Thursday, August 8, 2024 | Trey Comstock
My squishy, mainline, United Methodist upbringing shielded me from the worst excesses of a graceless God. However, life in the early 2000s made purity culture unavoidable. At its core, purity culture attempts to scare and guilt young people, particularly young women, into not having sex before marriage with vague or explicit threats of judgement from your family, future spouse, and God. The version that I received never stated that God would no longer love me if I had premarital sex but did overtly state that it was one rule that God really expected me to follow. I may not have risked full wrath, but I certainly risked a specific form of divine disappointment if I went too far with a young lady.
Now, the actual Bible shows greater ambivalence around the whole issue. Paul, in particular, definitely links sex and marriage, but one senses that infidelity poses the greater concern. Still, he writes to the Corinthians that sex and marriage go together. “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practising self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.” (1 Corinthians 7:8-9 NRSV) In pervious chapter, he also talks about sexual intercourse making two people one flesh, and thus, it matters who one becomes one flesh with. So, yes, the New Testament definitely sees sex as belonging within marriage, so any sex outside of marriage – premarital or adulterous – goes against God’s ideal plan for our lives. However, one has to assemble this through only sidelong mentions. Paul says a ton about sexual immorality and infidelity and little about hormone fueled teens. Purity culture makes the rhetorical choice to connect all the material about sexual immorality and with premarital sex, but Paul never clearly makes that leap.
Paul, Jesus, and John, who account for the vast majority of the words and thoughts of the New Testament, each give strong voice to the forgivability of even horrific acts. As Jesus hangs, dying painfully, on the cross, he forgives his killers, “Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’]] And they cast lots to divide his clothing.” (Luke 23:34 NRSV) If unjustly killing the Son of God in tortuous fashion receives forgiveness, losing one’s virginity in a moment of lapse before your prefrontal cortex has complete formed is certainly capable of receiving forgiveness. Purity culture holds up premarital sex as this special class of particularly scary sin, but Jesus, Paul, nor God ever said that. God’s grace remains God’s grace.
The fear that God will somehow reject the nonvirgin prevents us from having a sane, Christian conversation about why one should wait until maturity and marriage before having sex. Sex has the ability to mess up your life and the lives of others. The bonding chemicals involved in sexual intercourse can alter the brain in profound ways. Pregnancy, the scare of a potential pregnancy, weighing a potential abortion, all open up one to trauma – no matter one’s age. It’s one of the first places where teens start playing for keeps and can do permanent harm to themselves or another person. God won’t hate you. God will always forgive you. Having casual sex as a teenager doesn’t put you on a slip and slide to damnation, but sex, when misused can do profound harm to another person. If we seek to answer a call to love our neighbors, not opening them up to harm constitutes a decent step in that direction.
In 2 Samuel 18, God doesn’t hate David. Back in 2 Samuel 12, the Prophet Nathan, offers David a piece of absolution. David still sits on the throne as God’s anointed. However, David has sinned, and the ripple effects of those actions come home to roost. First, the king has his way with Bathsheba and kills Uriah – complicating the family and setting a poor example. Then, when David’s first son, Amnon rapes his sister, Tamar, David lets it go. “When King David heard of all these things, he became very angry, but he would not punish his son Amnon, because he loved him, for he was his firstborn. But Absalom spoke to Amnon neither good nor bad; for Absalom hated Amnon, because he had raped his sister Tamar.” (2 Samuel 13:21-22 NRSV) Absalom takes matters into his own hands, kills Amnon, and sets out on a collision course with his father – creating an open military rebellion against David. This rebellion resolves in 2 Samuel 18 with the death of Absalom and David’s mourning.
David doesn’t lose his relationship with God in this. At the end of his life, in 2 Samuel 23, David ends, much as he began, praising God. His actions still carried heavy consequences for the people around him – two sons dead, and a daughter devastated. David doesn’t carry all the blame for this, but his actions and failures to act contributed. He caused harm. God did not reject him.
When we construct a graceless God, where we follow the rules as best we can or risk the hell fires, we miss the point. According to the Kinsey Institute, a major pillar of research into sexual and reproductive health, the average age of sexual initiation in the US is 16.8 years of men and 17.2 years for women. While the US Census Bureau reports that the average age of marriage is 30.5 years for men and 28.6 years for women. If we construct a false Christianity where God has special wrath for unmarried, nonvirgins, God apparently has special wrath for the majority of the adult population under the age of 28. We rob God of God’s power to meet people wherever their actions have landed them.
We strive to meet God standards not out of fear of divine rejection but out of love, a desire to avoid inflicting harm. Martin Luther frames salvation as an opportunity to be set free to do good works. John Wesley links justification, a clearing of your ledger with God, with regeneration, an opportunity actual begin loving. With God’s help, we can live differently, show more love, and do less harm.
If you still want a relationship with God, God’s right there to meet you in whatever pitch you crashed into. It doesn’t matter if you had premarital sex, ruined the life of your family with deadly consequences, killed God’s son, or anything else in between. God will love us, so that, in time, we can learn to do the same.