IIC 144: Jason Evert, Chastity.com, and the Integration of Formation

Dr. Peter: [00:00:00] Let’s start today with just a very short little exercise. Now, this is not a thought exercise, but an experiential exercise. A very short one. So it’s good if you can have your attention for this, if you’re not driving or if you’re not operating heavy machinery or not exercising. This is going to be very short. Don’t worry about it though if you are driving or doing something else, you can just kind of bypass this. But if you are in a good place to do this, I’m just going to invite you to notice what is going on inside you right now. Again, if that feels safe, if that feels right and good. If it doesn’t feel safe to go inside right now — there may be a few people out there where this isn’t a good thing, it’s not a good time, it might not be comfortable, it might not be familiar enough — so if it doesn’t work for you, don’t do it. But I am curious, if it is good place for you, what thoughts, feelings, body sensations, beliefs, assumptions, impulses, desires, what attitudes are up and active in you right now? Whatever is going on inside, I’m just going to invite you to notice it. What’s happening in your body? What’s happening in your thoughts? Your feelings? Impulses, desires? What are you noticing? We’re just getting a baseline here.

Dr. Peter: [00:01:30] And now I invite you to really tune into what happens spontaneously inside you when you hear this word. I’m going to say a word, and I’m going to invite you to notice what happens, what changes within you when I say this word. Here’s the word: chastity. Just noticing. How does that word land within you? Chastity. What does it bring up? What do you feel? What are you sensing inside? What reactions are happening inside you in response to the word chastity? Body reactions. Body sensations. Beliefs. Thoughts, emotions, assumptions, whatever it is, desires, impulses, attitudes. Could even be temptations. Sometimes that happens. It could be all kinds of reactions from all kinds of parts. All different parts have different reactions to this, this word chastity. Can we get curious about these reactions and where these reactions come from? It’s helpful to pause here to write some things down, you’re welcome to do that. It might have been really informative. You can let me know if something came up, in the comments, if you want, about the reactions inside to this word chastity. Thank you for doing that exercise, if you were able to do that with me, if you chose to. But let’s go a little deeper into what the church has to say about chastity. We’ve listened to some of our parts, what’s going on inside us, our reactions about chastity.

Dr. Peter: [00:03:58] Let’s hear what Pope John Paul II has to say. He says, “In the Christian view, chastity by no means signifies rejection of human sexuality or a lack of esteem for it. Rather, it signifies spiritual energy, capable of defending love from the perils of selfishness and aggressiveness and being able to advance it toward its full realization.” This is paragraph 33 of Pope John Paul II’s 1981 apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio, or On the Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World. Chastity is such a positive thing for Pope John Paul II. Chastity has this protective function. It defends love from the perils of selfishness and aggressiveness, helping bring love to its full realization in relationship. Now let’s go to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. We read, “Chastity means the successful integration of sexuality within the person, and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being. Sexuality, in which man’s belonging to the bodily and biological world is expressed, becomes personal and truly human when it is integrated into the relationship of one person to another, and the complete and lifelong mutual gift of a man and a woman. The virtue of chastity, therefore, involves the integrity of the person and the integrality of the gift.” That’s from paragraph 2337. So the Catechism, the Church, is teaching us the integration of sexuality of the person, the integration within relationships, the integration of the person, and the integrality of the gift, the mutual gift of sexuality, the mutual gift of self.

Dr. Peter: [00:05:53] Those are such important themes. But if we cut away to leading edge research and thinking in the secular world, we find that Daniel Siegel and Chloe Drulis, in a 2023 article, argue that “We will offer scientific support for the IPNB position that the mind is relational and embodied and that integration is the basis of mental health.” This integration is so critical, I can’t stress that enough. That’s why I call this podcast Interior Integration for Catholics. We have two renowned researchers here, and I discussed interpersonal neurobiology and Dan Siegel in a previous podcast episode. They’re discussing integration as the basis of mental health. And we also have the Catechism of the Catholic Church describing chastity as the successful integration of sexuality within the person. We have to explore this further. And there are no two people I would rather dive into this topic with than those who are with me in this episode today. So let’s do this.

Dr. Peter: [00:07:11] I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, also known as Dr. Peter. I am your host and guide in this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast, and I am so glad to be with you today. I’m a clinical psychologist, a trauma therapist, a podcaster, a writer, the co-founder and president of Souls and Hearts. But most of all, I am a beloved little Son of God, a passionate Catholic who wants to help you to taste and see the height and depth and breadth and warmth and the light of the love of God, especially God your father, and also Mary your mother, your spiritual parents, your primary parents. I am here to help you embrace your identity as a beloved little child of God and Mary. And as you know, we are in the midst of a whole series on the integration of personal formation here, bringing in the best, the brightest, the most creative and influential Catholic thought leaders in this personal formation space. And today, in episode 144 of Interior Integration for Catholics, this releases on August 12th, 2024, I am so pleased to bring you Jason Evert of The Chastity Project and chastity.com to discuss the integration of formation and chastity from his unique perspective. And I am also so glad to have my friend and colleague, the co-founder of Souls and Hearts, with me in this episode, Dr. Gerry Crete. This interview was filmed at the National Eucharistic Congress in July 2024. So let’s get to it.

