Do Christian apologists need to know how to defend chastity and marriage?

Rod Dreher, not one of my favorite people, writes about it in the American Conservative. (H/T Dalrock)

He writes:

Though he might not have put it quite that way, the eminent sociologist Philip Rieff would probably have said yes. Rieff’s landmark 1966 book The Triumph Of the Therapeutic analyzes what he calls the “deconversion” of the West from Christianity. Nearly everyone recognizes that this process has been underway since the Enlightenment, but Rieff showed that it had reached a more advanced stage than most people—least of all Christians—recognized.

Rieff, who died in 2006, was an unbeliever, but he understood that religion is the key to understanding any culture. For Rieff, the essence of any and every culture can be identified by what it forbids. Each imposes a series of moral demands on its members, for the sake of serving communal purposes, and helps them cope with these demands. A culture requires a cultus—a sense of sacred order, a cosmology that roots these moral demands within a metaphysical framework.

You don’t behave this way and not that way because it’s good for you; you do so because this moral vision is encoded in the nature of reality. This is the basis of natural-law theory, which has been at the heart of contemporary secular arguments against same-sex marriage (and which have persuaded no one).

Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the sexual revolution—though he did not use that term—as a leading indicator of Christianity’s death as a culturally determinative force. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture was at the core of Christian culture—a culture that, crucially, did not merely renounce but redirected the erotic instinct. That the West was rapidly re-paganizing around sensuality and sexual liberation was a powerful sign of Christianity’s demise.

[...]As philosopher Charles Taylor writes in his magisterial religious and cultural history A Secular Age, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).” To be modern is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition.

Gradually the West lost the sense that Christianity had much to do with civilizational order, Taylor writes. In the 20th century, casting off restrictive Christian ideals about sexuality became increasingly identified with health. By the 1960s, the conviction that sexual expression was healthy and good—the more of it, the better—and that sexual desire was intrinsic to one’s personal identity culminated in the sexual revolution, the animating spirit of which held that freedom and authenticity were to be found not in sexual withholding (the Christian view) but in sexual expression and assertion. That is how the modern American claims his freedom.

To Rieff, ours is a particular kind of “revolutionary epoch” because the revolution cannot by its nature be institutionalized. Because it denies the possibility of communal knowledge of binding truths transcending the individual, the revolution cannot establish a stable social order. As Rieff characterizes it, “The answer to all questions of ‘what for’ is ‘more’.”

Our post-Christian culture, then, is an “anti-culture.” We are compelled by the logic of modernity and the myth of individual freedom to continue tearing away the last vestiges of the old order, convinced that true happiness and harmony will be ours once all limits have been nullified.

Gay marriage signifies the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because it denies the core concept of Christian anthropology. In classical Christian teaching, the divinely sanctioned union of male and female is an icon of the relationship of Christ to His church and ultimately of God to His creation. This is why gay marriage negates Christian cosmology, from which we derive our modern concept of human rights and other fundamental goods of modernity. Whether we can keep them in the post-Christian epoch remains to be seen.

It also remains to be seen whether we can keep Christianity without accepting Christian chastity.

One of the reasons why I write so much about chastity and dating and courting on this blog is to try to convince people that it is necessary to have a rigorous, grounded understanding of the practical execution of chastity and marriage. See, a lot of apologists have tunnel vision. They want to focus on apologetics, especially on philosophy, without talking about sexual morality, politics, current events, and other things that will affect whether a person is open to Christianity or not. Like it or not, Christianity has regulations on sexual behavior, and we have to be able and willing to defend those regulations.

I am not opposed to basic Christian apologetics on God’s existence and Christ’s resurrection, but I recognize that people who are too deeply compromised by unbounded sexual appetites are not going to be open to a genuine Christian re-prioritizing following conversion. I am not saying that we need to stop talking about the problem of evil and the women discovering the empty tomb and the fine-tuning of the cosmological constant. I am saying that we need to add onto all of that good stuff an understanding of public policy and ideology. We need to promote, in the culture, lifestyles and moral rules that are going to make it easier for a person to become a Christian. And that means studying to be persuasive on things like premarital sex, cohabitation, no-fault divorce, same-sex marriage, and so on.

