With God, nothing is impossible...

This weekend's Sydney Morning Herald magazine included a feature on the minority of people who have chosen not to have sex before (or outside) marriage. (Unfortunately it is not published online, or I would link to it). Though the author, Amanda Hooton, interviews a number of people who are celibate or trying to be (including the admirable Jason Stevens) and does so sympathetically, she throws a great deal of doubt on whether the celibate lifestyle and its promotion is healthy and safe.

She cites statistics which show that celibacy pledges actually achieve nothing by way of stopping pre-marital sexual activity, and actually increase the likelihood of such activity occurring in an unsafe way. Further, by linking sex to guilt and shame, religious groups are making it more difficulty for teenagers to behave in a mature way, not easier (is the claim).

Hooton writes:
It [sex] is...on some basic level, part of what it is to be human; part of life. And chastity, in this context at least, feels like a denial of life. Can it really be a path to happiness and contentment? Perhaps no-one can answer this question for anyone else...but one can't help wonder about the coercive powers of chastity movements en masse, rather than on an individual basis, in which so many people are manoeuvered into decision that are not only evidently wrong for them, but potentially dangerous.

So here we have the usual stuff about personal authenticity and sex as an expression of it. And the importance of the personal in sexual ethics.

All the people interviewed in the article are religious in one way or another, and extremely so -Pentecostal Christians and Mormons, which increases the impression that this is not a 'rational' way to behave. I was disappointed at how unconvincing they were. While some of them give a good account of themselves, the reasoning of some of the people interviewed far too easily falls into a lame consequentialism. That is, they seek to establish that sex before marriage is in some way demonstrably bad for you. 'You'll get pregnant'. 'You'll get disease'. 'You'll be psychologically damaged'. Trouble is, the secular person can respond to all these by saying 'good education prevents these', and 'teens are just as likely to have pre-marital sex with a chastisty pledge as without'.

And this is where I wonder whether Christians have got the reasoning about this all wrong and fallen back into a kind of terrible Pelagianism with regard to sex before marriage. In the first instance, the consequentialist arguments about pre-marital sex are not very convincing - and in fact there has emerged a counter argument (that celibacy is bad for you, or at least, for many). At this point the celibacy movements are looking more than a little shaky. They haven't convinced people that the consequences of sex outside marriage are that devastating. And the heated rhetoric they use seems to belong to a different age.

And times have indeed changed: in a former time, social pressure and shame would have pushed most people in the direction of pre-marital abstinence. People would have lived out a Christianised ethic in their sex lives, but on the basis of conformity to social norms. And the dangers, especially for girls, of misbehaviour were very severe. Without reliable contraception or easy access to abortion, self-control was a necessary weapon against the terrible stigma of teen pregnancy or worse. Religious teaching of course played a part, but in a negative sense: reminding people of the terrible spiritual consequences of misbehaviour rather than the potential for grace and forgiveness.

Now social pressure runs the other way (it is a truism to say!). 75% of people think pre-marital sex is fine. Religious groups are in decline. The public square is saturated with sexual images. It is thought normal and healthy to experiment with sex outside marriage, so long as you don't hurt anyone. It is 'part of a life' - felt to be part of really living. Girls and boys are taught that to be a full person you need to express your sexual self, not exercise restraint. And their bodily appetites confirm this.

This is where a theological account of human nature needs to come in. Whereas before, conformity to social norms made celibacy humanly possible, the new context makes it (for many people) humanly impossible. And this is where just telling people to try harder, or getting them to make pledges, or take cold showers, is bound to fail. Or, it gives them false hope in their ability to master themselves. It trusts too much in the flesh over which we have in the end so little power - without the Spirit of God. If you are a youth leader wondering how on earth you can tell your young people to keep their hands off each other, well let us acknowledge the reality of the situation: it is impossible. It is impossible because of social convention, because consequential arguments don't convince, and because human flesh is weak.

But Jesus said:
With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God. This applies to randy teenagers as much as to greedy rich men. With the Spirit of God, it is possible even for young people to remain celibate until they are married. I am convinced that this is the teaching of the Bible, which is good for human beings - even when they can't explain how. If it weren't at least sometimes the case that the Word of God asked of us something that runs counter to what is apparently reasonable and decent in the contemporary world, I would doubt that it was the Word of God!