Dr. Peter: [00:08:35] I’m super excited today on this episode of Interior Integration for Catholics to have an esteemed guest, Jason Evert. I’m sure you’ve heard of him, The Chastity Project. He’s done so much work over the last 25 years in this particular area, one of the foremost experts in this field. And we’re going to get right to it after I also introduce, I’m excited about, my co-host for this episode, Dr. Gerry Crete. You all know Dr. Gerry. He’s been with us from the very beginning at Souls and Hearts. But because of the limitations of time and so forth at the National Eucharistic Congress, I want to get right into it. So, Jason, first of all, thank you so much for being here. It is so good to have you. So thank you for making time in your busy schedule.

Jason Evert: [00:09:19] I’m happy to come on.

Dr. Peter: [00:09:20] Tell us about the Chastity Project. Like the vision, the mission. What’s it all about?

Jason Evert: [00:09:26] Well, we got started, I guess technically back when I was in college. I led a lot of high school retreats while I was in college, and the kids started opening up to me about the stuff they were going through, and a lot of it had to do with confusion on relationships, human sexuality, broken families. And I realized they just had no guidance in the formation of human love and chastity. At the same time, I was doing three years of sidewalk counseling at an abortion clinic in Pittsburgh, near Steubenville. And I just started feeling late, like, okay, why am I meeting a woman 45 minutes before her abortion? Like, why couldn’t I have met her when she was 15? Because if she learned about chastity, then she probably never would have dated this guy to begin with and be in this difficult situation. So I realized I’m like, throwing sandbags on the banks of a flooded river when there’s a dam broken a quarter mile upstream. Everybody’s focusing on the supply of abortion from legislation to law. But nobody’s focusing on the demand for abortion, which is unchastity. And at the same time, I was learning John Paul’s Love and Responsibility in school, and I felt like this is the antidote. And so I started sharing it with the kids on the retreats, and the light bulb was going on, and the kids loved it because of how John Paul’s approach was not so much from the outside in, but the inside out of the person, and it just resonated with them.

Jason Evert: [00:10:35] Graduated, ended up working for Catholic Answers in San Diego and they hired me to do apologetics. But I said, you know, my heart’s with the high school kids, you know, and I want to do this chastity thing. And I started speaking in the schools. And then it snowballed quickly to the point where it was 100,000 students a year. And then now we’ve been doing that for 26 years. And so I’ve written more than 20 books on the subject, and we’ve got a podcast called Lust Is Boring. We have chastity.com and do all kinds of different presentations around the world and resources, curricula, just focusing on God’s plan for human love. John Paul said in Love and Responsibility, “the word chastity needs to be rehabilitated.” So whereas a lot of people just want to shy away from the word because all the baggage that’s associated with it, we want to use the word and show how beautiful it is, and that we should love chastity. And what does that look like? How does that free us to love? And so that’s kind of the mission of what we’re all about, just helping people to be free to love so they can see God in this life and in the life to come.

Dr. Peter: [00:11:31] I love it how you connect this in to the core of our faith, which is love, right? The two great commandments, all about love. And you’re seeing the sort of deformation when we fall into these sexual sins, difficulties, and how that keeps us from our call to be love, to love and to be loved.

Jason Evert: [00:11:53] Yeah. And many of the young people I meet, they’re kind of living out of wounds that they don’t even realize, and medicating it with not only addictions and screens, but addiction to sexuality and pornography. I met a high school boy once and he said, “Yeah, I go home from school on Friday,” and he said, “I watch 12 hours of pornography on Saturday. I go to bed and I watch 12 hours of porn on Sunday, and I come back to school.” And he said, “I don’t even enjoy it anymore. It kind of disgusts me, but I don’t know how to live without it.” And it’s like, whoa, okay, like, how do we untwist all of this? Where do you even begin? Because if he starts a dating relationship, I mean, he’s going to destroy this 16-year-old girl in no time because he has no concept of self-control, let alone gift of self. And, you know, so we’ll meet these kids, like, you know, what do I do to break free from porn? And we got that question so often I got with Matt Fradd and we’re like, let’s just do a book, you know, a spiritual exercise where it’s like every tool we can possibly think of. And the key is we really wanted to make it human. So it wasn’t just do more rosaries, get to confession, or just get that filter on your computer, but really approaching it from a truly human perspective of just not only theological, but spiritual, emotional, physiological, relational, all of these elements in it. So that way, I mean, you could be doing all the spiritual stuff you’re supposed to do, but if you’re not patching up that childhood trauma, then it’s just this portal of entry where you keep going back to this as a mechanism to to heal those, or not even heal those wounds, but cover up those wounds. And so we really try to take a personal approach to kind of figure out, okay. Because, I mean, maybe your psychology is doing okay, but spiritually, you’re doing nothing, you know, and you need to shore that up. So we really wanted a human approach. And that’s what we try to do through Chastity Project as well.

