Purify Your Bride

I saw the movie Juno on Saturday. It was entertaining. Very crude but quite clever. Even though this movie has been hailed as a beckon of light for the culture of life I was struck by how lost it seemed. There was one running joke about teens being sexually active. The thing was she could not imagine what the alternative was. There was a factious answer that maybe there was a switch somewhere to deactivate your sexuality. For a teen, the opposite of being sexually active is being chaste. It struck me how far these teens were from even contemplating chastity as an option. They seemed to look at sex and procreation from every possible angle except that one.

It struck me because the logic of chastity seems quite obvious to me. Sure it is hard to live but when you are contemplating having babies and finding a life partner it seems like the idea staying pure until you are sure is going to cross your mind. Of course, you are going to try and avoid waiting all the way until marriage. That is pretty extreme. Still the idea of waiting a while makes so much sense. It is hard for me to understand how that would not come up.

I do see parallels with protestant thinking. As a protestant I never questioned Sola Scriptura. Why not? Now the logic of authority seems quite obvious to me. Sure it is hard to live but when you contemplate unity and truth it seems like the idea of a rallying point is going to cross your mind. Of course, you are going to avoid going all the way to infallibility. That is pretty extreme. Still the idea of one leader makes so much sense. Why did it not come up?

Well the reason is it didn’t seem possible. The concept of God giving us a leader and granting him the grace he needs to avoid error. Not only that but allowing us to know he has such a grace. That was to good to be true. The same goes with chastity. The idea that we could take lust out of the dating process and dignify sex by demanding a life long commitment before we would do it. That was just unthinkable for Juno and her friends.

To me the saddest scene in the movie is when Juno tells her dad that she has lost her faith in humanity. Her dad has no hope to give her. He admits his track record is bad. All he can do is give advice that has already failed him. Just trust your feelings and your partners feelings. So she does. If she is lucky that will last until college. Then she gets to feel sexually cheap and emotionally abandoned because they are not able to keep the commitment they are making with their bodies. So they both go to college and do it again with the next partner. What makes this more sad was the movie presents this as their happy ending.

Again the parallel seems strong. When people get confused about finding a church the answer is to try a formula that has failed and failed again. Usually it boils down to just trusting your feelings. They don’t know how to base the choice on truth or anything else that will last. Then they have a short term positive experience and we are supposed to rejoice. But it is so sad. Sad because what they long for is available yet they are not willing to consider it. So they settle for a short term counterfeit.