Winner, Lauren, F. “Chastity is a spiritual discipline for the whole church,” Christianity Today, May, 2005, pp. 29-33.

 

 

This powerful and timely article begins admitting that the word “chastity” sounds rather churchy and is unpopular even among people of faith. “A word like chastity can set our teeth on edge.” The word and idea strike most secular people of the world “as curious, strange, backwards, repressed.” (For instance, listen to Barbra Streisand as light-hearted Roz in the movie, “Meet the Fockers.” or think of any reference to sex in popular culture.)

 

 

But sex is not a kidding matter, as this writer points out.

 

 

About 65% of American teenagers have sex by the time they finish high school, and teenage “dating” websites that boast millions of members encourage teenage patrons to select not prom dates but partners for casual sexual escapades.

 

 

A 2002 study by the Centers for Disease Control found that 41% of American women aged 15-44 have, at some point, cohabited with a man.

 

 

According to the 2000 census, the number of unmarried couples living together has increased tenfold between 1990 and 2000.

 

 

Fifty-two percent of American women have sex before turning 18, and 75% have sex before they get married. According to a a 2002 study by the Kaiser Foundation and Seventeen magazine, more than a quarter of 15- to 17-year-old girls say that sexual intercourse is “almost always” or “most of the time” part of a “casual relationship.”

 

 

Faith communities do not fare a great deal better. According to three surveys of Christians (in the 1990s), two-thirds were not virgins before marriage.

 

 

True Love Waits (and other such programs) have raised hopes for sexual abstinence among Christians. But a 2001 study of 6,800 students showed that virgins who took the pledge were likely to abstain from sex on average 18 months longer than those who did not take the pledge. Though abstinence leaders welcomed this news, this author notes: “it simply means that a lot of abstinence pledgers are having sex at 19 instead of 18—hardly a decisive victory for abstinence.”

 

 

In 2003, researchers at Northern Kentucky University showed that 61% of students who signed sexual-abstinence commitment cards broke their pledges. Of the remaining 39% who kept their pledges, 55% said they’d had oral sex.

 

 

There seems to be two general responses to these realities among leaders and pastors. One is to decide that, for reasons of prevailing culture, having sex before marriage is no big deal. The other response is to make a big deal of it.

 

 

Lauren Winner has decided that

 

Ø      our usual strategies for helping people cope with sexuality are not working,

 

Ø      repeating biblical teachings about sex is simply not enough,

 

Ø      urging self-discipline isn’t enough,

 

Ø    reminding people of the psychological cost of premarital sex or infidelity is not enough.

 

 

What we need is something larger and deeper: a clear vision of what chastity ultimately is and the most important context in which it is to be practiced.

 

 

Attempting to promote a whole new idea of chastity as “discipled sex,” Winner goes on to venture, “Chastity is doing sex in the body of Christ—doing sex in a way that befits the body of Christ—and that keeps you grounded, and bounded, in the community.”

 

Sex is, in Paul’s image, a joining of your body to someone else’s. In baptism, you have become Christ’s body, and it is Christ’s body that must give you permission to join his body to another body. In the Christian grammar, we have no right to sex. The place where the Church confers that privilege on you is the wedding…. Chastity, in other words, is a fact of gospel life. In the New Testament, sex beyond the boundaries of marriage—the boundaries of communally granted sanction of sex—is simply off limits… Abstinence before marriage, and fidelity within marriage; any other kind of sex is embodied apostasy.

 

Chastity, then, is a basic rule of the community, but it is not a mere rule. It is also discipline.

 

This article goes on to discuss the “language of spiritual discipline—an ancient idiom of the church.”  There is new interest in the ancient concept of spiritual disciplines. (Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines.) “Chastity is something you do; it is something you practice. It is not only a state—the state of being chaste—but a disciplined, active undertaking that we do as part of the body.”

 

Coming to appreciate the challenge and possibilities of discipline helps us move away, this writer says, “from the nagging voice in our heads that says, ‘I’m being made to give up something that is totally normal and natural.’”  Spiritual disciplines are about just that: giving up something the body wants for a higher cause. “With all aspects of ascetic living, one does not avoid or refrain from something for the sake of rejecting it, but for the sake of something else…. The unmarried Christian who practices chastity refrains from sex in order to remember that God desires your person, your body, more than any man or woman ever will.”

 

 

This article was not written by someone who grew up in a protected atmosphere that allowed for pious hopes. She knows both sides of sex as you’ll see in her parallel article.

 

 

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

 

1.   What do you think about sex? Is it a big deal? Does it have anything to do with relationships or commitment? What does it have to do with love and marriage?

 

2.   Should the qualities of the church and the characteristics of people of faith be different from those outside a faith community?  How so? 

 

 

3.   How should communities of faith be impacting surrounding society in this and other regards?

 

 

IMPLICATIONS

 

1.   The fact is that the sexual standards and behavior of Christians is not that much different from others in our societies.

 

2.   It is important that we move from considering sex as a “No, no” in any way, to seeing it as an incredible treasure. It is the deepest form of human communication; it is an image of human-divine communion.

 

Dean Borgman   c. CYS