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<DIV><FONT size=2>From <EM>The New Yorker,</EM> November 3, 2008</FONT></DIV>
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<H1 id=articlehed>Red Sex, Blue Sex</H1>
<H2 id=articleintro>Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?</H2>
<H4 id=articleauthor><SPAN class="c cs"><SPAN>by </SPAN><A
href="http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?query=authorName:%22Margaret%20Talbot%22">Margaret
Talbot</A> </SPAN><SPAN class="dd dds">November 3, 2008 </SPAN></H4>
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<P class=caption>The “sexual début” of an evangelical girl typically occurs just
after she turns sixteen. Photograph by Mary Ellen Mark.</P></DIV><!-- end article photo -->
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<DD><A
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Pregnancy</A>;
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href="http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=Teen-agers">Teen-agers</A>;
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<P class=descender>In early September, when Sarah Palin, the Republican
candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old
daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the
revelation but by the reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the
evangelical voters that John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin. Yet
reports from the floor of the Republican Convention, in St. Paul, quoted dozens
of delegates who seemed unfazed, or even buoyed, by the news. A delegate from
Louisiana told CBS News, “Like so many other American families who are in the
same situation, I think it’s great that she instilled in her daughter the values
to have the child and not to sneak off someplace and have an abortion.” A
Mississippi delegate claimed that “even though young children are making that
decision to become pregnant, they’ve also decided to take responsibility for
their actions and decided to follow up with that and get married and raise this
child.” Palin’s family drama, delegates said, was similar to the experience of
many socially conservative Christian families. As Marlys Popma, the head of
evangelical outreach for the McCain campaign, told <I>National Review</I>,
“There hasn’t been one evangelical family that hasn’t gone through some sort of
situation.” In fact, it was Popma’s own “crisis pregnancy” that had brought her
into the movement in the first place.</P>
<P>During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol
Palin’s pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a
cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide. Social liberals
in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not
particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage,
but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the
social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only
education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a
teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.
</P>
<P>A handful of social scientists and family-law scholars have recently begun
looking closely at this split. Last year, Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the
University of Texas at Austin, published a startling book called “Forbidden
Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers,” and he is working
on a follow-up that includes a section titled “Red Sex, Blue Sex.” His findings
are drawn from a national survey that Regnerus and his colleagues conducted of
some thirty-four hundred thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds, and from a
comprehensive government study of adolescent health known as Add Health.
Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a
poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among
teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white
evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in
abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a
quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major
religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that
sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will
cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as
a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an
embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are
more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average,
white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term
of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major
religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.</P>
<P>Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus reports, is that evangelical
Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use
contraception. This could be because evangelicals are also among the most likely
to believe that using contraception will send the message that they are looking
for sex. It could also be because many evangelicals are steeped in the
abstinence movement’s warnings that condoms won’t actually protect them from
pregnancy or venereal disease. More provocatively, Regnerus found that only half
of sexually active teen-agers who say that they seek guidance from God or the
Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time.
By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that they most
often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult consistently use
protection.</P>
<P>The gulf between sexual belief and sexual behavior becomes apparent, too,
when you look at the outcomes of abstinence-pledge movements. Nationwide,
according to a 2001 estimate, some two and a half million people have taken a
pledge to remain celibate until marriage. Usually, they do so under the auspices
of movements such as True Love Waits or the Silver Ring Thing. Sometimes, they
make their vows at big rallies featuring Christian pop stars and laser light
shows, or at purity balls, where girls in frothy dresses exchange rings with
their fathers, who vow to help them remain virgins until the day they marry.
More than half of those who take such pledges—which, unlike abstinence-only
classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian—end up having sex before
marriage, and not usually with their future spouse. The movement is not the
complete washout its critics portray it as: pledgers delay sex eighteen months
longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners. Yet, according to the
sociologists Peter Bearman, of Columbia University, and Hannah Brückner, of
Yale, communities with high rates of pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s.
