A Prophetic Message for Evangelicals
Once I was thrown out of a Church for publicly telling the Elders a truth everyone was thinking but were too politically correct to mention. The content of that truth is no longer significant, but at that time I learned that bringing out in the open something that everyone wants to remain hidden is not the safest of choices. I was excommunicated from that church. Really, I was publicly barred from fellowship. If they could have turned a candle upside-down and stamped it out, like they did when Henry II was excommunicated by Becket, they probably would have. (Actually, that would have been kind of neat.) I think if they had a heretic bonfire available, they would have liked me to be the main course.
The Prophets, though I am not in their number, were not killed for being nice. They were killed for telling the truth to God’s people; a truth Israel denied and did not want to hear.
Now it appears that another ugly truth is waiting to be told. Luckily, I am not alone. The news is also being spread by George Barna and Mark Regnerus. I am only repeating their message.
Evangelicals are more sexually impure than almost any other demographic group in the United States. Not only is the Evangelical faith ineffective in lowering pre-marital sex rates in teens and divorce rates in marrieds, it actually appears to be damaging to sexual morality.
According to research cited by Regnerus in Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers, “Teenagers who identify as “evangelical” or “born again” show the following trends regarding sexuality.
80 percent think sex should be saved for marriage. But thinking is not the same as doing. Evangelical teens are actually more likely to have lost their virginity than either mainline Protestants or Catholics. They tend to lose their virginity at a slightly younger age—16.3, compared with 16.7 for the other two faiths. And they are much more likely to have had three or more sexual partners by age 17: Regnerus reports that 13.7 percent of evangelicals have, compared with 8.9 percent for mainline Protestants. (Emphasis added)
In other words, though they “talk the talk” Evangelical teens are, to use another apropos expression, “laying down on the job.” What is worse, they give in to temptation sooner than even their atheistic peers. Although the Abstinence Pledge delays sexual activity for Evangelical teens by 18 months, it does not eliminate it. In fact, it has the unintended result of increasing the possibility that the “pledged” teens will either get an STD or pregnant (or both).
Evangelical teens don’t accept themselves as people who will have sex until they’ve already had it. As a result, abstinence pledgers are considerably less likely than nonpledgers to use birth control the first time they have sex. “It just sort of happened,” one girl told the researchers, in what could be a motto for this generation of evangelical teens.
Margaret Sanger is laughing at us from the grave.
Nor is the solution to this hypocrisy offered by World Magazine here of much encouragement. Citing 1 Cor. 7:9, they note that our culture “postpones marriage while stretching celibacy to the breaking point.” As a counter, they recommend that a “counter-cultural church may do well to encourage younger marriages.”
Nope. Sorry. Evangelicals frankly are bigger failures at marriage than they are at premarital control. Citing Barna’s research, Tolerance.org notes the following:
11% of the adult population is currently divorced. 25% of adults have had at least one divorce during their lifetime. Divorce rates among conservative Christians were significantly higher than for other faith groups, and much higher than Atheists and Agnostics experience. (Emphasis in original)
So it appears that atheists and liberals are not only better at keeping their knees together before marriage they excel over Evangelicals in keeping their partnerships intact after marriage. Even Jews, Catholics, and Liberal Mainline Protestants fare better in both categories than do Conservative Christians; especially SBC Baptists.
“My brothers, this should not be!” to quote Paul in another context. Yet, as depressing as this fact is, to hide these results in the sand is to court disaster. To not mention these facts in order to keep up an illusion is to keep living a socially disastrous lie. To keep doing things as we have been is insane; the results are not likely to change. Something is desperately wrong, and if we ignore it, it is going to continue to get worse. Abstinence pledges and programs are a failure for the Southern Baptist Church. The marriages of the Baptists are becoming a mockery of their vows. To the world, we are worse than hypocrites when we stand up to support marriage of any variety; much less the apparently non-existent “Christian marriage.”
Killing the prophets, as always, does not invalidate their message. Nor does it make the threat of which they are warning go away. I am not certain what the solution to this growing crisis in conservative Christian sexuality is, but something must be tried soon or all credibility we have for Christ will be lost to us.
In the meantime; however, you Evangelicals stay away from my daughter.
UPDATE
Upon further analysis of the survey data results for Barna and Regnerus, I found in many ways their conclusions were flawed. Barna, for example, did not factor in Church attendance and denominational affiliation in with his definition of “Evangelical.” Regnerus did not lok at racial and socio-economic patterns that would also be major factors in his pre-marital sex statistics. These were and are major issues.
Church attendance very positively affects divorce statistics, bringing the Evangelical divorce rate well below the average rate for athiests and even other non-Christian religions. Race and socio-economic considerations appear to effect the premarital sex and divorce rates more than “Evangelical faith” as they have defined it. See a more detailed “retraction” of this post here.