Religion beat became a test of faith
A reporter looks at how the stories he covered affected him and his
spiritual journey.
By William Lobdell, Times Staff Writer
July 21, 2007
WHEN Times editors assigned me to the religion beat, I believed God
had answered my prayers.
As a serious Christian, I had cringed at some of the coverage in the
mainstream media. Faith frequently was treated like a circus, even a
freak show.
I wanted to report objectively and respectfully about how belief
shapes people's lives. Along the way, I believed, my own faith would
grow deeper and sturdier.
But during the eight years I covered religion, something very
different happened.
In 1989, a friend took me to Mariners Church, then in Newport Beach,
after saying: "You need God. That's what's missing in your life." At
the time, I was 28 and my first son was less than a year old. I had
managed to nearly ruin my marriage (the second one) and didn't think
I'd do much better as a father. I was profoundly lost.
The mega-church's pastor, Kenton Beshore, had a knack for making
Scripture accessible and relevant. For someone who hadn't studied the
Bible much, these talks fed a hunger in my soul. The secrets to living
well had been there all along — in "Life's Instruction Manual," as
some Christians nicknamed the Bible.
Some friends in a Bible study class encouraged me to attend a men's
religious weekend in the San Bernardino Mountains. The three-day
retreats are designed to grind down your defenses and leave you
emotionally raw — an easier state in which to connect with God. After
36 hours of prayer, singing, Bible study, intimate sharing and little
sleep, I felt filled with the Holy Spirit.
At the climactic service Sunday, Mike Barris, a pastor-to-be,
delivered an old-fashioned altar call. He said we needed to let Jesus
into our hearts.
With my eyes closed in prayer, I saw my heart slowly opening in two
and then being infused with a warm, glowing light. A tingle spread
across my chest. This, I thought, was what it was to be born again.
The pastor asked those who wanted to accept Jesus to raise their
hands. My hand pretty much levitated on its own. My new friends in
Christ, many of whom I had first met Friday, gave me hugs and slaps on
the back.
I began praying each morning and night. During those quiet times, I
mostly listened for God's voice. And I thought I sensed a plan he had
for me: To write about religion for The Times and bring light into the
newsroom, if only by my stories and example.
My desire to be a religion reporter grew as I read stories about faith
in the mainstream media. Spiritual people often appeared as nuts or
simpletons.
In one of the most famous examples, the Washington Post ran a news
story in 1993 that referred to evangelical Christians as "largely
poor, uneducated and easy to command."
Another maddening trend was that homosexuality and abortion debates
dominated media coverage, as if those where the only topics that
mattered to Christians.
I didn't just pray for a religion writing job; I lobbied hard. In one
meeting with editors, my pitch went something like this:
"What if I told you that you have an institution in Orange County that
draws more than 15,000 people a weekend and that you haven't written
much about?"
They said they couldn't imagine such a thing.
"Saddleback Church in Lake Forest draws that type of crowd."
It took several years and numerous memos and e-mails, but editors
finally agreed in 1998 to let me write "Getting Religion," a weekly
column about faith in Orange County.
I felt like all the tumblers of my life had clicked. I had a strong
marriage, great kids and a new column. I attributed it all to God's
grace.
First as a columnist and then as a reporter, I never had a shortage of
topics. I wrote about an elderly church organist who became a
spiritual mentor to the man who tried to rape, rob and kill her. About
the Orthodox Jewish mother who developed a line of modest clothing for
Barbie dolls. About the hardy group of Mormons who rode covered wagons
800 miles from Salt Lake City to San Bernardino, replicating their
ancestors' journey to Southern California.
Meanwhile, Roman Catholicism, with its low-key evangelism and deep
ritual, increasingly appealed to me. I loved its long history and
loving embrace of liberals and conservatives, immigrants and the
established, the rich and poor.
My wife was raised in the Catholic Church and had wanted me to join
for years. I signed up for yearlong conversion classes at a Newport
Beach parish that would end with an Easter eve ceremony ushering
newcomers into the church.
By then I had been on the religion beat for three years. I couldn't
wait to get to work each day or, on Sunday, to church.
IN 2001, about six months before the Catholic clergy sex scandal broke
nationwide, the dioceses of Orange and Los Angeles paid a record $5.2
million to a law student who said he had been molested, as a student
at Santa Margarita High School in Rancho Santa Margarita, by his
principal, Msgr. Michael Harris.
Without admitting guilt, Harris agreed to leave the priesthood. As
part of the settlement, the dioceses also were forced to radically
change how they handled sexual abuse allegations, including a promise
to kick out any priest with a credible molestation allegation in his
past. It emerged that both dioceses had many known molesters on duty.
Los Angeles had two convicted pedophiles still working as priests.
While reporting the Harris story, I learned — from court records and
interviews — the lengths to which the church went to protect the
priest. When Harris took an abrupt leave of absence as principal at
Santa Margarita in January 1994, he issued a statement saying it was
because of "stress." He resigned a month later.
His superiors didn't tell parents or students the real reason for his
absence: Harris had been accused of molesting a student while he was
principal at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana from 1977 to 1979;
church officials possessed a note from Harris that appeared to be a
confession; and they were sending him to a treatment center.
In September 1994, a second former student stepped forward, this time
publicly, and filed a lawsuit. In response, parents and students held
a rally for Harris at the school, singing, "For He's a Jolly Good
Fellow." An airplane towed a banner overhead that read "We Love Father
Harris."
By this time, church leaders possessed a psychological report in which
Catholic psychiatrists diagnosed Harris as having an attraction to
adolescents and concluded that he likely had molested multiple boys.
(Harris, who has denied the allegations, now stands accused of
molesting 12 boys, according to church records.) But they didn't step
forward to set the record straight. Instead, a diocesan spokesman
called Harris an "icon of the priesthood."
Harris' top defense attorney, John Barnett, lashed out at the priest's
accusers in the media, calling them "sick individuals." Again, church
leaders remained silent as the alleged victims were savaged. Some of
the diocese's top priests — including the cleric in charge of
investigating the accusations — threw a going-away party for Harris.
At the time, I never imagined Catholic leaders would engage in a
widespread practice that protected alleged child molesters and
belittled the victims. I latched onto the explanation that was least
damaging to my belief in the Catholic Church — that this was an
isolated case of a morally corrupt administration.
And I was comforted by the advice of a Catholic friend: "Keep your
eyes on the person nailed to the cross, not the priests behind the
altar."
IN late 2001, I traveled to Salt Lake City to attend a conference of
former Mormons. These people lived mostly in the Mormon Jell-O belt —
Utah, Idaho, Arizona — so-named because of the plates of Jell-O that
inevitably appear at Mormon gatherings.
