I’m still reading this thread, and I did want to respond to some of the things you said. I will say beforehand that I am a medical student– and I say that not to imply that my superior medical knowledge makes me an expert on the subject, but to imply that I am coming from a more secular public health perspective. In the health field, we go for harm or risk reduction and not the ideal– if an obese patient goes from a BMI of 37 to 33, we consider that a success because they are still obese but their risk of certain complications has gone down. My perspective on how to handle this within the body of Christ is very different, and I believe that it has already expressed pretty clearly in #9 and #15 (as well as in other threads.)

I don’t mean to be disrespectful to you, but you are misinformed about HPV & condoms– it is simply not true that condoms do “nothing at all” to prevent HPV transmission. The transmission of HPV is not 100% prevented by condom use, but it is reduced by 30-70% (depending on which study you read.) Trust me, I used to think the same thing (probably heard it from similar sources in evangelicalism until I came to school. One such study is here.

Other STDs– chlamydia, gonorrhea, HIV, syphilis, & HSV– are very well prevented by using a condom, as is pregnancy. Remember that we are talking about risk reduction, not risk elimination– if you look at 100 teenage sexual encounters with a condom and 100 teenage sexual encounters without one, the latter group is going to wind up with far more STDs and unplanned pregnancies than the former group.

Let’s do the math on this: suppose you have 100 teenagers that are going to have sex. Let’s say that all 100 sit through a lecture on abstinence and receive no education about safe sex practices. 30 decide not to have sex as a result of the lecture (and that is being very generous) and the other 70 do it anyway. That’s 70 kids at risk for becoming pregnant, getting an STD, etc. and that takes a toll on public health all across the nation.

Suppose instead that all 100 sit through a lecture on safe sex practices and this time 90 decide that it’s okay for them to have sex. Let’s say that 10 of them decide not to have safe sex anyway and 10 have a malfunction or use the wrong method. This time, you’ve reduced your risk dramatically! Your thesis about condom education putting kids in more danger is simply not true.

Getting a “false sense of protection” from using condoms is like getting a false sense of protection from wearing a seatbelt– they are statistically proven to work in reducing harm, not eliminating risk.

When we are talking about people outside the body of Christ, I think we need to encourage things will generally encourage behavior that will lead to less disease and fewer unplanned pregnancies (I do not support abortion in any way whatsoever, but if a teenage pregnancy can be prevented I am very much in support of it.)

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This is an old thread, and you may not see it. No, I don’t think that teaching abstinence in schools is likely to make a lot of kids abstinent–although it’s sure a lot better than teaching casual sex. However, condoms do very little for STDs–nothing at all for HPV, for instance, the most common STD today. If used improperly, they’re also ineffective for HIV, which is of course the most deadly STD. And they give kids a false sense of protection (”if I use them most of the time, I’ll be OK”), though they do little for STDs, they aren’t terribly effective as birth control, and they do nothing at all for the other problems of premarital sex. In other words, no, I don’t even think it’s a good idea to push the benefits of condoms in a secular setting, since doing so actually puts kids in MORE danger.

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We have to consider the public health consequences of the actions that people are going to take, and it is very unlikely that a government campaign or a school education is going to stop people from doing things that even devout Christians often end up doing when they don’t want to. We can be deeply concerned about the spiritual and emotional turmoil that people will bring on themselves through premarital sex, but Gospel witnessing to them is the most effective way to prevent that– not having some government lackey tell them about abstinence. Do you really think that a lot of kids are going to refrain from having sex devoid of the power of the Holy Spirit and just because someone in school told them that it’s a bad idea? Public health & social integrity are important things, and using condoms is going to be a more effective way of dealing with both.

If we’re talking about your own children, that is of course a different matter altogether and I cannot comment on what you should do, nor can I say for sure what I would do (since I don’t have any kids of my own.)

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You know what? If my unmarried teen or young adult child was having sex before marriage, I’d find it NO comfort that he/she was using birth control. None whatsoever. Not only is avoiding pregnancy not the biggest concern with premarital sex, but the young person would still be vulnerable to STDs along with sinning against God and opening herself to heartache. So no, on a scale of one to ten, finding out that she was at least using birth control wouldn’t even register a one on my “relief” scale. The birth control might even make her feel some sense that it was “OK” to fornicate, and it would tell her that having a baby is worse than having premarital sex, which is completely upside-down thinking. So I’m not at all on the side of those who say, “If they’re going to do it anyway, at least give them some protection.”

Now, if you say, “If they’re going to do it anyway, at least let them get married”–even if they’re sixteen–I’m a little more open to that, though of course I do think that teens don’t “have to” have sex, and that partners shouldn’t marry until they’re ready for marriage. But I’d sign for my sixteen-year-old daughter to get married before I’d sign for her to get the Pill.

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Y’all overlook the finding that virginity pledges merely decrease the likelihood that well-indoctrinated Christians will use birth control when they start having vaginal, premarital sex.

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By not specifying that the “other teens” were also motivated members of church groups with high parental involvement in their lives, the headline suggests that those who made chastity pledges were as sexually active as teen gang members. The others headlines cited, although less egregious, are as likely to mislead unless the proper context is given. There is nothing wrong with public committment ceremonies and promises, but if the support system is missing, those public proclamations will provide little protection against raging hormones.

By not supplying the necessary context, both chastity oaths explicitly, and the underlying faith support implicitly, are discredited, comforting those with the illusion that “because these kids will do it anyway,” adults should just wink, nod, avert their eyes, and hand out contraceptives like candy.

“And, if Christian teens start having vaginal, premarital sex at 21 instead of 17, so what?”

Well for one, they wouldn’t be teens. A twenty-one year old would also be more likely to have finished high school, be in a better position jobwise to care for the child, less likely to compound their situation with multiple children before they’re financially, socially, and emotionally ready for parenthood, and have matured enough to better cope with the emotional trauma of severed intimate relationships. Physical intimacy intensifies emotional attachment. Divorce is devastating to adults. It is no accident that a rise in teen suicide accompanied a rise in teen sexual behavior.

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There was a great article on Slate that summarized the book “Forbidden Fruit” which basically says what you say– evangelical teens tend to be just as terrible as their non-evangelical peers when it comes to sexual morality.

However, when you control for everything else and look at what they call “religiosity”– that is, how often they attend church, read their Bibles, pray, serve in mercy ministry, etc.– the numbers jump way up. In fact, this subset of Christians has high correlations for all sorts of positive attributes, as explored by Ron Sider in his book “Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience”: Giving, serving, volunteering, seeking justice for the poor, etc. And Christians would say to that, “Duh… if you’re a Christian and you’re actually repenting & trying to follow Jesus, of course you’re more likely to do it.”

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if you are surprised at the failure, I’d say that’s the first step. I completely agree with you: the church is doing something radically, radically wrong. We are going for quick, jazzy-sounding solutions instead of good Bible teaching & discipleship. We are pounding a pulpit and blathering on about how great abstinence is instead of forming communities where teens can support one another and be supported through the tough choices they have to make. We are holding up abstinence as a value without doing what it takes to live out that value.

A lot of people either don’t know how it’s going to be or forget how hard it was, and they assume that if you just stand up and make a commitment it ought to be easy. We as a church have to stop pretending about what the challenges are and build our communities in such a way that we can honor God with our bodies.

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I knew it!

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