When Steven Schafer looks out over his small congregation on Sunday mornings, he sees a picture of modern American family life.

About half of the congregants come from what was once typical — families headed by married couples.

The rest include “a lot of single parents, a lot of divorced parents, a lot of grandparents raising their kids,” said Schafer, pastor of Ridgewood Baptist Church in Pleasure Ridge Park. “The traditional family is not the norm.” That presents a major challenge to churches, which are struggling to respond to the revolution in how Americans structure their families, households and romances.

Nearly half of American adults today aren’t married — whether never-married, currently divorced, separated or widowed, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Married couples account for just under half of all American households — down from 71 percent in 1970, according to the U.S. Census.

Yet still today, married people are more likely than singles to attend church. And churches often seem focused on the nuclear family, whether it’s in the sermon topics, the posters on the walls or the graded Sunday schools.

The Rev. Kevin Cosby, pastor of St. Stephen Church, said his congregation is trying to create a culture in which “you’re not abnormal if you’re single.”

Labels: Christianity, cohabitation, culture, Marriage, religion, single parenting, singles, unmarried parents

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Labels: Catholic Church, culture, religion, singles

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...And yet, in the rush to (rightly) condemn, conservative responses have often overlooked the fact that Savage was on to something. In the past year, commentators including Elizabeth Scalia, Melinda Selmys, and Mark Shea have written articles to present the gay community as something other than simply an enemy. Each made clear their adherence to orthodox sexual ethics, but each nonetheless received a venomous response from many of their Christian readers. ...

Thus, the first line of response conservative Christians offer to the pastoral problem of homosexuality is to try to get rid of the problem through ex-gay ministries or reparative therapy; thus, Christian protest to the Uganda bill was half-hearted at best; thus, the concern for Christians over gay bullying has been minimal, and some Christians have even organized opposition to the opposition of gay bullying. The guiding principle is not the distinction between sexual activity and orientation, but their conflation into lifestyle or identity, and so those who are targeted for being or seeming to be gay are given only the most abstract support for their profoundly concrete humiliation.

Last year, Biola professor Matt Jenson addressed students in chapel (like Savage’s address, also available on YouTube). After calling Christians to accountability for failing to make a real space for single people, he turns to the question of homosexuality. “The church is right to tell gay people the good news and call them to a life of discipleship, if and only if it is willing to live as their family.” If Christians have any interest in reaching out to the gay community, if we have any hope to speak a message which can touch their hearts as well, we absolutely must be willing to live as their family. Behind his blundering obscenity, behind his facile attempts to explain Scripture away, behind the blatant hypocrisy of his behavior toward those who disagree with him, what Dan Savage means to tell us is, “The church has far too often, and for the most wrong-headed reasons, failed to be family to gay people.”

And he’s right.

Labels: Catholic Church, Christianity, culture, Dan Savage, homosexuality, religion

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Last week, The American published a piece by Eric Kaufmann on why the future will be more religious and conservative than we think. Kaufmann argues that there is a growing fertility advantage among more religious Americans, who tend to be more conservative. Kaufmann zeroes in on Hispanic and Asian population growth, which he argues will stabilize the share of nonreligious Americans at today’s levels.

Kaufmann’s analysis focuses largely on racial differences in religious identification. But when it comes to the shape of the future, looking to trends among the young may provide clearer insights. ...

While the PRRI survey shows a high degree of change among today’s Millennials, a Pew analysis of General Social Survey data shows they have a higher rate of unaffiliation than previous generations. Compared to their Baby Boom parents, Millennials (which Pew defines as ages 18 to 29) are twice as likely to list themselves as unaffiliated (26 to 13 percent). If the experience of early generations is a guide, levels of unaffiliation persist over time. The percentages of religiously unaffiliated members of the Greatest, Silent, Boomer, and Gen X generations have held remarkably constant over time. The level of unaffiliation among Millennials is therefore likely to remain high in the long run.

The proportion of young people who frequently attend worship services is also declining.

