Something is going wrong in Christian communities. We say that we care very much about premarital chastity, and yet anecdotes and studies alike show that many Christians, even in churches that teach sex is only for marriage, have premarital sex.
The statistics on unmarried Christians and sex are both hard to come by and not wholly reliable—people tend to fudge when talking to pollsters, presenting their lives as they wish they were, not as they actually are, so the single Christian talking to a pollster may pretty things up a bit. Still, a few snapshots from the field:
• Three surveys of single Christian adults conducted in the 1990s determined that approximately one third were virgins—meaning, of course, that two thirds were not.
• In 2003, researchers at Northern Kentucky University showed that 61 percent of students who signed sexual-abstinence commitment cards broke their pledges.
We hear that "sexual experiences don't ever go away totally. They live on, like ghosts, in all future relationships, and can do real damage there."
• Of the remaining 49 percent who kept their pledges, 55 percent said they'd had oral sex, and did not consider oral sex to be sex.
And yet, pastors (and Christian writers) spend a lot of time talking about sex. Indeed, the cultured despisers of Christianity often accuse us of being obsessed with regulating people's sex lives!
So what is going on?
There are, of course, many reasons that trying-to-be-faithful, believing Christians engage in sexual sin. (The number one reason is the Fall.) But I think pastors and writers and other Christian leaders bear part of the blame. We mean well. We desperately want to counter the decidedly un-Christian messages our surrounding society sends about sex. But in combating them, we often tell a few fibs ourselves. We say things about sex, and sexual sin, that are untrue and unhelpful.
Fib #1: Premarital sex makes you feel lousy
Ask Christian teens what their youth pastor has told them about sex, and you'll probably hear "If I have premarital sex, I will feel bad."
To be sure, that is sometimes true. At times, after a one-night stand, or after sex with your girlfriend of two years, or after even kissing a guy you don't know very well, you feel lousy. Ashamed, or alienated, or lonely, or just plain down in the dumps.
But sometimes, it is not true. Sometimes, even after sinful sex, a person will feel fantastic. Or maybe blasé. You don't necessarily feel devastated.
When we tell our unmarried listeners that they'll feel bad if they have premarital sex, we are making two different mistakes. For starters, we are making a pastoral error. Let's imagine Jason, 27, who has heard since puberty that premarital sex will leave him feeling like trash. For years, he walks the chaste straight and narrow, but at some point he stumbles and has sex with his girlfriend.
Does he feel horrible the next morning? Maybe; maybe not. If he doesn't, he may find himself thinking "Hmmm. My pastor has been telling me for a decade that this would feel horrible, but it doesn't. Maybe he's wrong, too, that God wants sex only in marriage." If guilt is the only resource the church has given Jason for diagnosing sin and remaining chaste, in the absence of guilt, he will simply keep having sex; not to mention doubting the authority of the pastor.
Jason's feelings, of course, were deceiving him—and that is exactly the point. Insisting that premarital sex will make you feel bad misstates the nature of sin. When we consider deception, or sloth, or gluttony, or any other sin, we know darn well that these don't always make us feel bad. The harlot in Proverbs may, in fact, be bitter as gall, but she appears to drip honey—and we, in our state of sleepwalking, are not always equipped to tell the difference between honey and gall. As Proverbs tells us, the man who follows her does not know that it will cost him his life.
This is the way sin works—it tells us that something not good is very good indeed. Our feelings are not always reliable—before or after sinning. This is precisely why we need the witness of Scripture and the Church to help us know what to do. If our feelings were always in line with God's reality, there would be no need for "Christian ethics."
Jesus understood that we are often out of touch with our sins. He makes the point in the parable of the Prodigal Son. The turning point of that story is Luke 15:17: the prodigal, Jesus tells us, "came to himself." Before this moment of turning, of awakening, the prodigal was not in himself at all. And we are often not in ourselves, not aware of our fallen state or the sins we cycle through.
What the church means to say, I think, is that premarital sex is bad for us, even if it happens to feel great. This is a harder teaching. It requires more nuance, more backdrop of the nature of sin and self-deception and ethics and the Fall. But it is also more pivotally responsible, more effective, and truer to Scripture.
Fib #2: Women don't really want to have sex
Okay, I admit it: this is a fib that really ticks me off. Many folks in the church insist on perpetuating this false idea that women don't have libido. One example: in a chapter called "What Girls Need to Know Before They Start Dating," one Christian parenting book reminds readers that "From early childhood, [girls'] fantasies are of Prince Charming and motherhood, not sex." By high school "a boy's sex drive … may be the strongest driving force in his mind. While girls may have an increase in libido, their thoughts are about nonsexual socialization, dating, fun, parties, holding hands, and maybe kissing. Every mother … should teach her daughter what boys are like." The rest of the chapter details just that, telling us that "Boys are high-octane sexual creatures." Moms must tell their daughters "not [to] fall for a boy's lies or lines."
Apparently moms don't need to talk to daughters about how to control their own desires—just how to fend off the raging bundles of hormones that take their daughters to the movies.
The idea that women aren't that interested in sex is certainly not new; nor is it uncontested. For much of Western history, women were thought to be less rational, and therefore more likely to abandon themselves to passion, than men.
But beginning in the seventeenth-century, women (in particular, white women) came to be seen as less passionate, less interested in sex, frankly less carnal, than men. Women might dispense conjugal favors, but they didn't crave sex.
Current opinion—popular and social-scientific—suggests the opposite. In their study The Good Marriage, Judith Wallerstien and Sandra Blakeslee found that in a quarter of marriages wives wanted more sex than their husbands, and in another quarter, men wanted more sex, and half "were evenly matched in desire."
