A new survey of Baptist newlyweds suggests that though true love does not always wait, it waits more often if it starts with a formal pledge of purity.
While a majority of church-going young couples in the Texas survey acknowledged having sexual intercourse before marriage, the study suggested Baptist couples were much more likely to wait until their wedding night if they took a formal abstinence pledge, such as Southern Baptists’ True Love Waits (TLW) program. The program gained popularity in the 1990s. Many of the earliest generations of youths to take the pledges have since entered into their first marriages.
Byron Weathersbee, interim chaplain at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, analyzed such 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 impacted their sexual behavior.
Of the young Christians surveyed, six out of 10 who made sexual-purity pledges abstained from sexual intercourse until marriage. But only three of 10 who didn’t take a formal pledge remained chaste.
All of the surveyed individuals — who had been married less than five years — professed faith in Christ. Of that figure, 99 percent attended 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, Weathersbee discovered. Nine out of 10 who acknowledged sexual activity prior to marriage never took a TLW pledge. “To a large degree, we’re missing it,” Weathersbee said. “The young people are receiving the data, but they’re not translating it into values that result in a lifestyle of purity and holiness.”
The strength of the TLW 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 TLW program in 1993. “The fact is rates of teenage sexual activity rose for 20 unbroken years. Then came TLW 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 the journal 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 in Fort Worth, Texas. (ABP)
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