Chastity is one of the many Christian practices that are at odds with the dictates of our surrounding, secular culture.  It challenges the movies we watch, the magazine we read, and the songs we listen to.  It runs counter to the way many of our non-Christian friends organize their lives.  It strikes most secular folks as curious (at best), strange backwards, repressed.

Chastity is also something that many of us Christians have to learn.  I had to learn chastity because I became a Christian as an adult, after my expectations and mores were already partly formed.  But even many folks who grow up in good homes, attending Christian schools and hanging out with good Christian friends – even these Christians-from-the-cradle often need to learn chastity, because unchaste assumptions govern so much of contemporary society.”

 These are the words that Lauren Winner opens her book with.  She says she is no expert, but wants to offer some reflections on the subject of chastity.  When she became a Christian she knew that sexuality was not something to take lightly and set about asking friends, talking to pastors and reading scripture to learn more about what would be the right way to live sexually.  What she found was that most contemporary Christian churches treated sex in a secretive sort of way, i.e. we only talk about this behind closed doors and when we do talk about it out loud it’s usually in a rant against our culture or as scare tactics with our teenagers.  When Winner started to look at the numbers, she discovered that this

Read more: Looking at Ch. 1 of Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity