Authors-choice: Hope & Revival

I live in a small town in Northern Virginia named Front Royal, where Human Life International is located. We have two cultures living side-by-side in this town – the typical secular American culture, and a thriving Christian culture.
My wife Kathy directs a small pregnancy help center there. Every day, she sees young girls and women whose lives have been ruined by straying from God’s plan for our sexuality. The typical life of a woman in Front Royal who lives a life without God’s guidance looks like this;

• Age 9 – Sex education in the public school begins. Boys and girls learn about homosexuality, birth control, and masturbation, among other things.
• Age 14 – The average young person is having sexual intercourse.
• Age 15 – Since birth control fails so often, especially among younger girls, the average sexually active girl finds herself pregnant.
• Age 16 – 1st abortion and 1st STD.
• Age 17 – 1st baby.
• Age 18 – The average sexually active girl will not be able to attend college, because she was too busy going to parties and having a good time, and so her grades are very low. Many young girls also have babies to raise by this time, which severely limits their schooling. The boys and men who got them pregnant, of course, get away with no penalties.
• Age 21 – Young people are usually “shacking up,” or living together, by this time.
• Age 23 – While some of her friends are getting married, she discovers that no man wants a woman who has two or three babies, all by different men.
• Age 24 – By this time, the average person has had 8 to 12 sexual “partners.”
• Age 24 – The average woman has had her 3rd STD. One out of four women getting married at this age have an incurable sexually transmitted disease.
• Age 34 – Since the young woman does not know how to bring up her children properly, she is a grandmother by this age, as her daughter(s) make exactly the same mistakes she did. If she does get married, she will most likely be divorced, since people who have sexual intercourse frequently before marriage have a 70% divorce rate. So, typically, she will endure a bitter life of struggle with no husband or helpmate.
• Age 38 – Her last child is gone.
• Ages 39-75 – For the last half of her life, she is lonely, usually finding companionship only by raising her own grandchildren.
There is another culture in Front Royal – the Catholic one. St. John the Baptist Church has 1,200 families with an average of six children. Less than one percent of these marriages have ended in divorce or separation, usually because the husband or wife were not properly catechized when they were young. As far as we know, there are no cases of AIDS among the Catholics in Front Royal, and no sexually transmitted diseases. We have not had a single teenaged pregnancy for the past fifteen years.
In contrast to the secular lifestyle, a child growing up in a Christian family in Front Royal can expect to live a life like this;

• Age 9 – Virtues education begins. This is chastity taught as just one virtue embedded in many, including prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. Additionally, the children learn by example from their parents, who do their best to live a virtuous life. As Father Marx has said, “Chastity is more caught than taught.”
• Ages 14-21 – No sex before marriage. Sometimes the kids are ridiculed by their secular friends who are already getting addicted to sex, drugs, alcohol and tobacco, but they know how to explain themselves properly.
• Age 22 – Complete college.
• Age 23 – Married.
• Age 24 – First child. The young couple use natural family planning (NFP) to space their children. They suffer from no AIDS or sexually transmitted diseases.
• Age 50 – 3%-6% divorce rate. They grow old together, and play with (not raise) their many grandchildren.
• A side effect of this kind of living is happy priests! Our priests spend much of their time baptizing and marrying couples, not doing marriage and crisis counseling.

So Who do You Think is Happier? ― The young woman who has had dozens of sexual “partners” and who is raising several children by herself, or the one who has a loving husband, children and family?

Author

Dr. Brian Clowes is the Director of Research and Education at Human Life International