Dr. Gerry: [00:13:31] I’m really curious how you approach those wounds in your ministry. Because, as a therapist…

Jason Evert: [00:13:36] I just send ’em to you! Well, I try to remove the stigma of counseling with them because many of them are even in cultures where like, no, our culture, you don’t go to counseling, because if you have a therapist, that means you’re a psycho and we’ve got it together. So we don’t need counselors because that’s for the real messed-up people. It’s like, good luck with that, you know? But I really try to encourage and empower them to, like, find somebody who can really help you go to those places. You know, a friend of mine, Chris Stefanik, he said, “Your mind is like a bad neighborhood. Don’t go in there alone.” And so you want to kind of bring company with you when you go to those places, otherwise you’re just stuffing your stuff.

Dr. Gerry: [00:14:13] Yeah. You know, a lot of the work that Peter and I do with parts work, IFS, is looking at kind of the interior world and how we have different inner conflicts, different parts that are kind of in opposition to each other. And so I could imagine on one hand, a part of, let’s just say me, that’s like, “I want to be holy and I want to be righteous, and I want to do the right thing and all that.” And another part is, “Oh no, I want to, I don’t know, look at pornography or something.” And so when you come in and say, “Hey, we’re going to talk about chastity.” I have one part going, “Yeah!” and I got another part going, “Uh oh, I’m running for cover.” You know, that kind of thing. I’m just curious how that resonates with you.

Jason Evert: [00:14:55] Oh, no, we say that in the schools. I mean, you walk in and, you know, sometimes I’ll walk in with the kids, and they don’t know I’m the speaker. A lot of the times you can hear them just grumbling, “Ugh, the stupid sex talk, here we go, blah, blah, blah, blah.” You know, it’s perceived as a threat because, you know, if we have this misunderstanding of chastity, it’s just this litany of prohibitions, then it’s like, well, that stands in the way of love instead of that’s what makes love possible. But we’re very authentic with the kids in regards to our own story and our own mistakes. And so we’re not up there, “Now, you, you, you!” It’s more like, “Now me, yeah, I struggle with this and you know, this.” And they realize, okay, I can just sit and watch this guy open his heart up to me, and then I don’t feel like I have to be defensive because he’s not coming after me. But then when it’s said and done, the defense is dropped and they realize, okay, I need to get my stuff together and then they come up afterwards. I told the kids at a high school in New York, if you guys need to hang out and talk afterwards, I’ll just be over there. And the kids formed a line seven hours long and we were there till 5:30 at night. We had to cut the line off to get the next talk. And the kids would just come up and just pour it out, from the abortion to the addiction, to the molestation to the cutting, to the, I mean, you name it. And they just dump because they’re just looking not so much for advice, but just someone to finally listen to them.

Dr. Gerry: [00:16:03] Yeah, I love it that it’s relational. And actually that’s what we do in our interior world, is we connect with the parts of ourselves that are coping in some negative way. And we actually, instead of pushing them away or chastising them or shaming them, we actually want to relate to them and understand them, which is, it sounds like that’s what you’ve been doing.

Jason Evert: [00:16:21] Yeah. It’s just trying to take a kind of a loving lance to the pus wound. You know, you’ve got this festering boil and you just got to really gently go in there and just pierce it. And then this stuff starts coming out and it’s like… but I’m not in their daily life. And so I’ve got to get them connected. And sometimes it’s connected to the campus minister, sometimes it’s the family, sometimes the family’s causing the problem and we got to get the police involved. I mean, so there’s we just got to make sure that they’re connected in some way instead of just kind of dropping a bomb and walking out the door. And so there’s a lot of follow up needed. So I, you know, tell every school, as soon as the assembly is over, you make an announcement, “We know today’s talk, Jason talked about a lot of sensitive stuff. Remember, our guidance department is here for you.” These people just, they need a network. Otherwise, it brings it up and it can get so scary. You just want to shut the lid on the Pandora’s box and be like, we’re not going to look in there again, because that’s a scary place to go.

Dr. Peter: [00:17:10] So you kind of see your role as like kicking it off, you know, and then that spark, you know, can catch, you know, and people can work more locally.

Jason Evert: [00:17:21] Yeah. I mean everybody in the infantry, you know, the army, has their own role. You know I might be like a bunker busting bomb, you know? And I can just, boom. And I can get to layers that others might be able to get to, but then I’m not the boots on the ground. You know, we need them, and then we need the field medics to come in, you know, and then we need this group to come in and rebuild. And so to me, I don’t see myself as the be all, end all of like, I come, I do the chastity talk, the kids are saved. It’s like, no, these teachers, these parents are trying to till the soil and sometimes it gets hardened and they get frustrated. And then someone can come in from the outside and create, you know, a breakthrough, God willing. I mean, I have 100 convents of nuns who pray for my talks. So I’m kind of buying souls with other people’s money at this point, but to have that kind of breakthrough that can facilitate the work these parents are hopefully doing at home and the teachers hopefully doing in the classroom.

Dr. Gerry: [00:18:08] I love that, and I love the way you’re mobilizing, helping the community. That’s fantastic. But you’re also providing more as well. Like more than just those talks. You’ve got your podcast and other services.

