Already back in 1993 when I was working full time in the pro-life movement, there was a growing realization that Christians had no one but themselves to blame for the increasing number of abortions in this country. Sure abortionists were a convenient and blameworthy target, as were their willing political allies at Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women, but when you looked at the numbers the dirty little secret was that Christians were having more abortions than non-Christians. Planned Parenthood’s own Guttmacher Institute reports that almost 68% of abortions in the United States are sought by Evangelical Christians or Roman Catholics.[1] Clearly Christians need not look any further than their own poorly catechized or poorly supported members to find a way to bring down the number of abortions in the United States.

That poor catechesis shows up in other ways. Abortion rates are now beginning to be seen as only symptomatic of a widespread neglect of proper moral formation among our children, and an even poorer job of surrounding them with the social safety net that they need to combat today’s pervasively sexualized culture.

 A New Yorker column from last week asks the question: Why do so many evangelical teenagers become pregnant?[2] The article draws heavily on Sociologist Mark Regnerus’s research published in Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers, and his follow-up book Red Sex, Blue Sex both of which seem to confirm the great Evangelical disconnect, “Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical.”[3] While we can disagree with the solutions that columnist Margret Talbot offers to this disconnect, there is no question that while Christians may be doing a good job of teaching our youth, we have failed our youth terribly in moving beyond the mere teaching of fact to actual formation.

The “pro-family” efforts of social conservatives—the campaigns against gay marriage and abortion—do nothing to instill the emotional discipline or the psychological smarts that forsaking all others often involves. Evangelicals are very good at articulating their sexual ideals, but they have little practical advice for their young followers. Social liberals, meanwhile, are not very good at articulating values on marriage and teen sexuality—indeed, they may feel that it’s unseemly or judgmental to do so.[4]

Personally, I have always been uncomfortable with the ongoing evangelical focus[5] on “protecting marriage” by opposing “gay marriage,” because it does little to address the more pervasive problems plaguing Christian families. It seems to me that the moral high ground of Christians on the issue of the sanctity of marriage has long since evaporated. It is almost as if Christian leaders naively expect to stop the moral hemorrhaging by drawing a line here. But this line solves nothing because in most cases it is drawn to separate out people who make up such a small percentage of the generally population and an even smaller percentage of the Christian population, that it really doesn’t address the problem within the church. Would calls for a law forbidding the marriage of unscripturally divorced individuals receive the same fanfare from our churches? Probably not. Far more difficult is the task of actually restoring the sanctity of marriage in our midst.

To take it a step further, if Christian opposition to gay marriage is really about the sanctity of marriage, why are unscripturally divorced clergy serving in parishes? In their “unrepentant sin” is their moral standing any stronger than a gay or lesbian clergyman? Or is it simply that more people have been directly touched by divorce, than by the issue of homosexuality?

With such moral misdirection on the part of our church’s leadership, it is no wonder that survey after survey finds our youth wandering aimlessly in a moral wasteland.