This could be because more teens pledge in communities where they perceive more
danger from sex (in which case the pledge is doing some good); or it could be
because fewer people in these communities use condoms when they break the
pledge. </P>
<P>Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some
schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers
apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority;
once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the
norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to
imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin
clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.</P>
<P class=descender>Religious belief apparently does make a potent difference in
behavior for one group of evangelical teen-agers: those who score highest on
measures of religiosity—such as how often they go to church, or how often they
pray at home. But many Americans who identify themselves as evangelicals, and
who hold socially conservative beliefs, aren’t deeply observant. </P>
<P>Even more important than religious conviction, Regnerus argues, is how
“embedded” a teen-ager is in a network of friends, family, and institutions that
reinforce his or her goal of delaying sex, and that offer a plausible
alternative to America’s sexed-up consumer culture. A church, of course, isn’t
the only way to provide a cohesive sense of community. Close-knit families make
a difference. Teen-agers who live with both biological parents are more likely
to be virgins than those who do not. And adolescents who say that their families
understand them, pay attention to their concerns, and have fun with them are
more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity. </P>
<P>A terrific 2005 documentary, “The Education of Shelby Knox,” tells the story
of a teen-ager from a Southern Baptist family in Lubbock, Texas, who has taken a
True Love Waits pledge. To the chagrin of her youth pastor, and many of her
neighbors, Knox eventually becomes an activist for comprehensive sex education.
At her high school, kids receive abstinence-only education, but, Knox says,
“maybe twice a week I see a girl walking down the hall pregnant.” In the film,
Knox seems successful at remaining chaste, but less because she took a pledge
than because she has a fearlessly independent mind and the kind of parents
who—despite their own conservative leanings—admire her outspokenness. Devout
Republicans, her parents end up driving her around town to make speeches that
would have curled their hair before their daughter started making them. Her
mother even comes to take pride in Shelby’s efforts, because while abstinence
pledges are lovely in the abstract, they don’t acknowledge “reality.”</P>
<P>Like other American teens, young evangelicals live in a world of Internet
porn, celebrity sex scandals, and raunchy reality TV, and they have the same
hormonal urges that their peers have. Yet they come from families and
communities in which sexual life is supposed to be forestalled until the first
night of a transcendent honeymoon. Regnerus writes, “In such an atmosphere,
attitudes about sex may <I>formally</I> remain unchanged (and restrictive) while
sexual activity becomes increasingly common. This clash of cultures and norms is
felt most poignantly in the so-called Bible Belt.” Symbolic commitment to the
institution of marriage remains strong there, and politically motivating—hence
the drive to outlaw gay marriage—but the actual practice of it is scattershot.
</P>
<P>Among blue-state social liberals, commitment to the institution of marriage
tends to be unspoken or discreet, but marriage in practice typically works
pretty well. Two family-law scholars, Naomi Cahn, of George Washington
University, and June Carbone, of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, are
writing a book on the subject, and they argue that “red families” and “blue
families” are “living different lives, with different moral imperatives.” (They
emphasize that the Republican-Democrat divide is less important than the higher
concentration of “moral-values voters” in red states.) In 2004, the states with
the highest divorce rates were Nevada, Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho, and West
Virginia (all red states in the 2004 election); those with the lowest were
Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. The highest
teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas
(all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota,
and Maine (blue except for North Dakota). “The ‘blue states’ of the Northeast
and Mid-Atlantic have lower teen birthrates, higher use of abortion, and lower
percentages of teen births within marriage,” Cahn and Carbone observe. They also
note that people start families earlier in red states—in part because they are
more inclined to deal with an unplanned pregnancy by marrying rather than by
seeking an abortion. </P>
<P>Of all variables, the age at marriage may be the pivotal difference between
red and blue families. The five states with the lowest median age at marriage
are Utah, Oklahoma, Idaho, Arkansas, and Kentucky, all red states, while those
with the highest are all blue: Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island,
Connecticut, and New Jersey. The red-state model puts couples at greater risk
for divorce; women who marry before their mid-twenties are significantly more
likely to divorce than those who marry later. And younger couples are more
likely to be contending with two of the biggest stressors on a marriage:
financial struggles and the birth of a baby before, or soon after, the wedding.
