Evangelical Teens and Sex

Hanna Rosin reviews Mark Regnerus’s book Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers and discusses why “evangelical” teens are the most likely to engage in premarital sex.

Teenagers who identify as “evangelical” or “born again” . . . think sex should be saved for marriage. But thinking is not the same as doing. Evangelical teens are actually more likely to have lost their virginity than either mainline Protestants or Catholics. They tend to lose their virginity at a slightly younger age—16.3, compared with 16.7 for the other two faiths. And they are much more likely to have had three or more sexual partners by age 17: Regnerus reports that 13.7 percent of evangelicals have, compared with 8.9 percent for mainline Protestants.

How is that possible? What happened to all those happy, young Christian couples from the ’90s swearing that True Love Waits? Partly, the problem lies in the definition of evangelical. Because of the explosion of megachurches, vast numbers of people who don’t identify with mainstream denominations now call themselves evangelical. The demographic includes more teenagers of a lower socioeconomic class, who are more likely to have had sex at a younger age. It also includes African-American Protestant teenagers, who are vastly more likely to be sexually active.

. . .

Abstinence pledgers are considerably less likely than nonpledgers to use birth control the first time they have sex. “It just sort of happened,” one girl told the researchers, in what could be a motto for this generation of evangelical teens.

. . .

Among the mass of typically promiscuous teenagers in the book, one group stands out: the 16 percent of American teens who describe religion as “extremely important” in their lives.

Read the whole review at Slate.

See also:

• WorldMagBlog: True Love Waits (an extra 18 months)
• CT Blog: Sexy Evangelical Teens

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