If you'd known me ten years ago, you would not have nominated me "girl most likely to work at a sex magazine." In fact, you probably wouldn't even have noticed me; I was terribly shy and ate lunch in the bathroom most days. But if you had noticed me, you might have noticed that I went to church every Sunday, bible study every Wednesday and Christian social club every Friday night. You might have noticed how bothered I was by my inability to speak in tongues at the Christian summer camp, how I prayed for my friends and for advice on which college to attend. I rarely thought about sex. Mostly, I just thought about kissing and how very unkissed (and, I assumed, unkissable) I was.
Being a Christian in high school was not particularly taxing, mostly because the religious life is compatible with the life of the socially ostracized. There are a lot of things that good Christian teenagers shalt not do, but most of those things happened at parties I wasn't invited to. Instead, I went to church with the rest of the dorks.
Don't get me wrong; I liked those dorks. But I think we appreciated the excuse we had not to be out drinking and partying and having sex were these things ever offered us, we knew that God would want us to say no. I remember making a toast on New Year's Eve of my senior year with a glass of non-alcoholic champagne in my hand: "Here's to the only sober party in town!" And we all cheered and clinked glasses and acted like that was a good thing.
There were a few cool kids in Young Life (the Christian club). They were the ones who stood up during meetings and gave their testimonies: "I was popular and cool and everyone thought I had everything, but despite the parties and drugs and sex and fun I was having I was missing Jesus." We nodded and clapped and welcomed them in. You're one of us now!
When I went off to college, Campus Crusade for Christ replaced Young Life. At our Friday night meetings the cool kid testimonies were a regular feature, the only difference being the titillation factor of the "before" stories. And that's when it hit me: I didn't have a before! I didn't have a testimony. I hadn't turned to Jesus because the rockstar life became too much for me; I found him because he could be found in my home, and I'd always been a bit of a homebody.
And then I started getting invited to parties, handed drinks and asked out on dates (believe me that I thanked God for Accutane that year). I accepted all the offers not because I was eager to establish a life beyond the pew, but rather, I was just so thrilled they asked. I didn't worry too much about what God thought of it all he had always been in my life, and getting along with him had never been quite as difficult as making new friends. So I threw myself at the latter task. As it happened, making new friends in college was not nearly as troublesome as it had been in high school. (Or maybe that was the beer.) But there were few Christians at the parties I went to most of them were teetotalers, and the appeal of college parties is somewhat lost on the sober. I started feeling guilty no great sins were committed at these events, but I was lying to my Christian friends. I could tell my parents back in England that I was hungover (English Christians aren't as quick to assume that booze leads to sin), but I couldn't admit it to my roommates. And the more time I spent away from Christians, the more onerous Christianity seemed to be. With my lifestyle no longer centered on God, focusing my life on Him was work. Sleep or pray; denim or khakis on Gay Jeans Day; write for the school paper or read the Bible; pass this class, go to this party, have this drink; hate the sin, love the sinner. I never felt I was abandoning God I simply put Him on hold, like so much laundry in the corner of my room or letters from high school friends on my desk. But the longer I stayed away, the more daunting the return.
And then I learned that I was supposed to be an evangelist. I had known that in high school, too, but I'd had an easy excuse: all my friends were Christians! And though I believed that religion is not relative, that if you know it's true for you then you have to believe it's true for everyone well, I just couldn't bring myself to talk to my non-Christian friends about Jesus. It was starting to feel barely relevant to my own life how could I expect it to be compelling to others? Religion was acceptable as an intellectual exercise, but actually living by it was for those soft in the head, as my professor announced on day one of our Old Testament history class. And was I really going to tell my friends that they should save sex for marriage? This was college.
Eventually I dropped out of Campus Crusade (come on, Friday nights?) and stopped going to church (Sunday mornings?) and then I stopped hanging out with most of my Christian friends altogether. I could sense that they were praying for my safe return (I'd once done the same for others) and I was uncomfortable being a cause.
But I continued to tell boys, often while lying half-naked in their beds, "I'm not going to have sex before I get married." And if they asked why, I'd tell them it was what I believed, that it was because of God. I'd become quite the expert at doing everything but sex, and it was actually quite comforting a sign that I hadn't completely abandoned everything I believed in. If I was turning down something as good as sex because of God, then surely I still believed in Him?
I changed my policy on pre-marital sex approximately five minutes before losing my virginity, at the age of twenty-one.
What shocked me most about my decision was how unshocking it felt. I don't know what I expected fire, brimstone, a darkened sky. At the very least, some minor emotional breakdown to indicate that I had, finally, lost my faith. My boyfriend certainly expected that, having been audience to one of my "Because of God" speeches. But all I could muster, both to the sex and to the biblical command it violated, was the emotional equivalent of a shoulder shrug (sorry Bobby). It wasn't that the sex was bad it was just that it didn't feel that different from what I'd been doing in bed for the past three years.
I had always thought of "sex" as what I wasn't doing intercourse. What I was doing was fooling around in bed. It never occurred to me that, in fact, I wasn't avoiding sex I was simply not making intercourse part of it. There are many good reasons to stop short of coitus, but by the time I was twenty-one, I no longer had a reason I was simply drawing the line out of habit. Making it though a marathon is a fine feeling, but less so if you've been running twenty-five-mile races for the past year.
After that, I didn't think about God (or attempt to talk to Him) for a long time. I wasn't sure what to say. I certainly had no intention of stopping sex once I'd started I couldn't think of any good reason to. Now that my life could be considered a "before" testimony, I realized it wasn't something I particularly wanted to recover from.
Six years later, I still consider my faith somewhat under construction (though the sex, at least, has improved). Do I believe in God? Yes. Jesus? Yes. And then the questions get harder. Is the Bible is a good guide to life? Mostly, yes. Is it possible God never intended us to wait until our early thirties for sex, that his ruling on sex before marriage was meant for a time when kids were married at twelve or thirteen? Yes. Have I ever regretted losing my virginity when I did? No. Did "saving myself" warp my perspective on sex? Yes, but the recovery period has been fun. Are there Christians, far less devout than I once was, who would be appalled at the behavior Hooksexup embraces? Absolutely. Do I embrace that behavior? Sometimes. If the love of money is the root of all evil, is Forbes magazine more sinful than Hooksexup? (That one's for the peanut gallery.) Will I ever be a Christian again the way I was in high school? I doubt it. Do I want to be? No. Do I wish that I wanted to be? Sometimes. Do I think that Christianity can be a pick and mix religion that you can take the bits that work for you and discard the rest? No. Will my answers to these questions change the next time I ask them? Perhaps. Do I consider myself a Christian? I don't know. Yes. No.
There's a priest who takes smoke breaks outside his church down the block from my apartment building, and each time I walk past him I think, I'd probably stop in and visit if the services weren't all in Spanish. And if they weren't so early on Sunday morning.
