When Religious Communities Face Statistical Reality
In what might be the most uncomfortable report card America has ever received, new virginity rankings reveal that religious communities’ actual behavior looks remarkably different from their stated values. It’s like discovering your health-obsessed friend has been eating fast food in their car the whole time shocking to admit, but obvious to everyone paying attention.
The rankings, compiled by researchers who clearly enjoy making people uncomfortable at dinner parties, show that geographical regions most associated with traditional values are paradoxically producing the most non-traditional results. The Bible Belt, in particular, is performing so poorly in these rankings that they might want to consider rebranding as the “Do As I Say Not As I Do Belt.”
According to CDC adolescent health statistics, teen pregnancy rates are highest in states where abstinence-only education is most prevalent, creating an irony so thick you could cut it with a purity ring. It’s almost as if telling teenagers “just don’t” without providing any additional information isn’t an effective educational strategy.
Religious communities have responded to these rankings with a mixture of denial, deflection, and creative reinterpretation of data. Some suggest the problem is with measurement methodology, apparently believing that if you criticize the thermometer, you can make the fever go away. Others argue that their communities are simply more honest about their failures, which is a interesting way to spin “we’re failing spectacularly.”
The rankings reveal that Mormon teens, despite growing up in a culture that treats premarital intimacy as slightly worse than murder, have rates of activity comparable to their less religiously intense peers. The main difference appears to be that Mormon teens feel significantly worse about it, creating what psychologists call “maximum guilt with standard behavior,” which sounds like a cable package nobody would voluntarily purchase.
Evangelical communities, known for their purity balls and virginity pledges, are posting numbers that suggest their teenagers are having more fun than a youth group pizza party. This has led to what church leaders are calling “a crisis of values,” which is religious speak for “our kids aren’t listening to us and we’re freaking out.”
Catholic teens, raised in a tradition with 2,000 years of sexual theology, are having premarital relationships at rates that would make their priests consider early retirement. The confessional booths are reportedly backed up like Starbucks on Monday morning, with priests sighing so heavily that ventilation upgrades are being considered.
According to research from the General Social Survey, there’s virtually no difference in premarital activity rates between religious and non-religious youth once you control for basic demographic factors. This finding has been met with the same enthusiasm typically reserved for discovering termites in your load-bearing walls.
The virginity rankings have exposed what sociologists call “the authenticity gap” the distance between what communities claim to believe and how they actually behave. This gap is so wide in some religious communities that you could drive a church bus through it, assuming the church bus wasn’t busy shuttling teens to and from activities where they’re definitely following all the rules and definitely not making out in the parking lot.
Youth pastors across the country are reportedly updating their resumes and considering career changes to fields where success is easier to measure and failure less likely to be published in national rankings. Suggestions include professional bull riding, bomb disposal, and literally anything else.
The rankings have also revealed interesting patterns in how communities respond to data they don’t like. Conservative religious groups tend to attack the messenger, question the methodology, and suggest that moral decline is responsible for making their kids act like regular kids. Liberal religious groups tend to say “we told you so” with varying degrees of smugness, which is arguably not helpful but definitely satisfying.
Some churches have responded by doubling down on purity culture, apparently operating under the belief that if you make the same speech louder, it becomes more effective. This is the educational equivalent of turning up the volume on a broken speaker you get more noise but not better sound.
Others have pivoted to what they’re calling “purity culture with nuance,” which seems to mostly involve the same rules but with better branding and an Instagram account. The message is essentially “don’t do it, but if you do, at least feel really bad about it,” which is probably not the healthy middle ground they think it is.
The virginity rankings have become a political football, with conservatives blaming liberal culture and liberals blaming conservative education policies. Both sides are probably right, which means both sides are also wrong, creating the perfect storm of everyone being insufferable about statistics.
As America continues to grapple with the gap between virginity rankings and community self-perception, one thing becomes clear: we’re really good at judging each other and really bad at acknowledging that human behavior doesn’t particularly care about what we think it should be.
SOURCE: https://newsstand.us/the-virginity-rankings/
SOURCE: Sarah Pappalardo (https://newsstand.us/the-virginity-rankings/)
