The fate of the True Love Waits movement, which began with the Southern Baptist Convention in the '90s, is a perfect example. Teenagers who signed the abstinence pledge belong to a subgroup of highly motivated virgins. But even they succumb. Follow-up surveys show that at best, pledges delayed premarital sex by 18 months -- a success by statistical standards but a disaster for Southern Baptist pastors.Everybody has their own story from high school about good church kids swearing an oath to their virginity and one day turning up pregnant. Everybody except me, that is; I didn't really know any evangelicals until I hit college, and my impression is that by this point in their lives kids have either checked out of church or they're true believers for life. While I was once told it was easily knowable by observation which of the good evangelical couples were going to the naughty places (Christians being good at nothing if not passing spurious judgment on superficiality), but I was unaware of anyone ever hitting the jackpot officially. Of course, I was never more than a low-level foot soldier, and there are ways of keeping such things under wraps, including those which one might otherwise assume would be anathema to a pious Christian....When evangelical parents say they talk to their kids about sex, they mean the morals, not the mechanics. In a quiz on pregnancy and health risks associated with sex, evangelicals scored very low. 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.
But I think most of them really, honestly believed with the utmost sincerity everything they said they did, for which I have a reluctant respect, because I obviously couldn't pull it off. Chastity was a new kind of ascetic benchmark; they had overpowered their sexual will to such an extent that it was overturned, and the proof of their virtue was in abstaining. That's what happens to the people who stick around long enough. (Of course, a necessary tangent is that the temptation of sex must be available in order to be denied; which explains why I remained a virgin all these years despite no great pious reasoning or spiritual willpower, see below).
That's all roundabout and has nothing to do with teenagers (late teenagers, perhaps) who were the subject of the initial survey that got us here. Several years ago there was an effort by some evangelicals to create a kind of "alternate dating" program for evangelical teens that effectively attempted to give parents yet more decision-making power over who their kids saw and prevent young couples from going out alone as much as possible. Though it was never pitched as such, (it was usually clouded with Christianese proclamations about "commitment") the real purpose was likely an attempt to curb the above phenomenon without caving in and giving kids real sex education. I would be interested to see whether this had any staying power, and whether or not it had the desired effect.
