Premarital sex really is as common as television depicts. At least that’s what the latest report from the Guttmacher Institute says. If a person turned 15 years of age after 1954, odds are he or she has had premarital sex. Ninety-five percent of respondents surveyed in 2002 who were age 44 or younger had had premarital sex.

Based on his findings, the author of the study argued against government-sponsored abstinence-only programs, saying that we should focus instead on teaching young people to be “safe once they become sexually active—which nearly everyone eventually will.” In other words, why bother teaching God’s laws if everyone fornicates before marriage?

However, the report has some pro-abstinence groups crying foul.

“The findings of this Guttmacher study should be closely scrutinized—and not taken as justification for engaging in premarital sex. The fact that 95 percent of the respondents admitted to having sex prior to marriage does not imply that such behavior is safe or wise,” Focus on the Family analyst Linda Klepacki said.

The Guttmacher Institute is in fact funded by Planned Parenthood, an organization founded on personal choice in sex, using everything from the pill to abortions to deal with sexual activity. “Corporate profits and staff salaries at Planned Parenthood depend on abortion services,” contends Richard Ross, founder of the True Love Waits abstinence movement. “Helping Americans abandon any sense that sex belongs in marriage is essential to boosting the demand for those abortion services.”

The study was certainly not intended as a wake-up call for the American public; rather, it was aimed at the government. The president’s administration has funded abstinence-only programs at an increasing rate in order to curb stds and other related problems. The first paragraph of the report, under “Objectives,” reads, “Policy [presidential] and programmatic efforts promoting sexual abstinence until marriage have increased, but it is unclear whether establishing such behavior as normative is a realistic public health goal.” The final paragraph of the report reads, “Premarital sex as normative behavior is not surprising …. Evidence from the past 50 years suggests that establishing abstinence until marriage as a normative behavior is a challenging policy goal. Instead, these findings argue for education and interventions that provide young people with the skills and information they need to protect themselves from unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases once they become sexually active.”

This report is not intended to discourage rampant premarital sex—it advocates stripping funding from abstinence-based sex-education programs.

But even those programs, the target of disdain by many, maintain modest objectives that fall short of the biblically prescribed waiting until marriage. When called upon to defend the Bush administration’s abstinence policies, Wade Horn of the Department of Health and Human Services said the purpose was to “help young people delay the onset of sexual activity.” But was it to discourage premarital sex among adults? “Absolutely not,” he said. “The Bush administration does not believe the government should be regulating or stigmatizing the behavior of adults.”

Fine—the government cannot regulate human conduct. Churches do that, right? Wrong. Church leaders today know well that if they were to preach God’s view on morality, they would lose congregants. As Jay Tolson wrote in U.S.News & World Report, “While most evangelicals would like to see Christian morality as the ruling ethos of the nation, they also believe Americans should be free to live the way they choose” (Dec. 8, 2003). The title of a USA Today article says it all: “Americans define faith their way” (Sept. 12, 2006).

A pastor quoted in Tolson’s article admitted that abortion and homosexuality, for example, were “minor concerns” at his church. “The bell we beat is that we must know Jesus.”

Know Jesus? You mean the same Jesus who called upon sinners to repent? The same Jesus who admonished the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well to “call thy husband,” knowing full well that she was living with a man out of wedlock? “Ye worship ye know not what,” He told the woman after she claimed to be religious (John 4:22). That Jesus?

What about the Jesus who confronted the woman caught in the act of adultery? I don’t condemn you, He said, before adding, “Go, and sin no more” (John 8:11). She wasn’t lost. But she was living in sin—and Jesus Christ told her to stop.

New Testament theology says that adulterers and fornicators will not inherit the Kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). It most certainly does not say define your religious views your way.

Society today wants to define its own standards of right and wrong, rather than accepting and trying to follow God’s absolute standards of morality. Even if 100 percent of the people disobey, God does not consider something unlawful as lawful. For more information on where this moral collapse is leading, watch for the cover story in the February 2007 issue of the Trumpet, “As in the Days of Noah ….”