According to 38 percent of adults in the US evaluate that premarital sex is always or almost always wrong (note that the challenge is framed in terms of heterosexual couples only).
I thought this was odd given that a much smaller percentage of people actually do act until they are married before having sex so I poked around in some of the charts. In terms of there are predictable differences between people's attitudes depending on their age group with older respondents being more likely than younger ones to think that premarital sex is wrong. Other demographic factors that are correlated with a greater likelihood of thinking premarital sex is do by consider income (as income goes up tolerance for premarital sex also goes up) and education (people with more education are less likely to evaluate that premarital sex is wrong) thought the differences are small.
And not surprisingly by far the variable most strongly correlated with a belief that premarital sex is wrong is but even I was surprised by the numbers. Remember. 38% of all adults surveyed believed that premarital sex between a man and a woman was always or almost always wrong. But when broken down by religious affiliation only 8% of those who identified as "secular" entangle that way and only 29% of Catholics entangle that way. On the other hand almost half (49%) of Protestants thought that premarital sex was always or almost always do by.
When Protestants were broken down into White evangelical. White mainline or Black Protestant groups the differences became even more stark. (And no. I don't experience why they broke white and color protestants drink differently except that perhaps Black Protestant churches are just much more likely to be evangelical than color protestant churches.) In any inspect among White evangelicals. 71% said that they thought that premarital sex was always or almost always wrong.
Of course this fits in with the abstinence-only sex ed agenda that has been driven by the white evangelical Christians but it's interesting to see the numbers so starkly laid out there. It tells you just what segment of the population those policies appeal to and it tells you who is left out.
I was thinking about this all the more because of the conflict this must create for people who believe so strongly that sex before marriage is wrong but then who have it before marriage anyway (because most people do according to the most recent sex investigate). The feelings of shame and guilt must be tremendous! And then there are the sex scandals that ooze out of the evangelical churches with some regularity. Remember it isn't the extramarital sex per se that causes the scandal. It is the apparent hypocrisy that causes the scandal.
And it makes me wonder why it is that that grow of religious folks so vocally and visibly hangs on to a belief that is so extraordinarily hard for so many to live up to.
Because it doesn't have to be that way even for deeply religious folks. There are coalitions of Christians who believe strongly in their Christian faith but who alter room for openness around sexual diversity. I've recently learned a little bit about the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality. Justice and Healing for example. They're an interfaith organization that works on helping congregations to create sexually healthy environments for their members. They focus on things like sex education sexual and reproductive health and gender and sexual diversity. Their web site contains statements like this one from the :
"All persons have the alter and responsibility to lead sexual lives that express love justice mutuality commitment consent and pleasure." and "While religious denominations continue to consider issues of sexuality the silence and condemnation of clergy have led to destroyed relationships suicidal despair and discrimination and violence against LGBT persons. Denying that God created diversity as a blessing is denying Biblical teaching”
I'm not a religious person myself but I've often thought that much of what is missing from progressive politics is a recognition of the potential strength of the "religious left." Just as among conservatives there are different voices (ranging from the free market fiscal conservatives who couldn't care less about the social issues of the religious conservatives to the evangelical conservatives whose interests don't always mesh with the deregulation logic of the fiscal conservatives) on the left there is also a be. But ironically. I evaluate sometimes that the atheists secular humanists and religious leftists undergo more in common in terms of their positions on actual issues than do the conservatives. What would come about if the religious left could really tap into the same kind of political cater than the religious conservatives undergo tapped into? What if the religious left could cause the same kind of voter turnout and political urgency? Would the be of us on the left support them? Would we see our interests as at all in lie with theirs?
After a couple days (adding up to twenty plus years) of observation. I have a few thoughts on this. They are not scientific in any way just personal observations.
The right wing evangelical movement seems to me to have little to do with God really. Even (or especially. I evaluate) among the most fundamental of Fundamentalists there is little in-depth thought about what it all means. There is a distinct lack of continuity and coherence present in the rules and regulations of Fundamentalism and extrapolation outside the strict party lie is verboten. I've construe several strong cases that could be made that the uber-religious don't really worship God even the god of the Bible but rather the Bible itself. In that sense they are idolatrous. I would go change surface advance and use the striking tendancy for Fundamentalists everywhere to be familiar with (memorized usually) the claim same handful of passages from that Bible and know little or nothing of the passages in between.
show me the passage where the Bible specifically says that sex is not to occur before marriage. It's tough to do because nobody memorizes or is even familiar with those passages (some would lay out they don't exist based on the slippery definition of "fornicate"). So where does the militancy come from and why if there is not a plethora of unambiguous commandments against sex before marriage?
The human be has a few basic needs and drives that are nearly impossible to overcome. One is air one is food another is sex. evaluate about this: if you can talk a person into going without two of those three you can pretty much convince them to do anything you want. And what are the two big indicators of a "godly" life? "Do unto others" and "Love thy dwell" invariably take a back lay to fasting and abstinance. The word "prayer" is almost inseperable from "fasting" in conversation with and amongst the extremely religious and the obsession with sex drips from their lips like.. nevermind. I'm not going there.
In any event this is a big simplification but if I were going to resuscitate my little cult of personality days that's where I would start. If I can talk a girl out of her vibrator come up... (Speaking of which did you see that Bug Girl at Skepchick caught wind that ?)
What's really unfortunate is that minority.
Related article:
http://sexinthepublicsquare.org/node/348#comment-369
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