Ron Sider again, this time on Christians and Sexual ethics...(HT: Brad Hightower who is in the middle of a thoughtful look at hypocrisy and the issues resulting from non-discipleship):
"True Love Waits, a program sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention, is one of the most famous evangelical efforts to reduce premarital sexual activity among our youth. Since 1993, about 2.4 million young people have signed a pledge to wait until marriage to engage in sexual intercourse. Are these young evangelicals keeping their pledges? In March 2004, researchers from Columbia University and Yale University reported on their findings. For seven years they studied 12 thousand teenagers who took the pledge. Sadly, they found that 88 percent of these pledgers reported having sexual intercourse before marriage; just 12 percent kept their promise. The researchers also found that the rates for having sexually transmitted diseases "were almost identical for the teenagers who took pledges and those who did not."
It is because of statistics like this, (and those about tithing, lying, divorce, domestic violence and so on) and the cynicism that they inspire about Christians that I wrote Showtime:Living Down Hypocrisy by Living Out the Faith. I really want to encourage more small groups of Christians to consider how desperately we need to live out the faith we confess.
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