They found themselves ostracized in their neighborhoods, schools and
careers. Often, they were dead to their own families.
"If Mormons associate with you, they think they will somehow become
contaminated and lose their faith too," Suzy Colver told me. "It's
almost as if people who leave the church don't exist."
The people at the conference were an eclectic bunch: novelists and
stay-at-home moms, entrepreneurs and cartoonists, sex addicts and
alcoholics. Some were depressed, others angry, and a few had
successfully moved on. But they shared a common thread: They wanted to
be honest about their lack of faith and still be loved.
In most pockets of Mormon culture, that wasn't going to happen.
Part of what drew me to Christianity were the radical teachings of
Jesus — to love your enemy, to protect the vulnerable and to lovingly
bring lost sheep back into the fold.
As I reported the story, I wondered how faithful Mormons — many of
whom rigorously follow other biblical commands such as giving 10% of
their income to the church — could miss so badly on one of Jesus'
primary lessons?
As part of the Christian family, I felt shame for my religion. But I
still compartmentalized it as an aberration — the result of sinful
behavior that infects even the church.
IN early 2002, I was assigned to work on the Catholic sex scandal
story as it erupted across the nation. I also continued to attend
Sunday Mass and conversion classes on Sunday mornings and Tuesday
nights.
Father Vincent Gilmore — the young, intellectually sharp priest
teaching the class — spoke about the sex scandal and warned us
Catholics-to-be not to be poisoned by a relatively few bad clerics.
Otherwise, we'd be committing "spiritual suicide."
As I began my reporting, I kept that in mind. I also thought that the
victims — people usually in their 30s, 40s and up — should have just
gotten over what had happened to them decades before. To me, many of
them were needlessly stuck in the past.
But then I began going over the documents. And interviewing the
victims, scores of them. I discovered that the term "sexual abuse" is
a euphemism. Most of these children were raped and sodomized by
someone they and their family believed was Christ's representative on
Earth. That's not something an 8-year-old's mind can process; it
forever warps a person's sexuality and spirituality.
Many of these victims were molested by priests with a history of
abusing children. But the bishops routinely sent these clerics to
another parish, and bullied or conned the victims and their families
into silence. The police were almost never called. In at least a few
instances, bishops encouraged molesting priests to flee the country to
escape prosecution.
I couldn't get the victims' stories or the bishops' lies — many of
them right there on their own stationery — out of my head. I had been
in journalism more than two decades and had dealt with murders, rapes,
other violent crimes and tragedies. But this was different — the
children were so innocent, their parents so faithful, the priests so
sick and bishops so corrupt.
The lifeline Father Vincent had tried to give me began to slip from my hands.
I sought solace in another belief: that a church's heart is in the
pews, not the pulpits. Certainly the people who were reading my
stories would recoil and, in the end, recapture God's house. Instead,
I saw parishioners reflexively support priests who had molested
children by writing glowing letters to bishops and judges, offering
them jobs or even raising their bail while cursing the victims, often
to their faces.
On a Sunday morning at a parish in Rancho Santa Margarita, I watched
congregants lobby to name their new parish hall after their longtime
pastor, who had admitted to molesting a boy and who had been barred
that day from the ministry. I felt sick to my stomach that the people
of God wanted to honor an admitted child molester. Only one person in
the crowd, an Orange County sheriff's deputy, spoke out for the
victim.
On Good Friday 2002, I decided I couldn't belong to the Catholic
Church. Though I had spent a year preparing for it, I didn't go
through with the rite of conversion.
I understood that I was witnessing the failure of humans, not God. But
in a way, that was the point. I didn't see these institutions drenched
in God's spirit. Shouldn't religious organizations, if they were
God-inspired and -driven, reflect higher standards than government,
corporations and other groups in society?
I found an excuse to skip services that Easter. For the next few
months, I attended church only sporadically. Then I stopped going
altogether.
SOME of the nation's most powerful pastors — including Billy Graham,
Robert H. Schuller and Greg Laurie — appear on the Trinity
Broadcasting Network, benefiting from TBN's worldwide reach while
looking past the network's reliance on the "prosperity gospel" to fuel
its growth.
TBN's creed is that if viewers send money to the network, God will
repay them with great riches and good health. Even people deeply in
debt are encouraged to put donations on credit cards.
"If you have been healed or saved or blessed through TBN and have not
contributed … you are robbing God and will lose your reward in
heaven," Paul Crouch, co-founder of the Orange County-based network,
once told viewers. Meanwhile, Crouch and his wife, Jan, live like
tycoons.
I began looking into TBN after receiving some e-mails from former
devotees of the network. Those people had given money to the network
in hopes of getting a financial windfall from God. That didn't work.
By then, I started to believe that God was calling me, as he did St.
Francis of Assisi, to "rebuild his church" — not in some grand way
that would lead to sainthood but by simply reporting on corruption
within the church body.
I spent several years investigating TBN and pored through stacks of
documents — some made available by appalled employees — showing the
Crouches eating $180-per-person meals; flying in a $21-million
corporate jet; having access to 30 TBN-owned homes across the country,
among them a pair of Newport Beach mansions and a ranch in Texas. All
paid for with tax-free donor money.
One of the stars of TBN and a major fundraiser is the self-proclaimed
faith healer Benny Hinn. I attended one of his two-day "Miracle
Crusades" at what was then the Pond of Anaheim. The arena was packed
with sick people looking for a cure.
My heart broke for the hundreds of people around me in wheelchairs or
in the final stages of terminal diseases, believing that if God deemed
their faith strong enough, they would be healed that night.
Hinn tells his audiences that a generous cash gift to his ministry
will be seen by God as a sign of true faith. This has worked well for
the televangelist, who lives in an oceanfront mansion in Dana Point,
drives luxury cars, flies in private jets and stays in the best
hotels.
At the crusade, I met Jordie Gibson, 21, who had flown from Calgary,
Canada, to Anaheim because he believed that God, through Hinn, could
get his kidneys to work again.
He was thrilled to tell me that he had stopped getting dialysis
because Hinn had said people are cured only when they "step out in
faith." The decision enraged his doctors, but made perfect sense to
Gibson. Despite risking his life as a show of faith, he wasn't cured
in Anaheim. He returned to Canada and went back on dialysis. The crowd
was filled with desperate believers like Gibson.
I tried unsuccessfully to get several prominent mainstream pastors who
appeared on TBN to comment on the prosperity gospel, Hinn's "faith
healing" or the Crouches' lifestyle.
Like the Catholic bishops, I assumed, they didn't want to risk what they had.
AS the stories piled up, I began to pray with renewed vigor, but it
felt like I wasn't connecting to God. I started to feel silly even
trying.