Jason Evert: [00:18:17] Yeah. And we bring to every school hundreds and hundreds of free books of chastity and healing from sexual abuse, pornography addiction. And we just put all the books out and we tell the kids, “Hey, if you want them afterwards, they’re free for you.” And the kids just pillage the table. I mean, I remember one girl came, she comes to the gym and she sits down and their boyfriend comes down in the gym, and he sits behind her and he wraps his arms and legs around her during the assembly. And, you know, at first it seemed like she appreciated his tentacles or whatever. But then, like when the talk was over, I noticed she was really scooted away from him. And then she comes down to the table and she’s like, what’s that book you have with 16 Reasons to Dump a Guy? Like, that book is right here, sweetheart. You know, and they just grab the stuff because they’re starving, but they don’t know who to ask. So they just get on TikTok and look for answers and you know where that leads.

Dr. Peter: [00:19:00] So you use this word a number of times already. It caught my attention. Human. That your approach is like, very focused in the natural realm, you know, as well as the spiritual realm, but also focused on the natural realm. And so that leads me to think about human formation, just the basic raw human formation. And that needs to be integrated with the spiritual stuff, the intellectual stuff. So it’s like you do a lot of intellectual stuff as well, informing the mind, just basically providing answers. So tell us a little bit about sort of the integration of the human, the intellectual and the spiritual and how you think about that and about how that works within your own heart, if you’re open to that.

Jason Evert: [00:19:38] Yeah. I mean, I see what we’re doing as kind of marriage preparation when it should be happening. I think we’ve made a mistake in the church of forgetting our own teaching that it needs to be, you know, remote, proximate, and immediate. And all we’re doing is the immediate marriage prep, which is not marriage prep, that’s triage. You know, like pre-Cana is like, okay, we’ve got 12 cohabiting couples looking at porn, contracepting, and getting married in three months. It’s like, wait a minute, we’ve got to start this in junior high. And so what we’re trying to do is begin then in terms of, okay, what is a human relationship supposed to look like? You know, what is it that you long for? And so we want to give them the intellectual, because some have become so skeptical of church teaching that if you just come in there with Scripture verses, it’s like, heard it before, thanks, but no thanks. They need to understand this makes sense, you know. And John Paul said that chastity can only be thought of in association with the virtue of love. And so if they can understand, okay, intellectually, this is airtight. You know, because what is love to will the good of the other. Can I make a sound case that abstinence is an expression of love, willing the good of the other in that that it’s more loving to to abstain with your girlfriend than to sleep with her because you’re doing what’s best for her, not just what feels good in the moment. I think we can make an airtight argument. This is good for her. And then if you’re approaching a relationship with goodwill, you’ll see that this is going to help you to love her better. But then how do we live this out? Is it just pure power of self-will? I just got to pull myself up by the bootstraps. I mean, chastity doesn’t even begin until you realize how bad you are at it. And then you realize, like, okay, I can’t do this by sheer human willpower. And then you start to tap into the divine grace and realize, okay, how helpless I am without him, and then I can live this out. And so we try to really help the kids to see it’s not just being intellectually convinced of this, because you could be like, yes, this is a good and noble thing to do, and I will will to do it, and then I will fall flat on my face in 12 minutes.

Jason Evert: [00:21:25] And then you realize, okay, your purity is the fruit of prayer. And so we really try to approach it from all of these perspectives. It’s a challenge when we speak in the public school because you can’t approach that dimension. But the beauty of John Paul’s way of approach, this humanistic approach is we’re able to use Love and Responsibility in public high school assemblies. I mean, we don’t say him by name, but we’re weaving it throughout the whole thing. We wrote a book called Pure Love on chastity. He was the first chastity book I wrote, and then we made a public school version of it. So we had to pull out all the religious references. And I have a quote in the Holy Father from there, where it says, “The greater the feeling of responsibility you have for your beloved, the more real love there is.” And so in the public school version, it just says, one guy said, and it has the quote, but it’s John Paul. I’m sure if I get to heaven one day, he’s going to be like, really? One guy? And I’m like, you don’t understand. But that’s the beauty of the truth is that you can weave it in without necessarily overtly addressing the spiritual.

Dr. Gerry: [00:22:19] I love what I’m hearing is it’s a very positive message. Do you approach lust as a topic in this?

Jason Evert: [00:22:25] Yeah. I mean the talk is called Love or Lust. And we really, you know, try to contrast them and what the difference is. But I mean, this is part of the Gospel. It’s good news. You know, I remember one priest that I knew talked about grumpy priests, and he said, they’re the grim bearers of the glad tidings. So it’s like, that’s not what we’re supposed to be. And so ultimately, chastity is to be loved. Like, this is good news. It frees you to love. And so I think they need to see that joy is associated with it. So there’s a lot of humor in the presentation. It’s very positive. And we go to some dark places, you know, of covering some heavy stuff. And to me, I use the humor as kind of an anesthesia because there’s a surgery that has to happen. And if you don’t anesthetize the patient before you stick the knife in, they’re going to jump off the table and sue you for malpractice. But if I get them numbed up for laughter, ha ha. And then I put the knife in, and then we go for the tumor, you know, and try to get that out, but it works. Laughter, for some reason, makes you trust a person more. And there’s that connection. And then we can go in and hit this heavy stuff of addiction and sexual abuse and trauma, but they’re in a place of trust where they realize, okay, this guy’s not shaming and blaming. You know, he’s coming at this subject with love.