I think a very important thing that Christians need to be able to do is to explain and demonstrate that chastity empowers an individual to love others in a way that is not available to them if they are sexually active with that person before marriage. See the papers below for more.

Related posts

• New study: delaying sexual activity produces improves relationship quality and stability
• New study: staying a virgin longer enables more satisfying relationships
• Study explains why college women abandon courtship for hook-ups
• New study: relationship quality diminished by early sexual activity, especially for women
• New study: marriage drops probability of child poverty by 82%
• New study finds that Christians who regularly attend church divorce less
• Can recreational sex turn a selfish, irresponsible man into a marriage-minded provider?
• New study finds that cohabitation damages children
• New peer-reviewed paper highlights the benefits of pre-marital chastity/abstinence
• Does being a virgin before marriage affect marital stability?
• How important are biological fathers for healthy child development?
• What causes women to become single mothers, and how are children affected?
• New study shows that children of working mothers live unhealthier lives
• New Scientist article shows why fathers are necessary for children’s well-being
• New study finds that women choose mates based on appearance
• Study: 80% of single evangelicals aged 18-29 are no longer virigins
• For women under 30, most births occur outside of marriage
• In the UK welfare state, single motherhood is passed from mother to daughter
• New study finds that teens who lose their virginity are more likely to divorce
• How more compassion and less moral judgments increases teen pregnancy
• New survey finds women more sexually active than men in high school
• Why do feminist academics think that feminism has empowered women?
• Who is responsible for the abolition of marriage? Men or feminists?
• Who is to blame for the hook-up culture?
• How the feminist welfare state causes generations of fatherlessness
• Less than half of 7 to 21 year old women think that marriage precedes child-bearing

Filed under: Commentary, Feminism, Christianity, Chastity, Self-Control, Abstinence, Sin, Worldview, Sex, Feminist, Adultery, Sexual Revolution, Premarital Sex, Hookup, Sexual Liberation

UK survey finds that men and women expect to have sex after a few dates

Dina sent me this depressing article from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Men now expect to sleep with a new partner on their third date – but women typically won’t consider it until the fifth, according to an intriguing new study on dating in the 21st century.

On the first date men are most likely to pay for dinner and drinks, with most couples tending to split the bill from the second date onwards.

But by the third date men expect sex and are willing to splash their cash to hurry the romance along.

[...]Both sexes are now spending small fortunes in a bid to prepare themselves for a date that could end in sex, the study found.

Men typically spend £46.79 on grooming, while women spend £5 less at £41.79.

Women prepare for a first night of passion by waxing their legs (58 per cent), buying new lingerie (32 per cent), and waxing their bikini line (17 per cent).

Men are most likely to buy new underwear (28 per cent), groom their pubic hair (27 per cent), and buy new bed linen (15 per cent).

The money is being spent wisely, as men say their biggest turn-offs are a hairy upper lip, dirty sheets, and hairy legs.

And women are turned off by dirty sheets, untidy nails, and an untidy bedroom.

I’ve posted before about how having a large number of premarital sex partners causes marriages to fail. This finding is true for men who have many partners, and especially true for women. The fun that people have before they are married gets paid for later when they cannot hold the relationship together. Premarital promiscuity teaches you nothing about how to be faithful and self-sacrificial in a marriage. It trains you to think that sex is not something to save for a commitment, but something to be done in order to have “fun”. When people have premarital sex, they are treating sex as a recreational activity. They are not willing to commit to loving and taking care of the person they are having sex with for life, so that the other person will not be harmed if the relationship fails. We shouldn’t be having fun with a person in ways we’re we will be deeply connected to them and then just pull away from them and leave them alone. If that happens to a person enough, it ruins their ability to be trusting and vulnerable. It’s hard to repair the damage once it’s been done.

I think that if we are going to be serious about marriage, then we need to think seriously about rolling back our support for this sort of promiscuity, as well as laws that promote break-ups like no-fault divorce. Instead of encouraging people to think that sex before marriage is normal, we should be encouraging them to look at the data that shows that waiting a long time (or even better, waiting until marriage) before having sex is the right thing to do.

And for Christians, let me just reiterate that premarital sex and adultery are both forbidden. You cannot be a Christian and be having sex outside of marriage. The Bible is very very clear about that. Although people like to think that Christianity is compatible with sex outside of marriage, it’s not. We need to be careful about watering down Christianity in order to avoid the need to bow the knee to God’s authority in sexual areas.