I read accounts of St. John of the Cross and his "dark night of the
soul," a time he believed God was testing him by seemingly withdrawing
from his life. Maybe this was my test.
I met with my former Presbyterian pastor, John Huffman, and told him
what I was feeling. I asked him if I could e-mail him some tough
questions about Christianity and faith and get his answers. He agreed
without hesitation.
The questions that I thought I had come to peace with started to
bubble up again. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God
get credit for answered prayers but no blame for unanswered ones? Why
do we believe in the miraculous healing power of God when he's never
been able to regenerate a limb or heal a severed spinal chord?
In one e-mail, I asked John, who had lost a daughter to cancer, why an
atheist businessman prospers and the child of devout Christian parents
dies. Why would a loving God make this impossible for us to
understand?
He sent back a long reply that concluded:
"My ultimate affirmation is let God be God and acknowledge that He is
in charge. He knows what I don't know. And frankly, if I'm totally
honest with you, a life of gratitude is one that bows before the
Sovereign God arguing with Him on those things that trouble me,
lamenting the losses of life, but ultimately saying, 'You, God, are
infinite; I'm human and finite.' "
John is an excellent pastor, but he couldn't reach me. For some time,
I had tried to push away doubts and reconcile an all-powerful and
infinitely loving God with what I saw, but I was losing ground. I
wondered if my born-again experience at the mountain retreat was more
about fatigue, spiritual longing and emotional vulnerability than
being touched by Jesus.
And I considered another possibility: Maybe God didn't exist.
TOWARD the end of my tenure as a religion reporter, I traveled to
Nome, Alaska. Sitting in a tiny visitor's room, I studied the sad,
round face of the Eskimo in front of me and tried to imagine how much
he hated being confined to jail.
Peter "Packy" Kobuk was from a remote village on St. Michael Island in
western Alaska. There natives lived, in many ways, just as their
ancestors did 10,000 years ago. Smells of the outdoor life hung heavy
in his village: the salt air, the strips of salmon drying on racks,
the seaweed washed up on the beach.
But for now, Packy could smell only the disinfectants used to scrub
the concrete floors at the Anvil Mountain Correction Center.
Unfortunately, alcohol and a violent temper had put Packy there many
times in his 46 years. For his latest assault, he was serving three
months.
The short, powerfully built man folded his calloused hands on the
table. I was surprised to see a homemade rosary hanging from his neck,
the blue beads held together by string from a fishing net.
I had come from Southern California to report on a generation of
Eskimo boys who had been molested by a Catholic missionary. All of the
now-grown Eskimos I had interviewed over the past week had lost their
faith. In fact, several of them confessed that they fantasized daily
about burning down the village church, where the unspeakable acts took
place.
But there was Packy with his rosary.
"Why do you still believe?" I asked.
"It's not God's work what happened to me," he said softly, running his
fingers along the beads. "They were breaking God's commandments — even
the people who didn't help. They weren't loving their neighbors as
themselves."
He said he regularly got down on his knees in his jail cell to pray.
"A lot of people make fun of me, asking if the Virgin Mary is going to
rescue me," Packy said. "Well, I've gotten helped more times from the
Virgin Mary through intercession than from anyone else. I won't stop.
My children need my prayers."
Tears spilled from his eyes. Packy's faith, though severely tested,
had survived.
I looked at him with envy. Where he found comfort, I was finding emptiness.
IN the summer of 2005, I reported from a Multnomah County, Ore.,
courtroom on the story of an unemployed mother — impregnated by a
seminary student 13 years earlier — who was trying to get increased
child support for her sickly 12-year-old son.
The boy's father, Father Arturo Uribe, took the witness stand. The
priest had never seen or talked with his son. He even had trouble
properly pronouncing the kid's name. Uribe confidently offered the
court a simple reason as to why he couldn't pay more than $323 a month
in child support.
"The only thing I own are my clothes," he told the judge.
His defense — orchestrated by a razor-sharp attorney paid for by his
religious order — boiled down to this: I'm a Roman Catholic priest,
I've taken a vow of poverty, and child-support laws can't touch me.
The boy's mother, Stephanie Collopy, couldn't afford a lawyer. She
stumbled badly acting as her own attorney. It went on for three hours.
"It didn't look that great," Stephanie said afterward, wiping tears
from her eyes. "It didn't sound that great … but at least I stood up
for myself."
The judge ruled in the favor of Uribe, then pastor of a large parish
in Whittier. After the hearing, when the priest's attorney discovered
I had been there, she ran back into the courtroom and unsuccessfully
tried to get the judge to seal the case. I could see why the priest's
lawyer would try to cover it up. People would be shocked at how
callously the church dealt with a priest's illegitimate son who needed
money for food and medicine.
My problem was that none of that surprised me anymore.
As I walked into the long twilight of a Portland summer evening, I
felt used up and numb.
My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago — probably
around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in
denial, had finally caught up.
Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded,
requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of
faith or you don't. It's not a choice. It can't be willed into
existence. And there's no faking it if you're honest about the state
of your soul.
Sitting in a park across the street from the courthouse, I called my
wife on a cellphone. I told her I was putting in for a new beat at the
paper.
william.lobdell@latimes.com
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Bread Pudding with Raspberry Jam
Bread Pudding with Raspberry Jam
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/gale-gand/bread-pudding-with-raspberry-jam-recipe/index.html
When I'm looking for a slightly more elegant dessert than my usual chunky bread pudding, this individual version goes on the dessert menu immediately. Cutting the bread into rounds that fit neatly in your ramekins makes the dish much prettier; adding a layer of bittersweet orange marmalade means that each spoonful taps a warm vein of citrus flavor, a wonderful contrast to the creamy custard. This is a richer, more delicate, less "bready" bread pudding than most; feel free to leave out the marmalade, or use another flavor of jam.
Prep Time:
25 min
Inactive Prep Time:
hr min
Cook Time:
40 min
Level:
Easy
Serves:
8 servings
When I'm looking for a slightly more elegant dessert than my usual chunky bread pudding, this individual version goes on the dessert menu immediately. Cutting the bread into rounds that fit neatly in your ramekins makes the dish much prettier; adding a layer of bittersweet orange marmalade means that each spoonful taps a warm vein of citrus flavor, a wonderful contrast to the creamy custard. This is a richer, more delicate, less "bready" bread pudding than most; feel free to leave out the marmalade, or use another flavor of jam.
