Fascinating stuff from Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker (read on: there's a Benedict Option angle here). Excerpt:
During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin's pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America's dominant political divide. Social liberals in the country's "blue states" tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter's pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in "red states" generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn't choose to have an abortion.A handful of social scientists and family-law scholars have recently begun looking closely at this split. Last year, Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, published a startling book called "Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers," and he is working on a follow-up that includes a section titled "Red Sex, Blue Sex." His findings are drawn from a national survey that Regnerus and his colleagues conducted of some thirty-four hundred thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds, and from a comprehensive government study of adolescent health known as Add Health. Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents--seventy-four per cent--say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their "sexual début"--to use the festive term of social-science researchers--shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.
What's happening here? Well it turns out that a lot of people who profess Evangelical Christianity and socially conservative values don't actually live them in a meaningfully countercultural way. Talbot:
Religious belief apparently does make a potent difference in behavior for one group of evangelical teen-agers: those who score highest on measures of religiosity--such as how often they go to church, or how often they pray at home. But many Americans who identify themselves as evangelicals, and who hold socially conservative beliefs, aren't deeply observant.Even more important than religious conviction, Regnerus argues, is how "embedded" a teen-ager is in a network of friends, family, and institutions that reinforce his or her goal of delaying sex, and that offer a plausible alternative to America's sexed-up consumer culture. A church, of course, isn't the only way to provide a cohesive sense of community. Close-knit families make a difference. Teen-agers who live with both biological parents are more likely to be virgins than those who do not. And adolescents who say that their families understand them, pay attention to their concerns, and have fun with them are more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity.
This is where the Benedict Option angle comes in. If you want to raise kids who observe Christian sexual morality, you stand a better chance of success raising them in a social network where traditional sexual morality is reinforced by being a shared moral ideal. And, you can't be the kind of family that talks the church talk but doesn't walk the church walk. This, it seems to me, argues for a form of cultural secession -- some form of the Benedict Option.
I found this part of the article pretty fascinating too:
In "Forbidden Fruit," Regnerus offers an "unscientific postscript," in which he advises social conservatives that if they really want to maintain their commitment to chastity and to marriage, they'll need to do more to help young couples stay married longer. As the Reverend Rick Marks, a Southern Baptist minister, recently pointed out in a Florida newspaper, "Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional marriage, when divorce has already broken it down." Conservatives may need to start talking as much about saving marriages as they do about, say, saving oneself for marriage."Having to wait until age twenty-five or thirty to have sex is unreasonable," Regnerus writes. He argues that religious organizations that advocate chastity should "work more creatively to support younger marriages. This is not the 1950s (for which I am glad), where one could bank on social norms, extended (and larger) families, and clear gender roles to negotiate and sustain early family formation."
Marry young, yes -- but you have to have a support network in place to help you succeed. What is your church doing, if anything, to help singles live chastely but non-neurotically, especially in dealing with the loneliness? What is your church doing, if anything, to support young marrieds?
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Imagine what it's like being a devout Christian and stuggling with homosexuality! I have about 20 friends who were, and each of them were resolute in fighting for healing and change in their lives. All but two of them eventually gave up and joined the lifestyle by the time they hit their mid-20s. Very few have any semblance of faith left at all.
Their churches offered them little other than political action against what they nebulously termed to be the "enemy" that is the "gay agenda". So these kids, who grew up in terribly pathological - yet "devout Christian" - families (and it can be argued that that's what their homosexuality may have sprung from), found ZERO support in their church, and every reason to hide, hate themselves, and think God hated them every time an attractive member of the same gender came into view. Eventually, they couldn't take it anymore.
We feed people into the gay community because of our lack of attentivess to our own sin, and our lack of support for others who struggle. Then we sublimate our anger at our diminishing cultural prominence (which is happening because our own rampant, yet hidden sin takes away our clout) by mobilizing to unprecedented effect against the "common enemy" of this nebulous "gay agenda", making anyone who even struggles with these issues find their churches unsafe. So these isolated people white-knuckle their struggles alone for only so long before they fail and give up.
I don't mean to divert this discussion from the issue of teen pregnancy and young marriages. But the problems-at-heart, and the solutions, are somewhat parallel.
Our churches need to stop being PACs and become hospitals for souls who are struggling with the crosses they must take up, once again. And soon.
Actually, the one ADVANTAGE to having children in one's 30s or even 40s is that, when you are 80 and need somebody to take care of you, the obvious candidate will be 40 or 50 and still physically up to the task. I see so many 80+ mothers and their 65-y.o. daughters struggling against two sets of infirmities at once. Of course, back in the Good Old Days, an 80+ mother might have a whole bunch of children, ages 40 through 65. At least in some subcultures, the youngest daughter might be the Designated Caregiver, who, it was presumed, would not marry and would spend her entire life with her parents. In return, she would eventually inherit the family house. One of my great-uncles married a woman who had survived this arrangement.
Bearded professor guy at 10:23, I'm pouring a cup of tea and sending it your way, because I couldn't agree more strongly with what you said. In fact, I say it all the time myself. If you have too many choices, you won't make any.
I'll join TfT in praise for Bearded Professor.
The idea of finding 'the right partner' is, I'd emphatically argue, *not* a 'pernicious myth' -- unless you're boring and average, to put it frankly.
If you're the type of person that wouldn't be comfortable just being 'one more person', it'll be very hard to be satisfied with someone who embraces mediocrity, as the vast majority of people do.
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