No, that headline didn’t come from The Onion (or Lark News ) but from this Fox News story on how—are you ready for this?—some evangelicals are encouraging young people to marry . Despite the eye-rolling headline and being thirty years late in noticing the “evangelicals are pushing kids to get married” trend, the article itself is rather fair and balanced. Indeed, it may actually be informative for people who live in areas where Christian views on sexual morality are considered strange and impractical (i.e., America). Excerpt:
When Margie and Stephen Zumbrun were battling the urge to have premarital sex, a pastor counseled them to control themselves. The couple signed a purity covenant.
Then, when the two got engaged and Margie went wedding dress shopping, a salesperson called her “the bride who looks like she’s 12.” Nonchurch friends said that, at 22, she was rushing things.
The agonizing message to a young Christian couple in love: Sex can wait, but so can marriage.
“It’s unreasonable to say, ‘Don’t do anything . . . and wait until you have degrees and you’re in your 30s to get married,’” said Margie Zumbrun, who did wait for sex, and married Stephen fresh out of Purdue University. “I think that’s just inviting people to have sex and feel like they’re bad people for doing it.”
Against that backdrop, a number of evangelicals are promoting marrying earlier, nudging young adults toward the altar even as many of their peers and parents are holding them back.
Couples like the Zumbruns are caught between two powerful forces — evangelical Christianity’s abstinence culture, with its chastity balls and virginity pledges, and societal forces pushing average marriage ages deeper into the 20s.
Granted, the chastity balls and virginity pledges are predominately found in evangelical circles. But when did abstinence and chastity become practices associated exclusively with evangelicals? Does the media think that other conservative Christians have abandoned sexual ethics? I always thought that the Catholic Church owned this issue. How did it become an evangelical thing?
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