Why virginity is not the gospel

Girls pledged their virginity and were given promise rings by their fathers, a placeholder for an engagement ring when their virginity would be promised to another man. Young women were taught that the most important thing they could offer their future husband was a body untouched by another male. Much has been written about the culture of shame and sexual ignorance that has resulted from such an emphasis on sexual purity. The harm caused is now so widely acknowledged that a once vocal proponent of the no-dating purity culture, Joshua Harris, has recently apologised and retracted his views and his book on the topic.

Shame, purity and sexual ignorance continue to haunt Christian communities around the globe. In Melbourne, I have encountered Christians who abstained from anything except holding hands until marriage, only to find that the leap from total abstinence to sex in one night was painful, awkward and sometimes traumatising. If you have been told something is shameful your whole life, it takes more than a wedding ceremony to shift to a sex-positive mindset.

Read more: How the 'extreme abstinence' of the purity movement created a sense of shame in evangelical women. This legacy entrenches hierarchical gender roles, can push sexual activity underground as something hidden or secret, and arguably inhibits healthy sexual development in young people. Similarly, it diminishes any robust theology of sin and, alarmingly, it can create dangerous conditions for those vulnerable to sexual predation.

These centuries of thinking about virginity, sex and sinfulness have led us a long way from the woman whose child Christians celebrate at Christmas. Somehow, a virginal young woman became used by men to support claims that sex equals sin. Yet, in the Christian tradition, Mary is best remembered as mother of God, prophet and faithful follower of Jesus. Sexual renunciation in the early Church had distinct meanings and motives that differentiate it from similar practices in other religions and philosophies.

For early Christians, the virginal ideal was a special way of life in which one dedicates oneself wholly and permanently to God and His kingdom, which was believed to be at hand. The Gospel message with its eschatological calling, and the new life in Christ with its transforming power, were the ultimate source of this remarkable phenomenon. In order to prove and demonstrate this thesis we started our study by the New Testament ch.

From these two sources we realized that the ideal of virginity was highly honored on eschatological and mystical bases; but it was not mandatory for all as a condition of salvation. Virginity was the fruit of the love of purity and chastity--a main feature of the new creation in Christ--not the outcome of any negative view of the body or sexuality, as in the apocryphal works and the heretical sects which we studied in ch. Since religious notions and practices can be better understood when compared and contrasted with similar notions and practices in other religions and philosophies, therefore we studied chastity and sexual renunciation in pagan and Jewish traditions ch.

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