Smart Pastor

I found this last week on CT. Very Interesting….

What may be a promising twist to the story of the American university’s fall from grace was covered in a recent New York Times Magazine article, “Students of Virginity.” There’s a growing number of brave students banding together to both resist the hookup culture and to promote sexual abstinence before marriage—and not mainly for religious reasons.

photo credit: Stoichiometry

Virginity clubs like Harvard’s True Love Revolution (TLR) and Princeton’s Anscombe Society instead ground their arguments in philosophical ethics and scientific studies that show the harmful consequences of recreational sex. The list of things undesirable and therefore avoided is long: diseases, unplanned pregnancies, rape, feelings of regret and alienation, and in some cases, higher divorce rates and maternal poverty. Overall, argues TLR, casual sex leads to “personal unhappiness and social harm,” while premarital abstinence ensures better health, better relationships, and “better sex in your future marriage.”

The piece then goes on to suggest how we might make a bridge to the culture.

Where a Christian sexual ethic can pick up where philosophy and statistics leave off is in articulating reasons for premarital abstinence beyond “it works.” And for this, it will likely be seen as antiquated and strange. The idea of doing something (or not doing something you want to do) for reasons other than individual gain or loss defies the my-happiness-first logic that’s enshrined in the West. If going to a “pimps and ho’s” party, getting drunk, and sleeping with a stranger decreases my overall health and happiness, it makes sense to refrain. But what if having protected sex with my fiancée seems like it will increase our health and happiness? If our benefit is the measure, then refraining becomes absurd.

The church, following the picture of sexuality throughout Scripture, has consistently taught that sex belongs smack dab in the middle of marriage. “One can say that in Christianity’s vocabulary the only real sex is the sex that happens in a marriage,” Lauren Winner wrote in Real Sex. “The faux sex that goes on outside marriage is not really sex at all.” Thus, a distinctly Christian argument for premarital abstinence is ontological, not utilitarian. God keeps sex in marriage as an expression of the audacious covenant that two people make, in the context of community, to be bound together exclusively and eternally—an echo of the bond between the persons of the Trinity.

Here is my thought…perhaps we could make the theological argument based on a practical foundation. This works because this is how you were made. This works because it is in alignment with the One who holds the universe together.

I agree that making the rational for it a strictly practical one gives permission to walk away from that decision when it no longer seems practical, but it seems the practical benefit of abstinence has power to make a bridge. Let’s not be so quick to run away from it.