Jason Evert: [00:23:35] And so if you think of any virtue you have, it’s not because you’re afraid of the consequences of not having that. Like, you’re not motivated to be faithful to your wife or brave or whatever, because you’re just afraid and guilty and shameful of the alternative. And so we don’t use shame, guilt, scare tactics, pregnancy rates to like, frighten the kids into abstinence because that’ll work for like eight minutes. You know, they’re back at it. The only thing stronger than that craving for lust is the craving for love. And so if we can show them that lust is the counterfeit of that, it’s just reducing a human person to their sexual value. And when we start talking about the way that John Paul saw human love. And when he talks about the woman having the peace of the interior gaze, that when a man has purity in heart, he can give that to his wife. And women hear that, and it’s like, oh, that’s what I want. I want a guy who just even knows how to look at me, let alone how to treat me or touch me or talk to me. I want to be looked at rightly, but I find it resonates with the women. But then something deep in the men are like, I want to be able to look at a girl like that, but I’ve got these porn goggles on my head that have been stuck there since seventh grade, and I don’t even know how to judge the value of a woman except by how much lust she generates in me. And so though it stirs up like, I want that. But how do I get that? And then you can bring the rest of the sacraments and the Gospel and how to live it out.

Dr. Gerry: [00:24:53] Wow. I love it. I also really appreciate that you mentioned sexual abuse. My doctoral dissertation was on male survivors of childhood sexual abuse, and so many people don’t want to hear about it. I mean, they’ll say, oh yeah, that’s a bad thing, but they don’t actually want to hear about it. And so it keeps the topic under wraps. And here you are. I just feel like you’re coming in with a lot of courage and honesty and giving an opportunity for kids to hear that. I know when I was growing up, we didn’t hear anything.

Jason Evert: [00:25:21] Don’t want to trigger anybody. Don’t trigger them. Just keep it down. I’m like, no, no, no. That, if you don’t talk about it, it never happened thing does not work. Especially with the boys. Because, I mean, we talk about sexual abuse in every assembly. And, you know, because my wife went through that as a child and she wrote a book on how to heal from sexual abuse. And, you know, we wrote the thing together of just how to face that and to heal it and not absorb the shame that doesn’t belong to you in the first place, and the blame. And so we, we kind of go through all the lies that you tend to believe of, like it was my fault or, you know, now I’m worthless or worth less because of what happened. And I mean, the girls come up afterwards, the guys come up. As a guy, like it doesn’t happen to guys, like that’s a girl thing, you know? And if it happens to a guy, you just bury that. You just die with that secret. But then they’re living out of this trauma and don’t realize how much it’s informing their relationships or their lack of relationships.

Dr. Gerry: [00:26:13] But even you talking about that topic breaks that shame thing, for girls too, but for especially for guys. So I really appreciate that.

Jason Evert: [00:26:23] It’s heartbreaking how prevalent it is and the fact that these kids are just walking around. I remember meeting one girl on an Indian reservation where I was speaking, and she had been raped by 13 different guys. Not times, I mean multiple times by 13 guys. Like, and it’s just like, oh, and you wonder why she’s doing bad in math class and she’s just processing all of this trauma by just burying it under who knows what. And so, yeah, I mean, you’ve got to bring these things to the surface. And unfortunately, the parents, I mean, sometimes their head is in the sand, sometimes the parents are causing it, sometimes the parents are just oblivious or allowing it to happen under their own roof. And so, you know, it’s not a matter of just, let’s go home and tell dad. Well, dad’s the one doing this. It’s like, whoa. So, yeah, you got to bring these things to the light so that they’re not, you know, just living out of all these different traumas for the next 30 years of their life and then generationally just passing it on to their own kids one day.

Dr. Gerry: [00:27:20] Right, right. But also bringing it up so that they can work toward healing, work toward actually achieving chastity, because abuse or trauma is the way that, at least the way I see it. And I see early exposure to pornography as a type of sexual abuse. So it is disrupting the proper order of sexuality.

Jason Evert: [00:27:40] And it becomes a cyclical thing. I remember seeing an interview with a woman who’s a pediatric nurse who helps children who are child survivors of sex abuse. And she said at her hospital here in the Midwest, she said the number one perpetrator we are seeing of sexual abuse against children is not the clergy, is not some cohabiting boyfriend. It’s not some creepy guy trying to give you candy out of the back of his trunk down the street. Not even close. They said the number one perpetrator of sexual abuse against children is 11 to 15 year old boys who’ve been exposed to pornography because they see the junk on the iPad. They watch it for years. The parents don’t know. Then their nine year old sister has a slumber party with their cousin who comes over. It’s 11:00 at night. The parents aren’t around and things happen and nobody gets told. And that stuff just gets buried. And then that girl, 11, turns 13, and then she starts flirting with the boys. And by the time she’s 14, she’s in there. But you’re not getting to, where did this all start? Where did she lose that sense of her value? It came from this porn addicted, you know, 13 year old cousin or whatever. And so you can just see how these, these lies feed on each other. And then the girls fall into these addictions as well, pornography, and thinking, oh my goodness, I must be the only girl on earth struggling with this. And then the isolation, the shame of that. And so, yeah, these, these poor kids, I mean, they’re up against stuff that just was not on the radar 20 years ago.

