Only 5% purity
An alarming study was released yesterday on premarital sex. If you haven't heard or read about it yet, please GO HERE now.
The gist of it is, over nine out of ten people have had sex before marriage; 95% to be exact. I don't know about you, but this makes me rethink everything. It's one thing if the rate was 60%. Somehow, I could convince myself that a large majority of my students fell into the remaining 40%. But, it's not. It's only 5%. 5%! Come on! The moral purity of our culture is on a radical and alarming rate of decline. And to think that our students are in the thick of it should challenge all of our assumptions. What assumptions are you challenging?
The gist of it is, over nine out of ten people have had sex before marriage; 95% to be exact. I don't know about you, but this makes me rethink everything. It's one thing if the rate was 60%. Somehow, I could convince myself that a large majority of my students fell into the remaining 40%. But, it's not. It's only 5%. 5%! Come on! The moral purity of our culture is on a radical and alarming rate of decline. And to think that our students are in the thick of it should challenge all of our assumptions. What assumptions are you challenging?
Labels: relationships
posted by Shift Staff at 12:04 AM
7 Comments:
Ever since the 4% of teenagers will be Christians in the next generation thing flew around and created a lot of fearful hype that later turned out to be unfounded, I guess I'm a bit skeptical when statistics like this are tossed out there.
I would agree. 5% does seem a little sparse. However, I wonder if they dropped that study age bracket from the top age of 44 to 34, if that number would drastically change? I'm willing to bet that it would change the stats a lot. I'd like to see a study of the same with people age 16 to 29. That would be interesting.
It's one thing to tell teens that true love waits when they only have to wait until they get married when they're 19 or 20 or 22--when most Boomers married. Then pat answers and fear of pregnancy can work quite well. But with the average marriage age moving steadily up, being a 30 or 40-year-old virgin is quite another matter. I think youth ministries need to develop a longer term view. In other words, ask "How can our students lead a life of sexual purity regardless of when they get married?" vs. "How can we get them to hold out until they graduate?"
As alarming as these statistics are, I find them hard to believe. I am a 24 year old male abstinence educator (who waited until I was married) who ministers the message of abstinence to over 10,000 students a year and the response I get (via anonymous surveys) are quite different then what that survey shows.
I am seriously considering launching research of my own to survey Christian Youth (via a number of different churches in the Chicagoland area) via anonymous surveys (so that they don't feel the need to be untruthful) and see what the response is. What do you all think?
It would be interesting to see how/if Christian youth differ. Also, the study in the report was done by the Guttmacher Institute, which was founded by the then-president of Planned Parenthood. I think it's a separate organization now, but it would be interesting to know if that agenda influences how they figure these statistics out.
Tim, this article in Books & Culture talks about that 4% number you mentioned and how evangelicals so often misuse statistics. I guess the assumption I'm challenging is how much of our ministry is driven by stats.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/001/5.11.html
ABC News reported this yesterday:
"A study by the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization that researches sexual and reproductive health, found that teenagers today wait longer to have sex than they did in the past — the proportion of teenage girls who had ever had sex declined from 49 percent in 1995 to 46 percent in 2002."
Doesn't really fit this 5% statistic.
You can read the full story here:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/Health/story?id=2798436&page=1
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