CLEVELAND (RNS)—Some of Antonio James' classmates laugh when they learn the 15-year-old has pledged not to have sex until he marries.
It's not just male bravado that puts pressure on the 6-foot-1, 219-pound football player to be sexually active.
“There's so much temptation around here with girls,” he said.
One place where he and other teens can find support for their decision is at church. In the last two years, Antonio's church and four other urban congregations have begun holding ceremonies at which parents, guardians and church members pledge to support youths choosing a chaste lifestyle.
RNS photo/Courtesy of Antonio James
Antonio James and his grandmother, Mary James, participate in a True Love Waits ceremony at Glenville New Life Community Church in Cleveland. The teenager said he plans to remain a virgin until he gets married.
The rituals are part of a new openness about sexual issues in the sanctuary.
Breaking a sacred silence in a hookup culture, church leaders are talking about sex with young people as part of a larger effort that includes providing in-formation about health and job programs to combat poverty and hopelessness.
And youths are responding to the no-sex-in-the-city message.
At two Cleveland churches recently, 225 young people—almost double the number from a year earlier—made purity pledges at True Love Waits sexual purity rallies, said Gail Reese, director of the Ministry of Reconcilia-tion.
Her ministry also has begun a program to train youths to lead discussion and support groups in churches and community centers.
“There's no way in the world we can avoid talking about sex, because we see the devastation it does in our community,” said Rick Gillespie-Mobley, co-pastor of Antonio's church, Glenville New Life Community Church.
Academic studies on the effectiveness of abstinence programs in the general population have found mixed results. But the effort seems to pay off for religious youths. Scholars at the University of Texas at Austin found religion and chastity pledges have “robust protective effects” on the incidences of premarital sex.
Nearly 40 percent of 15- to 25-year-old virgins surveyed said their primary motivation for abstinence was that it was against their religion or morals.
What prompts more churches to go beyond an implied “Just say no” message and open up conversations with youths about sex is a growing understanding of the impact popular culture has on young people, pastors and youth ministers note.
“It almost seems daunting to me at times,” Theresa Zickert, youth minister at St. Helen Catholic Church in Cleveland's suburban Newbury Township, said of the task of fighting popular culture. But she also says kids are “looking for deeper meaning for their sexuality.”
St. Helen youths who went through an eight-week “Theology of the Body” series last year wanted to have the program repeated this year, she said. “We have to keep revisiting” the subject, Zickert said. “They need to be reaffirmed in their commitment.”
Evangelicals have been slower than Catholics to talk about sex, said Anna Broadway, who is generating buzz among conservative Chris-tians with plain talk in her new book, Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity.
“There's a lot of hypocrisy about how we deal with our humanity. That creates a lot of hiding of sin,” she said. “It keeps people from being more honest and wrestling with things in a healthy way.”
Peter Kerlin, youth and young adult director at the evangelical Church on the Rise in Westlake, will soon lead lessons in the “Livepure” series on sex and said churches “have to have the guts and respect for young people” to talk about sex.
But nowhere has this issue taken on more urgency than in inner-city churches, where national and local leaders say sexual issues must be addressed early to break the downward cycle of teen pregnancy, high school dropout rates, single-parent families, and alcohol and drug abuse.
Congregations no longer can ignore the coarseness of cultural acceptance of casual sex in movies, music and television, on the Internet and through other influences on youths, said Reese, a leader of the chastity movement in city churches.
“It was something we knew of, that it was there, but we didn't address it,” Reese said. “When you look around, it's more in your face than it was before.”
Young people say it is tough out there.
Lyndaisha Orr, 16, who attended a recent training session with Reese at a Cleveland-area YMCA, said support groups help her “to know I'm not the only one going through these battles.”
Faith has become her path to abstinence, she said.
“I'm doing this because God says, ‘Do it,'” Lyndaisha said. “I don't want to be used by somebody. I hate being used by somebody.”
At New Life Church, Antonio said he also is able to resist the peer pressure to have sex.
“I'm going to be something,” he tells himself when others mock his decision to postpone sex. “And you all are going to end up doing something that will mess you up.”
David Briggs writes for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.