1 loaf brioche or challah
2 cups half-and-half
2 cups heavy cream
Pinch salt
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise
6 eggs
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup raspberry jam
Chocolate chips, as needed (optional)
Confectioner's sugar, for dusting
Equipment: 8 (3 to 4 1/2-ounce) ramekins; a cookie or biscuit cutter, the same diameter as your ramekins
Cut the crusts off the loaf of bread and slice into 1/2-inch thick slices. Use a cookie cutter to cut out rounds of bread that will fit snugly into your ramekins. (You can make additional rounds by cutting 1/2-moons around the edges of a slice of bread, then assembling them into whole rounds later.) Place the bread rounds in a baking dish or a sheet pan with sides. Cut any scraps into small cubes and reserve for another dish.
In a saucepan, heat the half-and-half, cream, salt, and vanilla bean over medium heat, stirring occasionally to make sure the mixture doesn't burn or stick to the bottom of the pan. When the cream mixture reaches a fast simmer (do not let it boil), turn off the heat. Set aside to infuse for 10 minutes.
In a large mixing bowl, whisk the eggs and sugar together. Whisking constantly, gradually add the hot cream mixture. Strain into a large bowl to smooth the mixture and remove the vanilla bean. Pour over the bread rounds and let them soak for 15 minutes, gently turning the bread over once.
Fill each ramekin with 1 soaked bread round. Spoon a tablespoon of jam into each ramekin, add some chocolate chips, if desired, then top off with a second bread round. If there is any remaining custard, pour it over the ramekins to top them off until they are almost full. Let soak in the refrigerator another 30 minutes.
Heat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Arrange the ramekins in a hot water bath. Bake until just set and very light golden brown on top, about 25 to 30 minutes. Dust with confectioners' sugar and return to the oven for 10 more minutes to caramelize slightly. Serve warm or chilled.
Printed from FoodNetwork.com on 09/25/2008
© 2008 Scripps Networks, LLC. All Rights Reserved
Advertisement will not be printed
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/gale-gand/bread-pudding-with-raspberry-jam-recipe/index.html
When I'm looking for a slightly more elegant dessert than my usual chunky bread pudding, this individual version goes on the dessert menu immediately. Cutting the bread into rounds that fit neatly in your ramekins makes the dish much prettier; adding a layer of bittersweet orange marmalade means that each spoonful taps a warm vein of citrus flavor, a wonderful contrast to the creamy custard. This is a richer, more delicate, less "bready" bread pudding than most; feel free to leave out the marmalade, or use another flavor of jam.
Prep Time:
25 min
Inactive Prep Time:
hr min
Cook Time:
40 min
Level:
Easy
Serves:
8 servings
When I'm looking for a slightly more elegant dessert than my usual chunky bread pudding, this individual version goes on the dessert menu immediately. Cutting the bread into rounds that fit neatly in your ramekins makes the dish much prettier; adding a layer of bittersweet orange marmalade means that each spoonful taps a warm vein of citrus flavor, a wonderful contrast to the creamy custard. This is a richer, more delicate, less "bready" bread pudding than most; feel free to leave out the marmalade, or use another flavor of jam.
1 loaf brioche or challah
2 cups half-and-half
2 cups heavy cream
Pinch salt
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise
6 eggs
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup raspberry jam
Chocolate chips, as needed (optional)
Confectioner's sugar, for dusting
Equipment: 8 (3 to 4 1/2-ounce) ramekins; a cookie or biscuit cutter, the same diameter as your ramekins
Cut the crusts off the loaf of bread and slice into 1/2-inch thick slices. Use a cookie cutter to cut out rounds of bread that will fit snugly into your ramekins. (You can make additional rounds by cutting 1/2-moons around the edges of a slice of bread, then assembling them into whole rounds later.) Place the bread rounds in a baking dish or a sheet pan with sides. Cut any scraps into small cubes and reserve for another dish.
In a saucepan, heat the half-and-half, cream, salt, and vanilla bean over medium heat, stirring occasionally to make sure the mixture doesn't burn or stick to the bottom of the pan. When the cream mixture reaches a fast simmer (do not let it boil), turn off the heat. Set aside to infuse for 10 minutes.
In a large mixing bowl, whisk the eggs and sugar together. Whisking constantly, gradually add the hot cream mixture. Strain into a large bowl to smooth the mixture and remove the vanilla bean. Pour over the bread rounds and let them soak for 15 minutes, gently turning the bread over once.
Fill each ramekin with 1 soaked bread round. Spoon a tablespoon of jam into each ramekin, add some chocolate chips, if desired, then top off with a second bread round. If there is any remaining custard, pour it over the ramekins to top them off until they are almost full. Let soak in the refrigerator another 30 minutes.
Heat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Arrange the ramekins in a hot water bath. Bake until just set and very light golden brown on top, about 25 to 30 minutes. Dust with confectioners' sugar and return to the oven for 10 more minutes to caramelize slightly. Serve warm or chilled.
Printed from FoodNetwork.com on 09/25/2008
© 2008 Scripps Networks, LLC. All Rights Reserved
Advertisement will not be printed
Sunday, November 9, 2008
New Yorker: Red Sex, Blue Sex
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/03/081103fa_fact_talbot?currentPage=all
Red Sex, Blue Sex
Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?
by Margaret Talbot November 3, 2008
The “sexual début” of an evangelical girl typically occurs just after she turns sixteen. Photograph by Mary Ellen Mark.
Keywords
Teen Pregnancy;
Teen-agers;
Evangelicals;
Sexual Behavior;
Christians;
Premarital Sex;
Regnerus, Mark
In early September, when Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin. Yet reports from the floor of the Republican Convention, in St. Paul, quoted dozens of delegates who seemed unfazed, or even buoyed, by the news. A delegate from Louisiana told CBS News, “Like so many other American families who are in the same situation, I think it’s great that she instilled in her daughter the values to have the child and not to sneak off someplace and have an abortion.” A Mississippi delegate claimed that “even though young children are making that decision to become pregnant, they’ve also decided to take responsibility for their actions and decided to follow up with that and get married and raise this child.” Palin’s family drama, delegates said, was similar to the experience of many socially conservative Christian families. As Marlys Popma, the head of evangelical outreach for the McCain campaign, told National Review, “There hasn’t been one evangelical family that hasn’t gone through some sort of situation.” In fact, it was Popma’s own “crisis pregnancy” that had brought her into the movement in the first place.
During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin’s pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide. Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.
A handful of social scientists and family-law scholars have recently begun looking closely at this split. Last year, Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, published a startling book called “Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers,” and he is working on a follow-up that includes a section titled “Red Sex, Blue Sex.” His findings are drawn from a national survey that Regnerus and his colleagues conducted of some thirty-four hundred thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds, and from a comprehensive government study of adolescent health known as Add Health. Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.
