has such a powerful grip on our society. It helped me understand how the only valid way to fight pornography’s control on the mind is by adopting “the naked truth.” It cannot be fought by strengthening the unholy, God-dishonoring misrepresentation of the body that is so zealously promoted in our culture. It is this distorted perspective, this pornographic conception of the body, that has laid the very foundation for the porn industry’s overwhelming success in Western civilization, with our own country notoriously leading the way.
God will not honor the perpetuation of this false view of the body, even if the greatest Christian leaders have defended and preached it in His name. He has already told us that He will only use the truth to set us free. That is why I am glad to be a contributing writer on this website, whose purpose is to spread a healthy, godly, creational view of the body, one that is both theologically correct as well as human-friendly, to help people break free from the dehumanizing effects of porn addiction.
— Rev. David L. Hatton, RN
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