Interesting piece in the upcoming New Yorker on why evangelical teen-agers are getting pregnant:
The gulf between sexual belief and sexual behavior becomes apparent, too, when you look at the outcomes of abstinence-pledge movements. Nationwide, according to a 2001 estimate, some two and a half million people have taken a pledge to remain celibate until marriage. Usually, they do so under the auspices of movements such as True Love Waits or the Silver Ring Thing. Sometimes, they make their vows at big rallies featuring Christian pop stars and laser light shows, or at purity balls, where girls in frothy dresses exchange rings with their fathers, who vow to help them remain virgins until the day they marry. More than half of those who take such pledges—which, unlike abstinence-only classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian—end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse.
So True Love Waits but apparently not very long. As someone who has a very short attention span (very short indeed), I can totally see how that happened: a moving speech by a pastor about how bad sex really is, a pledge to please parents, a sexual urge, and there we go…
As the Reverend Rick Marks, a Southern Baptist minister, recently pointed out in a Florida newspaper, “Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional marriage, when divorce has already broken it down.” Conservatives may need to start talking as much about saving marriages as they do about, say, saving oneself for marriage.
This point is so obvious I am not sure why it is not all over the conservative websites? Where I come from, conservative Protestant Christians are excommunicated if they even consider divorce, but they are, of course, in the religious minority…