Labels: culture, demographics, race, religion

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Speaking as they do to equal access to a sacrament, last Sunday’s verses from Acts 10 might have seemed, to those fixating on the question of same-sex marriage, like something of a rebuke to the Catholic church and her bishops:

Then Peter proceeded to speak and said, “In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him. . . Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people, who have received the Holy Spirit even as we have?”

Here we see Peter endorsing inclusivity; following the example of the Christ who interacted with all, the church—through the authority of Christ and the workings of the Holy Spirit—offers Life-in-Christ to all. If all proclaiming Christ are accepted to baptism, one might wonder, then why not all to marriage?

I think it comes down to offices, and the equality to be found therein. We talk about vocations and “one’s state in life,” but I wonder if we would not better serve both clarity and charity by considering that beyond baptism we are called to an Office. Since all Offices are callings, then all servants are equal within them and each office is lived within the fundamental calling of all baptized people, which is to chastity, first and foremost.

This brings home the barely-recognized fact that, except for those called to the Office of Marriage—who are themselves meant to be chaste within that Office—the rest of the world, the majority of humanity walking about, gay or straight, are meant to resist sexual concupiscence, whether within the Office of Singleness or Religious Consecration. ...

Why does this Office get all the fun? Because, while all offices are equal, the Office of Marriage—far from being “for everyone” or a simple expression of a mood subject to change—is one of especial humility and sacrifice. The essentials of procreation residing within us are so powerful that unless one ardently works to prevent it, new life will come (a recent study found that 54% of abortions stem from contraception “failure”). The little bang of sperm and ova are the microcosmic reflection of the macrocosmic big bang of Creation; co-operating with God in the continuance of that creation means humbly accepting—for the rest of one’s life—involvement and responsibility for specific human beings of varied gifts and challenges. There are no days off; if you don’t like your job, you can’t just move away; you can’t re-staff. Parenthood contains moments of surreal bliss countered by a lifetime of work, self-abnegation, stress, and anxiety. Besides procreation, sexual tenderness in marriage brings a depth of consolation meant to balance out the fullness of that burden or—for a childless couple—the pain of longings unfulfilled.

For the rest of the world—the majority who are called to chastity—what are they meant to do within their Offices? Serve God and others by helping the helpless and companioning the lonely; feeding the hungry; comforting the frightened; really listening to another, even when we’d rather not. In other words, precisely the same things the married folks do, but without the extra gifts, responsibilities, and stresses of children, and without the consolation (and life-creating complications) of sexual intimacy.

Labels: Catholic Church, chastity, Christianity, culture, gay marriage, heterosexual couples, Marriage, religion, sex

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...My non-religious opposition to SSM comes from a Burkean point of view. That is, I do not believe that we should be so quick to revolutionize and to deconstruct the traditional family, which has endured for so long, and has been so key to the cohesion of our civilization. The “traditional family” (one man + one woman, bound exclusively) is not a natural fact; it is an achievement of civilization. As sociologist Carle Zimmerman shows in his historically-based “Family and Civilization,” the traditional family is a historical artifact that provides a unique basis for human flourishing — this, versus the “trustee family” (the clan, including polygamous ones), or the atomized family, which is the ultimate product of individualism. Zimmerman, a Harvard sociologist, doesn’t make religious arguments — indeed, one gets the idea that he is not religious at all — but rather observes the connection between ways of seeing the family and the individual, and the decline of ancient Greece and Rome. The book is too complex to get into in detail here, but this is a passage from a column I wrote about it some years back:

Civilization depends on the health of the traditional family.

That sentiment has become a truism among social conservatives, who typically can’t explain what they mean by it. Which is why it sounds like right-wing boilerplate to many contemporary ears.

The late Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman believed it was true, but he also knew why. In 1947, he wrote a massive book to explain why latter-day Western civilization was now living through the same family crisis that presaged the fall of classical Greece and Rome. His classic “Family and Civilization,” which has just been republished in an edited version by ISI Press, is a chillingly prophetic volume that deserves a wide new audience.

