a winner on sex

two opeds on premarital sex, one each from nytimes contributor lauren winner and chuck colson. i'm most impressed with winner's assessment of the flawed 'chastity pledge':

"Pledgers promise to control intense bodily desires simply by exercising their wills. But Christian ethics recognizes that the broken, twisted will can do nothing without rehabilitation by God's grace. Perhaps the centrality of grace is recognized best not in a pledge but in a prayer that names chastity as a gift and beseeches God for the grace to receive it."

i've argued a version of this point with my own grandmother at thanksgiving dinner: without Christ, abstinence doesn't make much sense (of course, if you're stoically reasoned, you'll recognize that most if not all research demonstrates that abstinence is the healthier choice). i'm chaste because i'm a christian.

at any rate, the fact that abstinence education hasn't worked in practice (see below) is important to recognize for policy. but, more important, i think, is that this fact can be used in arguments against a successful naturalistic moral system. think about it... maybe i'll post on it later.

both articles are reproduced below.
______________________________________
Saving Grace
Lauren F. Winner.
New York Times. May 19, 2006. pg. A.25

Lauren F. Winner is the author of ''Girl Meets God'' and ''Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity.''

The recent Harvard study that found teenagers' virginity pledges to be ineffective should come as a surprise to no one. Several studies had already come to that conclusion. If we are truly to help our teenagers adopt the countercultural sexual ethic of abstinence until marriage, Christians concerned about the rampant premarital sex in our communities need to rethink, rather than simply defend, young people's abstinence pledges.

It is awfully easy for Christians to blame our community's sexual sins on the mores of post-sexual revolution America -- to criticize Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs, to natter on about how ''Grey's Anatomy'' portrays sexual behavior that doesn't square with Christianity.

But perhaps it's more important that we reconsider how we talk about sex in the church. For although the church devotes an immense amount of energy to teaching about sexuality -- just go to the Christian inspiration section of your nearest Barnes & Noble and compare the number of books about chastity to books that challenge, say, consumerism -- many Christians still ''struggle with'' (in that euphemistic evangelical phrase) premarital sex, adultery and pornography.

So why is the church's approach to teaching chastity falling short? Consider the popular ''True Love Waits'' virginity pledge: ''Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate and my future children to a lifetime of purity including sexual abstinence from this day until the day I enter a biblical marriage relationship.''

This pledge and others like it are well meaning but deeply flawed. For starters, there's something disturbing about the assumption that teenagers are passively waiting for their future mates and children, when the New Testament is quite clear that some Christians are called to lifelong celibacy. (Paul, for example, did not have a mate or children, and Dan Brown's fantasies notwithstanding, Jesus's only bride was the church.) Chastity is not merely about passive waiting; it is about actively conforming our bodies to the arc of the Gospel and receiving the Holy Spirit right now.

Pledgers promise to control intense bodily desires simply by exercising their wills. But Christian ethics recognizes that the broken, twisted will can do nothing without rehabilitation by God's grace. Perhaps the centrality of grace is recognized best not in a pledge but in a prayer that names chastity as a gift and beseeches God for the grace to receive it.

The pledges are also cast in highly individualistic terms: I promise that I won't do this or that. As the Methodist bishop William Willimon once wrote: ''Decisions are fine. But decisions that are not reinforced and reformed by the community tend to be short-lived.''

During our first year of marriage, my husband and I lived in a small apartment inside a church. On Tuesdays, Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon met downstairs. As I got to know some of the regulars, I began to wonder if there wasn't something the church could learn from the 12-step groups in our midst.

After all, what are 12-step groups but communities of people expecting transformation? People show up because they want to change, and they know that making a promise by themselves -- I will stop drinking -- won't cut it. Alcoholics Anonymous explicitly recognizes that transformation works best when a community comes alongside you and participates in your transformation.

Christians, like 12-step group attendees, are people who are committed to becoming, to use the Apostle Paul's phrase, new creatures. Living sexual lives that comport with the Gospel is one part of that.

Perhaps pledges for chastity need to be made not only by the individual teenager. Perhaps we also need pledges made by the teenager's whole Christian community: we pledge to support you in this difficult, countercultural choice; we pledge that the church is a place where you can lay bare your brokenness and sin, where you don't have to dissemble; we pledge to cheer you on when chastity seems unbearably difficult, and we pledge to speak God's forgiveness to you if you falter. No retooled pledge will guarantee teenagers' chastity, but words of grace and communal commitment are perhaps a firmer basis for sexual ethics than simple assertions that true love waits.


Keeping a Pledge
Grace, Transformation, and Community

Chuck Colson

July 5, 2006

I read the New York Times every day. But I can't remember the last time I found profound theological wisdom in its columns—that is until recently.

Lauren Winner, an insightful new voice among Christian writers, graced the New York Times op-ed pages with a straight-talking explanation of Harvard's recent studies showing that abstinence pledges have proven ineffectual among teenagers. According to Winner, we shouldn't be surprised.

Now before getting defensive, listen to her well-grounded theological explanation: "Pledgers promise to control intense bodily desires simply by exercising their wills. But Christian ethics recognizes that the broken, twisted will can do nothing without rehabilitation by God's grace."

This is no less than the apostle Paul teaches us in Romans 7. Winner further proposes, "Perhaps the centrality of grace is recognized best not in a pledge but in a prayer that names chastity as a gift and beseeches God for the grace to receive it." She also rightly draws our attention to the brash individualism of such pledges. Quoting Methodist bishop William Willimon, she writes, "Decisions are fine. But decisions that are not reinforced and reformed by the community tend to be short-lived.''

To that I say, "Amen!" Winner re-affirms something that the Church has known but all too often forgotten: true transformation requires God's enabling grace. And because of the way God created us to reflect the inherent relational nature of the Trinity, transformation happens best within the context of community. I applaud Winner's nudging reminder that the community of believers must be indeed just that, a community, supporting and enabling that counter-cultural commitment to God's ways.

Unwittingly, Winner's argument also point to the lessons we've discovered in working in some of the most difficult trenches of transformation—the prisons. Simply more education or a pledge before the parole board won't help prisoners stay out of prison. True change of will requires God's enabling grace and power.

And for that change to seep down deep, prisoners need a community of support. They need volunteers who will open up the Word of God and show them how to live, mentors who will come alongside and share their lives, and most of all, they need the open arms of a church community to embrace them and support them when they return.

And this is perhaps what grieves me most about the recent decision from a judge in Iowa, ruling against the faith-based prison program, the InnerChange Freedom Initiative. Shutting down programs like IFI will only succeed in hurting the community, by standing in the way of the only transformation that really works.

The IFI program works because it does exactly what Winner and I've talked about. It provides a way for grace-filled transformation to occur in the context of community. In so doing, it is a witness to the Church of what it has too often forgotten, and a witness to the community of the only true power to change.