Dr. Gerry: [00:28:54] Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen over the last ten years more women are looking at pornography, but they’re also looking at pornography in more the ways men do. So more objectifying body parts, it’s less about love addiction or romantic at all. It’s becoming more and more like men. It’s really disturbing.

Jason Evert: [00:29:15] What do you think is behind that?

Dr. Gerry: [00:29:16] I think it’s a lot of changes. Like, if you think about, I’m, you know, dating myself somewhat. But I think Sex in the City, for example, was a show that came out in the 90s. It was the first time, like women openly talking about men in ways that men usually talk about women and not in a good way. And so you’re normalizing bad male behavior for women.

Jason Evert: [00:29:37] Yeah. Now we’re equal.

Dr. Gerry: [00:29:38] Yeah. No, no, we need to do the opposite.

Jason Evert: [00:29:43] Yeah. Very true.

Dr. Peter: [00:29:45] So tell me about how you instill hope. You know, because that obviously happens. I mean, I was at one of your talks three years ago, and it was like a really hopeful thing. I loved being there with my daughters. And so tell me, like, how does that happen? How are you able to do that? I mean, obviously, you know, there’s graces and so forth, but tell me a little bit about that.

Jason Evert: [00:30:05] Well, I mean, hope ultimately comes from God, not just from merely sheer optimism that things are just going to get better. And so we try to share our stories and just be open and honest with the kids of, you know, that I had struggled with pornography, you know, from elementary school, you know, into through junior high, through high school, and then finally got rid of the stuff towards the end of high school and have, thanks be to God, stayed free from it ever since. And I think for a lot of young men, it’s like, oh, I thought this was just what guys do. And that once you’re in it, you know, it just stays with you. It’s just this dark companion that’s with you when you’re bored and lonely and angry and stressed and tired. You just go to porn and it deals with it. And so for them to hear like, okay, I’m not really happy with this addiction, but it is actually possible to be free. Or even people who experience same-sex attractions for them to hear like, okay, wait a minute, I can experience these attractions and not be sinning by having them and be loved by God, but choose to not act out sexually and be happy and not repressed and like that’s possible. And so we share stories of people that we meet, that experience same-sex attractions, practice chastity. In the LGBT community, they’re seen almost as unicorns. It’s like it’s either gay pride or gay shame. There’s nowhere to live in between. And this idea that you don’t have to live in a closet or march down a gay pride parade, you can, you know, share with whoever you want that you experience these attractions, practice chastity, and live a joyful life.

Jason Evert: [00:31:23] So the kids need to see hope in order to believe in it sometimes. And so to realize, okay, these are people that are real and they’re authentic and they’ve got their own scar tissue and they’re willing to show that there’s a better way. I think it’s just the living witness of the fact that it doesn’t have to end, you know, where you think it is going. You know, even if you’ve made mistakes, you’ve started over. I share lots of anecdotes during the presentation of kids that I’ve met along the way that have just been in some really dark places and decided, I’m done and I don’t want this anymore. And then a couple years later, they’re in such a different place. And so for the kids to hear, okay, if that teenager can do it, this person can do it, you know, that’s what I want to do. Because they’re not happy. I mean, they want a pure love, you know? They want a demanding love. They said that young people love John Paul so much, this was when he was a young priest. They said he was happy and demanding. And that combo was just potent for a young person. You know, it’s not this grumpy priest who waters down the Gospel. It’s this happy guy who calls you to be saints. It’s like, and so you can understand why he had this magnetic personality.

Dr. Gerry: [00:32:25] We would say an integrated personality.

Dr. Peter: [00:32:27] Yeah, an integrated person. I mean, what I think again, it goes back to, Jason, that you’ve got so front and center is the call to love. To be loved, and then to reflect that love back to God and neighbor. And to do that with the entirety of your being. Because I think what happens so often is that there can be this walling off of the sexual, you know, this sort of like, that’s a no-go zone or that’s the hopeless zone. You know, I can grow in these other ways and maybe compensatory, you know, try to make up for it. But this has been impossible, I think is often the way that it’s thought about. And it carries with it so much other meaning and so many other sorts of symbolic representations. It just gets really complicated in there. And so for you to be able to sort of unpack that and say, look, you know, let’s actually get to the roots of this. And I love the idea of not taking this on at the last minute or in the last hour, right, but taking it all the way back. So what recommendations do you have for parents? There’s a lot of parents listening to this. A lot of parents are viewers. If you are the parent of young children now, let’s just say ten years old, ten years old, eight years old, seven years old. What recommendations are you giving to parents to kind of start this as early as it ought to be?

