Separating Sex From Marriage
In the modern detachment of sex, marriage, and the procreation and rearing of children from one another, one of the most obvious breakdowns is the separation of sex from marriage. For example, the briefest of comparisons between popular, prime time television shows of the 1950’s and 1960’s with those we saw by the 1980’s and 1990’s through today makes it clear that folk having sex outside of marriage is now widely considered to be normal, moral, and even necessary to good health. Think of I Love Lucy and My Three Sons versus Golden Girls and Friends. These days, many if not most parents invite this perspective into their living rooms and children’s lives without hesitation.
And what about those who at least try to pursue the old ideal of abstinence until marriage? Women like the protagonist in The Georgia Satellites’ well-known song: “No huggee, no kissee until I get a wedding ring…Don't hand me no lines and keep your hands to yourself.” Well, they are repressed, deviant, and more likely to be the object of ridicule and the butt of jokes than to be admired and held up as examples to others. Think Steve Carrell’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Or how many of you remember the CEO of the now-infamous adultery hook-up website Ashley Madison offering a one-million-dollar award to any woman who could get evangelical athlete Tim Tebow to give up his virginity outside of marriage? Or as Yahoo News put it, “the lucky lady who can prove she took his V-card”?
Much of this is the outcome of—indeed the true goal for many people involved in—the movements to expand contraception and abortion-on-demand that I tackled in my July 10 blog post. That is, their push to “free” sexually-active singles from the “threat” of pregnancy. The drive to separate sex from procreation was heavily fueled by the obsession with separating sex from marriage.
Today, in highly regarded national surveys such as the General Social Survey, about 90% of never-married men and women between the ages of 25 and 40 have had at least one sex partner in the past five years, and almost two-thirds of males and over one-third of women claim they have partnered with three or more people. The overwhelming majority of unmarried adults of both sexes have had at least two partners in the previous five years. Liberal beliefs about sex between unmarried adults mirror the behavior.
And, as I documented in my recent book After the Revolution, and both here and here at the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), and in Christianity Today and IFS articles I wrote about cohabitation among professing evangelicals, the latter are not far behind everyone else in either sexual beliefs or practices. Those who attend church regularly do markedly better, something that is also true among professing Catholics. But the degree to which even religiously active Catholics and Evangelicals have abandoned the tradition Christian sexual ethic restricting sexual activity to those in monogamous, heterosexual marriages is downright scary to those of us who still believe that Biblical teaching and historic doctrine and practice matter. And to any observant human beings willing to honestly acknowledge the terrible outcomes of all of this.
The days of sex before marriage for most folk only involving two people who at least believe they are heading for marriage, as was true as recently as the 1950’s in the U.S., are over. The CDC Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance (YRBS) survey of high school students reports that in 2021, 48% of American teens had engaged in sexual intercourse at some point prior to graduating high school (their confidence intervals place this within 46% and 51% nationally), with about 35% doing so before completing their junior year. The National Survey of Family Growth’s (NSFG) most recent survey (2017-19 inclusive) of never married respondents has over 60% having had sex by age 18, 67% by age 19, over 77% by ages 20 and 21, then by age 22, a whopping 82%.
The YRBS percentages had significantly declined in recent years, which is heartening. (NSFG is more of a mixed bag.) But decline or not, this a lot of sex among unmarried youth who are far too young to handle its consequences.
One sobering fact to consider. There is so much sex outside of marriage that, despite a society drenched in contraception and easily available abortion, 4 in 10 babies born today are out-of-wedlock. That percentage was less than 20% in 1980 and about 10% in 1970. Were we not told by sexual progressives that making contraception and abortion widely available would reduce this? Hasn’t worked out that way, has it?
With this, we also have a wholesale flight from marriage, delaying marriage to later and later ages, while the number of couples engaged in cohabitation continuously reaches new heights. This is obvious in the three graphs below. Warnings that normalizing and promoting sex outside of wedlock would weaken marriage were unheeded if not ridiculed. Sorry sexual progressives—on this point, conservatives were right, and you were wrong.
Of course, sexual activity outside of marriage also includes many forms of gratification other than intercourse, heterosexual and homosexual. I address the former in After the Revolution, and tackle hard data about beliefs and actions related to same-sex sexual relations here and here. And what are we to male of Teen Vogue’s infamous guide to “safely enjoying” anal sex for teens?
There is another type of separation of sex from marriage I will briefly mention before closing. That is the absence of procreative sex that is inherent to same-sex marriage. Marriage has historically been seen—legally, culturally, theologically—as something that is “consummated” by sexual intercourse, such that its complete absence has often been grounds for annulment; that is, the declaration that the union is not a true marriage. In places like England, such annulment regulations have actually been set aside for same-sex marriage, while remaining intact for opposite sex marriages. Why? There is no sexual counterpart of the procreative act available to gay couples, and annulment on grounds of failure to consummate through this procreative act is long rooted in common law, with heterosexuals unwilling to give up this basic, reasonable, and realistic ground for voiding a marriage. Something to think about.
Since the 1960’s sexual revolution, our society’s privileging of sex within marriage, and at least its ideal of abstinence until matrimony, has been completely abandoned. The professing church, rather than being “salt and light” on this issue, continues to yield ground to the sexual revolutionaries. We Christians seem to be content with being one step behind the world. Thankfully, the official teaching of Roman Catholics, as well as Evangelical denominations and churches, have mostly held firm. Ditto, from what I can tell, those of Eastern Orthodox churches (for example, see here). Those who are committed members of these churches continue to do much better, and therein lays the hope of a remnant people holding to God’s marital and sexual ethics. May we shore up our foundations, fix what is broken, and be truly counter-cultural in this vital area, despite increasing cultural and even legal opposition and ridicule.