</P>
<P>There are, of course, plenty of exceptions to these rules—messily divorcing
professional couples in Boston, high-school sweethearts who stay sweetly
together in rural Idaho. Still, Cahn and Carbone conclude, “the paradigmatic
red-state couple enters marriage not long after the woman becomes sexually
active, has two children by her mid-twenties, and reaches the critical period of
marriage at the high point in the life cycle for risk-taking and
experimentation. The paradigmatic blue-state couple is more likely to experiment
with multiple partners, postpone marriage until after they reach emotional and
financial maturity, and have their children (if they have them at all) as their
lives are stabilizing.” </P>
<P class=descender>Some of these differences in sexual behavior come down to
class and education. Regnerus and Carbone and Cahn all see a new and distinct
“middle-class morality” taking shape among economically and socially advantaged
families who are not social conservatives. In Regnerus’s survey, the teen-agers
who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of
contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it.
Regnerus writes, “They are interested in remaining free from the burden of
teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted
diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college,
advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake.
Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks.” These are the kids who tend to score
high on measures of “strategic orientation”—how analytical, methodical, and
fact-seeking they are when making decisions. Because these teen-agers see
abstinence as unrealistic, they are not opposed in principle to sex before
marriage—just careful about it. Accordingly, they might delay intercourse in
favor of oral sex, not because they cherish the idea of remaining “technical
virgins” but because they assess it as a safer option. “Solidly middle- or
upper-middle-class adolescents have considerable socioeconomic and educational
expectations, courtesy of their parents and their communities’ lifestyles,”
Regnerus writes. “They are happy with their direction, generally not rebellious,
tend to get along with their parents, and have few moral qualms about expressing
their nascent sexuality.” They might have loved Ellen Page in “Juno,” but in
real life they’d see having a baby at the wrong time as a tragic derailment of
their life plans. For this group, Regnerus says, unprotected sex has become “a
moral issue like smoking or driving a car without a seatbelt. It’s not just
unwise anymore; it’s wrong.” </P>
<P>Each of these models of sexual behavior has drawbacks—in the blue-state
scheme, people may postpone child-bearing to the point where infertility becomes
an issue. And delaying child-bearing is better suited to the more affluent, for
whom it yields economic benefits, in the form of educational opportunities and
career advancement. But Carbone and Cahn argue that the red-state model is
clearly failing on its own terms—producing high rates of teen pregnancy,
divorce, sexually transmitted disease, and other dysfunctional outcomes that
social conservatives say they abhor. In “Forbidden Fruit,” Regnerus offers an
“unscientific postscript,” in which he advises social conservatives that if they
really want to maintain their commitment to chastity and to marriage, they’ll
need to do more to help young couples stay married longer. As the Reverend Rick
Marks, a Southern Baptist minister, recently pointed out in a Florida newspaper,
“Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional
marriage, when divorce has already broken it down.” Conservatives may need to
start talking as much about saving marriages as they do about, say, saving
oneself for marriage.</P>
<P>“Having to wait until age twenty-five or thirty to have sex <I>is</I>
unreasonable,” Regnerus writes. He argues that religious organizations that
advocate chastity should “work more creatively to support younger marriages.