Jason Evert: [00:33:38] Yeah, yeah. Well, one is get over your insecurities when it comes to talking about this stuff. Because if you don’t speak, I mean, the world is going to fill the void of your silence with a very contrary message. And the church will never give you an age number. You know, at 12, tell him this, at 14, give him that. Because the parents are the primary sex educators. They should know their kids best. And the kids deserve what’s age appropriate so they can have that period of latency, of innocence extended as long as possible. And every kid is so different. I mean, like some kids are like 13 and they couldn’t care less where the baby came from. And then you got some eight year old like, “Mommy, how did the baby get in your belly?” It’s like, “Oh, God, put the baby in my belly.” “But by what means did God put that baby in that belly?” Like they just won’t give up. They’re so precocious. And so the church realizes that and expects the parents to be able to figure out what is age appropriate for this one versus that one. But they got to talk. And when you do talk, you can’t talk about like, bad body parts, dirty body parts. Sex is bad. Sex is dirty. Because that’s a part of the backlash that’s happened from this purity culture idea is that for years, abstinence was promoted in a very negative, shame-based way.

Jason Evert: [00:34:41] And some people went for it and be like, “Okay, I got to stay in line because sex, it’s dirty, it’s bad and it’s evil. And so you should save it for the person you love the most.” It’s like, okay, all right, I’ll go with that. And then they get married and they’ve got to transition from this dirty, evil, wicked, bad thing to, okay, now tonight — as opposed to yesterday — it’s holy and good and wonderful. And some of them just have not been able to make that shift from reverse into fifth gear. And it’s created dysfunction in their own marriages. And so I think it’s important that we be able to explain human sexuality in a way that’s age appropriate but beautiful. I’ve met more kids than ever in the past couple of years, especially adolescent females, identifying as asexual. And you start talking to them and I start to explain to them. Okay, like the chair is asexual, the wall is asexual. It’s not a sexual being. You, by virtue of being a human being, are a sexual being. But I understand that word asexual has resonated with you of a lived experience of not feeling drawn towards that thing. And let’s explore that. Why? Where’s that aversion coming from? It’s because all they’ve ever heard or seen of human sexuality was on a classmate’s cell phone at the eighth grade lunch table, and what they saw was mortifying.

Jason Evert: [00:35:53] And if that’s what I’m expected to do with a husband, I am asexual. So it becomes this harbor from them, from having to confront that scary thing that I’m supposed to like that I find disgusting. And so I think it’s important that parents realize what these kids are up against with screens, to make sure that they’re protected from being exposed to this stuff in the ways that they are. And so you’ve got to set up accountability filters. But all those things ultimately serve for the purpose of building a relationship with the kid, that it’s not just okay, set it and forget it. It’s like, no, this is here so we can talk about things. You can look at my cell phone. So what I do with my kids is they know my cell phone is open season. Anytime you want to look at dad’s phone, you can look at dad’s phone. I mean, I’m going to be here to watch that you’re not, you know, stumbling on stupid stuff in YouTube. But you can look at my internet history, you can look at my call history, you can look at my social media, you can look at all that stuff. And then they realize, okay, if dad is going to be this transparent with his device, we can’t put up a fuss if he wants to look at our phone as well.

Jason Evert: [00:36:50] And so there’s got to be that mutual accountability. We’re in this together, guys. You know, and I can talk to my teenage boys about, like, it’s not like me spying on you. It’s not that I don’t trust you. I don’t trust pornographers, you know. And they’re the ones going to be soliciting. So we’re going to be a team and hold each other accountable. So I think, yeah, parents, get your head out of the sand, become computer literate. I mean, some parents don’t know how to open an email attachment. And their kid’s like hacking into the Pentagon’s website for fun. It’s like you got to catch up. So one tool I would just throw out there to the parents is something we use called pluggedin.com. It’s from Focus on the Family. It gives you movie, television, video game, and music reviews. So if the kid’s like, oh, you know, can I go watch this movie? Check it out. Like, not that one. How about this one? And you can see a thorough review of the spiritual elements, the sexual elements, the violence, the language, and it’ll explain everything. Same thing with video games and all that stuff. So if the kid says, hey, I want to buy this nice race car game. It’s called Grand Theft Auto. It’s like, no, not happening. And here’s why. And so tools like pluggedin.com we found to be pretty helpful.

Dr. Peter: [00:37:49] Beautiful. So, all of your resources, chastity.com. Is that where people go?

Jason Evert: [00:37:54] Everything is at chastity.com. And then from there they can connect to the podcast, social media, the books, the resources. And if they want, everything we sell is also in bulk. And so that way, if they want to buy a case of the books and give it to the local high school or youth group or confirmation class, we just make it kind of budget-friendly. So that way they can give it away in mass, and then if they can’t afford it, we’ll just give it to you for free.

Dr. Peter: [00:38:13] And they can get in touch with you or with your staff through chastity.com?