In all civilizations, Zimmerman theorized, there are three basic family types. The “trustee” family is tribal and clannish, and predominates in agrarian societies. The “domestic” family model is a middle type centering on the nuclear family ensconced in fairly strong extended-family bonds; it’s found in civilizations undergoing rapid development. The final model is the “atomistic” family, which features weak bonds between and within nuclear families; it’s the type that emerges as normative in advanced civilizations.

When the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, the strong trustee families of the barbarian tribes replaced the weak, atomistic Roman families as the foundation of society.

Churchmen believed a social structure that broke up the ever-feuding clans and gave the individual more freedom would be better for society’s stability and spent centuries reforming the European family toward domesticity. The natalist worldview advocated by churchmen knit tightly religious faith, family loyalty and child bearing. From the 10th century on, the domestic family model ruled Europe through its greatest cultural efflorescence. But then came the Reformation and the Enlightenment, shifting culture away from tradition and toward the individual. Thus, since the 18th century, the atomistic family has been the Western cultural norm.

Here’s the problem: Societies ruled by the atomistic family model, with its loosening of constraints on its individual members, quit having enough children to carry on. They become focused on the pleasures of the present. Eventually, these societies expire from lack of manpower, which itself is a manifestation of a lack of the will to live. ...

Why? Zimmerman was not religious, but he contended the core problem was a loss of faith. Religions that lack a strong pro-fertility component don’t survive over time, he observed; nor do cultures that don’t have a powerfully natalist religion.

Labels: Christianity, conservatism, culture, demographics, extended family, family structure, gay marriage, natalism, religion

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Ever since “90210’s” Donna Martin held on to hers for seven seasons, adult virginity — the state of having it and the act of losing it — has been a recurring plot point on TV dramas, and not just ones set in high school. The rules that apply to virginity in characters of a certain age are more or less the same ones that apply to Chekhov’s famous gun: If it appears in the first season, it will probably go off by the third, or the fourth, or the seventh, just as it did for Donna Martin. There are currently three fictional adults — or two adults and a self-identified “Girl” — grappling with their virginities with varying amounts of shame in big-name TV shows. (Shame-free virginity: not currently a fictional TV offering.)

“Grey’s Anatomy’s” April Kepner (Sarah Drew) just lost her virginity last week, and will be dealing with the fallout in this one, on tonight’s episode. April’s deflowering would have been a happy event — if the show hadn’t used the mind-bending powers of retroactive continuity to suddenly assert that she had been saving herself because of her religious beliefs. At the beginning of last season, the high-strung, cheery Kepner (a common characteristic of TV virgins is a type-A, neurotic personality) yelled at her colleagues, in an effort to quell their merciless teasing, “I am a 28-year-old virgin, namely because I wanted my first time to be special and then I waited too long, and partially because I’m pretty sure guys find me annoying.” She then spent the next year and a half flirting, making out with and never quite sleeping with a series of guys who weren’t right for her, without once mentioning chastity or a higher power.

Then last Thursday, she threw herself on fellow resident Jackson, assuring him — after he kept repeating to her, out loud, “You’re a virgin” — that having sex with him was really what she wanted to do. The next day, she seemed shell-shocked. When Jackson tried to apologize, she explained, “It’s not you. It’s Jesus. I was a virgin because I loved Jesus. And now Jesus hates me.” Ta-dah! April Kepner had been magically transformed from an accidental, circumstantial virgin into a religious one. In the process she’s gotten stuck in a fun house mirror of TV sex-shaming: Having felt ashamed for two seasons about not having had sex, she now gets to feel ashamed for a few more seasons about having had it.

Labels: culture, gender, men, premarital sex, religion, sex, virginity, women

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When Vanderbilt wanted its freshmen students to learn about ethics, the school turned to the late Rev. Peter Gomes to teach them. Gomes’ book, The Good Life, was required reading for the Vanderbilt class of 2015.

Now some critics of Vanderbilt’s nondiscrimination policy hope the school will turn to Gomes, a Harvard professor who died last year, once again.

In 2003, a Christian group at Harvard called the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship ran afoul of that school’s nondiscrimination policy because it required its leaders to hold specific beliefs.

Harvard’s administration told the group to change its ways or leave campus. But Gomes, a professor and minister of the Memorial Church at Harvard, defended the student group, saying the university was discriminating against it.