This is not the 1950s (for which I am glad), where one could bank on social
norms, extended (and larger) families, and clear gender roles to negotiate and
sustain early family formation.”</P>
<P>Evangelicals could start, perhaps, by trying to untangle the contradictory
portrayals of sex that they offer to teen-agers. In the Shelby Knox documentary,
a youth pastor, addressing an assembly of teens, defines intercourse as “what
two dogs do out on the street corner—they just bump and grind awhile, <I>boom
boom boom</I>.” Yet a typical evangelical text aimed at young people, “Every
Young Woman’s Battle,” by Shannon Ethridge and Stephen Arterburn, portrays sex
between two virgins as an ethereal communion of innocent souls: “physical,
mental, emotional, and spiritual pleasure beyond description.” Neither is the
most realistic or helpful view for a young person to take into marriage, as a
few advocates of abstinence acknowledge. The savvy young Christian writer Lauren
Winner, in her book “Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity,” writes, “Rather
than spending our unmarried years stewarding and disciplining our desires, we
have become ashamed of them. We persuade ourselves that the desires themselves
are horrible. This can have real consequences if we do get married.” Teenagers
and single adults are “told over and over not to have sex, but no one ever
encourages” them “to be bodily or sensual in some appropriate way”—getting to
know and appreciate what their bodies can do through sports, especially for
girls, or even thinking sensually about something like food. Winner goes on,
“This doesn’t mean, of course, that if only the church sponsored more softball
leagues, everyone would stay on the chaste straight and narrow. But it does mean
that the church ought to cultivate ways of teaching Christians to live in their
bodies well—so that unmarried folks can still be bodily people, even though
they’re not having sex, and so that married people can give themselves to sex
freely.” </P>
<P>Too often, though, evangelical literature directed at teen-agers forbids all
forms of sexual behavior, even masturbation. “Every Young Woman’s Battle,” for
example, tells teen-agers that “the momentary relief” of “self-gratification”
can lead to “shame, low self-esteem, and fear of what others might think or that
something is wrong with you.” And it won’t slake sexual desire: “Once you begin
feeding baby monsters, their appetites grow bigger and they want <SPAN
class=smallcaps>MORE</SPAN>! It’s better not to feed such a monster in the first
place.”</P>
<P>Shelby Knox, who spoke at a congressional hearing on sex education earlier
this year, occupies a middle ground. She testified that it’s possible to
“believe in abstinence in a religious sense,” but still understand that
abstinence-only education is dangerous “for students who simply are not
abstaining.” As Knox’s approach makes clear, you don’t need to break out the sex
toys to teach sex ed—you can encourage teen-agers to postpone sex for all kinds
of practical, emotional, and moral reasons. A new “abstinence-plus” curriculum,
now growing in popularity, urges abstinence while providing accurate information
about contraception and reproduction for those who have sex anyway. “Abstinence
works,” Knox said at the hearing. “Abstinence-only-until-marriage does not.”</P>
<P>It might help, too, not to present virginity as the cornerstone of a virtuous
life. In certain evangelical circles, the concept is so emphasized that a girl
who regrets having been sexually active is encouraged to declare herself a
“secondary” or “born-again” virgin. That’s not an idea, surely, that helps
teen-agers postpone sex or have it responsibly. </P>
<P>The “pro-family” efforts of social conservatives—the campaigns against gay
marriage and abortion—do nothing to instill the emotional discipline or the
psychological smarts that forsaking all others often involves. Evangelicals are
very good at articulating their sexual ideals, but they have little practical
advice for their young followers. Social liberals, meanwhile, are not very good
at articulating values on marriage and teen sexuality—indeed, they may feel that
it’s unseemly or judgmental to do so. But in fact the new middle-class morality
is squarely pro-family. Maybe these choices weren’t originally about
values—maybe they were about maximizing education and careers—yet the result is
a more stable family system. Not only do couples who marry later stay married
longer; children born to older couples fare better on a variety of measures,
including educational attainment, regardless of their parents’ economic
circumstances. The new middle-class culture of intensive parenting has
ridiculous aspects, but it’s pretty successful at turning out productive,
emotionally resilient young adults. And its intensity may be one reason that
teen-agers from close families see child-rearing as a project for which they’re
not yet ready. For too long, the conventional wisdom has been that social
conservatives are the upholders of family values, whereas liberals are the
proponents of a polymorphous selfishness. This isn’t true, and, every once in a
while, liberals might point that out.</P>
<P>Some evangelical Christians are starting to reckon with the failings of the
preaching-and-pledging approach. In “The Education of Shelby Knox,” for example,
Shelby’s father is uncomfortable, at first, with his daughter’s campaign.
Lubbock, after all, is a town so conservative that its local youth pastor tells
Shelby, “You ask me sometimes why I look at you a little funny. It’s because I
hear you speak and I hear tolerance.” But as her father listens to her arguments
he realizes that the no-tolerance ethic simply hasn’t worked in their deeply
Christian community. Too many girls in town are having sex, and having babies
that they can’t support. As Shelby’s father declares toward the end of the film,
teen-age pregnancy “is a problem—a major, major problem that everybody’s just
shoving under the rug.” <SPAN
class=dingbat>♦</SPAN></P></DIV></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>