How Do You Talk About Premarital Sex?

The headline is an actual, not a rhetorical question.

I’ve been bombarded with information about how vexing this question is for churches in the last few days.

So, for one, Saturday’s New York Times had an editorial which talked about teen birth rates and abortion rates in two dozen countries. The U.S. was highest in both, which seems almost impossible. Our abortion rate was dramatically higher than freewheeling Western Europe, for instance: ours being at about 30 abortions per a thousand women between 15 and 19 and Germany's rate standing at about 5.  (More interesting than the editorial itself is the chart that accompanies it.) 

The Times’ take on the numbers? It’s perhaps a predictable one: By encouraging abstinence, kids still have sex, but now don’t use birth control. Since few others in the world do this, therein lie your numbers.

I also picked up a book this week called Quitting Church, by the Washington Times religion editor, Julia Duin. I’m only about 40 pages in. It’s an easy if discouraging read (I might have a little more on it shortly). It covers similar ground as The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, previously mentioned here, but it draws different conclusions. Rather than attributing falling American church attendance to a change in our cultural mindset, as Fall does, Quitting pretty much blames churches for being lousy.

Among the ways churches are lousy is that they are not helpful in talking about premarital sex. However, the book damns both sides. On the one hand, it argues that Catholics are leaving in droves because, in the interest of attracting new people, priests don’t teach classic hard-line Catholic dogma about, say, the evils of contraception. Longtime Catholics then leave, because the preaching is no longer meaty and integrous. So Catholics need to teach classic conservative dogma more.

And yet, as per the Times, teaching classic biblical morality of “Don’t have sex before marriage” is also damned as both not realistic (teens and young adults who hear this message still have sex at rates almost exactly equal to everyone else) and lacking in the kind of depth that will actually help people.

And then many of the leaders in our congregation just this week had a vibrant conversation about pastoring premarital sex in our midst—proving that, whatever our approach might be, there’s much more to be said.

So you all—whether paid church leaders or not—what do you think needs to be said on the subject and how do you recommend it be said?