“Fr. Jape” has a long, rambling, at times snarky, critique of the new “chastity movement” among hip young evangelicals in the latest New Pantagruel. This, however, is a good point:
Much of the energy of the purity brigade is generated by the opposite notion—that it is the chaste, rather than the unchaste, who suffer. Thus, as opposed to their happy-go-lucky-rutting-round-the-clock counterparts, the chaste require “intentional communities,” as Winner makes it, for constant group therapy. Being consigned to a life cut off from human contact would entail suffering. But trying to avoid sin is hardship, not suffering. The idea that you are suffering is just your dirty “old man of sin” talking, as the Apostle names the bugger. You should want him to suffer and drop dead. His pain is your gain! But don’t try to make an epic tale out of it. In the history of the church, many people have truly suffered, but the struggle for chastity seems to rate as a particularly saintly, heroic enterprise only among the evangelicals and Jesus freaks—and only in recent decades. They need to grow up.
Now, at the risk of offering more information than readers care to have, I’m in no position to lecture others on the virtues of pre-marital chastity. But it does strike me that we’ve lowered our standards quite a bit when simply managing not to have sex is taken to be an exercise in heroic virtue!
A Thinking Reed 
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