Jason Evert: [00:38:17] Yeah. We got a way to launch projects, which means they don’t have to pay anything for the resources and we’ll crowdfund on social media to give it to them. So anywhere in the world, people, nuns in Honduras will email us, like, we’d like a thousand books in Spanish. And so we just post the project, we announce it on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter like, hey sister, you know, whatever wants to raise all this money, can you guys just donate? And people just click around, donate 20 bucks a pop, you hit the thermometer goal and then it triggers the warehouse. The warehouse ships through the books and she gets 1000 books. And we didn’t pay for it, neither did she. So it’s just a neat way to evangelize. Yeah.

Dr. Peter: [00:38:49] So if there’s one thought, if there’s one sort of key central idea that you would like to leave, one thing to remember from this interview, from our time together, what would that be?

Jason Evert: [00:39:00] Well, I think that John Paul’s insight that chastity can only be thought of in association with the virtue of love. That’s the only way to understand this virtue. It doesn’t stand in the way of love. It makes love possible. And if you want to live it out, I think of, you know, one thing I’ll leave you with. I’ve noticed in the Old Testament, God the Father gives a lot of commands and commandments, you know, I mean, there’s tons of them. But from my reading of the New Testament, I’ve only found one in the entire New Testament from the father. There’s only one thing. I mean, Jesus has different things he says and commands, but God the Father, only one. And it’s when he says, “This is my beloved Son, listen to him.” So, like the only command of the father in the New Testament is to listen. And so if you’re going to live out your vocation and have a life of prayer, it’s listening, which is the hardest part of prayer. You know, I can get in there and I can do petition and I can do this, and I can do that, and I’m a man. I can do, do, do. But actually just be still and receive and listen. That’s the heavy lifting right there. And so if we want to live out this virtue, we have to first listen to the father, to the one thing he’s asking us to do, which is just listen.

Dr. Gerry: [00:40:03] Thank you. I’m very inspired and I wish that your team was at my high school.

Jason Evert: [00:40:08] Yeah, I could have used it myself. Yeah.

Dr. Peter: [00:40:12] It’s such a blessing to have had you with us, Jason. And thank you so much for your response to God’s call to take this on. It’s changing lives, and your work has been helpful to me and my family. I have a copy of Pure Love that goes back more than 20 years, from when my oldest was just a preschooler. So thank you for all you’ve done.

Jason Evert: [00:40:33] Oh, my pleasure. God bless you.

Dr. Peter: [00:40:35] Thank you Jason, thank you Gerry, for opening up such a great discussion, and I invite you to get in on the conversation. Feel free to leave a question or comment in the YouTube space. I will respond to it. And please make sure that you subscribe to our YouTube channel, Interior Integration for Catholics. I’m going to invite you to check out all the episodes in this series on the integration of personal formation, starting with episode 133. We have 11 so far, with more on the way up. Next week is my interview with Dr. Edward Sri, theologian and co-founder of FOCUS, and we are discussing the integration of formation for FOCUS missionaries and those they serve. But let’s switch gears here. Let’s talk again about you. If you are a Catholic who recognizes the need for structure in your human formation journey in your life, and you want to find a structured program in a community of like-minded Catholics in relationship with other Catholics, in a small group journeying together toward loving God wholeheartedly and our neighbors as ourselves, and if parts and systems thinking appeals to you, check out the Resilient Catholics Community. You can do an internet search, or you can go to our landing page at soulsandhearts.com/rcc.

Dr. Peter: [00:41:47] We are now up to nearly 400 members, and we’re onboarding our largest cohort ever. Get on the interest list for the next cohort — we are accepting applications again on October 1st, 2024 — and find out a lot more. Now I’m also giving a special shoutout in this podcast episode for Catholic formators. If you are a Catholic coach, a Catholic therapist, a Catholic spiritual director, a seminary formator, a priest. If you are any Catholic adult who accompanies other Catholics in their personal formation, whether that’s human, spiritual, intellectual, and or pastoral, and if you recognize that you need to work on your own formation, we have a special community for formators. It is our Formation for Formators community. You can check that out at members.soulsandhearts.com/fff. Again, these are small groups facilitated by IFS-trained professionals that focus on your human formation. Those are going to be starting again in mid-September of 2024. We’re filling those slots up right now. You can check it out, go to our web page, members.soulsandhearts.com/fff, fill out that interest form. Or you can reach out to Pam at office@soulsandhearts.com. Let her know that you’re interested.

Dr. Peter: [00:43:06] You can let her know if you have questions as well. Now I also have this new endeavor and I’m super excited about it. Especially because now dozens of people are getting on board with this. Over the next few weeks, I’m inviting you in this process of writing your vision statement and your mission statement and your value statement. In my semi-monthly reflection from July 22nd, 2024, I describe these three statements and how they can help you focus your life. And in the reflection released today on August 12th, 2024, I go over step by step how to write a personal vision statement with examples from the Saints. Check all that out at soulsandhearts.com/blog. You can also get on our mailing list if you’re not getting our emails. If you’re not getting these reflections at home, you can get on our page at soulsandhearts.com, the front page, the home page, and click the blue button and you can get those immediately sent to you. So I’d love to have you on board with that. And let’s wrap it for today by invoking our patrons and our patrons. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint Joseph, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Special thanks to the Human Formation Coalition, who provided the support to make this transcript available.