Conservatism teaches that individuals are not inherently good and so must be carefully civilized.
Michael Gerson, former Bush speechwriter and conservative/religious shill. This is from a column in the WaPo entitled “The Kind of Village it Takes.” Takes to what? you may find yourself asking.
To be honest, I’ve read the article, and I can’t be entirely sure. Except that it has to do with teenagers having sex. Specifically, evangelical teenagers, and how Michael Gerson wants everyone to just stop saying that they have sex just like any other teenagers, and that being Right With Gawd doesn’t stop them from having sex any earlier than their “mainline Protestant” peers:
Recent books and studies seem to indicate disturbing sexual trends among evangelical Christians. And this time we’re not talking about their pastors or political leaders. The new attention is on evangelical teenagers, who reportedly start sex earlier than their mainline Protestant peers.
One gleeful headline on an Internet site recently read: “Evangelical Girls Are Easy.” That is not the way I remember it.
What is this? Rashomon?
I dunno, Michael, maybe it was just that you weren’t getting any. And that your peers who were maybe didn’t want to confide in you, because they suspected you might do something squirrelly like rat them out to their pastors. Just a guess.
After being confronted with that little factoid, Michael consults a social scientist, who assures him that it’s much more complicated than the “sniggering media” reporting showing evangelical kids have sex at the same age as their non-evangelical peers.
My, isn’t that interesting. A conservative embracing nuance when it serves his purpose.
Michael is quite relieved to find out that “intensely” religious kids put out a few months later on average than their less-intense evangelical peers and the irreligious mainline scum, meaning all that tithing has paid off:
When the statistics on teen sexuality are controlled for social and economic factors, conservative Protestant teens first have sex at about the same time as their peers — the average is midway through their 16th year. That is hardly comforting to conservative Protestant parents, who would expect more bang for the bucks they spend funding Sunday schools — well, actually, less bang.
But these numbers shift when controlled for religious intensity. For those who attend church often, sexual activity is delayed until nearly 17, while nominal evangelicals begin at 16.2 years, earlier than the national average.
So, really, the “nominal” (and what a nice way to distance yourself from these results) evangelicals put out earlier than the non-evangelicals, and the “intense” evangelicals put out later. Which, I’m sure, when averaged together, gets you right back to the beginning: evangelism is no cure for teenage sexuality. But still, speaking in tongues and snake-handling and believing in literal demons only buys you about 9 months over the rest of the WWJD crowd.
But that’s inconvenient! So Gerson pulls out a bunch of statistics about cohabitation and children out of wedlock that really have nothing to do with teenagers having sex, but everything to do with making the uncomfortable fact that evangelical kids fuck, too, a little less uncomfortable. Oh, and have we directly bashed liberals yet? We have not! So, back to Michael:
These messages of responsibility are often reinforced by tightknit religious communities, but they are not owned by them. Wilcox notes that American liberal elites often “talk left and walk right, living disciplined lives and expecting their children to do the same, even when they hold liberal social views.” Divorce rates among college-educated Americans, [Sociologist Peter Berger] points out, have fallen since the 1980s, as it became more evident that casual divorce did not serve the long-term interests of their children.*
Because they can’t really be liberals if they do moral things! They can’t really be liberals if they lead disciplined lives and give their children the tools to do the same things!
Kind of a problem he has with the “live and let live” concept, isn’t it? But then, this is the guy who also has trouble with the idea that atheists can have a moral framework when they don’t have an angry invisible friend threatening them with eternal torment if they fart the wrong way.
Now, he does recognize that support networks are crucial for influencing behaviors, and he does recognize that kids who have goals and ambitions are less likely to get sidetracked by early pregnancy. And he even recognizes that abstinence-only sex miseducation doesn’t automatically confer any sort of protection against having sex. But his solution — to the extent he offers one — just seems to be more of the same; more intense and tight “moral” networks, more rigidity. Heaven forfend he might concede that those socially-liberal parents who give their kids accurate information and the tools to make good choices might have something there.
H/T: Thers.
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* Actually, my understanding of the reason for falling divorce rates among college-educated Americans has to do with the fact that they tend to marry later than non-college-educated Americans, and not just because they want to have sex. Though the real statistic he should be looking at is the divorce rate among evangelicals as opposed to other groups. But I’m guessing that wouldn’t have worked out well for him.
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