ThinkProgress cites a study that points out that Evangelical kids have premarital sex in similar numbers to everybody else: 80% for Evangelicals, 88% for heathens.
Both ED Kain and Russell Saunders, along with TP itself, cite the study as a case against Abstinence-Only education (AOE). As a practical matter, I am not a big fan of AOE. My wife Clancy and I do not intend to go that route and if our local school does, we will fill in the gaps ourselves. The only real area of disagreement between us, really, is how in depth we want to get (do we stop at the mot proven methods, or do we go over everything?). The clinical stuff will be hers; the psychological stuff will be mine.
Having said all of this, I don’t see this report as necessarily being more than just a poke in the eye of the self-righteous. There is also the assumption among many that we can count on the religious folks to forgo contraception either due to (a) lack of sex-ed and (b) the religious implications. It’s an assumption that is not foreign to me. Putting my mind in that of a religious person (I am a half-lapsed Episcopalian, a weak version of weak sauce), I can easily imagine an aversion to bringing a condom along or taking contraception because that makes the sex worse than just sex, it makes it premeditated sex. It might be easier to ask God for forgiveness for the heat of the moment, but might be harder to explain to God why you were so prepared for it. Also, Catholics and contraception (though the more Catholics I get to know, the less I find that this is really an issue – even among the devout).
However, the data doesn’t necessarily support that conclusion. According to the Add Health Study, very religious teens are within 10% of being as likely as the irreligious when it comes to using contraception (58% to 65%). If we consider the 8% difference between those who have sex and do not have sex to be on the irrelevant side of things, we have to view the 7% differential on contraception in the same light. The difference between those who use contraception the first time is only 1% different.
Now, the Add Health numbers and the numbers in the original article are not exactly measuring the same thing. For one thing, Add Health is looking at religiosity more than what the brand of religion is. So a self-described Evangelical who only attends church once a week would count as irreligious but a Unitarian who attends every week would be considered very religious. From the perspective of what we’re looking at, though, neither source is much more valuable than the other. Anybody can call themselves an Evangelical. The numbers for self-described Evangelicals is not necessarily indicative of the devout ones that keep their children sheltered. The TNC numbers are also looking at young adults while the Add Health numbers are looking at teenagers. If the discussion is sex ed, I think the latter numbers (which show a 15% differential in sex among whites) are probably more valuable.
However, even if we assume that there is relative parity between the religious freaks and the heathens, whether sex has occurred is really only part of the story. When did it occur? With what frequency? It’s entirely possible (and reasonable to believe, given the two sets of numbers we’re looking at) that the religious folks are starting later. It’s also not necessarily unreasonable to believe that they might have fewer partners are fewer instances, which can have other benefits down the line.
Sex is not necessarily a switch that one turns on, inviting a torrent of potential negative repercussions all at once once flipped. Just as contraception reduces the risk of pregnancy, so do partner reduction and instance reduction. Now, maybe this reduction is not occurring at all. Maybe they’re just a bunch of hypocrites. But the TNC numbers do not shed might light on this. Instead, we (and my initial response was no different) look at the numbers and assume a sort of boolean variable with all other things being equal (except contraception, which we assume is not equal because we know how those religious freaks are about contraception).
None of this is to say that Abstinence-Only education is a good idea. I am rather skeptical of the notion that a middle-aged teacher putting a condom on a banana is going to make teenagers all hot and bothered (I actually question the degree to which kids would listen in any event, because they are much more savvy than we, the ones who “just don’t get it”). I do think that an opt-out is reasonable, and I think the resistance to Abstinence-Plus is based more on philosophical tribalism rather than real pragmatism.
One of the reasons I do think that AOE is a losing battle, though, is because whether sex is in the classroom or not, it’s virtually everywhere else in as public a spectacle as the FCC will allow. This is one of the reasons that devout Christians often try to pull a curtain to the rest of the world. When I lived in Mormonland, I sort of rolled my eyes at the cottage industry of avoid-secular-society movies and entertainment that they lined up for their kids. But really, that has as much to do with my religious inclinations than good parenting or bad. Evangelicals and Mormons have a sub-culture to retreat to. We don’t. If we did, it might not be all that unattractive an option.
I have no beef with any of this.
FWIW, I was raised in a very, very conservative evangelical church. BOTH of the minister’s daughters ended up pregnant out of wedlock, and the kids in the youth group were just as sex-obsessed as kids in any other context. This despite a relentless drum-beat of “don’t do it!” at all times.
