Distressed at the sexual permissiveness of modern American culture, the leaders of the Southern Baptist Church decided to launch a virginity pledge movement in 1993, challenging young people to make a formal vow to abstain from pre-marital sexual activity. Because of that movement, a remarkably large number of American adolescents (23% of females and 16% of males) have in the intervening years taken such a formal virginity pledge. The effects of this movement are naturally showing up in America's institutions of higher learning, with a recent survey of American college students finding that approximately one in six (16%) had taken a formal virginity pledge. Given all of the good that can come out of a rediscovery of chastity (fewer out-of-wedlock pregnancies, fewer cases of sexually transmitted diseases, more psychologically healthy adolescents and young adults), social scientists have good reason to regard the virginity-pledge movement as a very good thing. However, in a study recently published in The Journal of Adolescent Health, researchers at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation strain very hard-no doubt for ideological reasons-to view the success of the virginity-pledge movement in an astonishingly negative light!
Drawing on data collected over three years from 870 adolescents living in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas, the scholars look closely to identify those social, personal, and family characteristics that predict delayed sexual activity. Not surprisingly, adolescents are particularly likely to delay sexual activity if they come from religious families, if they have parents who disapprove of such activity, if they have friends who disapprove of such activity, if they believe that such activity will endanger their health, or if they believe that such activity will jeopardize their psychosocial well-being (p<0.01 for all five variables for both sexual intercourse and oral sex).
Likewise unsurprising are data showing that adolescents are distinctively less likely to engage in sexual activity if they have taken a formal virginity pledge (p<0.05 for sexual intercourse; p<0.01 for oral sex). The researchers further establish that adolescents are especially likely to remain sexually continent if they have made a private pledge of virginity, even when that private pledge is not accompanied by a formal public pledge-an important finding given that only a quarter (23%) of private pledgers have made a public pledge). Compared to peers who have made no such private pledge, adolescents who have made a private pledge to delay sexual activity are less than half as likely to engage in sexual intercourse (Odds Ratio of .43). This effect "persisted even [in statistical models] controlling for demographic and social variables" such as race, age, and other background characteristics.
"Adolescents who made a formal public pledge to wait until marriage to have sexual intercourse and/or made a [private] promise to wait until they were older or married to have sexual intercourse were less likely to have participated in oral sex and vaginal intercourse," the Pacific scholars acknowledge, "than adolescents who hadn't participated in a formal or non-formal [private] pledge." But for some reason, the researchers emphasize statistics showing that a formal virginity pledge does not affect sexual behavior if it is not accompanied by a private pledge.
It will not puzzle anyone that the researchers can see no distinctive self-restraint among those few adolescents who make a formal public virginity pledge without also making a private pledge. No one has ever expected much good to come out of dissembling. But given that the researchers' data show that "ninety-five percent of adolescents who had made a formal [virginity] pledge had also made a private pledge," the virginity-pledge movement is almost entirely a thing of real substance, not of feigned words.
Since the new study clearly identifies real private conviction in nineteen out of twenty adolescents who have made a formal and public virginity pledge, it may seem more than a little strange that the authors of the study focus on the very few adolescents (only one in twenty) who make a public virginity pledge without private substance and whose subsequent sexual behavior is indistinguishable from that of peers who have made no such pledge. But it is only this peculiar focus that can account for the researchers' overblown worries about how "formal pledges may...fail if adolescents are simply responding to external pressures (i.e., from parents, teachers) in making such commitments." Only such a peculiar focus can explain a conclusion in which the Pacific researchers warn that "the results of this study suggest that prevention programs that rely solely or even heavily on formal public virginity pledges may not be as effective as previously believed."
Given that formal virginity pledges appear quite efficacious except among the very few (five percent!) who take them without heartfelt private commitment, such negative commentary seems entirely unwarranted. This negative commentary appears to owe almost nothing to the available empirical data and almost everything to an ideological bias-common among progressive scholars-against anything even remotely tied to conservative religious faith.
Indeed, the same ideological bias that prompts the Pacific scholars to work so very hard to discredit formal vows of virginity is probably the reason that the researchers report with very little comment or emphasis a finding that is very damaging to a cause much more popular among progressive intellectuals than anything coming from Southern Baptists, namely, the cause of contraceptive education. In parsing the data, the researchers concede that "a positive association emerged between all three sexual behaviors [genital play, oral sex, and sexual intercourse]...and formal contraceptive education." Indeed, the researchers admit that "adolescents who received information on condoms were twice as likely to have participated in genital play, oral sex, and vaginal intercourse as those who had not received formal contraceptive education." (The researchers-probably chagrined by their findings-are eager to point out that, though persistent, the linkage between formal contraceptive education and heightened levels of sexual activity does not cross the threshold of statistical significance in multi-variable analyses that account for various social and psychological characteristics, including parents' attitudes toward teen sexual activity.)
The choice could hardly be clearer: Americans can either entrust their adolescent offspring to those who will teach them about pledges of virginity or they can entrust them to those who will instruct them in the mechanics of contraception. The outcomes in the lives of the young people affected will be dramatically different.
