sex as a Christian recruiting tool?

I used to be a pizza delivery driver, it's an interesting profession that gives you a somewhat unique view of the people in your community. What I mean is you see people in their own homes, you get a glimpse into their private lives. They've spent the day at work and when they return home they're tired and they discard their public facade, I see them in that state.

However this is less about the private lives of the pizza consuming public than it is about a curious recruitment tactic I witness being used by a Christian customer.

Religion is something that you can't avoid as a pizza delivery driver. It's not uncommon to receive a religious tract instead of a tip from the faithful. As a side note I can comment that I've done informal comparisons, and the more religious markings that are on a person's car (I mean like Jesus fish and religious bumper stickers) the smaller the tip they give the delivery driver is likely to be, if they tip at all. The worst sign of all is a bumper sticker advertising a religious radio station, often describing the station as a "family" station. At least 50% of the people whose cars bear such advertisement will stiff the driver, not even letting him keep the change from a dollar.
I find this interesting. I'll bet they shell out the hard currency when the collection plate comes along at church.. but the generosity doesn't extend to people delivering their pizza.

But back to the subject of this post, sex. We all know that the Christianity has a long and proud history of working to keep people from having sex (except their leaders, who have an equally proud history of engaging in among what they consider the more deviant forms of sex in secret while railing against it in public). I've heard too many stories of people who have been raised to view sex as intrinsically dirty, and of what that crippling upbringing has done to their lives.

Sex (at least premarital sex) is sinful. Temptation is the work of the devil. We're supposed to be strong and resist temptation. Denial of pleasure is a virtue.
These should be familiar messages to most.

I mention this because, on one occasion, I found myself delivering pizza to someone who used the brief moment of contact while exchanging pizza for money to invite me to some sort of social function at his church, making sure to mention all the girls they had there that I could meet.

This dismayed me on multiple levels. First off, did he say that to EVERY young male he met, or was there something about me that announced "single and socially awkward"?
The second example is probably the correct answer.

But moving on, the thing that really bothered me was seeing a Christian attempting to use sex as a recruiting method. Sure, you could try to take the position that social contact between the genders is NOT equivalent to sex. But I think that's a weak argument that falls apart upon examination of the basic relationship between men and women (er, the nature of the personal relationships that form between them, I mean). Humans, as animals, are driven by biological urges. We seek out food, water, shelter.. AND the opposite sex. The fundamental concept that lead to our concepts of relationships, love, and all that is sex. To an extent I'll accept a degree of uncertainty here because there can be an awfully vague border between friendship and love, and friendship clearly doesn't have to be driven by sex, but in the end I think it's clear that the standard male-female relationship that starts out as dating and traditionally ends up with marriage is a social construct designed to provide a stable environment to support the children that tend to result from the sort of male-female interaction that we're talking about here.
In other words, sex.

I was kind of disturbed to realize that I was dealing with a religious individual who was basically attempting to use women as a lure to draw me to his church.

I wonder what the women would have thought if they knew about this. Or perhaps they did know, perhaps they've accepted the Christian belief that women must be subservient to men, perhaps they were happy being used as a lure to draw in converts to their religion.
Part of me wonders if, had I gone to the social event, there would have been a group of girls tasked with socializing with me to make me feel welcome, to try to get me to stay by suggesting they were interested in me.

In any case the attempt was self defeating in my situation. When I think of a woman with a strongly religious background, I think of a woman with a lot of baggage that I REALLY don't want to deal with. I don't want to offend people, I'm sure there are a lot of happy, well adjusted religious people out there, but at the same time there's no way to deny that religion DOES screw some people up.

I was just repelled by the hypocrisy of using women's sexuality as a lure to draw loners into a religion that then goes out of its way to demonize sex.

That and I couldn't keep from thinking how much that sounded like a standard cult recruiting technique. You know, isolate a loner and get him to go to a social gathering where you heap attention on him to make him feel welcome, and then later you begin the process of indoctrination (as in brainwashing) once he's relaxed and vulnerable.


I've since found out that this is not an isolated incident. Others have reported similar experiences.