Reading through all the Pope stuff last week I came across this slightly jarring observation:

Leading Italian sociologist Professor Franco Ferrarotti doesn’t think the Pope’s influence on the young is deep or will last. ‘My field workers tell me young people don’t really follow his advice,’ he says. ‘They use contraceptives. They cheer him, they love it when he talks to them about chastity, then the next thing they go to bed together. It’s a kind of schizophrenia.’ (James Button ‘How a childless man was Papa to millions’, Melbourne Age, 9 Apr. 2005)

Large numbers of conservative religious youth throughout the world seem to hold similar attitudes. They feel some sort of intellectual loyalty to the teachings of their religion, but many of them don’t let this get in the way of an active pre-marital sex life.

Several books about Christian fundamentalist environments discuss this phenomenon, often at some length. Alan Peshkin (1986) in God’s Choice: The Total World of a Fundamentalist Christian School (University of Chicago Press) quotes this school’s headmaster as telling his staff that ‘God has allowed us the privilege of snatching precious young people from Satan’s clutches’ (97). Girls wear dresses, boys have short hair. The students are inundated with fundamentalist rhetoric, Bible study, creation science - you name it. The school has a discipline policy that would send most Australian students and their parents running for the door.

Some kids swallow the fundamentalist ideas whole, but just as many others seem to ignore most of them. They watch risque TV shows, they joke about dope, they are avid rock music fans, they show each other sexy magazines. There’s graffiti in the toilets. There are some pregnancies. Students know a lot of their peers are smoking, drinking and petting. A Year 11 tells her class that she’s been kissed and ‘likes frenching’, much to her teacher’s amusement (207). A senior girl, strongly evangelical, bewails the tendency of other girls to unbutton their shirts ‘way down’, although some do ask her to pray for them so as ‘to keep the lust out of [their] minds’ (198). Most intriguing of all, many of this girl’s friends pray that Jesus will delay his return (i.e. delay the introduction of God’s kingdom on earth!) until after they have married, had children and generally enjoyed what this life has to offer.

In interviews Peshkin conducted with teachers and students, he found that 62% of the staff sometimes watched ‘non-encouraged’ movies and that ‘no teacher or administrator [was] uniformly, consistently orthodox in behaviour’ (171-2). As for the students, although they had ‘largely internalised’ the norms of their institution, a mere 29 per cent of them followed school-expected behaviour when it came to dating (183).

Christian friends have remarked to me that these sorts of observations also hold true for Australia. One man, who was very devout when younger, told me he could never understand why the majority of his youth group seemed to live classic ‘Sunday Christian’ existences: ‘They were as holy as you like right through the Sabbath, but the rest of the week they were just like ordinary teenagers. On Friday and Saturday especially, you saw them drinking, smoking, going to rock dances. They swore, they told dirty jokes, they slept with their girlfriends and boyfriends. There were several pregnancies and about an equal number of quiet abortions.’

Are the corrosive processes of Western secularisation responsible for this apparent schizophrenia, or have things always been like this? You tell me.

Filed in: Fundamentalism, Sexuality