The Sunday Chicago Tribune had a front page article on the national phenomenon of "purity dances" among conservative Christians. These are formal social occasions where fathers take their daughters to formal dances, where daughters pledge themselves to sexual abstinence before marriage, and where fathers embrace the role of protectors of the purity of their daughters. If you're a young man, listen up: there is new hope here for you, for finding a pure woman to marry, even in these United States. If you're a young man, here's a great motivator for you yourself to abstain from premarital sex: be worthy of the pure woman who has saved herself for you.
Of course, the article is full of the mockery, cynicism, sarcasm, and disdain for the truly good that our present-day social customs aim at any idealism in the realm of sexuality. That mockery is, in my view, a reflection of the jaded who no longer believe in any romantic or chivalrous idealism in sexual relations. That mockery is also the terror of the guilty who don't want to see anyone achieve what they so cavalierly threw away forever. The saying is that misery loves company. In many areas of life, it is also very true, deep in the psychology of many, that mediocrity loves company. Mediocrity in sexual matters and in other matters wants to level the playing field so that excellence is flattened. Mediocrity reacts with envy, anger, and sarcasm when someone is going for the brass ring in life because, when someone else shines, they are obviously and emphatically left in the dark. The rational solution is to get out of the dark yourself, not to drag others into it.
Yet, in spite of the mockery in the article, the very fact that the article had to be written, especially in an elite, national newspaper, is very good. Some people even in our debauched United States are waking up to reality. Christians believe that we have a God-given human nature. Sin and the incessant social embrace of sin blind, deaden, and paralyze many of our natural, healthy human instincts. Ironically, in this post-Freud age, the widespread culture of promiscuity represses the truly human instinct for sexual purity. There is a natural human yearning for a pure spouse who has reserved the sexual act for marriage. We have repressed that instinct for so long in the United States that this idealistic yearning seemed all but dead and fictional, a concoction of another age, a caricatured "patriarchal" age of oppression. But nature has a way of making its comebacks because we are hardwired for the good. As an old commercial used to say, "it's not nice to fool mother nature." When we try to fool mother nature, reality bites back--hence so much widespread chaos and turmoil today in relations between men and women.
Part of the mockery of chastity comes in the classic attack that abstinence does not work--that even teenagers who pledge themselves to abstinence end up engaging in premarital sex. These critics also like to make the point that, once the teens break the abstinence pledges, they are more likely to engage in "unsafe" sex because they know nothing--or at least nothing "accurate"--about contraception. Let's take this bromide apart, step by step. First, as noted by one of the conservatives quoted in the article, virtually all teens know about contraception in today's America. Just walk into any drugstore; and you will see the products lined up in open shelves in a bewildering, vibrantly capitalistic array of colors and labels. Second, as also noted by a quoted conservative in the article, why not respect the full freedom of the teen by laying out all the alternatives, which include abstinence? As in the abortion debate, social liberals have a great fear of presenting alternatives, of presenting options other than those celebrated in the media. You have heard of politically correct thinking--well, we have among many social liberals, sexually correct thinking: you should not take seriously the option of abstinence before marriage.
But there is a more fundamental and radical critique that can be made against the argument that teens who break abstinence pledges are more likely to end up pregnant. This radical critique says that there is nothing wrong with preserving the natural link between cause and effect in sexuality: the undeniable (though not exclusive) purpose of sex is to reproduce. If x, then y. That causal connection is a big red flag: if sex leads to kids, it's a great sign that sex should be reserved for that person judged by you worthy to be a parent. When we find that person worthy of parenting our kids, we want to claim them permanently so that they stick around for the arduous task of raising and educating the kids. That arrangement is marriage. We have just reinvented the wheel for a society that thinks itself too clever to need the wheel. An unwanted pregancy is surely a great problem, especially for those in economic hardship; but we can address the problem by social compassion, by alternatives such as adoption, by re-teaching the need for abstinence before marriage, without cutting the natural, healthy link between sex and babies. Once we try to fool mother nature, we are the ones who end up as fools. Many can testify to that result.
Posts
Following the 2004 Presidential election, we've expanded our discussion to cover the public policy decisions of Catholics in public service on both sides of the political divide.
