(Also posted on Jesus Manifesto)

Last night I caught part of a british made documentary on TLC about the Purity movement &amp; "Purity Balls" where girls as young as 9 or 10 pledge to abstain from sex before marriage in a public ceremony with their fathers. It was kind of creepy. In the interviews with the families it appeared to me that many of the parents had regrets about their own past actions &amp; were trying to impose an ideal of "purity" on their children as a result. There was also an interview with a young woman who was raised in the Purity movement, did &amp; said all the right things, &amp; yet still wound up pregnant by her first boyfriend, who was also in the movement. She's now somewhat estranged from her parents and still dealing with her feelings of guilt &amp; shame.

I recently finished reading The Body And Society by Peter Brown. It's a dense history of sexual renunciation in early Christianity by a Princeton historian, &amp; well worth the effort. What I found interesting was that the sexual ethics of christian communities in the Roman Empire took many forms in different contexts. Some communities married their young people off as soon as possible as a way of keeping their sexual behavior within acceptable ethical limits. In some communities, virginity was an idealized state imbued with spiritual glamour. Some communities had problems develop when married women declared themselves widows after baptism, even though their husbands were still alive. Marriage in the Roman Empire was usually arranged, and "family values" were viewed as the backbone of the empire. A young woman could be prosecuted for refusing to marry. A good example of this can be found in the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla.

It seems to me that the Purity movement is a form of fundamentalist reaction to our lack of community in fragmented postmodern America. It is an attempt to impose the restraints that would exist naturally in a village or a tight ethnic community. As such it tends to come off as bright &amp; shiny evangelical fascism.

The problem I have with most of the debate about sexuality in this country is that it's simplistic. I'm sorry, but sex is complicated. It's not a problem to be solved by imposing vows of chastity on prepubescent girls or passing ballot measures against gay marriage. (That's a whole different can of worms.)

I did like Lauren Winner's book Real Sex, mostly because of her honesty, but felt it could have been more encompassing. Drawing on Wendell Berry, she primarily makes the point that sexual ethics are determined by community. As we live in a society where community bonds have been eroded by technology &amp; media, the question arises: How do we find &amp; form community?

peace
joseph