* from the issue
* cartoon bank
* e-mail this
Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus reports, is that evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception. This could be because evangelicals are also among the most likely to believe that using contraception will send the message that they are looking for sex. It could also be because many evangelicals are steeped in the abstinence movement’s warnings that condoms won’t actually protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease. More provocatively, Regnerus found that only half of sexually active teen-agers who say that they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time. By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult consistently use protection.
The gulf between sexual belief and sexual behavior becomes apparent, too, when you look at the outcomes of abstinence-pledge movements. Nationwide, according to a 2001 estimate, some two and a half million people have taken a pledge to remain celibate until marriage. Usually, they do so under the auspices of movements such as True Love Waits or the Silver Ring Thing. Sometimes, they make their vows at big rallies featuring Christian pop stars and laser light shows, or at purity balls, where girls in frothy dresses exchange rings with their fathers, who vow to help them remain virgins until the day they marry. More than half of those who take such pledges—which, unlike abstinence-only classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian—end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse. The movement is not the complete washout its critics portray it as: pledgers delay sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners. Yet, according to the sociologists Peter Bearman, of Columbia University, and Hannah Brückner, of Yale, communities with high rates of pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s. This could be because more teens pledge in communities where they perceive more danger from sex (in which case the pledge is doing some good); or it could be because fewer people in these communities use condoms when they break the pledge.
Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.
Religious belief apparently does make a potent difference in behavior for one group of evangelical teen-agers: those who score highest on measures of religiosity—such as how often they go to church, or how often they pray at home. But many Americans who identify themselves as evangelicals, and who hold socially conservative beliefs, aren’t deeply observant.
Even more important than religious conviction, Regnerus argues, is how “embedded” a teen-ager is in a network of friends, family, and institutions that reinforce his or her goal of delaying sex, and that offer a plausible alternative to America’s sexed-up consumer culture. A church, of course, isn’t the only way to provide a cohesive sense of community. Close-knit families make a difference. Teen-agers who live with both biological parents are more likely to be virgins than those who do not. And adolescents who say that their families understand them, pay attention to their concerns, and have fun with them are more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity.
A terrific 2005 documentary, “The Education of Shelby Knox,” tells the story of a teen-ager from a Southern Baptist family in Lubbock, Texas, who has taken a True Love Waits pledge. To the chagrin of her youth pastor, and many of her neighbors, Knox eventually becomes an activist for comprehensive sex education. At her high school, kids receive abstinence-only education, but, Knox says, “maybe twice a week I see a girl walking down the hall pregnant.” In the film, Knox seems successful at remaining chaste, but less because she took a pledge than because she has a fearlessly independent mind and the kind of parents who—despite their own conservative leanings—admire her outspokenness. Devout Republicans, her parents end up driving her around town to make speeches that would have curled their hair before their daughter started making them. Her mother even comes to take pride in Shelby’s efforts, because while abstinence pledges are lovely in the abstract, they don’t acknowledge “reality.”
Like other American teens, young evangelicals live in a world of Internet porn, celebrity sex scandals, and raunchy reality TV, and they have the same hormonal urges that their peers have. Yet they come from families and communities in which sexual life is supposed to be forestalled until the first night of a transcendent honeymoon. Regnerus writes, “In such an atmosphere, attitudes about sex may formally remain unchanged (and restrictive) while sexual activity becomes increasingly common. This clash of cultures and norms is felt most poignantly in the so-called Bible Belt.” Symbolic commitment to the institution of marriage remains strong there, and politically motivating—hence the drive to outlaw gay marriage—but the actual practice of it is scattershot.
Among blue-state social liberals, commitment to the institution of marriage tends to be unspoken or discreet, but marriage in practice typically works pretty well. Two family-law scholars, Naomi Cahn, of George Washington University, and June Carbone, of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, are writing a book on the subject, and they argue that “red families” and “blue families” are “living different lives, with different moral imperatives.” (They emphasize that the Republican-Democrat divide is less important than the higher concentration of “moral-values voters” in red states.) In 2004, the states with the highest divorce rates were Nevada, Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho, and West Virginia (all red states in the 2004 election); those with the lowest were Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. The highest teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas (all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine (blue except for North Dakota). “The ‘blue states’ of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic have lower teen birthrates, higher use of abortion, and lower percentages of teen births within marriage,” Cahn and Carbone observe. They also note that people start families earlier in red states—in part because they are more inclined to deal with an unplanned pregnancy by marrying rather than by seeking an abortion.
Of all variables, the age at marriage may be the pivotal difference between red and blue families. The five states with the lowest median age at marriage are Utah, Oklahoma, Idaho, Arkansas, and Kentucky, all red states, while those with the highest are all blue: Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The red-state model puts couples at greater risk for divorce; women who marry before their mid-twenties are significantly more likely to divorce than those who marry later. And younger couples are more likely to be contending with two of the biggest stressors on a marriage: financial struggles and the birth of a baby before, or soon after, the wedding.
There are, of course, plenty of exceptions to these rules—messily divorcing professional couples in Boston, high-school sweethearts who stay sweetly together in rural Idaho. Still, Cahn and Carbone conclude, “the paradigmatic red-state couple enters marriage not long after the woman becomes sexually active, has two children by her mid-twenties, and reaches the critical period of marriage at the high point in the life cycle for risk-taking and experimentation. The paradigmatic blue-state couple is more likely to experiment with multiple partners, postpone marriage until after they reach emotional and financial maturity, and have their children (if they have them at all) as their lives are stabilizing.”
Some of these differences in sexual behavior come down to class and education. Regnerus and Carbone and Cahn all see a new and distinct “middle-class morality” taking shape among economically and socially advantaged families who are not social conservatives. In Regnerus’s survey, the teen-agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it. Regnerus writes, “They are interested in remaining free from the burden of teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college, advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake. Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks.” These are the kids who tend to score high on measures of “strategic orientation”—how analytical, methodical, and fact-seeking they are when making decisions. Because these teen-agers see abstinence as unrealistic, they are not opposed in principle to sex before marriage—just careful about it. Accordingly, they might delay intercourse in favor of oral sex, not because they cherish the idea of remaining “technical virgins” but because they assess it as a safer option. “Solidly middle- or upper-middle-class adolescents have considerable socioeconomic and educational expectations, courtesy of their parents and their communities’ lifestyles,” Regnerus writes. “They are happy with their direction, generally not rebellious, tend to get along with their parents, and have few moral qualms about expressing their nascent sexuality.” They might have loved Ellen Page in “Juno,” but in real life they’d see having a baby at the wrong time as a tragic derailment of their life plans. For this group, Regnerus says, unprotected sex has become “a moral issue like smoking or driving a car without a seatbelt. It’s not just unwise anymore; it’s wrong.”
