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This chapter traces the development of adolescent heterosexual ethics and norms, including their motivations to avoid sex or engage in sex. It documents what types of adolescents are likely to take abstinence pledges, how well they work, and the sexual and familial idealism they portray. It also explores the popular but vaguely defined theme of “emotional readiness” as a barometer of sexual preparedness.

Impartialist political philosophy must show how and why the priority of impartial justice can be reconciled with a belief in the permanence of pluralism. Although the argument from epistemological abstinence explains the permanence of pluralism, it cannot explain why justice should have motivational priority. It delivers only, and at most, a modus vivendi defence of toleration. The way to attain a defence that is more than a modus vivendi is to ground political impartialism in moral impartialism.

Mesoamericans celebrated sexuality, which placed them in opposition to Catholic priests. The cultures manifested a connection between abstinence, purity, and uncleanliness caused by excess and imbalance due to a lack of sexual moderation.

The emphasis on the virgin birth of Jesus, the apparent celibacy of Jesus due in part to his itinerant lifestyle, and the apparent sexual abstinence of many of his disciples served as models for Christian practice at a later period. The early Christian motivation for celibacy was connected to the eschatological expectations of the early community, and later celibacy became associated with a veneration of the ascetic lifestyle.

This chapter follows the American evangelical sexual abstinence rhetoric to sub-Saharan Africa to explore the differences between the American and African cases. It shows that the abstinence message in Kenya and Rwanda largely borrows the rhetoric of the abstinence campaigns in the United States, with a stronger emphasis on the fear of AIDS. Surprisingly, Rwandan youth express less fear of acquiring HIV/AIDS than fear of displeasing God. American evangelicals offer a positive focus on purity and emphasize that pleasing God has tangible benefits for the individual. In contrast, Kenyan and Rwandan youth emphasize that pleasing God is an end in itself. For evangelicals in the United States, sin is an individual problem; in the context of sub-Saharan Africa, sin is viewed as a structural problem. There are gender differences, too: in the United States, the campaigns portray females as possessing power over their bodies; in sub-Saharan Africa, Kenyan and Rwandan young people portray females as bearing responsibility for their bodies.

The chapter summarizes Christian attitudes toward animal sacrifice in the first two centuries AD, with regard to both Greek and Jewish religion, and with a clear distinction between the period before AD 70 and the period after AD 70. As regards the Christian teaching towards pagan addressees, the preaching against the offering of sacrifices mainly comes to the fore in the Apologetics of the 2nd century. Similarly, the Christian objection to Jewish animal sacrifice is explicitly expressed only in the 2nd century AD, but traces of it are found already in the 1st century. Second-century attestations show Christians abstaining from sacrifices, something which played a role in their being arrested or condemned by the pagan authorities. Special attention is also paid to the issue of sacrificial metaphors as a factor contributory to the alienation of worshipers from the practical aspects of animal sacrifice.

This chapter considers the incongruity of the positive, benefits-oriented rhetoric of an evangelical abstinence campaign that is all about a prohibition. The message focuses on a positive call to a lifestyle of purity instead of a negative prohibition implied by the term abstinence. The campaign rhetoric is reconfiguring virginity too, constructing it as a choice that can be found after it has been lost. To a public audience, abstinence is portrayed as the healthy choice. The chapter considers the impact of this shifting rhetoric—from prohibition to admonition—on attempts to control adolescent sexuality, as well as how it defines the contours of evangelicalism as a whole. Evangelicals use rhetorical agency as a strategy of persuasion, constructing their audience as teenagers who have the power to control their bodies.

A key argument in the evangelical sexual abstinence campaigns is that delaying sexual gratification today means a greater prize of true love and romance tomorrow. This theme is communicated through the use of the fairy-tale narrative, complete with beautiful princesses in distress, valiant princes on horseback, and evil forces that threaten to steal the princesses' virginity. This chapter analyzes how the fairy-tale narrative both supports and subverts traditional gender roles. Young women may be waiting for their princes, but they are also taught that modestly covering their bodies exerts power and control over lustful young men. The young men, in turn, are actively pursuing and protecting their princesses, but they are also trapped and emasculated by their seemingly uncontrollable hormonal urges.

