Purity and passion

Have to say I was taken aback by the vehemence and vitriol against the idea of sexual purity expressed on yesterday's thread. I can understand why some people don't agree with the idea, and I can understand why people find the idea of the father-daughter purity balls off-putting (I'm not sure how I feel about them myself). But it's interesting to me, and dismaying, to see how infuriated so many people become by the very thought that sexual purity is an ideal worth living up to, even if one doesn't share that idea themselves.

I hope readers will take a few minutes to read the transcript of the PBS Frontline documentary "The Lost Children of Rockdale County," exploring the roots of a syphilis epidemic that struck students in three public high schools in an affluent suburb of Atlanta. This devastation to the bodies and the souls of teenagers is what you get when you turn your back on any notion of sexual restraint. Note especially this passage:

NARRATOR: Jennifer is 17. Her friends, Penie and Kira, are 16. They are devout Christians.

INTERVIEWER: Are you guys all virgins?

JENNIFER, KIRA, PENIE: Yes. Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Why? Why have you stayed virgins?

KIRA: Because that's- that's my morals that I live by. My parents have taught me from- since I was little that that's a good thing to do. I mean, it's just always been a right to me. It's always been right to save it.

NARRATOR: The girls say their way of life has isolated them from their peers.

KIRA: We got into high school, and high school's a lot different than middle school. Sex is the cool thing, and drugs is the cool thing, and drinking is cool. I went to one party in 9th grade, and I just- I just didn't like it after that. I mean- I mean, I wanted to go, I mean, because everybody wants to go to parties. And I got there, and I just knew that was not what I'm- that's not what I'm about. I'm about something different.

NARRATOR: The girls all left the Conyers public schools for a private Christian school called Springs Academy. Their circle of friends has narrowed, too, to those who share their beliefs.

JENNIFER: Guys definitely seem to be intimidated- I don't know by other Christian girls, but seem to be intimidated by me. Sometimes it's hard, and it's- like, you question yourself. It's, like, "Why is this worth it?" It's, like, "These guys are there afraid of me." It's definitely been lonely at times.

PENIE: It really is hard, you know, when you try to be good, and then people want to always tar you and say, "Oh, no. You're a hypocrite," you know? It's really hard.

NARRATOR: At times, the girls say, they have even been harassed by their peers.

PENIE: People like to say things. You know, they said that I was sleeping with- around with a lot of guys, you know, and that's not the case, you know? And they'd say I get drunk, and I was not doing that at all, you know? And drugs and anything else you can imagine. You know, none of that was true.

INTERVIEWER [switching to another set of interviewees -- RD]: What do you think of girls who decide they're going to stay virgins till they get married?

KATY: It's not going to happen. I mean, there's still a few out there that actually do stay virgins till they get married, and that's real good. I wish I could have done that. But it's just- most of them that say that that's going to- they're going to do that, it's not going to happen because of peer pressure and just being curious, falling in love with somebody.

NARRATOR: Katy and her friends are freshmen at one of Rockdale's three public high schools.

INTERVIEWER: What's the typical age for girls to lose their virginity?

KATY, BRIDGET, CHRISTINE: Thirteen. Fourteen. Thirteen or fourteen.

BRIDGET: Fourteen.

INTERVIEWER: That's typical?

GIRLS: Uh-huh.

INTERVIEWER: What kind of music do you guys like?

GIRLS: Rap.

INTERVIEWER: Like what?

GIRLS: Like, Master P. Tupac, definitely. Oh, I love Tupac.

INTERVIEWER: What do you like about rap?

GIRLS: The beat. The beat. And the words. And it's just, like, loud. You can really get up and dance.

CHRISTINE: And the way that it's, like- they can talk about something that's, like, completely stupid, like drugs and stuff. [crosstalk] But it's the way they put it, it sounds interesting.

INTERVIEWER: Give me an example.

CHRISTINE: I can't think of a song.

GIRLS: [singing rap] Oh, take three witches and put 'em in a [unintelligible] I take clothes off you, and I'm blowing [unintelligible] mind. Take one more before I go [unintelligible] Seven b***es get f****d at the same time. The [unintelligible] she can s**k a ding-dong all day, all night, all evening long. b***h has never done it. She says she never tried. [unintelligible] mother-f****g [unintelligible] if the b***h is a good trick. Anybody can talk to a b***h and get the b***h to f**k, but how many [unintelligible] talk to a b**h and get their d**k s****d like me? A pimp that you never saw [unintelligible]

INTERVIEWER: That's about group sex.

GIRLS: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Is that something anybody does around here?

GIRLS: Uh-huh!

BRIDGET: Lots of people. A lot of people.

CHRISTINE: Yes, a lot of people.

In which school's peer culture would you rather your children -- female and male -- be immersed? I would much rather my children go to a school where however dorky the attempts to build a culture of purity of heart, mind and body may be, they at least make the attempt, than send them off into such a snake pit.

Can any civilization survive such moral degradation and chaos being accepted by its mainstream? I'm serious. This is the culture of death.

Philip Rieff, from "The Triumph of the Therapeutic":

In our recovered innocence, to be entertained would become the highest good and boredom the most common evil. The best spirits of the twentieth century have thus expressed their conviction that the original innocence, which to earlier periods was a sinful conceit, the new center, which can be held even as communities disintegrate, is the self. By this conviction a new and dynamic acceptance of disorder, in love with life and destructive of it, has been loosed upon the world. [snip] That there are colonies of the violent among us, devoid of any stable sense of communal purpose, best describes, I think, our present temporarily schizoid existence in two cultures -- vacillating between dead purposes and deadly devices to escape boredom.

