But sex becomes a monster when you are a member of what I’ve started to call the “sexually-in-between” demographic—or the “Sexual Tweens” for short.

“Sexual Tweens” include those individuals who, regardless of age and sexual orientation, face a rather challenging, messy situation when it comes to reconciling their sexuality and activities with their religious commitments.

Young adults in particular belong to this “Sexual Tween” cohort since they experience sexual desires intensely, yet (most) have no imminent plans for marriage, as do other groups such as those who might never marry since they identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender (LGBT), or those who were married but are now divorced.

These individuals are out of luck when it comes to sexual expression within the context of faith, since marriage is the only life situation in which one can “legitimately” experience and act on sexual desire. As a result, meeting a religious tradition’s sexual expectations within these cohorts can seem a rather Olympic challenge.

In my study called “Spirituality and Sexuality in American College Life,” I surveyed over 2500 students across the U.S. and conducted in-depth interviews with 120 participants about their struggles (and occasional triumphs) in reconciling their religious lives with their sex lives. I encountered far too many young adults agonizing over what they experienced as a rather impossible situation, and whose faith lives were thrown into some level of crisis or even shattered altogether with a single “sexual misstep,” sometimes with an act as seemingly innocent as a kiss.

Given the intensity and frequency of warnings against sexual sin—especially within Christianity, which often publicizes sex “at the wrong time” as the worst of all transgressions, evident in popular books like Every Young Woman’s Battle: Guarding Your Mind, Heart, and Body in a Sex-Saturated World, devoted to “fighting lust” and waging a war for purity —the young adult faithful often face a terrible conundrum. They must either “win” the long “heroic battle” to “guard” their purity, or they “lose” themselves not only to the “evils” of sex outside of marriage, but often their place in religious communities, too.

As another Christian advice guide for teens explains, “When awakened at the wrong time, desire becomes lust, and lust is restless and shrouded in shame.” In response to this inconveniently timed lust—which includes all sexual feelings that occur outside of marriage—readers are told they must “put lust to death” because sexual sin is literally a “life-and-death issue.”

The sad thing of course, is that in a young person’s attempts to enact the death penalty upon their sexuality, it’s their faith life and relationship with God that may turn out to be the real casualty instead.

(For those interested, the results of my study will by published as Sex and the Soul by Oxford University Press in the spring of 2008.)