Noli Irritare Leones

Non-worksafe figleaf has a question

If abstinence is a virtue then why on earth should we give it up just because we’re married? Why stop “Just saying no” just because you’ve said “I do?”

Again, it’s a sincere question for which there might be many flip or pat answers but no substantive ones.

I’ve already responded to him in comments, but I decided to expand on my remarks there, to make a larger point about how we think about sex and abstinence before marriage.

So, let me start by referencing a concept that comes out of Methodism, called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral

The Wesleyan Quadrilateral is a methodology for theological reflection that is credited to John Wesley, leader of the Methodist movement in the late 18th Century. The term itself was coined by 20th century American Methodist Albert C. Outler in his introduction to the 1964 collection John Wesley (ISBN 0-19-502810-4).

Upon examination of Wesley’s work, Outler theorized that Wesley used four different sources in coming to theological conclusions. The four sources are:
Scripture – the Holy Bible
Tradition – the two millennia history of the Church
Reason – rational thinking
Experience – our personal and communal journey in Christ

I’m picking this concept because I think it’s a useful descriptive framework for discussing how Christians of various denominations work through various theological problems (and moral issues that depend on theological reflection). Different groups of Christians would balance these sources differently. Many wouldn’t pick the Wesleyan Quadrilateral as their own description of their framework. From Protestant tradition, you have the notion of sola scriptura, Catholics have scripture, tradition, and the teaching authority of the Church, Anglicans have Hooker’s three-legged stool of scripture, tradition, and reason (I think Wesley’s quadrilateral is an expansion of this, since Wesley would originally have come out of this tradition). Quakers have traditionally believed in a direct and perceptible guidance of the Holy Spirit; some other varieties of Christians want to caution against and contain people’s perceptions of direct guidance from God rather more. And so on. But, regardless of how you think these different sources should be weighed, every Christian in some way looks to the Bible, every Christian in some way relies on tradition (in the broad sense of being theologically influenced by other Christians, past and present), and everyone reflects through the lens of his or her own reason and experience.

Now, one reason that questions of sexual ethics are so contentious in Christianity today is that this is an area where the four legs of the Wesleyan quadrilateral seem to be pulling in different directions. A long time ago, Catholic blogger Amy Welborn raised a question that has stuck in my mind: how do you speak of Catholic teaching to, for example, someone who has never felt more ordered than when he came out as a gay man? Amy is someone who accepts Catholic teaching; she’s also someone who recognizes that the teaching that she accepts and defends doesn’t always easily line up with how people experience their lives. What do you do when you genuinely believe something that’s at odds with other people’s experience?

Obviously, if you’re figleaf, and aren’t even Christian at all, the solution is, in any case where Bible and Christian tradition seem to contradict reason and experience, to go with reason and experience. So our hypothetical gay man, who has felt himself suffocating in his attempt to follow what he’s been taught, and avoid his ostensibly disordered inclinations, should, when he finds that in his own experience his life seems more ordered as an out gay man, trust his experience and not what he’s been taught. Whether he then goes on to abandon Christianity, or whether he reinterprets the relevant Bible passages would be immaterial to figleaf.

But let’s take a case less sharp than that of our hypothetical gay man. Let me, instead, return to figleaf’s original question, and ask just what happens when you apply the Wesleyan quadrilateral to the question of heterosexual premarital sex. Experience has got to clash less sharply with traditional teaching here, in as much as going without sex for even a very long time, in hope of being able to eventually marry and have sex, is intrinsically less burdensome than the prospect of going without sex for life. But how far are those different legs pulling in the same direction?

What the Bible and tradition may have to say about sexual ethics is a question with some complexities of its own. The Old Testament has detailed sexual rules that apply to an entirely different culture from our own, some of which no Christian at all feels bound to follow. The New Testament speaks in general terms about avoiding “porneia,” and occasionally addresses the sexual ethics of particular individuals (particularly the apparently chaotic sexual lives of the church at Corinth). And, since I’m talking about tradition in very general terms, and not about the teaching authority of any particular church, even the largest Christian church, I’d have to say that there’s pretty wide variance among Christians in how that tradition is understood.

But let me take a flying leap in this post, and assume that it’s a reasonable reading of both the Bible and Christian tradition to say that, for heterosexuals, they tend to point to sex within marriage as being generally good, and sex outside of marriage as being generally bad. This isn’t exactly a view that is winning at this point in our culture, even among theologically conservative Christians

And get this: half of U.S. conservative Protestant adults do not believe premarital sex is always wrong, and the majority of never-married conservative Protestant adults are in fact not sexually celibate in any give year. There’s fodder for preachers.