Related posts

• New study: delaying sexual activity produces improves relationship quality and stability
• Traditional marriage is a threat to the values of single women
• New study: staying a virgin longer enables more satisfying relationships
• Study explains why college women abandon courtship for hook-ups
• New study: relationship quality diminished by early sexual activity, especially for women
• New study: marriage drops probability of child poverty by 82%
• What do radical feminists want women to want?
• New study finds that Christians who regularly attend church divorce less
• How do prostitutes stay in business in an era of hook-up sex?
• Can recreational sex turn a selfish, irresponsible man into a marriage-minded provider?
• New study finds that cohabitation damages children
• New peer-reviewed paper highlights the benefits of pre-marital chastity/abstinence
• Does being a virgin before marriage affect marital stability?
• How important are biological fathers for healthy child development?
• What causes women to become single mothers, and how are children affected?
• New study shows that children of working mothers live unhealthier lives
• New Scientist article shows why fathers are necessary for children’s well-being
• New study finds that women choose mates based on appearance
• Men should prefer women who allow moral judging and spiritual leading
• Where have all the good men gone, and why aren’t men marrying?
• Do men have a responsibility not to marry feminists?
• Why do some women tolerate jerks as boyfriends?
• The dangers of sentimentality in relationships
• How feminism made women unsuitable for marriage and parenting
• Why Christian men should be chaste
• Study: 80% of single evangelicals aged 18-29 are no longer virigins
• For women under 30, most births occur outside of marriage
• How feminist pastors like Mark Driscoll and Kevin DeYoung undermine marriage
• In the UK welfare state, single motherhood is passed from mother to daughter
• New study finds that teens who lose their virginity are more likely to divorce
• How more compassion and less moral judgments increases teen pregnancy
• New survey finds women more sexually active than men in high school
• Why do feminist academics think that feminism has empowered women?
• Who is responsible for the abolition of marriage? Men or feminists?
• Who is to blame for the hook-up culture?
• How the feminist welfare state causes generations of fatherlessness
• Less than half of 7 to 21 year old women think marriage precedes child-bearing

Filed under: News, Abstinence, Adultery, Affair, Chastity, Commitment, Communication, Dating, Faithful, Faithfulness, Fidelity, Heterosexual, Heterosexuality, Love, Marriage, Premarital Sex, Quality, Recreational Sex, Relationship, Romance, Sex, Stability, Stable

Brookings Institute: three simple rules to avoid poverty

An editorial from the left-leaning Washington Post, by scholar from the left-leanings Brookings Institute.

Take a look at this:

Policy aimed at promoting economic opportunity for poor children must be framed within three stark realities. First, many poor children come from families that do not give them the kind of support that middle-class children get from their families. Second, as a result, these children enter kindergarten far behind their more advantaged peers and, on average, never catch up and even fall further behind. Third, in addition to the education deficit, poor children are more likely to make bad decisions that lead them to drop out of school, become teen parents, join gangs and break the law.

In addition to the thousands of local and national programs that aim to help young people avoid these life-altering problems, we should figure out more ways to convince young people that their decisions will greatly influence whether they avoid poverty and enter the middle class. Let politicians, schoolteachers and administrators, community leaders, ministers and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.

Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year). There are surely influences other than these principles at play, but following them guides a young adult away from poverty and toward the middle class.

The most interesting part of the editorial was where the left-wing pro-abortion group Planned Parenthood complained that telling people the likely consequences of their own actions was either “racist” or “judgmental”:

The recent attacks by Planned Parenthood on Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s mayor, for launching a campaign designed to inform teenagers of the consequences of teen pregnancy provides a good example of how many in our society face the effects of nonmarital births on teen mothers and their children. In one of the campaign posters, a baby with tears rolling down his face says: “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen.” Another shows a girl saying to her mom: “Chances are he won’t stay with you. What happens to me?” Planned Parenthood criticized the ads, displayed in the subway and bus shelters, for ignoring racial and economic factors that contribute to teen pregnancy. Other critics say the ads stigmatize teen parents and their children.

