Adelle M. Banks of the Religion News Service wrote today that doubt is growing among evangelicals over the cost of abstinence-only education.
Banks cites admissions from the National Association of Evangelicals that:
- 80 percent of young evangelicals have engaged in premarital sex
- almost a third of evangelicals’ unplanned pregnancies end in abortion
- evangelicals face a “15-year gap between the average onset of puberty and the average age of marriage” during which their ideologues have absolutely prohibited all sexual activity
In two recent conferences, a video, and a pastor information packet, the NAE is reportedly opening discussion — but not endorsement — of alternatives to abstinence.
If that shift is having an impact, it’s not apparent among evangelicals’ choice of elected officials. Wisconsin, Tennessee, Utah, and North Dakota are just a few of the states where Republican-controlled legislatures have recently proposed bills or passed laws to suppress comprehensive sex education and subsidize abstinence-only education programs which foster ignorance toward alternatives.
Nor is any shift evident among the leadership of the Christian Right. Focus on the Family glamorizes abstinence and employs scare tactics about sex instead of facts about practical alternatives to total abstinence. Instead of conceding to strong evidence that abstinence-only education fails to deter risky sexual activity, the Family Research Council contends that such adverse research merely proves the federal government should throw even more taxpayer money, not less, at religious special interests seeking to indoctrinate public-school students. Last month, FRC and the American Family Association got even loopier, misrepresenting research to claim that chastity somehow improves math scores. FRC has a history of miscasting the entire topic of abstinence as an issue for young teen-agers, when in fact the abstinence-only ideology mandates celibacy until an average marriage age of 30.
Moderates in the National Association of Evangelicals — especially families who have suffered premature marriages, pregnancies, and abortions that were prompted by abstinence-only ideology — may long for honest and frank discussion. But so long as they lack the ocean of corporate, super-PAC, and talk-radio money that keeps the Christian Right alliance afloat, they may find it difficult to make their voices heard where it counts.
My understanding has been that higher religiosity correlates with marrying at younger ages – presumably so that they can engage in guilt-free sex. So, it’s no surprise that their divorce rates are so high.
It’s ironic that the primary effect of “pro-family” ideology is to retard the formation of viable families while actually encouraging the formation of families with below-average chances of survival. And, married or not, they insist that all pregnancies result in births, regardless of the parents’ economic, emotional, or intellectual qualifications for raising children, and/or their desire to do so.
But another one of my understandings is that people with troubled family lives gravitate more strongly towards religion. So, the troubled families created by “pro-family” ideology are actually a big win for the religion numbers game. Religious power brokers don’t really care if their adherents are poor or rich, miserable or happy, powerless or powerful, or if families are dysfunctional or thriving, just as long as they adhere. If they are poor, miserable, powerless, or dysfunctional, religion offers them solace. If they are rich, happy, powerful, or thriving, religion offers them assurance that God wants them to be.
And those rich and powerful adherents also help perpetuate the religious industry and provide “role models” for the poorer wannabes. Within christianity, its easily demonstrated by the fact that the diatribes by Jesus against the rich are almost universally ignored or rationalized away to give the rich a free pass to keep financing things like anti-LGBT and anti-women political schemes.
And to keep the clergy well-fed.
I like the way they pat themselves on the back for so often having achieved their stated goal of only teaching abstinence in schools. Yet, at the same time, any conscious person knows damned well that you are not going to stop the young people from having sex. THAT will never happen. So pat away you idiots ’cause you ain’t gettin’ nowhere. :)
I would suggest not making the mistake of thinking that most of that super pac money comes from people who actually support the Christian Right world view. A great deal of it comes from the hard secular Right.
Coors, Smith, Mellon-Scaife, the Kochs, and many others who give heavily to super pacs that influence the Right of Christianity are certainly to the Right, but they are Christians in name only. People like Adelson aren’t even Christian in name.
The Right wing churches calm the potential turbulence of the common citizen as more and more money (capital) migrates upward to the top 1%. Today more wealth is held by the very top than at anytime in America’s history except the brief “gilded age” – and some studies indicate that the disharmony may now be worse than it was then.
It is the desire of those in charge that people be so caught up in something that keeps them quiet that they need not fear for their own positions of power. Religion is convenient for that goal. As one of George W. Bush’s appointees later told the media, even Bush didn’t REALLY care if two men wanted to marry each other. Which implies that his public position was to keep the evangelicals happy.
I seriously think that if the Religious Right was not convenient for certain ruling elites they would have been eliminated years ago. On the other hand, if you aren’t careful extremist religious groups get a mind of their own and even take real power. Witness Iran where it was an alliance of business people and imams who overthrew the Shah — before the religious part of the coalition eliminated the business people too. I often wonder how many GOP elites remember that.
Reyn