I read an article on ChristianityToday.com titled
How to Re-Frame the Conversation About Chastity. The article reviews a book titled:
A Wild Constraint: The Case for Chastity
. The reviewer writes:
Taylor draws our attention to the political significance of chastity for Josephine Butler, a 19th-century suffragette who campaigned against practices that forced women into leveraging sex for survival, whether through prostitution or pragmatic marriages. Butler's fight for increased vocational opportunities for women was directly tied to her fight against what Taylor calls "sexual tyranny." "If women were able—and permitted—to contain their sexuality, not just women but society as a whole would benefit … A sense of the body in its social context was a prerequisite of the fight for women's rights."
Today, at least in industrialized, Western societies, the battle is more for women's emotional and psychological health... Yet abstinence is no less useful or radical here. Only in chastity does one fight for integrity of personhood as worth more than the fleeting hit of attention earned with entrée to one's body. If we are not ready to grant men things like access to our bank accounts or power of attorney, why would we give them free run of our bodies? Such a choice becomes possible only with a divided sense of self, whereby some parts are more valued and secured than others.
This is women's empowerment in the very best sense of the phrase - empowering women to be in control of themselves, their sexuality, their lives. As Christians, we have a responsibility to champion the integrity of the person against what the reviewer identifies as our "divided sense of self." We must rediscover a holistic understanding of the person as worth protecting from being divided and distributed (whatever the short-term return might be).
I also appreciated the reviewers comments:
...Secondly, we must stop speaking of abstinence as if it has no post-marriage value. The fact is, we are talking about self-control—a virtue that matters as much to marital monogamy as it does to premarital chastity. And those are just the sexual applications! But when all we tout is abstinence, rather than sexual self-control, the connection to all other spheres of healthy restraint is lost—and with it the urgency and relevance of being disciplined people, of being adults.
This point alone is worth the price of admission. We've been sold the idea that abstinence is a virtue only necessary
before marriage. That is a lie. First, there are many periods of time within in marriage when abstinence must be practiced: after the birth of a child, a long sickness, when traveling, etc. (
cf. 1 Corinthians 7:5).
Even more importantly, marital faithfulness
is a form of "abstinence"! Dictionary.com defines
abstinence as:
1. forbearance from any indulgence of appetite...
2. any self-restraint, self-denial, or forbearance.
As a married man, I must abstain from - retrain / deny / forebear my sexual appetite for - any sexual expression outside of marriage whether adultery, lust, pornography, etc. So abstinence is a virtue not just
before marriage but through
all of life.
As the reviewer identifies: at its root, abstinence is about sexual self-control. Proverbs 25:28 tells us,
"Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control." Just as city with no walls has no protection, without self-control a person (or a marriage) has no protection.
The call to sexual self-control (abstinence) is not prudish but practical. Self-control is a fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:23), a quality necessary to our leaders (1 Tim. 3:2; Tit. 1:8), and a virtue we are all called to develop (Acts 24:25; 1 Thes. 5:6-8; 2 Tim. 3:3; Tit. 2:2, 5-6, 12; 1 Pet. 1:13; 4:7; 5:8; 2 Pet. 1:16). We must encourage the habits of abstinence and self-control in our unmarried young people that they might develop into faithful and self-controlled husbands and wives.
I often have to remind pre-marital couples that marriage is not a "silver bullet." You will wake up the morning after your wedding ceremony essentially the same person who went to sleep the night before. If you have not been practicing sexual self-control before marriage, you will not find it any easier after marriage. As with all habits, (virtues, character traits) they come only with discipline and practice.
As the author of this book seems to argue, maybe we need to re-frame the conversation to be about "sexual self-control." Maybe the whole "abstinence only education" debacle has so sullied the word "abstinence" that is no longer a useful. Don't get me wrong: "abstinence" is a useful and necessary
concept, but maybe the
word itself should be replaced.
However we go about it, our young people must be shown the lifelong applicability of "abstinence" as sexual self-control. Only in teaching our young people to control themselves sexually
outside of marriage will they be prepared to control themselves
inside marriage. Only in teaching our children self-control might they be empowered to stop parting themselves out and giving away those pieces of themselves in exchange for fleeting returns. Like a city whose walls are broken down is a generation who lacks sexual self-control.
September 27, 2009 – “Do you want to be well?” – John 5:6
sang:
