Living the Fact-Value Distinction

• Email
• Share
• Print

In my academic life, I teach and do research on gender, family, and social psychology. In my other professional life, I write popular books about how our dating and marriage patterns are changing. And for more than five years, I’ve written "Pure Sex, Pure Love," a biweekly sex and relationship column that combines my academic research, my popular writing, and my Catholic faith. In the column, I've reported on peer-reviewed academic studies, but I’ve also asked my readers to define the meaning of a “hook-up” and to share their opinions on whether you can be friends with an ex, the challenges of cohabitation, and the downside of insisting you marry only your soulmate. Although my Catholic faith guides my writing, my columns are heavy on research and light on doctrine.

In the last few years, I’ve taken the column on the road, giving talks at colleges and universities. Young Catholics have a lot of questions about sex, and when it comes to sex and their faith, the questions seem both endless and endlessly complicated. According to the Church, how far is too far, sexually speaking, before marriage? If you have oral sex are you still a virgin in the eyes of God? If I know I’m going to marry my boyfriend, is it more OK to have premarital sex? Does the Catholic Church think sex is dirty? Everybody else is doing it, so why can’t I?

I enjoy public speaking and figure that there are plenty of students in the audience who are just as uncomfortable as I am when my PowerPoint clicks over to the slide titled “oral sex.” Yes, I blush a lot. Yes, my husband, parents, and in-laws would all prefer I did something else with my time, but my calling, as I understand it, is to present the best research that I can find and to answer the sincere questions of these young adults as they try to weigh the often conflicting demands of their faith, their hormones, and their peers.

After the Daily Iowan wrote an article about a talk that I gave at the University of Iowa, I expected the critical e-mails suggesting that my faith was incompatible with being an unbiased social scientist. But I was surprised to receive criticism as well from devout older Catholics, who reprimanded me for presenting sociological data as if it were “morally neutral information.”

When I showed a table of changing mate preferences across seven decades, was I really giving a “free pass” to young adults to sleep around? Hardly. The data show that they aren’t waiting for permission from me or anyone else. Since the 1930s, college men and women have been asked to rank 18 characteristics on a scale of zero to 3, with zero being irrelevant or unimportant and 3 being indispensable. In the 1930s, chastity made the top 10 characteristics that both men and women sought in a spouse. By 2008, it had fallen to 18, dead last — meaning that the vast majority of the more than 1,100 students surveyed at schools nationwide considered chastity totally unimportant in their selection of a mate.

When I cited research showing that most Catholics don’t think premarital sex is morally wrong and that “Catholic guilt” is a thing of the past in their age cohort, was I telling them to ignore the Church’s teachings? Of course not. I was trying to describe the world as it is. According to national surveys, the attitudes of Catholics on contraception, premarital sex, and abortion are much closer to the opinions of the rest of the country than to the teachings of the Church. Catholics who want to convince younger believers to follow the Church’s teachings on sexual morality need to know what they’re up against.

The vast majority of young adults, including Catholics, are having sex before marriage. Chastity has become an old-fashioned and deeply uncool idea. But casual sex is not as common as it might seem. Despite what we see on TV, about 80 percent of college students have had one or fewer sexual partners in the past year, and many young adults don't feel fulfilled by the sexual status quo. My goal is to help them to understand what is at stake with their sexuality and to start a reasoned conversation, within the Church, about sex and dating.

To present sociological facts as other than what they are would violate my ethics as a researcher and journalist — and I believe it would also do a disservice to my faith, which embraces intellectual inquiry. No sincere question should be off the table. No data should be “too depressing” to present. An open, straightforward discussion of facts in light of faith will embolden young people to make wise decisions about their futures.

Christine Whelan is a sociologist currently teaching at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of Marry Smart: The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to True Love. Read more of her writing at www.christinewhelan.com.