Church Voices

A Christian friend of mine, who is currently serving in the military, recently asked me for advice on how to go about defending the Biblical sexual ethic of abstinence against some of his male peers. I ran into similar situations several times while on the wrestling team during my high school years, and so also once faced the question, How does a Christian go about making sense out of such an issue before people who see your beliefs thereabout outmoded, immature, and pitifully deluded? Of course, appealing to ‘what the Bible says’ is just appealing to another harmless delusion in the eyes of your interrogators. So another approach is necessary. Here are some suggestions:

Tactic # 1: Upon being heckled, I have found the following line of questioning to be especially potent (originally suggested by my youth minister): First, ask your heckler if he or she plans to be married. This is almost a rhetorical question. When replied yes, follow that with “So tell me, when you get married, how many people would you prefer to have slept with your spouse before you?” Ouch. A hard-hitting question! A common response is “That’s none of my business.” And my reply “Ahh, but you see, it is. Once you are married, it very much is your business! If you can’t even discuss sexual issues with your spouse without thinking you have a right to information from them in that regard, I feel desperately sorry for your marriage!” If you phrase your questions and responses right, it is easy to make them out to be the unreasonable party in the discussion.

Tactic #2: Along similar lines, you could point out the virtue to be had in purity not for your sake, but for your future spouse’s sake. Tell them that you want to love your future spouse so much that you are storing up treasures for him or her in the now. Say also that because you know if your spouse inquired as to how many people you slept with before them, any number would probably be disappointing on some level, but the greater the number the greater the hurt. Sexual pain is the worst kind of pain. Few examples would suffice to show this (take cheating and adulterous behavior, for example). Tell them you will care enough for your spouse’s feelings to avoid the issue. Further, then ask something that makes them out to be a jerk, like “Why wouldn’t you care about your wife’s feelings?!” Argumentum ad absurdum isn’t always a poor strategy.

Tactic #3: You could always just go the route of appealing to the avoidance of STDS or emotional scarring, which is always a rational thing to do. Many secular people practice abstinence for this very reason—not because they see anything religiously virtuous about it, but because it is the rational thing to do. Memorizing some useful stats like the following could be of some use:

*Sociologist George Gilder, in his book Men and Marriage, said that men who respond to short term sexual desires are apt to have significantly higher rates of suicide, drug and alcohol addiction, mental disease, accidental death, and arrest. There is a vital difference between “responding to a short term sexual desire” even with the endorsement of health professionals, and being willing to wait until marriage to gratify that desire in its proper context. (From here)
*95% of heterosexual young people become sexually active before marriage. (Reference)
*63% of youth, aged 14 to 21, are sexually active (Reference).

To my mind, this means that if I regularly engage in sexual activity, then I have a greater chance of engaging someone who has previously engaged someone else in the same way. Why is this observation significant? Because your chances of contracting an STD wouldn’t be too far from the percentages mentioned above, either. “Well, it doesn’t follow from those statistics that such behavior is dangerous.” No, not from those statistics alone. But when you compare them with these, they do:

*One in four new STD infections occur in teenagers. (Reference).
*One in five people in the United States has an STD. (Ibid.)
*Two-thirds of all STDs occur in people 25 years of age or younger. (Ibid.)

At least I have no difficulty in assessing these stats—It is clear that sexual promiscuity almost entails encountering an STD in some form or another (this becomes especially evident when you note that many people who have STDs don’t even know it). Remember, all this is to say nothing of emotional baggage that comes with each encounter. When you throw that into the mix, we are toppling with reasons not to be sexually active before marriage. Therefore, It seems even apart from Biblical conviction abstinence is more than justified.