Purity pledgers more likely to wait until their honeymoon

Posted: 2/3/06

Purity pledgers more likely to wait until their honeymoon

By Ken Camp

Managing Editor

WACO—Many church-going Texas Baptist young couples acknowledge having sex before marriage, but they are much more likely to wait until their honeymoon if they take a formal purity pledge like True Love Waits, research reveals.

Byron Weathersbee, interim university chaplain at Baylor University, analyzed sexual purity pledges and sex education in a Christian context as the focus of his doctoral dissertation.

He surveyed young married couples in Texas Baptist churches to examine how—and how much—churches made an impact on their sexual behavior.

Six out of 10 Texas Baptist young people who made sexual purity pledges abstained from sexual intercourse until marriage, but only three of 10 who didn’t take a pledge remained chaste, Weathers-bee found.

All of the surveyed individuals—who had been married less than five years—professed faith in Christ, 99 percent attend church, 84 percent said they grew up in church and 87 percent grew up in a two-parent home.

Even so, 62 percent of the males and 65 percent of the females engaged in sexual intercourse before marriage, he discovered.

Nine out of 10 who acknowledged sexual activity prior to marriage never took a True Love Waits purity pledge.

“To a large degree, we’re missing it,” Weathersbee. “The young people are receiving the data, but they’re not translating it into values that result in a lifestyle of purity and holiness.”

Weathersbee confessed he was “blown away” by how few Christian parents are engaged in talking to their children about sexuality.

“And I’m convinced if it weren’t for the menstrual cycle that forces mothers to deal with their daughters, it would be even worse,” he added.

The strength of the True Love Waits emphasis lies in the way it involves parents, a supportive network of peers, the church as a whole and the community at-large in emphasizing the importance of a pure lifestyle, Weathersbee said.

The overall sexual abstinence movement—both faith-based and secular—clearly has reaped positive benefits, said Richard Ross, who pioneered the True Love Waits program in 1993.

“The fact is, rates of teenage sexual activity rose for 20 unbroken years. Then came True Love Waits and from that the broader abstinence movement. From that moment on, rates of teenage sex have dropped every year for 12 unbroken years,” he said.

Ross pointed to a study published three years ago in Adolescent Family Health that credited the decline in adolescent pregnancy in the United States primarily to the increasing number of sexually abstinent teenagers.

“It clearly shows that increased abstinence accounted for 67 percent of the decrease in pregnancy for girls ages 15 to 19,” said Ross, professor of student ministry at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Some research has led analysts to conclude many American teens are substituting other sexual behaviors for intercourse. For instance, a report released by the National Center for Health Statistics last September found more than half of American teens ages 15 to 19 engaged in oral sex.

Weathersbee’s research also revealed “only 27 percent of the young people entered the marriage bed chaste,” having refrained not only from intercourse but also from other practices such as oral sex.

But Ross insists teens who take faith-based abstinence pledges understand their promise to mean any sexual behavior.

“The results are clear. Teenagers who make a pledge of purity not only have lower rates of intercourse; they also have lower rates of other risky behaviors—including oral and anal sex,” he said.

Teens who take the True Love Waits pledge promise to enter “a lifetime of purity” that includes—but is not limited to—refraining from sexual intercourse until marriage, he noted.

“Every teaching book for True Love Waits carefully makes the point that teenagers are pledging lifetime purity in thought, look and touch,” Ross said. “We also teach: If it involves a sexual organ, it is sex.”

True Love Waits leaders have written a grant proposal to fund a study comparing faith-based abstinence programs to other secular programs, he noted. While some studies have pointed to high failure rates among abstinence programs in general, Ross believes Christian programs will show dramatically different results.

“Kids at school make a promise to a notebook. True Love Waits teenagers make a promise to God Almighty,” Ross said.

Instead of relying solely on will power and self-discipline, Christian young people “experience the power of God as they resist the tug to the dark side,” he added.

True Love Waits programs build on years of preaching and religious education that stress the sanctity of marriage and the importance of sexual purity, whereas school-based programs may devote only a few class periods to the subject of sexual behavior before students are asked to abstain, he noted.

Christian sexual purity pledges like True Love Waits also involve parents and a supportive faith community, but school-based promises generally are “solo events” that leave teens isolated, he added.

“School programs almost never offer follow-up nor do they tie pledging teenagers to a supportive peer network,” Ross said. “True Love Waits teenagers continue to receive teaching and support year-round on purity, and they experience accountability and support from all the other True Love Waits students.”

Weathersbee agreed the True Love Waits purity pledge—particularly with its emphasis on a lifetime commitment to purity and holiness—offers young people something many of them deeply desire and desperately need. And for students who want to “go counter-cultural,” it gives them something positive to rebel against—prevailing lax attitudes about sexuality, he noted.

“The purity pledge gives students an exit ramp off a fast lane they don’t want to be on,” he said. “It brings their eyes up to a grander vision. Students really want to buy into something meaningful.”