And just because I am deeply skeptical of AOE doesn’t mean I don’t strongly recommend abstinence. Every single time I discuss contraception, STI prevention, etc with an adolescent patient, I strongly encourage putting off sexual debut for as long as possible, and keeping the number of partners low. Abstinence is a great form of contraception, for those who choose it. But it’s lousy for kids who aren’t interested.
Shall I sadly assume this means you won’t be gracing me with a guest post after all?
My guest post is on a different (though not unrelated) subject.
The subject of sex was more subdued in my church. Since Episcopalians run the spectrum from liberal to conservative, the sermons were often kept abstract. Though the official line was that premarital sex was bad, the focus (to the extent that there was one) was that sex out of love was bad.
I happen to think that this even-keeled and measured approach was a particularly good one (there’s a reason I never had the falling out with TEC that my wife did with Catholicism). I sometimes think that abstinence is like dieting. You might be talking about how bad sex is… but you’re still talking about sex. A lot. The notion that sex is a wonderful thing that God has bestowed upon humanity but that it isn’t for children was effective in me pushing things back longer than I otherwise would have. (Obviously, this has little to do with sex-ed, but is related to ways families and churches broach the subject.)
Not a single person in my youth group ended up pregnant or siring a kid out of wedlock that I know of (we stay in touch). That likely had more to do with economic class than the church, though. Which, really, is often the case.
It’s a tough nut to crack, with different approaches likely being the “right” ones with different people in different situations.
Came from a conservative good school type area (not super religiously conservative, but there were many kids where church was their social life).
Out of a class of 60, 4 or so abortions, none of which I knew about at the time. And, as usual, it’s never the “sluts” (the girls who engaged in sex/bj on a regular basis)
I meant to throw this in to the post, but didn’t find the right segue (maybe I’ll write something more on it later): Anyone who has lived in the south and has perused dating websites will run into a particular stereotype: the hyperchristian single mother. It’s difficult to determine whether they found Christ after getting pregnant, whether it’s a form of signalling (I may be a single mother, but I’m not a slut), or whether it is indicative of a larger problem. In any case, their grammatical style and demeanor often suggests that they fit other demographics and personality types that are at risk for unwed pregnancies.
Specimens of this breed populate the entire U.S., including urban areas otherwise well-populated with Yankees. It does seem more poigniant in the South, though, although that may be the result of social stereotypes coming in to play.
Most charitably, I have taken the signalling to mean “I’m looking for a husband to help me raise my kids,” and least charitably, I’ve taken it to mean “I value the outward appearance of piety more than the behavior of chastity that actual adherence to my religion would demand.” At the end of the day, there is little social profit in pushing the issue to the point that cognitive dissonance becomes revealed.
Perhaps more charitably than your “most charitably”: “I’m not some breed specimen who’s probably inferior to college educated folks. I’m a human being with feelings and a need for human companionship like almost all other human beings. My faith is important to me, so I want it to be clear what I believe. Also, because I’m human and a sinner, I sometimes don’t live up to the standards my faith puts to me. My faith, in fact, accounts for my imperfections with the concept of unearned grace. I know this concept has some internal contradictions, but no worldview lacks internal contradictions entirely.”
or more likely, “I was young and unloved, and someone ‘swept me off my feet'” Now, I want an actual partner I can work with.
This is tangental, and I think I might have commented on this elsewhere on LOOG (can’t remember)…
My sister teaches at OU in Norma, OK; they have a very, very strong baptist/evangelical student base. She says that one of the unintended negative consequences of AbOnly teaching is that a lot of promising young women, starting to form relationships with young men amid a typhoon of raging hormones, decide that the only alternative is to get married, have kids and quit school.
I think that these marriages have a high mortality rate, and leave the young women economically disadvantaged.
Oops. Norman OK, not Norma. (Not that Norma isn’t very nice, I’m sure.)
Mr. Thurman,
Excellent post!
I’ll also add that I appreciate your unwillingness to use the study as a “see, evangelicals are hypocrites!!!” gotcha point, as if evangelical Christianity did not already account for hypocrisy by their belief in original sin.
Glad you liked the post!
I think that in general the hypocrisy charge is overwrought. Hypocrisy exists, to be sure, and can be quite problematic, but while it’s one part falling short of one’s beliefs it’s another part believing in something to begin with. The easy way to avoid hypocrisy is not to believe in anything.