“How can a profession of faith be irrelevant in the leadership of a faith-based group?” he wrote in a 2003 letter to the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper.

Harvard eventually backed down.

Elliot Huck, a Vanderbilt freshman from Bloomington, Ind., hopes his school will do the same.

Huck is a member of Cru, also known as Campus Crusade, one of about a dozen groups that will probably lose their status as registered student organizations because it, too, requires its leaders hold specific beliefs.

Vanderbilt insists that the groups drop their requirement or lose their status.

Labels: Christianity, culture, religion, religious liberty, universities

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The Welsh Government has written to Catholic schools in Wales following complaints over teachers inviting pupils to sign a petition against the Givernment’s plans to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples.

Ministers in Westminster are still "looking into” whether or not to issue a similar warning to schools in England.

More than 600,000 people so far have signed the Coalition For Marriage campaign petition, supported by figures such as Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Catholic Education Service said last month that it had contacted its 385 secondary schools in England and Wales asking them to circulate the letter by the Archbishops of Westminster and Southwark - the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols and the Most Reverend Peter Smith - which was recently read in parishes, defending the traditional definition of marriage.

They were also encouraged to consider publicising the petition.

Secular and humanist campaigners accused Catholic schools of “political indoctrination” by promoting the campaign among schoolchildren.

But Church education chiefs insisted they were “proud” to teach Catholic values in schools.

Ministers in both London and Cardiff were asked to look into the matter amid allegations that schools could be breaking equality and political impartiality laws.

Labels: Catholic Church, gay marriage, religion, religious liberty, schools, United Kingdom, Wales

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As the 2012 presidential election grows closer, voter demographics will grab ever more airtime. In a finely balanced electorate, switching parties is less common, making internal growth of party bases more important. Getting the vote out is one aspect of this; population change another. ...

All of which explains why pundits' interest in demography has been steadily rising. Ruy Teixeira, for instance, claims that the growth of the college-educated, secular and Hispanic proportion of the population will soon provide the Democrats with an inbuilt electoral majority. Chris Bowers of the Nation styles this the “End of Bubba Dominance.” On the other side of the ledger, American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks highlights the role of fertility: “Liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result.” “In Seattle,” adds Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation, “there are nearly 45 percent more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19 percent more kids than dogs.”

In order to adjudicate between these competing predictions, I teamed up with Vegard Skirbekk and Anne Goujon, two leading Austrian-based experts in the art of projecting the size of subgroups in populations. The results, published in the journal Population Studies, show that Democrats are only marginally younger than Republicans and Republican women bear the same number of children as their Democratic sisters. Immigration, however, is an important factor. If ethnic party identification remains as it is, Latino population growth will benefit the Democrats, shifting the balance between the two parties by two and a half points in the Democrats’ favor over the next 30 years. ...

Those who doubt whether demography can shape politics should consider world Jewry. The combination of religious polarization and demographic upheaval is especially stark among Jews. They began to secularize in large numbers in the 19th century, and Orthodoxy emerged to combat this trend. The temperature of Jewish fundamentalism increased sharply after the horrors of World War II, and an ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, community emerged, segregating itself from other Jews. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and the largely secular Zionist leadership assumed that the black-hatted, sidelocked Haredim were a relic of history. They gave the ultra-Orthodox an exemption from the draft, subsidies to study at yeshiva, and other religious privileges to make sure their anti-Zionism didn't dissuade the Great Powers from establishing a home for the Jews in Palestine. In 1948, there were only 400 Israeli Jews with military exemptions, many of which were not used. By 2007, that number had soared to 55,000. Meanwhile, the fringe of ultra-Orthodox pupils in Israel's Jewish primary schools in 1960 has ballooned: they now comprise a third of the Jewish first grade class. They are gaining power: in Jerusalem, Haredim rioted in late December, demanding the right to segregate women on buses, and have already elected the city's first Haredi mayor. Outside Israel, work by Joshua Comenetz and Yaakov Wise reveals that the ultra-Orthodox may form a majority of observant American and British Jews by 2050.

