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Erika Harold, Miss America 2003, has just emerged victorious from a very public struggle over sex. Erika, a professed Christian, announced after winning the title that she would be using her year in the spotlight to promote sexual abstinence for teenagers. For reasons best known to themselves, the Miss America pageant organizers in Atlantic City ordered her not to do so. Then, in the face of controversy, they reversed their decision but made Erika promise that she would couch her message in the more politically correct theme of "teen violence."

One look at the multi-billion-dollar television industry upon which the Miss America pageant feeds should make clear the pageant promoters' difficulty. How many premarital and extramarital sex acts are shown or implied each year on American television programs? How many times does a message of abstinence make it onto the airwaves—outside of Christian stations? Hmmm.

Probably the most obvious and counter-cultural ethical position of Christians today—one shared by the other "peoples of the Book," Jews and Muslims—is the proscription against premarital sex.

Abstinence has not had a higher-profile or more appropriate spokesperson in modern America than Erika Harold. But her message is rooted in the earliest history of the church. Not a single church father can be found who did not assume that Christians should remain chaste before marriage.

In the early second century, the Roman governor Pliny questioned some ex-Christians, who reported that Christians met before dawn for a secret ritual that included an oath to refrain from moral no-nos, including sexual sins. The ritual so described is generally considered to have been baptism, which, as Justin Martyr described a few years later, did require the new Christian to make this kind of moral promise.

Turning to such early church manuals as the Didache, Clement of Alexandria's Paidagogos, or the many disciplinary writings of Tertullian, we find sexual sins getting a lot of attention. Fornication (sex by unmarried people) and adultery (sex between married people with other partners) are condemned in the strongest terms, and discussions keep cropping up about whether newly baptized Christians should be required—or at least urged—to remain celibate, and about whether sex in marriage should be only for the purpose of conceiving children.

Reading these discussions, you get the sense that "the sky hung low" for these people. That is, heaven was a nearby, almost tangible reality, where many natural physical functions would drop away into insignificance: no one would be married (Luke 20:34-36), be born, or die. In a church vividly aware that this was the place of which they were truly citizens, it was not a stretch to say that even God's command in Genesis to "be fruitful and multiply" was now suspended—at least, for those carrying the good news of Christ's gospel to a world next door to death. Such messengers of heaven saw themselves as strangers and sojourners in a transitory, sin-besotted physical world. The anticipation of heaven was so powerful that it motivated some to begin living as the angels do—renouncing such physical pleasures as sexual intercourse.

This heavenly-mindedness may help account for the fact that chastity—often called by the early Christians simply "virginity"—became a hallmark of spiritual greatness among the Christians. Neither the Jews nor the pagans had ever much linked spiritual perfection with sexual abstention.

Another (but probably less influential) reason "virginity" became the badge of honor for many early Christians was that some of their Roman persecutors, in their attempts to give Christianity a bad name, accused the Christians of engaging in secret sex rituals in their meetings. As the second-century defender of the faith Justin Martyr wrote,

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October (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46