Each of these models of sexual behavior has drawbacks—in the blue-state scheme, people may postpone child-bearing to the point where infertility becomes an issue. And delaying child-bearing is better suited to the more affluent, for whom it yields economic benefits, in the form of educational opportunities and career advancement. But Carbone and Cahn argue that the red-state model is clearly failing on its own terms—producing high rates of teen pregnancy, divorce, sexually transmitted disease, and other dysfunctional outcomes that social conservatives say they abhor. In “Forbidden Fruit,” Regnerus offers an “unscientific postscript,” in which he advises social conservatives that if they really want to maintain their commitment to chastity and to marriage, they’ll need to do more to help young couples stay married longer. As the Reverend Rick Marks, a Southern Baptist minister, recently pointed out in a Florida newspaper, “Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional marriage, when divorce has already broken it down.” Conservatives may need to start talking as much about saving marriages as they do about, say, saving oneself for marriage.
“Having to wait until age twenty-five or thirty to have sex is unreasonable,” Regnerus writes. He argues that religious organizations that advocate chastity should “work more creatively to support younger marriages. This is not the 1950s (for which I am glad), where one could bank on social norms, extended (and larger) families, and clear gender roles to negotiate and sustain early family formation.”
Evangelicals could start, perhaps, by trying to untangle the contradictory portrayals of sex that they offer to teen-agers. In the Shelby Knox documentary, a youth pastor, addressing an assembly of teens, defines intercourse as “what two dogs do out on the street corner—they just bump and grind awhile, boom boom boom.” Yet a typical evangelical text aimed at young people, “Every Young Woman’s Battle,” by Shannon Ethridge and Stephen Arterburn, portrays sex between two virgins as an ethereal communion of innocent souls: “physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pleasure beyond description.” Neither is the most realistic or helpful view for a young person to take into marriage, as a few advocates of abstinence acknowledge. The savvy young Christian writer Lauren Winner, in her book “Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity,” writes, “Rather than spending our unmarried years stewarding and disciplining our desires, we have become ashamed of them. We persuade ourselves that the desires themselves are horrible. This can have real consequences if we do get married.” Teenagers and single adults are “told over and over not to have sex, but no one ever encourages” them “to be bodily or sensual in some appropriate way”—getting to know and appreciate what their bodies can do through sports, especially for girls, or even thinking sensually about something like food. Winner goes on, “This doesn’t mean, of course, that if only the church sponsored more softball leagues, everyone would stay on the chaste straight and narrow. But it does mean that the church ought to cultivate ways of teaching Christians to live in their bodies well—so that unmarried folks can still be bodily people, even though they’re not having sex, and so that married people can give themselves to sex freely.”
Too often, though, evangelical literature directed at teen-agers forbids all forms of sexual behavior, even masturbation. “Every Young Woman’s Battle,” for example, tells teen-agers that “the momentary relief” of “self-gratification” can lead to “shame, low self-esteem, and fear of what others might think or that something is wrong with you.” And it won’t slake sexual desire: “Once you begin feeding baby monsters, their appetites grow bigger and they want MORE! It’s better not to feed such a monster in the first place.”
Shelby Knox, who spoke at a congressional hearing on sex education earlier this year, occupies a middle ground. She testified that it’s possible to “believe in abstinence in a religious sense,” but still understand that abstinence-only education is dangerous “for students who simply are not abstaining.” As Knox’s approach makes clear, you don’t need to break out the sex toys to teach sex ed—you can encourage teen-agers to postpone sex for all kinds of practical, emotional, and moral reasons. A new “abstinence-plus” curriculum, now growing in popularity, urges abstinence while providing accurate information about contraception and reproduction for those who have sex anyway. “Abstinence works,” Knox said at the hearing. “Abstinence-only-until-marriage does not.”
It might help, too, not to present virginity as the cornerstone of a virtuous life. In certain evangelical circles, the concept is so emphasized that a girl who regrets having been sexually active is encouraged to declare herself a “secondary” or “born-again” virgin. That’s not an idea, surely, that helps teen-agers postpone sex or have it responsibly.
The “pro-family” efforts of social conservatives—the campaigns against gay marriage and abortion—do nothing to instill the emotional discipline or the psychological smarts that forsaking all others often involves. Evangelicals are very good at articulating their sexual ideals, but they have little practical advice for their young followers. Social liberals, meanwhile, are not very good at articulating values on marriage and teen sexuality—indeed, they may feel that it’s unseemly or judgmental to do so. But in fact the new middle-class morality is squarely pro-family. Maybe these choices weren’t originally about values—maybe they were about maximizing education and careers—yet the result is a more stable family system. Not only do couples who marry later stay married longer; children born to older couples fare better on a variety of measures, including educational attainment, regardless of their parents’ economic circumstances. The new middle-class culture of intensive parenting has ridiculous aspects, but it’s pretty successful at turning out productive, emotionally resilient young adults. And its intensity may be one reason that teen-agers from close families see child-rearing as a project for which they’re not yet ready. For too long, the conventional wisdom has been that social conservatives are the upholders of family values, whereas liberals are the proponents of a polymorphous selfishness. This isn’t true, and, every once in a while, liberals might point that out.
Some evangelical Christians are starting to reckon with the failings of the preaching-and-pledging approach. In “The Education of Shelby Knox,” for example, Shelby’s father is uncomfortable, at first, with his daughter’s campaign. Lubbock, after all, is a town so conservative that its local youth pastor tells Shelby, “You ask me sometimes why I look at you a little funny. It’s because I hear you speak and I hear tolerance.” But as her father listens to her arguments he realizes that the no-tolerance ethic simply hasn’t worked in their deeply Christian community. Too many girls in town are having sex, and having babies that they can’t support. As Shelby’s father declares toward the end of the film, teen-age pregnancy “is a problem—a major, major problem that everybody’s just shoving under the rug.”
Red Sex, Blue Sex
Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?
by Margaret Talbot November 3, 2008
The “sexual début” of an evangelical girl typically occurs just after she turns sixteen. Photograph by Mary Ellen Mark.
Keywords
Teen Pregnancy;
Teen-agers;
Evangelicals;
Sexual Behavior;
Christians;
Premarital Sex;
Regnerus, Mark
In early September, when Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin. Yet reports from the floor of the Republican Convention, in St. Paul, quoted dozens of delegates who seemed unfazed, or even buoyed, by the news. A delegate from Louisiana told CBS News, “Like so many other American families who are in the same situation, I think it’s great that she instilled in her daughter the values to have the child and not to sneak off someplace and have an abortion.” A Mississippi delegate claimed that “even though young children are making that decision to become pregnant, they’ve also decided to take responsibility for their actions and decided to follow up with that and get married and raise this child.” Palin’s family drama, delegates said, was similar to the experience of many socially conservative Christian families. As Marlys Popma, the head of evangelical outreach for the McCain campaign, told National Review, “There hasn’t been one evangelical family that hasn’t gone through some sort of situation.” In fact, it was Popma’s own “crisis pregnancy” that had brought her into the movement in the first place.