The Jewish example shows that population change can reverse secularism and shift the center of gravity of an entire society in a conservative religious direction. Notice that change has come about because values have polarized people and increasingly determine family size.

In a more modest way, the same is true elsewhere.

Labels: Christianity, culture, demographics, Europe, immigration, Islam, Israel, Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, religion

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A group of pastors and former youth ministry leaders suggest that today's youth ministries should be disbanded, calling the common practice of separating congregations by age for worship and Bible study "unbiblical."

The church leaders state their case in the documentary film, "Divided: Is Age-Segregated Ministry Multiplying or Dividing the Church?"

The film is produced by the National Center for Family Integrated Churches in association with LeClerc Brothers Motion Pictures. The producers released the documentary earlier this month online, and have made it available for free until Sept. 15.

"Divided" follows "edgy twenty-something" Christian filmmaker Philip LeClerc on a quest to find answers to why his generation is increasingly turning away from attending church. Recent surveys have shown that as many as 85 percent of young people will leave the church and many never return.

NCFIC Director Scott T. Brown told The Christian Post that today's modern concept of youth ministry is a "50-year failed experiment." Brown said that when he was a church leader in the '70s and '80s he could have been the "poster boy" for the youth ministry movement in California. However, he said he now feels that dividing children from adults at church is an unbiblical concept borrowed from humanistic philosophies. ...

"I look back and realize I did more harm to families than I ever imagined," Dellinger says in the film. "I see that more as I look back because I was usurping the authority of parents, especially fathers by having their children's hearts turn towards me – with their permission."

Labels: adolescence, Christianity, culture, emerging adulthood, Fathers, religion

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Among the contradictions of my childhood experiences in churches was the fact that, on one hand, there was the famous portrait of Jesus by Warner Sallman—meek and mild verging on the effeminate—and, on the other hand, the appearance of various sports figures to remind us that Jesus was not just male but a man's man who ran the moneychangers out of the temple with a whip.

It is hardly a newsflash that we've been living through an era of upheaval in gender roles. Churches have been divided over the role of women in ministry. In "Young, Restless, Reformed" circles, a new generation is discovering Jonathan Edwards and "masculine Christianity" in one fell swoop. Weaned on romantic—even sentimental—images of a deity who seems to exist to ensure our emotional and psychic equilibrium, many younger Christians (especially men) are drawn to a robust vision of a loving and sovereign, holy and gracious, merciful and just, powerful and tender King. As David Murrow pointed out in Why Men Hate Going to Church (2004), men are tired of singing love songs to Jesus and don't feel comfortable in a "safe environment" that caters to women, children, and older people. His critique is familiar to many: men don't like "conformity, control, and ceremony," so churches need to "adjust the thermostat" and orient their ministry toward giving men tasks (since they're "doers"). Men don't like to learn by instruction; they need object lessons and, most of all, to find ways to discover truth for themselves. ...

In the drive to make churches more guy-friendly, we risk confusing cultural (especially American) customs with biblical discipleship. One noted pastor has said that God gave Christianity a "masculine feel." Another contrasted "latte-sipping Cabriolet drivers" with "real men." Jesus and his buddies were "dudes: heterosexual, win-a-fight, punch-you-in-the-nose dudes." Real Christian men like Jesus and Paul "are aggressive, assertive, and nonverbal." Seriously?

The back story on all of this is the rise of the "masculine Christianity movement" in Victorian England, especially with Charles Kingsley's fictional stories in Two Years Ago (1857). D. L. Moody popularized the movement in the United States and baseball-player-turned-evangelist Billy Sunday preached it as he pretended to hit a home run against the devil. For those of us raised on testimonies from recently converted football players in youth group, Tim Tebow is hardly a new phenomenon. Reacting against the safe deity, John Eldredge's Wild at Heart (2001) offered a God who is wild and unpredictable. Neither image is grounded adequately in Scripture. With good intentions, the Promise Keepers movement apparently did not have a significant lasting impact. Nor, I predict, will the call of New Calvinists to a Jesus with "callused hands and big biceps," "the Ultimate Fighting Jesus."