Rieff goes on to say that all cultures require remissions [i.e., thou-shalt-nots], and in Christian culture, the chief remission had to do with mastering the "sexual opportunism of individuals." But this was:

...not ascetic in a crude renunciatory mode which would destroy any culture. Max Scheler described that culture accurately, I think, when he concluded that "Christian asceticism -- ast least so far as it was not influenced by decadent Hellenistic philosophy -- had as its purpose not the suppression or even extirpation of natural drives, but rather their control and complete spiritualization. It is positive, not negative, asceticism -- aimed fundamentally at a liberation of the highest powers of personality from blocakge by the automatism of the lower drives." That renunciatory mode, in which the highest powers of personality are precisely those which subserve rather than subvert culture, appears no longer systematically efficient. The spiritualizers have had their day; nowadays, the best among them appear engaged in a desperate strategy of acceptance, in the hope that by embracing expressions of therapeutic aims they will be embraced by the therapeutics; a false hope -- the therapeutics need no doctirnes, only opportunities. But the spiritualizers persist in trying to maintain cultural contact with constitutencies already deconverted in all but name.

What the sociologist Rieff (who was not a Christian) is saying is that classical Christian culture was built around a creative renunciation of the sexual urge. It did not crudely suppress it, but only channeled it and regulated it toward culturally useful ends. But (to oversimplify) the great Freudian revolution in consciousness overturned this cultural regime, and replaced it with a "therapeutic" model in which fulfilling the individual and his desires was highest goal of Western culture. This inevitably disintegrates culture, because there are no binding remissions commanded by shared authority. As Rieff presciently recognized (this book was published 40 years ago), the spokesman for the old Christian cultural order have little credibility; most of their flock have been deconverted by the culture.

Forty years after his prophetic book, I think Rieff is wrong about one thing (which he couldn't have foreseen anyway): the best of the Christian thinkers are no longer trying to negotiate terms with the therapeutic overculture. That culture war has been lost. They are instead trying to build a counterculture, and countercultural institutions, to save their children's moral sanity. We return, once again, to MacIntyre:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of the imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.

But we do not want, or should not want, to retreat behind the castle walls and pull up the drawbridge. I prefer Pope Benedict's more hopeful scenario, about which I blogged yesterday. Wrote Benedict:

The [early] Chrsitians were able to demonstrate persuasively how empty and base were the entertainments of paganism, and how sublime the gift of faith in the God who suffers with us and leads us to the road of true greatness. Today it is a matter of the greatest urgency to show a Christian model of life that offers a livable alternative to the increasingly vacuous entertainments of leisure-time society, a society forced to make increasing recourse to drugs because it is sated by the usual shabby pleasures. Living on the great values of the Christian tradition is naturally much harder than a lfie rendered dull by the increasingly costly habits of our time. The Christian model of life must be manifested as a life in all its fullness and freedom, a life that does not experience the bonds of love as dependence and lmitation but rather as an opening to the greatness of life. Here, too, I refer to the idea of the creative minorities that enrich this model of life, present it in a convincing way, and can thus instill the courage needed to live it.

A secularist friend of mine suggested to me recently that this might be the only real option for convinced cultural and religious conservatives: small, cohesive communities where truly creative work can be done, because so much focus and energy doesn't have to be diverted to fighting a war against a culture that is unremittingly hostile to traditional cultural conservatism.

One last thing: we have a cleaning lady that's comes on Fridays to help out. Maria is a marvel. She's an immigrant from Mexico who is raising two young teenage girls virtually alone, as her husband works in another state. She is a stalwart at her Pentecostal church, a Hispanic congregation. This morning she was telling me about how much practical help, in terms of spiritual and moral support, she and her family gets from her church community. I asked her if she had always been Pentecostal, and she said no, that she was raised Catholic. Why did you leave? I asked. She said that the Catholic parish in her small village in Mexico "didn't tell us nothing." I asked her to explain, and she said that the priest never gave them any practical help with living their very hard lives. Pentecostalism did. And it does here in America, she says. She told me the pastor at her parish last night preached a sermon that she and her oldest daughter ("who wants a boyfriend, but she's too young for that") needed to hear to encourage them.

Why am I bringing this up in this context? Not as a criticism of the Catholic Church, but rather to show that people who live on the social and economic margins have a profound practical need for an active community of virtue. I mean, we all need that, but the poorer you are, the more you need it, and I could see in Maria's face and hear in her voice that her church is not just a nice place for her to go. It is her lifeline. Why? Because, in part, Maria's daughters are in the highest demographic for teen pregnancy in this country. Economic circumstances have forced her to be, in effect, a single mom. With two girls in public school, at high risk for having a pregnancy that could ruin their chances at attending college and making a stable middle-class life for themselves. These daughters are adrift in a culture that does everything it can to tear down the kind of traditional morality that would help Maria and her daughters make it through the teen years safely. That little Pentecostal congregation to which she belongs is the only thing Maria and her girls have.

You can laugh at the ideal of sexual purity all you want, and think (wrongly) that we traditional Christians are nothing but a bunch of Church Lady prudes out to spoil everybody's fun. But you should well consider who really gets hurt the most in a culture that sneers at the ideal of sexual restraint. Bill Maher and his ilk are deadly enemies of Maria and her girls. And me and my children too.