Joe reports that most teenagers aren’t sexually active in America today. In his Bancroft Prize-winning biography of Jonathan Edwards, George Marsden provides some historical contrast. Here is the skinny on pre-marital sex in eighteenth century Puritan New England:
“Bundling,” which was supposed to be a way of getting acquainted without sexual intercourse, did not always work as advertised. Pregnancies before marriage were rising dramatically in New England… Premarital sex was commonplace. Even when it resulted in pregnancy, so long as the couple married, there was no longer much stigma involved. Alluding to that new attitude, Jonathan [Edwards] perceived another alarming decline. “And there is not that discountenance of such things as there formerly used to be…. Formerly, things were accounted such a wound as a person never could get over as long as he lived…. Now they are so bold and impudent, that they are not ashamed to hold up their heads.”
Edwards’ preaching may have been ineffectual in his day. But times have changed. The National Survey results can only mean that finally, after centuries of struggle, we have burst the shackles of oppressive Puritan sexual morality.
October 7th, 2010 | 2:58 pm
I believe a comparison of marriage and birth records from colonial New England indicates perhaps as many as half of all Puritan maidens went to the altar “in a family way”.
You have no idea how many times I have told people this, only to be told I was making it up. But historians have known about this for decades–it’s just that nobody wants to believe it.
When you get down to it, the practice makes a lot of practical sense, since divorce was well-high impossible, and children absolutely essential for the continuation and expansion of the family business (generally a barely-above-subsistence farm). So no man wanted to marry a woman only to discover she was barren–that would be like buying a pig in a poke.
That’s not to say that the Puritan Fathers were promiscuous–far from it. To get to the point of “bundling”, there had to be a serious sign of commitment, effectively a tacit agreement to marriage. After a brief trial drive around the block, the deal was sealed (literally), and the marriage was performed. I doubt anyone ever successfully managed to duck out of marriage, having impregnated the woman whom he was courting.
So, there was a definite difference between premarital sex then and now: then, the objective was to get pregnant so one could marry. Now, the objective is to avoid pregnancy so one doesn’t.
October 7th, 2010 | 6:01 pm
“Formerly, things were accounted such a wound as a person never could get over as long as he lived…. ”
Wow. What a bleak way of understanding a particular sin!
October 8th, 2010 | 9:43 am
Yes, the goal ought not have been to get the pendulum to swing all the way back to permanent social ostracism and endless guilt (and I don’t know that it was — you can’t tell from the context.) But it’s useful to look back to the earlier practice of “permanent wound” to see the trajectory, which wasn’t a good one.
October 9th, 2010 | 9:51 am
Stuart is quite right — if anything his estimate is on the low end.
In many respects, the same was true in Jesus’ day. The scandal of Mary’s pregnancy was not so much that she was pregnant, but that Joseph was not the father of her baby.
October 9th, 2010 | 2:54 pm
In ancient Jewish law, betrothal was binding. Early Christians carried on that tradition, so that a prior engagement constituted an impediment to marriage. I believe it was so down to the Renaissance in the West; it’s still the case in the Eastern Churches.
In the East, betrothal used to be a rite separate from Crowning in Marriage (the sacramental marriage rite of the Orthodox Churches), and could take place weeks, months or even years before the wedding (particularly in dynastic marriages). However, because people are fickle, and because the Church was not willing to back down on the binding nature of betrothal, the rite continually moved closer to the wedding service. Today, it takes place immediately prior to the Crowning, in the narthex of the Church, and includes the plighting of troth and the exchange of rings. In the Crowning service proper, there is no exchange of vows or of rings, because the couple are not ministers of the sacrament–the presbyter is: he unites them to Christ and each other through the invocation and descent of the Holy Spirit, by the placement of the Crowns upon their heads, and by the procession around the analogion (the “Dance of Isaiah”).
Given this view of marriage, a betrothed woman getting pregnant by her fiance might be considered sinful, but it would not be particularly scandalous.
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