Are these really the images we have of men in the Scriptures? Furthermore, are these the characteristics that the New Testament highlights as "the fruit of the Spirit"—which, apparently, is not gender-specific? "Gentleness, meekness, self-control," "growing in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ," "submitting to your leaders," and the like? Officers are to be "apt to teach," "preaching the truth in love," not quenching a bruised reed or putting out a smoldering candle, and the like. There is nothing about beating people up or belonging to a biker club.

Labels: Christianity, culture, gender, men, religion

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I’ve written before about Evangelicals’ collapsing sexual mores, and now I see now that the Religion News Service is on the case and repeating many of the same statistics: Eighty percent of young Evangelicals have premarital sex, and almost a third of pregnancies end in abortion. This is a grave cultural problem within the church (along, of course, with the Evangelical divorce rate). ...

But why are we doing so much worse now? I tend to think it’s a logical result of the “everything but” culture that’s overrun much of the church. In other words, “We Christians live just like you, but without the sin.” Our dating relationships are the same. Our goals for marriage are the same. Our cultural habits are the same. Everything thing is same . . . except (hopefully) for the sin. Let’s take dating. The Christian church has bought hook, line, and sinker the notion that we should wait to marry until either our education is complete or we’ve attained a certain amount of subjective financial stability (whatever comes later). This results of course in a demand for an incredibly extended commitment to chastity — a “15-year gap between the average onset of puberty and the average age of marriage.” Similarly, within the world of Christian marriage, it’s impossible to overstate the extent to which healthy marriage is discussed within secular frameworks of happiness and fulfillment, with scripture providing the holy means for gaining secular ends.

Labels: abortion, Christianity, culture, evangelical Protestantism, Marriage, premarital sex, religion, sex

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A Rome conference in late April hinted that the Vatican may be moving towards a more restrictive posture on annulments, the procedure in church law for declaring a marriage null and void, which some critics refer to as “Catholic divorce.”

If so, the fallout could have special significance for the United States, home to just 6 percent of the world’s Catholic population but accounting for roughly two-thirds of the 60,000 annulments issued by church courts each year.

The April 26-27 Rome conference focused on canon 1095 of the Code of Canon Law, which allows a marriage to be declared null if one of the parties lacked the ability to consent because of “causes of a psychic nature.” Of the 15 to 20 possible grounds for an annulment in church law, more are granted on the basis of canon 1095 than all others combined, roughly two-thirds of the total.

As a result, some wags have dubbed canon 1095 the “loose canon.” ...

Polish Bishop Antoni Stankiewicz, dean of the Roman Rota, the Vatican court that handles most marriage cases, told the conference that interpretation of canon 1095 must avoid an “anthropological pessimism” that would hold that “it’s almost impossible to get married, in view of the current cultural situation.”

“We must reaffirm the innate human capacity to marry,” Stankiewicz told the group. ...

“We can’t equate incapacity with a lack of moral virtue,” he said. “Otherwise we would be saying that only saints can have valid marriages.”

Labels: annulments, Catholic Church, culture, Marriage, religion

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The unmarried man gives his mind to the Lord’s affairs and how he can please the Lord; but the man who is married gives his mind to the affairs of this world and to how he can please his wife, and he is divided in mind. So, too, the unmarried woman, and the virgin, gives her mind to the Lord’s affairs and to being holy in body and spirit; but the married woman gives her mind to the affairs of this world and to how she can please her husband.” 1 Corinthians 7: 32-34

In a November 1, 2010 letter, Archbishop Robert Carlson of St. Louis offered encouragement to lay men and women of his archdiocese who choose to remain single in order to make themselves available for prayer and apostolic work. In the letter he said, “Single men and women who have given themselves wholeheartedly to Christ…bind themselves to the service of others, and they participate directly in the Church’s mission and share themselves intimately with those who walk with them on the journey to Christ’s kingdom.”

Archbishop Carlson continued, “They discern God’s will for themselves through prayer, spiritual reading, and retreats. They commit to their families—parents, siblings, and extended family members. They partner with friends, co-workers, fellow parishioners, neighbors, and all whom they encounter in seeking to make our world a better place.”