During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin’s pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide. Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.
A handful of social scientists and family-law scholars have recently begun looking closely at this split. Last year, Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, published a startling book called “Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers,” and he is working on a follow-up that includes a section titled “Red Sex, Blue Sex.” His findings are drawn from a national survey that Regnerus and his colleagues conducted of some thirty-four hundred thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds, and from a comprehensive government study of adolescent health known as Add Health. Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.
* from the issue
* cartoon bank
* e-mail this
Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus reports, is that evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception. This could be because evangelicals are also among the most likely to believe that using contraception will send the message that they are looking for sex. It could also be because many evangelicals are steeped in the abstinence movement’s warnings that condoms won’t actually protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease. More provocatively, Regnerus found that only half of sexually active teen-agers who say that they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time. By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult consistently use protection.
The gulf between sexual belief and sexual behavior becomes apparent, too, when you look at the outcomes of abstinence-pledge movements. Nationwide, according to a 2001 estimate, some two and a half million people have taken a pledge to remain celibate until marriage. Usually, they do so under the auspices of movements such as True Love Waits or the Silver Ring Thing. Sometimes, they make their vows at big rallies featuring Christian pop stars and laser light shows, or at purity balls, where girls in frothy dresses exchange rings with their fathers, who vow to help them remain virgins until the day they marry. More than half of those who take such pledges—which, unlike abstinence-only classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian—end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse. The movement is not the complete washout its critics portray it as: pledgers delay sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners. Yet, according to the sociologists Peter Bearman, of Columbia University, and Hannah Brückner, of Yale, communities with high rates of pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s. This could be because more teens pledge in communities where they perceive more danger from sex (in which case the pledge is doing some good); or it could be because fewer people in these communities use condoms when they break the pledge.
Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.
Religious belief apparently does make a potent difference in behavior for one group of evangelical teen-agers: those who score highest on measures of religiosity—such as how often they go to church, or how often they pray at home. But many Americans who identify themselves as evangelicals, and who hold socially conservative beliefs, aren’t deeply observant.
Even more important than religious conviction, Regnerus argues, is how “embedded” a teen-ager is in a network of friends, family, and institutions that reinforce his or her goal of delaying sex, and that offer a plausible alternative to America’s sexed-up consumer culture. A church, of course, isn’t the only way to provide a cohesive sense of community. Close-knit families make a difference. Teen-agers who live with both biological parents are more likely to be virgins than those who do not. And adolescents who say that their families understand them, pay attention to their concerns, and have fun with them are more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity.
A terrific 2005 documentary, “The Education of Shelby Knox,” tells the story of a teen-ager from a Southern Baptist family in Lubbock, Texas, who has taken a True Love Waits pledge. To the chagrin of her youth pastor, and many of her neighbors, Knox eventually becomes an activist for comprehensive sex education. At her high school, kids receive abstinence-only education, but, Knox says, “maybe twice a week I see a girl walking down the hall pregnant.” In the film, Knox seems successful at remaining chaste, but less because she took a pledge than because she has a fearlessly independent mind and the kind of parents who—despite their own conservative leanings—admire her outspokenness. Devout Republicans, her parents end up driving her around town to make speeches that would have curled their hair before their daughter started making them. Her mother even comes to take pride in Shelby’s efforts, because while abstinence pledges are lovely in the abstract, they don’t acknowledge “reality.”
Like other American teens, young evangelicals live in a world of Internet porn, celebrity sex scandals, and raunchy reality TV, and they have the same hormonal urges that their peers have. Yet they come from families and communities in which sexual life is supposed to be forestalled until the first night of a transcendent honeymoon. Regnerus writes, “In such an atmosphere, attitudes about sex may formally remain unchanged (and restrictive) while sexual activity becomes increasingly common. This clash of cultures and norms is felt most poignantly in the so-called Bible Belt.” Symbolic commitment to the institution of marriage remains strong there, and politically motivating—hence the drive to outlaw gay marriage—but the actual practice of it is scattershot.
Among blue-state social liberals, commitment to the institution of marriage tends to be unspoken or discreet, but marriage in practice typically works pretty well. Two family-law scholars, Naomi Cahn, of George Washington University, and June Carbone, of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, are writing a book on the subject, and they argue that “red families” and “blue families” are “living different lives, with different moral imperatives.” (They emphasize that the Republican-Democrat divide is less important than the higher concentration of “moral-values voters” in red states.) In 2004, the states with the highest divorce rates were Nevada, Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho, and West Virginia (all red states in the 2004 election); those with the lowest were Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. The highest teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas (all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine (blue except for North Dakota). “The ‘blue states’ of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic have lower teen birthrates, higher use of abortion, and lower percentages of teen births within marriage,” Cahn and Carbone observe. They also note that people start families earlier in red states—in part because they are more inclined to deal with an unplanned pregnancy by marrying rather than by seeking an abortion.
Of all variables, the age at marriage may be the pivotal difference between red and blue families. The five states with the lowest median age at marriage are Utah, Oklahoma, Idaho, Arkansas, and Kentucky, all red states, while those with the highest are all blue: Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The red-state model puts couples at greater risk for divorce; women who marry before their mid-twenties are significantly more likely to divorce than those who marry later. And younger couples are more likely to be contending with two of the biggest stressors on a marriage: financial struggles and the birth of a baby before, or soon after, the wedding.
There are, of course, plenty of exceptions to these rules—messily divorcing professional couples in Boston, high-school sweethearts who stay sweetly together in rural Idaho. Still, Cahn and Carbone conclude, “the paradigmatic red-state couple enters marriage not long after the woman becomes sexually active, has two children by her mid-twenties, and reaches the critical period of marriage at the high point in the life cycle for risk-taking and experimentation. The paradigmatic blue-state couple is more likely to experiment with multiple partners, postpone marriage until after they reach emotional and financial maturity, and have their children (if they have them at all) as their lives are stabilizing.”
