'Moralistic theraputic deism'

Courtesy Feminary, I plowed through an article on The Revealer about the findings of a survey of American teenagers and their spiritual and moral beliefs. Somewhat more readable and interesting than the article itself are the comments, one of which I quote here:

I've been interviewing some smart young guys from a very conservative, very Christian town in central California. In their 20s now, they're all committed to remaining virgins until they marry. They're all graduates of True Love Waits, as are many of the kids they grew up with. And one of these men reports that fully half of the women in his church youth group -- all of whom "believed" in abstinence -- got pregnant in their teens. ... Teen pregnancy is a sign of a conservative culture, one that disapproves of birth control and educating kids about sexual realities.

This suggests a subtle and interesting distinction between the hypocrisy that the left often sees in the Christian right and a basic brokenness about fundamentalism. The Christian teenagers who said one thing and did another are not hypocrites as much as they are simply living the anti-intellectual, anti-education, anti-knowledge party line of fundamentalism, complete with the counter-intuitive results: Teenagers who pledge to "wait" until marriage to have sex wind up pregnant.

I was pretty religious when I was a teenager. It was the 70s, and as a high school freshman I even went through a Jesus freak phase, or at least as much of one as I could muster in the bland, vanilla-creme suburbs of Houston. By the time I was 18 and in my first semester of college, however -- and 200 miles away, in the post-hippie enclave of Austin -- I had sorted my priorities a little differently. I had joyous sex, and used birth control, and didn't have any moral qualms. Or rather, the moral qualms I had were feminist rather than Christian -- I actually counted the number of times I was on top and she was on top, and made sure they came out roughly equal. And that ethos served me a hell of a lot better as a sex beginner than "True Love Waits" would have.