Follow this link to a great article from the online Christianity Today on the crisis of when to tie the knot in our society today.
Virginity pledges. Chastity balls. Courtship. Side hugs. Guarding your heart. Evangelical discourse on sex is more conservative than I’ve ever seen it. Parents and pastors and youth group leaders told us not to do it before we got married. Why? Because the Bible says so. Yet that simple message didn’t go very far in shaping our sexual decision-making.
So they kicked it up a notch and staked a battle over virginity, with pledges of abstinence and accountability structures to maintain the power of the imperative to not do what many of us felt like doing. Some of us failed, but we could become “born again virgins.” Virginity mattered. But sex can be had in other ways, and many of us got creative.
To read more click here, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/august/16.22.html?start=1 .
I have to disagree with the author’s point based on my own personal experience. The discouraging of marrying too young saved me from an almost certain disaster of a marriage. I married a different person several years later and am very happy in that relationship. I don’t think kids in their late teens and early twenties are mature enough to understand all that marriage entails and the proper motivations for getting married. …and yes, I did have sex before I was married. I can be (have been) forgiven for that, but I could not be forgiven for getting married, divorcing, and then re-marrying, because that would put me in a perpetual state of committing adultery. I say, let’s not worry obsessively over whether or not young adults remain virgins until they are married. It’s the ideal thing, but since when have we (as imperfect human beings) lived up to the ideal?
Discourse requires subjectivity acknowledging itself as such, rather than as something more. I recommend the following post: http://deligentia.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/objective-vs-subjective-a-matter-of-biblical-hyperbole/