Still, if very few people actually live this particular teaching, and if many Christians even interpret the Bible and tradition in ways that don’t require absolute premarital abstinence (and, heck, even in the old, conservative days, I gather that dispensation was sort of sometimes made if you were already engaged), still, you have to admit, “abstinence is a virtue until you get married” is a plausible reading of the Bible and tradition.

So, the first question, is if you’ve already concluded that Bible and tradition require you to abstain from sex till you marry, and permit you to make like a rabbit as soon as that wedding ring is on your finger, will you find your position supported by reason and experience? Or are reason and experience so at odds with this conclusion that you’ll be desperately straining to force yourself to accept it?

I think that, in this case, you’ll find abstinence before marriage to be a coherent and convincing ethical position.

Assume that having your baby before the two of you are actually committed enough that you’re sure you’d want to be dealing with each other for at least the next couple of decades is a really bad thing.

Assume that birth control sometimes fails, and that the failure rate is high enough that you’d rather not chance it in the above uncommitted circumstance.

Assume, further, that birth control is still reliable enough that, once you’re married, you can reduce the failure rate to a manageable level (having your baby with two committed parents at not quite the optimal time is not quite so horrible as having your baby with two parents who didn’t want to be dealing with each other for the next couple of decades).

And it all falls together. In fact, even people who aren’t willing to abstain until marriage often place limits on who they’ll have sex with based on who they can stand facing a pregnancy with (even if that line is kind of the opposite of the above: “I know I’m going to get an abortion in that case, and I’m not having sex with any man who would try to prevent me from doing so”).

Sure, the utilitarian consequences of sex don’t provide an argument against premarital sex that’s going to be solidly convincing to all those people who (in an age of relatively reliable birth control) weigh the consequences differently, and they don’t, by themselves, answer the question of where you draw the boundary on completely non-procreative premarital sexual acts, but birth control failure is still a significant enough consideration that premarital chastity is hardly an irrational and arbitrary position.

I’ve picked birth control and babies for my example, because that’s, in my opinion, where the sharpest difference is found between what happens when you’re married and what happens when you’re not. When you’re married, the whole world around you supports and acknowledges your mutual commitment to each other and to your kids, and when you’re not married, well, you can’t count on that. But there are other reasons people may find themselves persuaded that their experience does, after all, support abstinence until marriage. Let’s take, for example, a post where figleaf approvingly cites a blogger who sets some sexual rules for herself that are a good deal more modest

Three Rules for Before You Get Involved with Them, Two Rules for After
Or, Why I Am Not a Swinger

Wayne drank bad coffee just because it was coffee and he believed that he liked coffee; I had bad sex just because it was sex and I believed that I liked sex.

…

So I figured I needed some rules to have sex by. These are the rules I came up with.

1. I will never sleep with anyone BEFORE the first date.
…
2. I will never sleep with someone who is sleeping with someone else.
…
3. I will never have another one-night stand.
…
4. I will not remain emotionally intimate with a man who extends and then withdraws the offer of sexual intimacy.
…
5. I will not remain emotionally intimate with–or even continue to speak to–a man who deceives me, either deliberately or through carelessness, about his status or intention with regards to the other rules.
…

Taken as five bullet points they seem kind of stark and maybe even a little conventional. But *don’t take them as bullet points! Instead check out how she fills in the details here.

Holly’s conclusion that she, personally, “will never sleep with anyone BEFORE the first date” is a world apart from Dawn Eden’s conclusion that “No nude is good news.” The experience both are starting from, though, is similar; both have made some sexual decisions that they regretted, and have decided in the future to draw a line in advance that rules out some of what they’ve done in the past. It’s possible that some of the difference in their conclusions stems from different experiences, but, whether that’s the case or not, it’s pretty clear that one factor is the fact that Dawn Eden is accepting Catholic teaching, and casting her experience in those terms, while Holly is rejecting the Mormon teachings she grew up with, and trying to develop rules that work for her as she goes.

How sex catches our emotions, though, is a matter itself too entangled to be able to simply say that experience either clearly does, or clearly doesn’t support the principle that abstinence until marriage is your best policy. There can be a special kind of hell (and don’t I know it) in being suddenly dropped after you’ve gone to the point of intercourse, with someone you’ve come to care for deeply. And part of the reason that happens isn’t always that the guy is just callous; it’s also that sometimes sex, or stuff that may have happened during sex, are doing things to his own feelings, and he’s also facing stuff he can’t at this time handle.