This is what George W. Bush called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. Planned Parenthood thinks that trying to get women to think in terms of cause and effect is pointless. They are too stupid to do anything but have sex with brutes and then murder their children. Over and over. That’s Planned Parenthood’s view of women. They won’t lift a finger to help women towards marriage, and the prosperity and security it would bring them and their children.

The simple fact is that Planned Parenthood makes a lot of money off of killing babies, and they don’t want the killing to stop.

Filed under: News, Abortion, Contraception, Marriage, Michael Bloomberg, New York City, Out of Wedlock Birth, Planned Parenthood, Poverty, Premarital Sex, Teen Motherhood, Teen Pregnancy

Does abortion produce fewer out-of-wedlock births, less child abuse, and lower crime rates?

Here’s an article that commenter Scott sent me from the Public Discourse.

Topic snippet:

In the 1960s and 1970s, abortion advocates used a variety of arguments to advance their cause. Some emphasized women’s liberty and autonomy. Others tried to persuade people that easy access to abortion would benefit society as a whole. Consider just two representative quotations:

“A policy that makes contraception and abortion freely available will greatly reduce the number of unwanted children, and thereby curb the tragic rise of child abuse in our country.” (NARAL, 1978)

“The impact of the abortion revolution may be too vast to assess immediately. It should usher in an era when every child will be wanted, loved, and properly cared for.” (NARAL co-founder Larry Lader, 1974)

Legal abortion, advocates argued, would result in fewer out-of-wedlock births and less child abuse, and would ensure that every child was wanted. Over time, these arguments lost credibility because neither out-of-wedlock births nor child abuse was decreasing.

In the early 2000s, academics Steven Levitt (University of Chicago) and John Donohue (Yale University) published a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, titled “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime,” claiming that legal abortion unexpectedly lowered crime rates in many American cities during the 1990s. Groups supporting abortion rights generally distanced themselves from this argument, fearing its eugenic implications. Though the findings have received some widespread credibility because of Levitt’s popular book Freakonomics, they have been much criticized by other academics.

In this essay I show that easy access to abortion during the past forty years has not benefited society as a whole. Legal abortion has not reduced out-of-wedlock births, child abuse, or crime rates.

And here’s a sample: (I chose one that I haven’t posted about before)

Abortion advocates frequently argued that legal abortion would decrease child abuse. Children who were wanted, they claimed, would be less likely to suffer from abuse than those who were unwanted. But social science data suggest that this logic is flawed. A landmark study of 674 abused children by Edward Lenoski (University of Southern California) found that 91 percent of the parents admitted that they wanted the child they had abused.  A 2005 study by Priscilla Coleman (Bowling Green University) showed that women who obtained abortions were 144 percent more likely to abuse their own children.

At a more theoretical level, Dr. Philip G. Ney, head of the Department of Psychiatry at Royal Jubilee Hospital in Canada, has outlined why abortion can lead directly to child abuse.

1. Abortion decreases an individual’s instinctual restraint against the occasional rage felt toward those dependent on his or her care.
2. Permissive abortion diminishes the taboo against aggressing [against] the defenseless.
3. Abortion increases the hostility between the generations.
4. Abortion has devalued children, thus diminishing the value of caring for children.
5. Abortion increases guilt and self-hatred, which the parent takes out on the child.
6. Abortion increases hostile frustration, intensifying the battle of the sexes, for which children are scapegoated.
7. Abortion cuts the developing mother-infant bond, thereby diminishing her future mothering capability.

Overall, American statistics paint a clear picture. Legal abortion did not reduce child abuse. In fact, the exact opposite happened. The National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect has reported that child abuse has increased more than 1,000 percent since the legalization of abortion in 1973. According to data from the US Statistical Abstract, deaths due to child abuse continued to rise after the Roe v. Wade decision and increased by 400 percent between 1972 and 1990. Obviously, child abuse is caused by a variety of complicated factors. Still, our experience in the United States provides no evidence that legal abortion reduces child abuse.

This is a good one to bookmark, I’ll bet you will be able to use it in a debate. By the way, if you want more of a rebuttal of Freaknomics, you can check out John Lott’s book “Freedomnomics“. It has a whole section on abortion and crime.

