The Perverse Incentives of Sex in Evangelicalism
One of the myths of “evangelicalism” is it inoculates the young against “sin” and keeps them pure, compared to the alternatives. While anecdotal stories can be told this simply is NOT statistically true for most evangelical young.
It sure wasn’t true at the evangelical school I attended or in the church. In fact, the worst of the bunch was the pastor’s son. Yet the pastor publicly claimed his son was pure and virginal even though he absolutely knew that was a lie. In reality, the son was going through a large number of the teenage girls at the time and it wasn’t all consensual. His wife, who I knew somewhat, later said in an interview they were having sex and the pastor knew it the whole time but lied from the pulpit. “Dr. Hyles’ lying was blatant just like David’s. David was a blatant liar. He told lies that he couldn’t possibly get away with. The problem is that his dad has set himself up so good, that everybody doubts everything because that’s how they have been taught.” But the preacher dad also lied about his own affairs, as did his son-in-law who seduced an underage girl when he took over as pastor.
World Magazine is religious and conservative. They say it’s time for evangelicals to face the truth about their churches and sex. “Statistically, evangelical teens tend to have sex first at a younger age, 16.3, compared to liberal Protestants, who tend to lose their virginity at 16.7. And young evangelicals are far more likely to have had three or more sexual partners (13.7 percent) than non-evangelicals (8.9 percent).” Of course, their truth is that evangelicals aren’t evangelical enough and don’t preach against sex enough. They laughingly claim evangelicals are trying to be hip and culturally relevant.
Yet, they note, “80 percent of teenagers who say they have been “born again” agree that sex outside of marriage is morally wrong. Still, as many as two-thirds of them violate their own beliefs in their actual behavior.” This sounds like they got the anti-sex message it’s just this sort of attitude inspires destructive behavior. It creates what economists call “perverse incentives” where the policy encourages behavior very different from that stated as it’s goal when implemented—in some ways it’s the “rent control of sex” where to protect housing supply for the poor it destroys housing.
One problem is while evangelicals are as likely, or more so, to “sin” sexually than their non-evangelical counterparts they can’t exactly plan on sinning. That compounds the sin they are committing. It is one thing to justify the “sin” by saying, “one thing led to another and we got carried away” and quite another to say “I was planning on this for the whole week and did what I planned.” The latter would be considered far worse than the former.
The problem is when one “gets carried away” and isn’t planning the sex then one can’t exactly take precautions to prevent pregnancy or venereal disease. The evangelical attitude does little to nothing to inhibit teen sex overall but it does succeed at discouraging them from using contraceptives or protection from sexually transmitted diseases. Of course, one thing I saw among evangelicals was a fervent desire to have sin come with bad consequences as a means of punishing the sinner. In their mind the consequences of unplanned sex proves sex is sinful and God will punish those who sin.
The relatively vicious Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, put it this way:
“There’s a price to pay, and it is a very heavy price. God made us male and female and gave sex for us to enjoy inside a marriage relationship between a man and a woman — not two men, not two women. The Bible says that anyone who sins sexually, sins against their own body. How true. What’s the protection the world is looking for? It’s simple — follow God’s guidelines. Have only a monogamous relationship with your husband or wife.”
Joseph and Jillian Strayhorn, in Religiosity and teen birth rate in the United States, (Reproductive Health, 2009) reported: “Studies have suggested that religiosity is associated with behaviors that could lead to a higher teen birth rate. Studer and Thornton found that among 18 year-olds, religious teenagers were less likely to use medical methods of contraception when sexually active. Dodge and colleagues compared male college students in the United States and the Netherlands. American men reported higher rates of inadequate contraception and unwanted pregnancy than their Dutch counterparts; religiosity and sex education were thought to explain these differences.”
Similarly they found evangelical teens who took the “virginity pledge,” which the born-again thought would end teenage sex, were just as likely to have sex before marriage as non-evangelicals, but “were less likely to have used birth control and condoms in the past year and at last sex. This research raises the possibility that moralistic attitudes toward sexuality can actually increase the likelihood of pregnancy, by discouraging contraception without successfully discouraging sexual intercourse.”
The book Pure: Inside the Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free, author Linda Kay Klein tackled another destructive value in evangelicalism that disproportionately impacted girls and women. What she describes is consistent with the values I heard pushed by the born-again preachers.
“In purity culture, both young men and women are taught that sex before marriage is wrong. But it’s teenage girls who end up most affected… while boys are taught that their minds are a gateway to sin, women are taught that their bodies are. After years of being told that they’re responsible for not only their own purity, but the purity of the men and boys around them; and of associating sexual desire with depravity and shame, Klein writes, those feelings often haunt women’s relationships with their bodies for a lifetime.”
This is entirely consistent with the sermons I heard preached. If a woman was accused of “sexual” sin it was her moral failure that is obvious. When a man does the same thing it is also the woman’s fault. Former evangelical Lyz Lenz reported something similar in sexual abuse cases:
“The blame heaped on women for their sexual abuse is a by-product of the paradox of purity taught by Christian churches. Virginity is, according to the church, a woman’s greatest gift. Evangelical churches encourage women to cede control of their bodies over to her husband or her father — it’s a doctrine of freedom through submission. And because a woman’s body is valued as an object, women are often blamed for the sexual sins of men. If a man lusts after a woman it’s because she led him to sin. Under these circumstances, what woman could afford to report her abuser? She’s the only one with something — with everything — to lose.”
As for the mega church that ran my school and promoted the Moral Majority — meaning Falwell literally came to the school and lectured us it—collapsed in a series of scandals. The son-in-law of the former pastor who had an illegitimate sexual affair for years took over and ended up in federal prison for sexual crimes with an underage girl who came to him for counseling over sexual abuse she suffered.
Son-in-law Jack Schaap went to court trying to get his sentence reduced because he said the girl herself was to blame for what he did. His local paper reported, “A former minister of First Baptist Church of Hammond is gambling he can get out of prison by branding as a seductress the underage girl he molested.” Yet it was Schaap who drove this student out-of-state in order to have sex with her. He drove her to completely different states to have sex with her but claims she was the aggressor.
The girl’s father, in a court document, stated how they felt about the church they attended and the pastor to whom they were loyal followers: “The rule of our house was that the pastor was God’s representative on Earth. Always do what the pastor says.” Christian radio host Julie Silverstone Busby, another former member of the church who said Schaap acted inappropriately toward her, described the same authoritarian ethos: “We were taught to not question and to take the ‘man of God’s’ word over everything.” Even Linda Hyles Murphrey, who was in high school with me, said her father encouraged cultic, authoritarianism: “ “I believe First Baptist Church gradually evolved into a cult that was in complete idolatry of my father and, after his death, complete idolatry of Jack Schaap.” Murphrey says the crimes of Schaap were another legacy of her father: “He was allowed and encouraged to perpetuate what my father began: idolatry, secrecy, adultery, and a harshly punitive culture based on an endless list of legalistic rules that served ‘the man of God.’ Not God — or at least not a God that I would want to know.”
This is not atypical in evangelical church where the pastor is only beneath God in the hierarchy of obedience. God is above the pastor, the pastor above the congregation, the husband above the wife, and the wife above the children. As for the children total obedience is required. It is a system of belief that not only encourages assault but then actively covers it up or attaches blame to the victims.