Not "leftover"

For 60-year-old Sara (who declined to give her last name), a St. Louis resident who works in the health care industry, being a dedicated single gives her an opportunity “to enrich the Church and serve others in need.”

Labels: Catholic Church, religion, singles

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In an interview with Christianity Today Christine Gardner talks about the language that Evangelicals use to talk about abstinence. Gardner’s book is entitled, Making Abstinence Sexy–a telling encapsulation of how Evangelical abstinence are striving to affirm the culture’s obsession with sex–and visions of abundant, great sex in particular–while giving it a distinctive, Christian veneer:

They are using the very thing they are prohibiting to admonish young people to wait. They are saying, “If you are abstinent now, you will have amazing sex when you are married.”

Holy non sequitur, Batman! Gardner thinks that Christianity has something to offer that has been largely missing from these abstinence campaigns:

Language of sacrifice and suffering can be transformative to those who know that sex sells everything from cars to deodorant and, now, abstinence.

I think she’s getting close. Abstaining from sex is suffering, dying to the desires of our bodies. In a world where people are regularly remaining single into their thirties and beyond, it’s death with no this-worldly promise of new life. Perhaps reframing abstinence as participation in the cross of Christ is better preparation for marriage than the promise of great sex on the other side.

Labels: abstinence, Christianity, culture, Marriage, premarital sex, religion, sex

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Ashley McGuire fell in love with the Catholic Church five years ago, after reading its teaching against artificial birth control.

McGuire, then a skeptical Protestant college student, initially saw the ban as a mandatory march to “domestic slavery.” But the more she read, the more she was blown away by the idea that sex — and women’s bodies — must be about more than physical pleasure.

Yet the images the church uses to promote its own method of birth control freaked her out. Pamphlets for what the church calls natural family planning feature photos of babies galore. A church-sponsored class on the method uses a book with a woman on the cover, smiling as she balances a grocery bag on one hip, a baby on the other.

“My guess is 99 out of 100 21st-century women trying to navigate the decision about contraception would see that cover and run for the hills,” McGuire wrote in a post on her blog, Altcatholicah, which is aimed at Catholic women.

McGuire, 26, of Alexandria is part of a movement of younger, religiously conservative Catholic women who are trying to rebrand an often-ignored church teaching: its ban on birth control methods such as the Pill. Arguing that church theology has been poorly explained and encouraged, they want to shift the image of a traditional Catholic woman from one at home with children to one with a great, communicative sex life, a chemical-free body and babies only when the parents think the time is right.

The movement sees an opportunity: President Obama’s decision this year to require most religious employers, like employers in general, to provide contraception coverage. The move angered Catholics so much that it cracked open a discussion about contraception that has been largely taboo for decades because there’s so much disagreement about it.

“More priests have given sermons on this in the past few weeks than in the last 50 years,” said Janet Smith, a conservative theologian who teaches at the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit.

Labels: Catholic Church, contraception, natural family planning, religion

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Ann Romney was already fully immersed in stay-at-home motherhood — raising five sons, ages six to 16, in her Belmont home — when Mormon prophet Ezra Taft Benson took to a pulpit on February 22, 1987 and delivered a definitive sermon on gender roles in the church titled, "To the Mothers of Zion."

His message to working moms: "Come home."

The religious dynamic of the Romneys' Leave It To Beaver lifestyle has been largely lost on the partisans making hay out of the latest flare-up in the mommy wars, which was sparked by a Democratic strategist charging that Ann "has never actually worked a day in her life." But while much of the debate has centered on class — with liberals casting full-time motherhood as a luxury for the rich, and conservatives hoping working-class women will identify with her — the fact is that even if Mitt were a middle-class schoolteacher, there's a good chance Ann still would have foregone a career.

That's because for many Latter-day Saint women, staying at home to raise children is less a lifestyle choice than religious one — a divinely-appreciated sacrifice that brings with it blessings, empowerment, and spiritual prestige.

