Helping Make Virtue More "Realistic"

Did you hear all the fuss about Bristol Palin's interview last week? She first gained notoriety last summer shortly after her mother, Sarah Palin, was named the Republican candidate for the vice presidency of the United States. Bristol came under the scrutiny of the press as it was revealed that she was an unwed teenage mother-to-be.

Then this past week on Fox News, Bristol, now having given birth to her child, told the interviewer that sexual abstinence for teens is "not realistic at all." As you might imagine, the media focused on that one juicy tidbit.

At the end of the day, this isn't about Bristol Palin or her famous mother, because there are bigger issues at play in this discussion. Here is Al Mohler's conclusion:

Is sexual abstinence realistic for teenagers and young adults? Well, abstinence is certainly not realistic when teenagers put themselves - or they are put there by others - into a situation where sexual activity is likely. At some point, sexual abstinence becomes very unrealistic indeed.

The real issue for Christian teenagers and their parents is not to debate whether sexual abstinence before marriage is realistic or not. The larger and more important issue is that sexual abstinence until marriage is the biblical expectation and command. Once this is realized, the responsibility for everyone concerned is to ensure that expectations and structures are in place so that abstinence is realistic.

The debate over whether abstinence is realistic or not misses the more important issue -- abstinence must be made realistic.

Parents and teenagers must make certain that adequate protections and expectations are in place so that sexual abstinence is very realistic indeed. Far too many Christian parents allow their teenagers to be part of the "hooking up" scene of teenage culture. In that highly sexualized context, sexual abstinence would appear unrealistic in the extreme.

Premature pair dating and unsupervised liaisons, set within the supercharged culture of teenage sexuality, can put teenagers into very vulnerable situations. Asking whether sexual abstinence in those contexts is realistic can appear almost irrational.

Those who reject the norm of sexual abstinence for teenagers will leap on Bristol Palin's statement as evidence for their cause. But the real issue here is our responsibility to ensure that abstinence is made realistic and stays realistic. Anything short of this is truly "not realistic at all."

This perspective seems to have much wider application. How do my habits and patterns of life, how does the "culture" within my own home, shape my thinking on what virtues are realistic or unrealistic?