The point is not to get into a debate about whether men or women are more interested in sex. The point is to recognize that when we follow the advice of the parenting guide I quoted above, we fail to prepare women for some of the real challenges and pressures they will meet as they try to live chastely—the pressures of their own desires.
Fib #3: Premarital sex leaves permanent scars
Recently, a friend of mine—a 25-year-old single man whom I'll call M—wrote me an e-mail. M, a med student who became a Christian a few years ago, recently met a woman at a coffee shop. They chatted, and then she scribbled her address on a napkin and said, "If you're not doing anything late-ish on Friday night, drop by." M knew this was a proposition. He e-mailed me to ask why he should pass up the opportunity:
I know that as a Christian I'm not supposed to have sex before marriage, but you and I both know I've already had sex before marriage. Why shouldn't I have sex if I'm already "used goods"? I've often heard that you should "save yourself" for your wife, that remaining a virgin will make you a better husband. I'm apparently already destined to be a lousy husband, so what does it matter if I have sex again a few more times?
M has picked up a message that is common in the church: sexual sin scars you forever. We hear that "sexual experiences don't ever go away totally. They live on, like ghosts, in all future relationships, and can do real damage there." We read that if we have premarital sex, then, on our wedding day, the images of the other people we've slept with will hover around our betrothed like specters.
This language suggests that sexual sin is worse than other sins, that its consequences stain us forever, that somehow, Jesus' saving work on the Cross does not cover this.
Those suggestions, of course, are false. As Scripture promises, "though our sins are scarlet, they can be made white as snow; and as far as the East is from the West, so far has the Lord removed our transgressions from us."
In Mere Christianity, after dwelling at length on sexual morality, C. S. Lewis chastises the Christian who would suggest that illicit sex is the singular, unforgivable sin. "If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasure of power, and hatred. … [Thus] a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute."
This is not to say that sexual sin, like other kinds of sin, doesn't form us. Sinful sexual behavior can, indeed, teach us some false and destructive lessons about bodies and sexuality. Using pornography, to take just one example, teaches people that sex is autoerotic, that it is about instant gratification. It teaches people to see other people as objects. It removes sex from the context of a relationship and places it in the context of the laptop. These are serious lessons, and simply confessing sin does not unlearn them. But they are not scars that defy healing. Jesus' blood, not to mention the discipleship of church community, is big enough to, over time, unlearn these lessons. We distort the gospel when we focus on the long-term effects of sin at the expense of forgiveness.
So … that's what not to say. What, then, should we say when teaching about chastity?
What TO say
Speaking honestly about sex and sexual sin is difficult and scary. It's scary because it requires more than soundbites. It requires us to take on the big themes of the Christian story.
What might honest, helpful talk about sex look like? For starters, it might begin with a rich theological context. Rather than simply quoting a verse from Paul on fornication, we can begin with Genesis. For Paul's familiar injunctions against porneia were not innovations—they were riffs on the basic sexual vision laid out in Genesis 1 and 2. God created sex, and he created it for marriage. Indeed, chastity invites good, basic teaching about how to read Paul—not as a first-century killjoy, but rather as a saint who sought to preserve God's intent for creation.
Honest, helpful talk about sex also involves honest, helpful talk about the way sin works, and a recognition of just how fallen we are. The topic of sexual sin gives those of us who are pastors, teachers, and writers an opportunity to underscore how morally and spiritually unformed all of us really are.
Most American Christians don't really believe that the effects of sin mark us in our daily lives; most of us, I think, believe we are basically able to make good decisions—that our reason and perceptions are basically intact. Teaching about sexual sin necessitates teaching about just how distorted we really are.
I've found it useful to turn to the writings of great Christian saints when teaching on sin and the Fall. Augustine, for example, or Teresa of Avila, Thomas Aquinas, Ignatius of Loyola—they are always saying how worthless they are! They are always comparing themselves to worms! Their writings make great teaching tools.
"Why are these sainted masters of the spiritual life insisting they are clueless, wormy, and pathetic?" I ask. "Are they being disingenuous?" This leads to a discussion of how very fallen we all are, and how one of the fruits of the great saints' years of prayer and sanctification was a deeper recognition of our own worminess. This consideration of the effects of the Fall helps our people see that we don't have the ability, on our own (that is, without the witness of Scripture and the Christian community) to tell the difference between good and bad behavior, to differentiate between shades of black, white, and gray.
Honest, helpful talk about sex involves speaking not only about the will (as in, "Just keep your pants zipped up," or "Just walk away from that Internet porn," or "Just go for a run or take a cold shower when you feel like masturbating"), but also about grace.
Disciplining strong bodily urges like sexual desire is never possible simply though the will; it is possible only through the overflowing of God's grace.
And honest, helpful talk about sex involves not cheap scare tactics, but rather a presentation of Christ's offer of salvation, and of the joy that is possible through repentance and forgiveness. So rather than talk primarily about the ways sinful sexual acts might mark us, we can talk about the kind of people God wants us to be. We can retell the story of Jesus and the woman at the well. What is miraculous about that story is not merely that Christ knows and forgives the sinful woman, but that his forgiveness makes it possible for her to go forth and sin no more.
Pastoral talk about sex is scary, yes, but it is also an opportunity, for good pastoral talk about sex invites us not only to teach people chastity but also the essentials of the gospel. Robust teaching on sex will lead us inevitably into the great themes of Creation, Fall, and Redemption; of repentance and forgiveness; of formation and discipleship; indeed, of Christ's saving work on the Cross.
Lauren F. Winner is the author of Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity (Brazos), from which this article is adapted.
Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information onLeadership Journal.
Related Elsewhere:
The Brave New Case for Chastity | Everyone is asking who leads the evangelical movement. (Leadership Spring 2005)