Filed under: News, Abortion, Benefits, Bioethics, Child, Child Abuse, Children, Contraception, Crime, Crime Rates, Economics, Feminism, Legalized Abortion, Out of Wedlock, Out of Wedlock Birth, Parent, Premarital Sex, Pro-Abortion, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, Recreational Premarital Sex, Unwanted Child, Wanted Child

New study: delaying sexual activity produces improves relationship quality and stability

Dina sent me this article from the UK Daily Mail about a new study showing the importance of chastity for relationship quality and stability.

Excerpt:

New couples who jump into bed together on the first date do not last as long in relationships as those who wait a new study has revealed.

Using a sample of almost 11,000 unmarried people, Brigham Young University discovered a direct correlation between the length and strength of a partnership and the amount of time they took to have first have sex.

The study showed that those who waited to initiate sexual intimacy were found to have longer and more positive outcomes in their relationships while those who couldn’t help themselves reported that their dalliances struggled to last more than two years.

‘Results suggested that waiting to initiate sexual intimacy in unmarried relationships was generally associated with positive outcomes,’ said the report authored published by the U.S. National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health.

‘This effect was strongly moderated by relationship length, with individuals who reported early sexual initiation reporting increasingly lower outcomes in relationships of longer than two years.’

The study examined four sexual-timing patterns: Having sex prior to dating, initiating sex on the first date or shortly after, having sex after a few weeks of dating, and sexual abstinence.

Each one of these fields yielded different results in relationship satisfaction, stability and communication in dating situations.

Should we be telling children moral rules, backed by evidence, so that they will have better lives? Or should we be telling them lies so that they won’t feel bad about behaving immorally? That’s the choice that every grown-up has to make. Are we going to tell the children something that will guide them away from harm? Or are adults going to tell them something that makes them feel better about their own mistakes?

When I see studies like this, it makes me glad that I am still a virgin, and I really recommend that to everyone, especially to men. It’s important to keep a clear head and to protect your ability to make bond to the right woman, should she come along. That’s what gives you the ability to make a tight bond, and helps you to trust women and to believe the best about the good one that you finally decide on. Too much early sex, and seeing women at their worst, and you lose your ability to trust the good ones.

Related posts

• Traditional marriage is a threat to the values of single women
• New study: staying a virgin longer enables more satisfying relationships
• Study explains why college women abandon courtship for hook-ups
• New study: relationship quality diminished by early sexual activity, especially for women
• New study: marriage drops probability of child poverty by 82%
• What do radical feminists want women to want?
• New study finds that Christians who regularly attend church divorce less
• How do prostitutes stay in business in an era of hook-up sex?
• Can recreational sex turn a selfish, irresponsible man into a marriage-minded provider?
• New study finds that cohabitation damages children
• New peer-reviewed paper highlights the benefits of pre-marital chastity/abstinence
• Does being a virgin before marriage affect marital stability?
• How important are biological fathers for healthy child development?
• What causes women to become single mothers, and how are children affected?
• New study shows that children of working mothers live unhealthier lives
• New Scientist article shows why fathers are necessary for children’s well-being
• New study finds that women choose mates based on appearance
• Men should prefer women who allow moral judging and spiritual leading
• Where have all the good men gone, and why aren’t men marrying?
• Do men have a responsibility not to marry feminists?
• Why do some women tolerate jerks as boyfriends?
• The dangers of sentimentality in relationships
• How feminism made women unsuitable for marriage and parenting
• Why Christian men should be chaste
• Study: 80% of single evangelicals aged 18-29 are no longer virigins
• For women under 30, most births occur outside of marriage
• How feminist pastors like Mark Driscoll and Kevin DeYoung undermine marriage
• In the UK welfare state, single motherhood is passed from mother to daughter
• New study finds that teens who lose their virginity are more likely to divorce
• How more compassion and less moral judgments increases teen pregnancy
• New survey finds women more sexually active than men in high school
• Why do feminist academics think that feminism has empowered women?
• Who is responsible for the abolition of marriage? Men or feminists?
• Who is to blame for the hook-up culture?
• How the feminist welfare state causes generations of fatherlessness
• Less than half of 7 to 21 year old women think marriage precedes child-bearing

Filed under: News, Abstinence, Adultery, Affair, Chastity, Commitment, Communication, Faithful, Faithfulness, Fidelity, Love, Marriage, Premarital Sex, Quality, Recreational Sex, Relationship, Romance, Sex, Stability, Stable