I agree re: the implication that if you save your virginity, God will “reward” you by giving you someone who is also a virgin.

There is another side to this which I find equally disturbing. When I was a teen, we were taught that if you saved your virginity, God would automatically give you and your future spouse an explosive, problem-free sex life of bliss.

Now I will be the first to say that waiting until marriage is worth it :) But I have seen couples who waited still have problems and frustrations with their love life, due to medical issues and whatnot. I’ve also seen couples who didn’t care about abstinence have explosive sex lives.

I feel that if you teach a teen that God will reward him/her for abstinence in this manner, it could be setting them up for major bitterness and confusion later on, if every single thing about their sex life does not go perfectly.

Is it generally better to wait until marriage? Yes. Are one-partner relationships usually better in many ways? Yes. But is “getting benefits” the only reason we’re obeying God? Of course not.

A child, boy or girl, is supposed to obey his or her parents, per Eph 6 and other verses. This obedience ends when the child becomes an adult. However, in this purity ball system, it ends when the girl gets married; then the obedience gets transfered to her husband.

In this way the female is always in a system of obedience.

Furthermore, there seems to be an implied idea that IF I am a virgin, then I get to marry a virgin. Life does not work that way. All of us are sinners before God, and we cannot horse trade the lack of a specific sin into a similar lack in a spouse; to think otherwise is to believe one is entitled to something that is not promised in the Bible.

Another concern is that I have read that these types of vows do not work, the rate of virginity before marriage is the same for people that took a vow as for the others. And the vow carries the possible idea that IF one breaks it, then it is broken and one might as well do what one wants. And what does it mean when one DOES make a vow from the Bible, like a marriage vow?

So, yes to teaching abstinence to one’s children. But not in this way of a purity ball. The way of a Christian is in following the Spirit.

That statement disturbs me too, but for a different reason. It implies that the girl will find a husband. There is nothing in the Bible that says that any man or woman will find a spouse. God never promises anyone that they’ll get married, just that He’ll be with us, no matter what happens to us in life. As a woman who didn’t get married until her 30′s, I can tell you that this is one of the most damaging myths perpetuated among Christian singles. “There’s somebody for everybody. God knows I desire to get married, so He’ll provide somebody.” Then people–men and women–get frustrated when that doesn’t happen on their timetable.

I can also say from personal experience that in headship churches there is tremendous pressure to get married. They put such heavy emphasis on getting married and having kids, especially for women, that anybody not happily settled with a spouse and 2.5 kids is considered “not normal” and even vaguely threatening. I remember once my single’s Sunday School teacher (who met his own wife in Bible college thirty years earlier), was urging us to get more involved in the church. The youth group particularly needed mentors, he said. One of the men in our class snorted cynically and said, “They don’t want us hanging around the youth group. They’re afraid of the example we would set. They want their kids to get married early and think they’ll live happily ever after.” Even though I’m married now, I keep in touch with my single friends, and I can tell you that these kinds of attitudes are still prevalent. One prominent Christian leader even said once that we would be rewarded in Heaven for getting married on earth! You can imagine what kind of pain that caused to the single people who heard it.

What about the boys giving themselves as a wedding gift to their wives???

Is this more evidence that such people view women as chattel?

Absolutely disgusting.

That’s what I was thinking. The idea is good–of course you want to encourage kids to remain abstinent before marriage. And if you want to make it fun by dressing up in cute prom dresses, then hey, go for it. It’s the theology stated in the pledges that bugs me.
As others have already stated, the whole “husband/father as high priest” thing is pretty much non-biblical. The only verse you could find to possibly support that idea is 1 Cor 11:3. However, there is a great deal of controversy about the meaning of that verse, and many egalitarian writers have demonstrated that it can have an entirely different meaning. Therefore, to base your entire theology on that verse is, as the British say, downright dodgy. Even if you include Eph 5:22 (”wives submit”), you’re still basing your theology on only a couple of Bible verses, which is still dodgy. And of course, it brings up a whole host of practical questions. Why does a woman need a high priest over her? Isn’t that what Jesus Himself came to end? I mean, I was always taught that when the veil in the Temple split in half during Jesus’ crucifixion, that meant everybody now had direct access to God. So how on earth do you reconcile that with women needing some sort of spiritual authority over her? Are the husbands closer to God, then? (This is actually implied if you take the hierarchalist view of 1 Cor 11:3.) So how does that square with everybody being equal before God?

And, more relevant to this discussion, it encourages women to think of themselves as “belonging” to somebody for pretty much their entire lives. This idea is actually not unique to these purity balls, but pretty much runs through complementary literature on marriage and singleness. Girls are encouraged to stay home with their parents until they get married–the latest hit book on the subject says that a woman should stay home now matter how old she is and let her father guide her relationships “just like they did in the Bible.” Therefore, women are encouraged to be eternally dependent, first on their fathers and then on their husbands. Is that emotionally or mentally healthy for women?

As for the idea of having teenagers take formal pledges of chastity, will that even work? Remember the “True Love Waits” fiasco, where a study showed that teens who took that pledge were still committing sexual acts such as oral sex, because they believed it wasn’t “real sex”? I think Sally’s recommendations are far better.

And last, as to the submission issue, here’s what I think somebody in the headship movement would say, based on having grown up in it. “Submission only applies once you get married. The Bible says for wives to submit to their husbands. Of course, a woman should reject anything that contradicts God’s Word. Any man other than her husband who tries to pressure her into having sex is clearly not following God, so naturally the woman should reject him.” However, they still insist on women being passive–a woman should never initiate a relationship but always let the man do the courting.

For those who pointed out the catch 22 of submitting to men then telling them no when it comes to premarital sex a special thanks. I hadn’t even thought of that. Thank you for adding that element to this discussion.

Ruud, thank you for finding the pledge the girls take and telling us what it was.