But it’s not just intercourse that entangles our emotions and sends them on these roller coasters. It’s also “everything but.” And it’s not just “everything but” either, or even just the stuff you do naked. It can also be that one moment a hand first slips briefly under your clothing, or a single kiss, or sometimes, in the right context or moment, even just a hug, that suddenly turns your friendship in a whole different direction.

And it’s not as if the line is sharp, either, between loving marriages and lustful but not truly loving sex outside of marriage. Sex before marriage is a complicated mix of loving each other and letting each other down, and to some extent the same is true after marriage (the difference is, now you’ve made a public promise, when you let each other down, to keep turning back to each other and making it right again). Often it’s hard to feel that the sex before marriage was the wrong part, and easier to feel that all these things you were doing to the person that you were, after all, sleeping with, the ways you were not treating each other right, were the wrong part.

Anyway, there’s enough ambiguity here for people both to genuinely find that their reason, experience, and observation support the traditional “no sex till marriage” view, and that they don’t. The same is true with the pregnancy issue. Partly this is because people have widely different views of abortion (and I don’t, personally, think complete acceptance of totally uncommitted, short term sexual relationships is compatible with rejection of abortion – though a few people, mostly men, do try to hold both views simultaneously). And partly it’s because, in any such utilitarian calculation, different people weigh the different outcomes, and the odds, differently. And so the gains of having premarital sex, with birth control, may or may not be seen to outweigh the risk of pregnancy.

It’s not so much, here, that there aren’t reasons to avoid having sex too soon, or with insufficient knowledge of your partner, or with too little commitment – according to some standard or other – even if you’ve rejected Bible and tradition altogether. There are plenty of such reasons. Rather, it’s that if you aren’t relying on tradition to guide where you set your lines, then there’s no necessary reason that your own judgment is necessarily going to lead you to draw your lines in the same place.

The Catholic Church works around this by going beyond utilitarian calculations and appealing to its own understanding of natural theology and theology of the body. But I’m going to totally ignore this particular appeal to reason, and whether or how far it can be made to transcend the boundaries of the Catholic Church, because, for the moment, I’m more interested in how the more utilitarian reasoning gets used by Christians in influencing public policy, and, in turn, how it gets used by non-Christians in responding to Christians. Because each group makes its own mistake.

The conservative Christian mistake is this: placing on a particular sort of utilitarian argument way more weight than it will bear, in a culture in which many people haven’t accepted your moral reasoning about sex at all. I’ve said, above, that reason and experience, and the actual consequences of sex, can easily be found to support abstinence till marriage, if you’ve already concluded from scripture and tradition that that’s what you should be doing. It’s another thing entirely when you move abstinence out of the realm of cultural/religious promotion as a moral choice and put it in the realm of being the only government sanctioned choice you get to hear about. And then try to justify that political choice on purely utilitarian grounds about birth control failure. Because in that situation you can guarantee that most people won’t abstain, or even want to. And, when you actually calculate out how many people are going to be blowing you off, you can pretty much guarantee that you’d get more disease and pregnancy prevention by teaching condoms and birth control. Add to this the fact that some Christians will make arguments based on demonstrably false overestimates of the actual failure rate of particular contraceptives, and you can see why non-Christians have little patience for this sort of utilitarian anti-premarital sex argument. It flies in the face of their own experience and observation.

Non-Christian social liberals, then, tend to counter with a mistake of their own: wanting to get conservative Christians to accept that theirs is a wholly irrational appeal to religion, making about as much sense as avoiding the eating of shellfish, and totally at odds with ordinary human experience of sex and marriage. One which they should not only not expect to see promoted in public schools, but really shouldn’t even be preaching to the world at large; they should accept that it’s a purely personal preference disconnected from any really rational argument. But this isn’t true, either. There’s plenty of reason and experience, even now in an age of relatively reliable birth control, to support saving sex till marriage. Especially sexual intercourse, and especially if you’ve totally ruled out abortion as a response to birth control failure. So, it’s not that saving sex for marriage is a weird, irrational restriction; rather, it’s that its rationality is just compelling enough that you may accept it if you’ve already accepted that those first two legs of that Wesleyan quadrilateral point you in that direction, but not nearly compelling enough to convince the people who haven’t accepted that scripture and tradition point them there, or perhaps don’t believe in scripture and tradition at all.

UPDATE: figleaf corrects my interpretation of his views in the comments.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 25th, 2006 at 8:39 am and is filed under Sexuality, Theology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.