Abstain from your brain
There really is nothing like “a Christian model of values” or “biblical thinking on love, sex and marriage” to set the alarm bells ringing, is there?
Both are on offer to impressionable teenagers from a group of Christian evangelical groups in Ireland’s homegrown Bible Belt, Norn Iron and further afield in the less overtly crazy parts of the island. Seems it’s another example of Ireland catching religious flu sneezed across the Atlantic from the American evangelical movement.
One – Live for Life, seems to tout itself as being “abstinence-centred” rather than “abstinence-only”, which, on the face of it, sounds not-unreasonable. However, LfL seem to have some strange bedfellows:
Together with Evangelical Alliance, Love for Life is also one of the key organisers of a conference, Not Just a One Night Stand, being held today at a Presbyterian church in east Belfast. Timed to coincide with Marriage Week, the one-day event is open to all “16 to [unmarried] 30 somethings”, attending as individuals or couples. It’s designed to promote “biblical thinking on love, sex and marriage”, and, according to Mark, “to help young people connect their faith with their sexuality”.
Among the speakers will be Jonathan Berry, who says that he was previously involved in a long-term gay relationship from the age of 17 to 24, before converting to Christianity. Berry, who now describes himself as “a contented single”, is director of a UK-wide ministry called True Freedom Trust, which seeks to “support people saved out of a gay lifestyle, and those already in the church who struggle with same-sex attractions”.
Ah – praying away the Gay – funny how it always seems to come down to that with evangelicals. It’s never Praying Away Mixed Fibres or Christians against Crustaceans. Nope, if there’s one thing those evangelicals (and, amazingly enough, their god), love to hate, it’s the Gay.
Of course, claiming that their conference supports a biblical thinking on sex is a bit of false advertising if all they’re doing is “saving people out of a gay lifestyle”. The Bible is pretty clear in its thinking on homosexuality and unequivocally comes out in favour a lynch-mob-centered rather than support-group-centred approach.
In fact, using the Bible as an exemplar for thinking on love, sex and marriage is frankly, nuts. Can you imagine the moral outrage if someone promoted the moral values of a book other than the Bible that featured daughters getting their father drunk so they can sleep with them, fathers cursing their sons because they accidentally catch sight of them in the nip or men fathering children with their domestic help (though the last one does explain the behaviour of a lot of evangelical politicians…and John Edwards). And that’s just the first book!
It also seems that LfL’s abstinence centred approach might be a little light on that number two and three sources of Baby Jesus tears (after the Gay): abortion and contraception.
“It seems to me that they are shying away from the realities of teenage life,” according to Katy Morgan, the mother of a 15-year-old girl. “I’d prefer my daughter to receive neutral, pragmatic teaching, including how to use contraception effectively and sensibly. For all the talk of choice and inclusivity, there’s a lot of unspoken values going on here.”
It’s true that icebergsandbabies.org.uk, the dedicated website set up by Love for Life, acknowledges that there are three options for a young woman experiencing a crisis pregnancy – to keep the baby, to have it adopted or to have an abortion – none of which, it advises, are easy paths to take. But all the organisations recommended for further help and support on the site appear to be either Christian, anti-abortion or both.
Which possibly explains this example of Caps Lock thinking on the part of a nominal responsible grown adult:
“Recently I had a conversation with a headmistress who asked me why in this day and age, when contraception is widely available, so many young women become pregnant. When I asked her if she taught all methods of contraception in her school she admitted that they only taught natural methods. She failed to see the correlation.”
Who knew that abstinence -only education seems to cover thinking as well as sex.











