Celibacy is the commitment to remain sexually chaste while not married.

If the movie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, is any indicator, celibacy gets a bad rap as if only prudes and social outcasts are virgins by age 40. Even in most churches, celibacy is treated like a second-tier gift of God. Virginity, it seems, is only cool until your mid-twenties, then it’s time to get that thing fixed. Preferably with marriage. Even on Sunday mornings many of us marrieds try to fix up our unmarried friends, as if their singleness bothers us.

The reason being that our church friends all live within a culture that celebrates what it calls “sexual freedom” as the ultimate lifetime achievement. (e.g. the February issue of “Esquire” essay “The Martyrs of Sex” by John H. Richardson). So when my thirty-year old virgin friend says he feels sexually frustrated he gets oddly coherent messages from both the world and the church.

“Wait,” says the church with an eye to snag the next available bachelorette.
“Go for it,” says the world.

Both the church and the world suggest that sex is ultimate for human flourishing.

Jesus never taught that.

My friend and co-writer at Soulation, Brandon Hoops and I have decided to put our heads together to discuss sex and singleness. Hoops has attended and served with churches for his entire life, he knows whereof he speaks when he talks about ‘church culture.’ I’ve put all of Hoops words in italics so you can easily follow our conversation.

Being single and dealing with sexual desire is a complicated and lonely journey. In the church, most sexual desire conversations begin and end with lust. I’ve gotten into a new small groups before, and I can tell from the leader that there will be intense pressure to talk about lust. Lust can become magnified as if it’s the only real issue. I remember one group would end by tentatively going at the lust/masterbation topic. Every time. It got wearisome.

I have a childhood memory of going to a church conference and doing one of those “head bowed and eyes closed” things where I tentatively raised my hand and committed my dirty, sex-crazed teenage mind to God. More guilt. These experiences shaped what I’ve come to call ‘sin management.” That management is what God is most interested in, that we manage our sin, in much the same way that the Pharisees worked hard to help the Israelites manage every area of their lives.

I’ve learned God wants more than good performance, he wants our whole selves.

But the virginity-narrative of Christian culture is that God is much more interested in sober, virginal teens (I am thankful to Lars Rood for this pithy description) than whole, human selves. The message ends up being: God wants us to wait, not God wants us to become more fully human. Can you recall all those reasons we were told to wait?

Most of those reasons were punishment driven. Wait to have sex because if you don’t you’ll suffer the consequences: STDs, pregnancy, lack of intimacy later, hell, fear of infidelity later, shame, displeasing God. Or the simple one: you’ll just feel bad. But is the threat of consequences really the best motivating factor.

So then someone has sex and doesn’t feel bad or doesn’t get pregnant or get an STD or has a raucous time and a wonderful marriage and where does that leave these peeps? confused, angry. If anything they’ll feel lied to.

Fear works, but it’s a bit off from the motivation in 1 John, “Perfect love casts out fear.” So what kind of love motivation can you give people who want to keep their sex life and their marriage life in sync?

You can start with simple value for your private parts and where they go, what they do as a way to maintain personal health. I’ve been helped by thinking about the verse, “You were bought at a price therefore honor God with your body” (1 Cor 6:20). I think of a child of a single mother who works three jobs and wears herself out so that she can send her kid to college. That kid knowing his mom’s sacrifice and effort, hopefully, will go off to college eager to put forth an effort to honor her. He won’t treat her gift lightly. I think the same applies to our sexuality.

As I’ve written about before, sanctity, celibacy, holiness all require setting something apart. In celibacy you set apart your sexual appetite. Celibacy means you face your hunger for sex as if you trusted that God called this hunger good. It’s not just the satiation that’s good, but the actual hunger. In many ways the hunger must be faced, not simply squashed. In fact, just as a fasting person knows the power of food, so a virgin knows the power of sex. There’s a reason Madonna wrote that song “Like a Virgin”. Virgins are hardly sexless humans. Maybe the current “born-again-Virgin
Bachelor” is enough proof.

I like the metaphor for language learning, too. With my sex life, my husband and I have developed 11 years of sexual vocabulary. Celibates are choosing to wait to take Sex 101 with the person they’ve committed to for life. This makes them unversed in orgasmic descriptions or new techniques, but they’re quite aware of the power, the delicious attraction and growing hunger of sexual desire.

In Part 2, Hoops and I will talk about why it’s hard to be a virgin today, how to combine waiting and sexual desire and what sexual stewardship means for a married and a single person.