This chapter looks at how American evangelical teenagers are negotiating the gray area between sex and no sex. Although all the respondents have pledged to practice abstinence, they regularly make choices as to what constitutes appropriate physical intimacy within the context of the abstinence pledge. Young people choose to limit their choices in acts of self-control, creating boundaries of sexual activity. Whereas a diversity of appropriate boundaries exists, young people seem to agree on an execution of the concept of purity in which respecting others trumps self-gratification. Abstinent teens use their personal agency to discipline their sexuality and choose to surround themselves with communities of support. Positive peer pressure can reinforce the abstinence message, but it also can lead to rebellion within the peer group. Going along with the crowd can sometimes weaken the abstinence commitment by masking a false pledge.

Millions of young people have pledged abstinence, but that does not mean that they are all virgins. What happens to the happily-ever-after of the fairy tale of abstinence if the prince or princess did not wait for true love? Or, worse, what if the prince or princess never shows up? What, then, happens to the reward for abstinence? The abstinence campaigns offer a message of second virginity for those with sexually active pasts who want to renew a commitment to abstinence, but often young people are left to deal with the pain of their own fractured fairy tales. This chapter tells the stories of young people who have committed to abstinence but are also managing the pain of past sexual relationships, the challenges of forgiving a partner who did not wait, and the silent suffering and loneliness of singleness and homosexuality in a heterosexual world.

This chapter examines how evangelical abstinence educators in Africa rhetorically construct the condom. It argues that they construct the condom as (1) a tool for marital fidelity; (2) a tool for saving lives; (3) part of holistic community-based development; and (4) a tool for female empowerment. After demonstrating the prevalence of these four themes, it turns to an analysis of an evangelical statement of conscience on the AIDS crisis as an example of how these constructions of the condom affect public discourse about AIDS prevention. Although evangelicals tend to view the condom as a tool for promiscuity, in Africa the potential to save lives trumps the potential for increased promiscuity. The perceived lack of choices presented by the dire health situation in Africa provides rhetorical space for a positive construction of the condom as lifesaving. This medical focus echoes U.S. evangelicals' construction of abstinence as the healthy choice.

This chapter argues that the evangelical abstinence campaigns are unwittingly raising a generation of young people with false expectations about the role of sex in marriage and about the sacrifice and commitment of marriage in general. By tying the abstinence commitment to one's religious commitment, the argument for abstinence threatens to weaken the religious faith of young people if the reward for choosing abstinence is never realized, whether because of singleness or the failure of marital sex to live up to expectations of greatness. However, the abstinence campaigns do get a number of things right. For starters, the campaigns are forcing the church to talk about sex. It may be difficult for the soft voice of religion to be heard against the blaring megaphone of mediated culture, but the campaigns are cranking up the volume, and teens are listening. The campaigns are also empowering young people—particularly young women—to respect their bodies and to make wise, healthy choices.

This chapter challenges the idea that by the interwar period, appliance methods of contraception were increasingly replacing ‘inefficient’, ‘unreliable’, and ‘unpleasant’ traditional forms. It counters the often-made assumption that improvements in birth control technology and their greater availability improved individuals' ability to control their fertility. Although appliance methods were increasingly employed, their use did not signal the rejection of traditional forms. Contemporary social surveys, in particular the findings of the Lewis-Faning study for the Royal Commission on Population, are shown to have been misinterpreted. These surveys failed to recognize that those who experimented with modern methods, such as female caps and condoms, frequently disliked them and reverted back to ‘natural’ methods such as abstinence, abortion, and withdrawal.

Treatment professionals, friends, and relatives believe that helping alcoholics and addicts recuperate and live improved lives would entail loving the sinner and condemning the sin. Those who advocate harm-reduction strategies believe that it would also be possible for unhelped addicts still to acquire the necessary treatments since, in line with religion, it is also possible for society to love the sinner despite the sins that he or she has committed. This chapter explains how harm reduction strategies can provide still active addicts with the necessary care and assistance without forcing them to refrain from their habits and enter treatment. Doing such would make them realize a deep spirituality in themselves that would hopefully lessen the harm caused by the addiction and make recovery more easily reachable.

This chapter examines the correlation between sexual continence, abstinence, and separation on the one hand, and masculine aggressivity and strength on the other, in the Amazonian and Melanesian cultures. It argues that “sexual avoidances are part of the means by which males temporarily or more permanently constitute themselves as strong.” Furthermore, the chapter shows that the essence of masculinity includes not only strength and courage, but also a crucial element of “power and menace, of dangerous potency.” Markedly similar concepts of masculinity have been found both in New Guinea and throughout the Amazonian region, wherein aggression and self-assertive activities are associated with sexual taboos. Finally, the chapter deals with the concept of masculinity in a well-described ethnographic context suggesting the analytic association of aggression and sexual taboo that indicates the way in which men's cults may foster exclusiveness and gender separation.