In Lauren Winner’s book Real Sex, she claims that chastity is a discipline. The problem?

CHASTITY IS NOT A DISCIPLINE

This idea is self-evidently wrong, as are many of the other things she writes about Christianity, the Bible and sex. While the language she uses to talk about sex is very academic, what she writes is just not logically or textually supported.

At the outset the author seems set to challenge the American evangelical church’s entire “True Love Waits” approach to single sexuality. She is going to be bold and different and find out what the Bible really says! Actually, the relevant texts are given a very thin gloss and then she winds up saying pretty much the same things the church has been saying for years without any meaningful critique.

Let’s drill into her contention that chastity is a spiritual discipline a little more, because it is revealing.

Prayer is a discipline. You learn to pray in small doses. You start simply with mealtime prayers and bedtime prayers. You learn different forms of prayer. You study how people prayed in the Bible. You learn how to meditate on a passage of scripture. Over time you might work up to fasting and prayer or all night prayer vigils.

But crucially, you don’t start with these things. You work up to them, gradually.

Chastity, the way single Christians are asked to practice it by the church, does not work like that.

What Lauren Winner and the mainstream church advocates is not “sex is a sometimes thing” but total abstinence outside of marriage. She and the church are asking people just learning to walk to run a marathon.

It is widely known that in America people are getting married later and later. This was true when Winner’s book was first published in 2006, and after the long recession and the dire economic straits of an entire generation it is doubly true. The average age of marriage has climbed past thirty and is rapidly heading towards forty. For some ethnicities and classes, studies show that marriage is increasingly unlikely to occur at all.

This is sobering, all by itself, but consider its implications for a young Christian trying to stay chaste. Assuming that that person, without any restrictions, would start having sex around the age of 15 and that they do not get married until the age of 35, they are facing twenty years of trying for total abstinence.

And we’re shocked that most people fail?

Two decades of abstinence sounds less like chastity and more like a vow of celibacy. Does the teen girl who signs a purity pledge know that that is essentially what she is making? And if not, when she realizes it, will she stick to her pledge? That seems pretty unlikely.

Winner refers to the writings of the Apostle Paul a lot when she is doubling down on the church’s party line. This is important because the Old Testament is packed with polygamy, adultery and premarital sex, so it’s difficult to base an argument there. Winner devotes a few pages to attempting to show that Paul specifically forbade premarital sex. Her argument is not especially thorough or convincing, though. It is clear that Winner thinks that this is basically self-evident. Once again, it is not.

In Paul’s day, a person’s window for having premarital sex would have been quite brief. Women especially could expect to be married off in their mid teens. Men might hold off until the ripe old age of their early twenties, but that late by the standards of the time. The fact is that in Paul’s world, right around the time people reached sexual maturity they were ‘given in marriage’ by their parents. The opportunities for sex before marriage were rare, and would not have been a great concern for Paul or anyone else in his day.

Paul’s concern wasn’t with Christians engaging in pre-marital sex, but extra-marital sex or post-marital sex (as in the case where a spouse died young and their partner was a widow or widower for a time). There was also the case of ‘people like Paul’ who were intentionally celibate. Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 7 are specific - don’t make a vow of celibacy if you can’t keep it; if you are widowed and don’t think you can stay chaste, get married. Paul’s instructions are narrowly tailored, and widening them will take some convincing arguments.

Again, when Paul was writing people married young. The idea that someone, especially a woman, would wait until her thirties or forties until her first marriage would have been virtually inconceivable to Paul.

Are we to believe that Paul was offhandedly instructing people who ‘burn with passion’, who are not ‘called to singleness’, to abstain from sex for one or two decades or more?

In Matthew 23:4, Jesus says of the Pharisees, "They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger.”

I wonder: when the church asks single Christians for decades of abstinence is it placing a heavy burden on them and doing nothing to help? Have we become the Pharisees of sexuality?

I don’t have answers, nor do I suggest that single Christians should throw caution to the wind and start having premarital sex with everyone they meet. But I feel that there is a strong case that Christians need to reexamine what it means to be a single, sexual being in a time where marriage may not take place until mid life. For all her posturing that her approach will be different or ‘real’, the author is disappointingly uncritical of the standard narrative.