Dr. Jennifer Morse tells young leaders what the culture gets WRONG about sex

During Live Action’s 2025 Young Leaders Summit on March 22, Ruth Institute founder Dr. Jennifer Morse was part of a lineup of speakers who inspired over 1,500 young leaders with tools and resources to build a culture of life.

In her speech, Dr. Morse pointed out the harmful messages young adults receive in today’s culture about sex and love, and how to build a healthier culture instead. “In this house, we believe kids need their mom and dad,” she began, continuing, “The sexual revolution destroys lives. The sex of the body can’t change. And the most important one, in big type, is children are a blessing … And finally, of course, the human person is meant for love. This is what our faith teaches us. Every human person is meant for love.”

What the Culture Gets WRONG About S*x: Dr. Jennifer Morse at the Young Leaders Summit

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“My overall theme is to compare the sexual revolution with the Christian culture — which you could call the Christian sexual culture,” which she said “channels the sexual desire into appropriate things with benefits for children and family and the whole society.”

“We have lost that culture,” she said. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it. We have lost the Christian sexual culture. We lost it piecemeal.” To get that culture back, Morse said we first need to understand what it is that we support and are fighting for.

Regarding the problems with our current culture, she said it can be viewed as a tree with three main branches. “We call them the contraceptive ideology… And then we have the divorce ideology… And then finally, the gender ideology, which is the thing that’s on a lot of people’s minds all the time now.”

Under contraceptive ideology, it is argued that sex and childbearing should be separated. Under divorce ideology, having babies is culturally removed from marriage. And gender ideology undermines the biological reality of the male and female sexes.

“We ask at the Ruth Institute, what is owed to children? And we have two answers,” she said. “Children are entitled to know their identity. Every child, every person has the right to know their cultural heritage and their genetic identity. Every person — without exception. Even if your dad dies, right? You’d get to know who he is. Secondly, every child is entitled to a relationship with both of their parents, their natural mother and father, except for an unavoidable tragedy.”

She concluded by reiterating what it is these young leaders are ultimately fighting for, and that is a culture of love.

“We come from a variety of Christian traditions here, but all of us agree that at the heart of the universe is a deep and abiding love. Every person who has ever been conceived exists because God loves that person and wants them to exist. And God wants us to be part of his loving plan by our procreation coming about as a result of the love of the mother and the father. This is what traditional Christian sexual morality teaches, and I am not ashamed to say that this is what I believe.”