Some of these differences in sexual behavior come down to class and education. Regnerus and Carbone and Cahn all see a new and distinct “middle-class morality” taking shape among economically and socially advantaged families who are not social conservatives. In Regnerus’s survey, the teen-agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it. Regnerus writes, “They are interested in remaining free from the burden of teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college, advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake. Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks.” These are the kids who tend to score high on measures of “strategic orientation”—how analytical, methodical, and fact-seeking they are when making decisions. Because these teen-agers see abstinence as unrealistic, they are not opposed in principle to sex before marriage—just careful about it. Accordingly, they might delay intercourse in favor of oral sex, not because they cherish the idea of remaining “technical virgins” but because they assess it as a safer option. “Solidly middle- or upper-middle-class adolescents have considerable socioeconomic and educational expectations, courtesy of their parents and their communities’ lifestyles,” Regnerus writes. “They are happy with their direction, generally not rebellious, tend to get along with their parents, and have few moral qualms about expressing their nascent sexuality.” They might have loved Ellen Page in “Juno,” but in real life they’d see having a baby at the wrong time as a tragic derailment of their life plans. For this group, Regnerus says, unprotected sex has become “a moral issue like smoking or driving a car without a seatbelt. It’s not just unwise anymore; it’s wrong.”
Each of these models of sexual behavior has drawbacks—in the blue-state scheme, people may postpone child-bearing to the point where infertility becomes an issue. And delaying child-bearing is better suited to the more affluent, for whom it yields economic benefits, in the form of educational opportunities and career advancement. But Carbone and Cahn argue that the red-state model is clearly failing on its own terms—producing high rates of teen pregnancy, divorce, sexually transmitted disease, and other dysfunctional outcomes that social conservatives say they abhor. In “Forbidden Fruit,” Regnerus offers an “unscientific postscript,” in which he advises social conservatives that if they really want to maintain their commitment to chastity and to marriage, they’ll need to do more to help young couples stay married longer. As the Reverend Rick Marks, a Southern Baptist minister, recently pointed out in a Florida newspaper, “Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional marriage, when divorce has already broken it down.” Conservatives may need to start talking as much about saving marriages as they do about, say, saving oneself for marriage.
“Having to wait until age twenty-five or thirty to have sex is unreasonable,” Regnerus writes. He argues that religious organizations that advocate chastity should “work more creatively to support younger marriages. This is not the 1950s (for which I am glad), where one could bank on social norms, extended (and larger) families, and clear gender roles to negotiate and sustain early family formation.”
Evangelicals could start, perhaps, by trying to untangle the contradictory portrayals of sex that they offer to teen-agers. In the Shelby Knox documentary, a youth pastor, addressing an assembly of teens, defines intercourse as “what two dogs do out on the street corner—they just bump and grind awhile, boom boom boom.” Yet a typical evangelical text aimed at young people, “Every Young Woman’s Battle,” by Shannon Ethridge and Stephen Arterburn, portrays sex between two virgins as an ethereal communion of innocent souls: “physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pleasure beyond description.” Neither is the most realistic or helpful view for a young person to take into marriage, as a few advocates of abstinence acknowledge. The savvy young Christian writer Lauren Winner, in her book “Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity,” writes, “Rather than spending our unmarried years stewarding and disciplining our desires, we have become ashamed of them. We persuade ourselves that the desires themselves are horrible. This can have real consequences if we do get married.” Teenagers and single adults are “told over and over not to have sex, but no one ever encourages” them “to be bodily or sensual in some appropriate way”—getting to know and appreciate what their bodies can do through sports, especially for girls, or even thinking sensually about something like food. Winner goes on, “This doesn’t mean, of course, that if only the church sponsored more softball leagues, everyone would stay on the chaste straight and narrow. But it does mean that the church ought to cultivate ways of teaching Christians to live in their bodies well—so that unmarried folks can still be bodily people, even though they’re not having sex, and so that married people can give themselves to sex freely.”
Too often, though, evangelical literature directed at teen-agers forbids all forms of sexual behavior, even masturbation. “Every Young Woman’s Battle,” for example, tells teen-agers that “the momentary relief” of “self-gratification” can lead to “shame, low self-esteem, and fear of what others might think or that something is wrong with you.” And it won’t slake sexual desire: “Once you begin feeding baby monsters, their appetites grow bigger and they want MORE! It’s better not to feed such a monster in the first place.”
Shelby Knox, who spoke at a congressional hearing on sex education earlier this year, occupies a middle ground. She testified that it’s possible to “believe in abstinence in a religious sense,” but still understand that abstinence-only education is dangerous “for students who simply are not abstaining.” As Knox’s approach makes clear, you don’t need to break out the sex toys to teach sex ed—you can encourage teen-agers to postpone sex for all kinds of practical, emotional, and moral reasons. A new “abstinence-plus” curriculum, now growing in popularity, urges abstinence while providing accurate information about contraception and reproduction for those who have sex anyway. “Abstinence works,” Knox said at the hearing. “Abstinence-only-until-marriage does not.”
It might help, too, not to present virginity as the cornerstone of a virtuous life. In certain evangelical circles, the concept is so emphasized that a girl who regrets having been sexually active is encouraged to declare herself a “secondary” or “born-again” virgin. That’s not an idea, surely, that helps teen-agers postpone sex or have it responsibly.
The “pro-family” efforts of social conservatives—the campaigns against gay marriage and abortion—do nothing to instill the emotional discipline or the psychological smarts that forsaking all others often involves. Evangelicals are very good at articulating their sexual ideals, but they have little practical advice for their young followers. Social liberals, meanwhile, are not very good at articulating values on marriage and teen sexuality—indeed, they may feel that it’s unseemly or judgmental to do so. But in fact the new middle-class morality is squarely pro-family. Maybe these choices weren’t originally about values—maybe they were about maximizing education and careers—yet the result is a more stable family system. Not only do couples who marry later stay married longer; children born to older couples fare better on a variety of measures, including educational attainment, regardless of their parents’ economic circumstances. The new middle-class culture of intensive parenting has ridiculous aspects, but it’s pretty successful at turning out productive, emotionally resilient young adults. And its intensity may be one reason that teen-agers from close families see child-rearing as a project for which they’re not yet ready. For too long, the conventional wisdom has been that social conservatives are the upholders of family values, whereas liberals are the proponents of a polymorphous selfishness. This isn’t true, and, every once in a while, liberals might point that out.
Some evangelical Christians are starting to reckon with the failings of the preaching-and-pledging approach. In “The Education of Shelby Knox,” for example, Shelby’s father is uncomfortable, at first, with his daughter’s campaign. Lubbock, after all, is a town so conservative that its local youth pastor tells Shelby, “You ask me sometimes why I look at you a little funny. It’s because I hear you speak and I hear tolerance.” But as her father listens to her arguments he realizes that the no-tolerance ethic simply hasn’t worked in their deeply Christian community. Too many girls in town are having sex, and having babies that they can’t support. As Shelby’s father declares toward the end of the film, teen-age pregnancy “is a problem—a major, major problem that everybody’s just shoving under the rug.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)