These doctrinally-defined gender roles aren't entirely unique — they've been preached by various sects for centuries — but Mormons have proven uniquely unwilling to bend them to fit modern times. The Church took heat in the '70s for waging a high-profile campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment; and even today, Mormon women remain twice as likely to be homemakers as non-Mormons, regardless of income levels.

Benson's talk, which was distributed church-wide and is still quoted in Mormon Sunday School classes today, crystalized decades of LDS teachings on the divinely-declared role of women, and made little effort to bow to political correctness.

"Mothers are to conceive, to nourish, to love, and to train," Benson said. "So declare the revelations."

He went on to warn against placing materialism ahead of child-rearing:

Do not use the reasoning of the world, such as, "We'll wait until we can better afford having children, until we are more secure, until John has completed his education, until he has a better paying job, until we have a larger home, until we've obtained a few of the material conveniences," and on and on.

This is the reasoning of the world and is not pleasing in the sight of God... Do not curtail the number of your children for personal or selfish reasons. Material possessions, social convenience, and so-called professional advantages are nothing compared to a righteous posterity. In the eternal perspective, children--not possessions, not position, not prestige--are our greatest jewels.

...

Haglund said this determined focus on motherhood has built within Mormonism a mom-friendly infrastructure that allows families without the Romneys' car-elevator-level wealth to manage to survive on a single income.

"In many places, very few women are at home during the day and even fewer women in their 20s have kids, so the Mormon ward becomes the hub of playgroups, babysitting co-ops, and other kinds of social interaction for young mothers," said Haglund. "The shared sense that what they are doing is righteous, as well as unpopular, gives meaning to long and tedious days with infants and toddlers, and provides company in what can be an excruciatingly lonely endeavor."

Labels: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, culture, motherhood, religion

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Labels: age at first marriage, Catholic Church, culture, Marriage, religion

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Bruce Boling will celebrate Easter Sunday this weekend among Southern Baptists, just as he did when he prayed at a tiny Kentucky church where his family filled half the pews.

After decades away from faith, "I slowly began to see what I was missing was the relationship with God that I could find in my church," says Boling, 45, settled in with a little Baptist congregation in Hendersonville, Tenn.

Lydia Scrafano's heart will again thrill to hear Catholic hymns sounding on a great pipe organ, just as she did as a child in Detroit.

"I missed it all. I missed taking communion with a priest. I missed the stained glass. I missed the Virgin Mary," says Scrafano, 55, who has reconnected with her faith through a Catholic church in Williamsburg, Va.

Like many Christians and Jews, Boling and Scrafano drifted — or marched — away from the religion of their childhood.

Then, unlike most, they came back.

And they came back to stay, not just to parachute in for the Easter celebration this Sunday or a Passover Seder meal Friday night — holidays fundamental to Christianity and Judaism.

According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, more than half of Americans say they've switched religions at least once, but just 9% of U.S. adults say they've returned to the pews, practices and prayers that shaped them.

They're not converts; they're reverts. And religious denominations are stepping up efforts to reclaim, re-energize — and sometimes re-educate — these fallen-away faithful.

Catholic churches are adding adult programs to focus on returnees who often fear their actions or choices will keep them from the sacraments, the essential rites of Catholicism. Evangelical churches steer reverts to group Bible studies to help them establish stronger religious roots.

Rabbis reach out person-to-person to young adults through a program called "Next Dor" (dor is Hebrew for generation). It's promoted by Synagogue 3000, a consortium of leaders from Reform and Conservative movements, the two largest branches of Judaism in the USA.

Several Catholic dioceses have reported post-Christmas or post-Easter attendance bumps after major advertising efforts, such as a "Catholics Come Home" media campaign launched in Phoenix in 2008.

The Archdiocese of Washington pushed to increase confessions during Lent — the 40 days preceding Easter — by opening church and chapel doors on Wednesday evenings. Their advertising slogan: "The Light is ON for You." Within five years, the campaign spread across the country as more bishops adapted the idea for their dioceses.

But are they staying?

Labels: Catholic Church, Christianity, culture, evangelical Protestantism, Judaism, religion

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