{"id":447,"date":"2006-12-21T16:55:34","date_gmt":"2006-12-21T14:55:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/2006\/12\/21\/everyones-doing-it\/"},"modified":"2006-12-21T16:55:34","modified_gmt":"2006-12-21T14:55:34","slug":"everyones-doing-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/2006\/12\/21\/everyones-doing-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Everyone&#039;s Doing It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, almost everyone, and that&#8217;s not an exaggeration.&nbsp; A new study, published by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/news\/health\/2006-12-19-premarital-sex_x.htm\">USA Today<\/a>, interviewed about 40,000 people and they found that 95% had sex before marriage.&nbsp; That&#8217;s 19 out of 20.&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>The study is being used by some to attack government-funded abstinence programs.&nbsp; One expert says that these face an &#8220;extremely high hurdle. \u2026 Is it really feasible to make it normative behavior to have everyone wait until they&#8217;re married to have sex?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I think there are some things that need to be considered in light of this:<\/p>\n<p>1. To what degree should the <em>government<\/em> be involved in promoting abstinence?&nbsp; Does anyone think that the <em>government<\/em> can make a compelling enough case for abstinence to have success in teaching it (and thus to justify the expenditure)?<\/p>\n<p>2. How should churches (and Christian schools) address this issue?&nbsp; How aggressively should they be teaching it, at what ages, and how frequently?&nbsp; What should the primary motivation(s) be to encourage abstinence?&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>I encourage any readers who are youth leaders (in any shape)&nbsp;to think about their approach carefully.&nbsp; If 95% are doing it, a large percentage of those are Christians, and that means the church is losing the battle for sexual holiness before marriage.&nbsp; And probably not doing much better after.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, almost everyone, and that&#8217;s not an exaggeration.&nbsp; A new study, published by USA Today, interviewed about 40,000 people and they found that 95% had sex before marriage.&nbsp; That&#8217;s 19 out of 20.&nbsp; The study is being used by some to attack government-funded abstinence programs.&nbsp; One expert says that these face an &#8220;extremely high hurdle.\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/2006\/12\/21\/everyones-doing-it\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}