Chastity

I was reading Micah Fries's blog, and came across his commentary on a recent study by the Guttenmacher institute that most everyone has premarital sex, and that it has been that way for many decades.

Micah, who believes in pre-marital abstinence, was chagrined. That blog's commentary was as to be expected, but, there was one comment by Lee Saunders that caught my eye.

It’s not a matter of whether or how we teach abstinence. It is a matter of spiritual formation. People practice principles and convictions that are their own. The problem is that what we see as "faith" in a lot of kids and young adults isn’t their faith, it’s their parents’ faith and as the influence and authority of their parents begins to fade and they become more independent, if they don’t "catch" it on their own, they lose sight of it.

Exactly. After 18 years in my mother's church, I learned their doctrines and beliefs, and I learned to pretend I believed them all. But in truth, I came away from it with "my faith" and "the faith I was supposed to have". I knew they were different, so I kept quiet about "my faith." As an adult, I stopped pretending to believe "the faith I was supposed to have."

The interesting question would then be this... Why did the church fail to successfully impart the whole of its doctrine into my heart?

Another interesting question would be this... If church taught me how to pretend I had no doubts, didn't it teach me to be a hyporcrite?

While I never had sex until I my mid-twenties, since then, I've had sex less often that I'd like, and with more people than I'd like to admit.