Here is a surprising lede from ” title=”reading here”>reading here.
In following up on this article, both ” title=”Belief Beat”>Belief Beat blog tease out a theory about why more evangelical Christians are having sex before marriage. Nicole Neroulias writes:
the Bible and traditional social mores come from a time when puberty and marriage were synonymous, if not even reversed. So “waiting until marriage” was kind of a no-brainer. But now, the average Americans don’t wed until they are over 25. That’s another decade or more of polishing those purity rings — twice their lifetimes, at that point, and during the years when hormones and peer pressure are at their most insistent.
That is, no doubt, an important point. The longer one has to wait, the more difficult it is. It’s the reason that one of my college church friends used to say that if a guy at church was single, not married and not unusually weird, then he also wasn’t a virgin.
The question is what are the implications for churches and the U.S. Christian community? How should they respond?
