Catholics, Evangelicals, and Sexual “Purity”

Last updated on: April 21, 2016 at 5:00 am by Libby Anne

Catholics, Evangelicals, and Sexual “Purity” 2016-04-20T14:32:22-04:00 Libby Anne

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Yesterday I posted an email from a reader about a speaker at her Catholic high school. I spent some time dissecting a number of the things this reader reported that the speaker said, and spoke briefly about the differences and similarities in evangelical and Catholic teachings about sex, purity, and marriage. Today I want to get into these differences in a bit more depth and look a bit further at this particular speaker—Jason Evert—and his organization.

Jason Evert has an MA in theology and is a speaker for the Chastity Project. The Chastity Project website has no “about” section, so I’m having trouble finding out anything about it except that it is a ministry of a Catholic nonprofit organization, Stewardship: A Mission of Faith. Evert is himself the author of the book How To Find Your Soulmate without Losing Your Soul, which on first glance looks very similar to evangelical Josh Harris’s book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. But that doesn’t mean the Chastity Project necessarily approaches the issue identically to the way evangelicals do.

Take a look at this from the Chastity Project’s FAQ section:

Abstinence means that a person is not sexually active. If I heard that a guy was abstinent, that would not tell me much about him. Maybe he is a man with courage and character and is saving himself for his bride. Maybe he just cannot find a date. Either way, abstinence is defined as what a person is not doing—in other words, no sex.

Chastity is different because it is defined by what a person is doing with his or her sexuality. It means having the strength to use your sexuality according to God’s plan, whether you are single or married. Living this virtue purifies your heart, heals your memories, strengthens your will, and glorifies God with your body. For an unmarried person it means saving marital intimacies for marriage. As one woman said, ‘‘It is sexuality dedicated to hope.”

For the married and the unmarried, it means having reverence for the gift of sex. Chastity is a virtue that defends love from selfishness and frees us from using others as objects. It makes us capable of authentic love. In short, abstinence ends in marriage but chastity holds marriage together.

Evangelicals tend to focus on waiting and then having. It’s all no, no, no, and then all yes, yes, yes. Catholics try to create a more wholistic framework. Unfortunately, while their rhetoric on what comes before marriage can sound more positive than its evangelical counterpart—as an evangelical, I never heard abstinence before marriage framed as actively using your sexuality for God in the present—it is coupled with a greater control of what is permissible after marriage. Any sex that is not procreative in nature—oral or anal sex, for instance—is off limits. Not so for evangelicals.

And then there’s the whole birth control thing. Because yes, the Chastity Project comes out directly against every form of contraception except Natural Family Planning. Evangelicals have a more varied position on birth control. They tend to be completely against the use of birth control before marriage—for obvious reasons—and more ambivalent about it after marriage. An increasing number of evangelicals are against birth control forms that they believe are “abortifacient” and many other evangelicals worry that couples may use birth control to put off childbearing for longer than God might intend. However, that’s usually as far as they go.

While evangelicals are a bit ambivalent and situational about birth control, Catholic doctrine is not. According to the Catholic catechism, sex between a man and a woman must be both unitive and procreative. Evangelicals, in contrast, tend to be okay with sex being merely unitive.

I once noted that evangelicals tend to divide sex into two boxes—that which is marital and therefore acceptable, and that which is extramarital and therefore not acceptable. I noted this while also noting that feminists also tend to divide sex into two boxes, albeit different ones—that which is consensual and therefore acceptable, and that which is nonconsensual and therefore not acceptable. What about Catholics? Their boxes are different. There acceptable and moral sex box does necessitate marriage (that’s required for the “unitive” part), but it doesn’t stop there—sex must also be procreative for it to be moral.

One more thing to note before I wrap up. Catholics have a tradition of religious vocations that require celibacy, i.e. those of priests, monks, and nuns. Protestants, including evangelicals, do not have this. In contrast to Catholics, evangelicals don’t have much of a role or place for single individuals within their church communities, or a history of such figures. This means that those who are single and abstinent are universally viewed as simply waiting to be married. Abstinence is perceived a state of lacking—a state of waiting—and little more. Catholics, though, have histories of saints and well-known religious leaders who remained celibate their entire lives while serving God. Simply having this history means that being single and abstinent may not be seen so squarely as lacking and waiting. For Catholics, sex is not necessary for wholeness, chastity is—and that applies in every stage of life.

To be fair, the Catholic leadership has been struggling with how to approach singleness themselves as the number of single Catholics not interested in religious vocations has grown. I remember being at a meeting at my university’s Newman Center while in college, when one student asked the priest leading a study group whether being single could be a vocation in and of itself. He explained that he felt called to be single, but not a priest. The answer he was given was no, there is no such vocation. One must either marry or take up a religious vocation by becoming a priest, monk, or nun. That priest, though, had rather stirred up the parish as a hardliner, and other priests would answer differently. It’s a bit of an ongoing conundrum within the Catholic Church.

In the end, I would point to two primary differences between evangelical and Catholic teachings on sexual purity, one positive and one negative. First, the focus on chastity rather than abstinence, combined with a history of powerful celibate role models (both male and female), can give the Catholic approach to sex before marriage a more positive spin than the evangelical approach. Second, though, Catholics extend their efforts to control when and how and who has sex beyond marriage, requiring marital sex to be both unitive and procreative for it to be judged morally permissible. The evangelical approach to preventing sex before marriage may be more negative than the Catholic approach, but at least evangelicals take the hands off once a couple is married and leave them to themselves.

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