I never saw hyperChristian premarital sex as hypocritical.
It’s not hypocrisy. The exit clause is just bad, which you illustrated pretty well. It’s a systems failure: there’s no redundancy. If you don’t plan on having sex, you’re not going to pack a secondary form of birth control.
Is it more hypocritical if the church fathers pull the video tape and watch afterwards?
I totally fucking see “premarital sex” of the OlderBoy forces himself on younger girl as morally problematic, and I detest the cultures that make these things inevitable.
I could name names, because journalists talk about the boys who “got multiple girls pregnant” the year before getting married. Those aren’t NICE boys, and their sex generally isn’t exactly consensual.
…and all other instruments of faith and sex and god in the belly of a black winged bird.
I’m not sure I get the whole difficulty of abstaining. Maybe its just a cultural difference. Over here, if someone gets pregnant outside of marriage, there is strong social disapproval. People say that the parents did not bring them up right. i.e. there is a strong presumption that bad behaviour by children reflects badly on their parents. Given that teenagers are not entirely self-interested, this seems to put a brake on sexual activity among teenagers.
One effect could be an evolutionary effect. If someone matures sexually faster, they are likely to be sexually active faster. Their children are likely to have the same characteristics. That may be one reason why girls in Ms Teen USA look like they are in their early to mid twenties.
A girl’s instincts towards sex are to basically shut up and let it happen (these instincts are older than sin). Confront a girl with a situation she hasn’t been in before and has no experience about, and she’s liable to get raped. [some people are more in tune with their instincts than others, naturally, and some men are skilled at evoking certain evolutionary responses.].
And then you’re likely to blame her for not saying no, despite the fact that she wasn’t able to speak (and I mean that literally — it is quite possible to be unable to communicate during sex.).
I doubt you’re really seeing an actual brake on teenage sexual activity. What you’re seeing is clandestine abortions, like at my little Republican high school, where 4 out of 30 little ladies had an abortion (that’s from clinical records, and just from my year).
With regard to the difficulty of abstinence, it depends on what we’re talking about. If we’re talking about teenagers, I do think abstinence is possible at least a lot more often than it is being exercised now.
TNC’s numbers are looking at 18-29, where it becomes more difficult as we culturally move marriage further and further back. Cultures that marry younger, such as Mormons, sidestep some of this (assisted by social condemnation). But while it’s not difficult to tell someone to wait until they are 18 or 19 or 20, it’s much more difficult when you’re talking about 25 or 30.
“Keep it to grinding!” is a message we ought to be able to get behind as a society.
80% and 88% don’t seem all that similar to me.
If you turn it around, it says that 20% of Evangelicals avoid premarital sex, whereas only 12% of the general population do (the reference compared evangelicals to the general population, not to non-evangelicals). But since more than 26% of the general population are evangelicals, this reduces the percentage of “heathens” who abstain from premarital sex to about 9%.
That is,
let x = the rate at which heathens abstain
let tt = total population, tn = total abstainers (=tt*.12)
let et = total evangelicals, en = evangelical abstainers (=et*.2)
let ht = total heathens, hn = heathen abstainers (=ht*x)
tn = en + hn
tt*.12 = et*.20 + ht*x
but et = tt*.26, ht = tt*.74
so tt*.12 = tt*.26*.2 + tt*.74*x
or x = (.12 – .26*.2)/.74 = about 9%
So that makes Evangelicals more than twice as likely to abstain than are non-Evangelicals. That isn’t a trivial difference.
The article really doesn’t play straight with the numbers. If you found that an environmental factor increased your likelihood of contracting some disease from 9% to 20%, I don’t think you would consider it trivial. I’m not saying that abstention is a disease, just that being an Evangelical seems to have a huge impact, more than doubling the abstention rate, according to the study.
I also think that the notion of abstinence-only education is something of a strawman. Even in Wasilla, the sex education is “abstinence plus”. It is not so much the rest of sex education that is at risk, but the idea of representing abstinence as a possible and virtuous alternative.
There is no reason to leave out a discussion of abstinence, especially when it is so apparent from the statistics you cited that culture can have such a huge impact.
Likely the impact is even greater if one considers the number of partners over a lifetime. I suspect that those Evangelicals were much more likely having premarital sex with the partner they would eventually marry.
Monogamy may be a minority position, but it just isn’t all that strange. I don’t think there is a huge problem with presenting sexual fidelity as a virtue, even if (as with most virtues) many people fall short.