Christians abstain from sex before marriage in order to honour God, but today's sexually-inclined culture thinks celibacy only equals to repression.
Jonathon Van Maren, a writer and pro-life speaker, says today's culture thinks Christians are sexually repressed because they don't get to do what they want, whenever they want, and with whichever person or persons they want.
"This confuses them, because the secular hyper-individualism that dominates our cultural psyche is incessantly telling them and us that we must all hurry on and indulge in our fair share of pleasure while the getting is good," he writes in a blog post for Life Site News.
Van Maren does not deny that Christianity encourages repression and supression of desires, but he is quick to explain that being repressed is not a bad thing.
"Christians realise that there are greater goods than the gratification of desire. Delayed gratification—waiting for sex until marriage—strengthens the marriage bond and creates an exclusivity worth more than a hundred tawdry hook-ups," he says.
Because Christians recognise that God created sexuality, they know that the best way to enjoy it is to follow His will. Van Maren says Christians build sexual parameters not to deprive themselves but to "keep the wild animals out."
"Every society demands the repression of certain desires, and every society that ceased doing so has crumbled. Ours is already a confused and unhappy society, seeking the meaning of life in meaningless fluid-swaps that barely achieve the status of a cheap imitation of intimacy," he says.
Personally, Van Maren prefers the beauty of family and the beauty of dedicating oneself to one person for life, no matter how long that may be. "Our culture is so often asking the right questions about sex and happiness. It has just forgotten all the right answers," he says.
