According to Baptist Scott Croft, a married man who has a readily available sex partner, any romantic physical contact between unmarried people is a sin. In a 2007 article titled, Biblical Dating: Principles for Drawing Boundaries, Croft states:
“I believe the Bible teaches that all sexual activity outside of marriage is sin, and all romantically oriented physical activity is sexual activity. In my view, this includes premarital kissing.”
Croft believes that any romantic bodily contact between unmarried people is a sin. Hand holding? Kissing? Snuggling? Putting your arm around your boyfriend or girlfriend? Sin! Sin! Sin! Let me give you a real life illustration of how this kind of thinking works. Bethany Baird, an attractive 27-year-old Christian woman had this say when she answered the question, Should Christian Girls Kiss Before Marriage:
I’m just going to be honest from the get-go.
I’m twenty-five years old, I’ve been in two serious relationships, and I’ve never kissed a guy. It’s not because I think kissing is gross, or that I’ve never wanted to kiss. The fact is, I’m saving my very first kiss for my future husband on the day of our wedding.
Kissing is totally the norm.In a day and age where kissing is the norm for elementary schoolers and losing your virginity in, or by high school is expected, it seems absurd and ridiculous that anyone would possibly save their first kiss for marriage.
I’m totally aware of the fact that many of you reading this might have already given your first kiss away and possibly your virginity. If so, check the note at the bottom of this post before you continue reading.
I want to take you through five points that will help you better understand why I’m saving my first kiss for marriage, and why I think you should too. Even if you’ve kissed in the past, I want to challenge you to stop kissing and start waiting from this point forward.
….
Baird gives five reasons for why young women should NEVER kiss before their wedding day:
- Your Kiss is a gift. As the years have gone by I’ve to come to view my kiss as a gift. I view it as something very special, something I can treasure, something that I can save and share with my future husband alone…Instead of viewing your kiss as something meaningless and cheap, I want to challenge you to view it as a very expensive treasure box. It’s your job to keep your treasure safe until the person with the right key comes to unlock it.
- Viewing guys as brothers in Christ. It’s our job as Christian girls to live out a Biblical mindset. Even if you are a dating a guy, according to Scripture he is your brother in Christ until the wedding day. It’s not until the wedding day that he switches to the husband. Only then do we see the sexual dimension come in to play. No sooner and in no other type of relationship.
- Relationships with a purpose. We as Christian girls need to look to the Bible as our example and guidebook. The entire point of “getting to know” a guy or girl shouldn’t be for the goal of fun and pleasure, it should be for the purpose of discovering whether you two should marry.
- What does the Bible say? The most important question you can ask yourself about romantic relationships is this, “What does the Bible say?” I realize the Bible doesn’t say “thou shalt not kiss,” but it does give us some incredible principles and some pretty clear direction on where we should be headed.
- The Pure Bride. Did you realize that as a Christian your future marriage represents the Gospel? Just check out Ephesians 5. The chapter is filled with illustrations that compare an earthly bride and groom to Christ and the Church. A huge goal in each of those relationships is absolute purity, holiness and blamelessness. Instead of trying to scrape by until your wedding day, shoot to arrive as completely pure and undefiled as possible. Don’t ask, “How much can I get away with?” Instead ask, “How pure and undefiled can I be?”
Based on the Bible verses Baird quotes in the aforementioned post, she believes that kissing=sexual immorality. That’s right, kiss your boyfriend and you are committing sexual immorality. I will assume Baird thinks that kissing is fornication. So then, following Baird’s illogical logic to its theological conclusion, no young Christian woman who regularly necks with her boyfriend will go to heaven when she dies. I can hear Baird screaming from here, NO! NO NO! That’s NOT what I said. Yes, but it is what the Bible says. 1 Corinthians 6:9,10 states:
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
Galatians 5:19-21 states:
Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.
And while we are playing the Bible Sex Manual game, let me press this issue even further and say that having thoughts about kissing someone will land a person in hell. If kissing is immoral (fornication), then thinking about it is too. The Bible is clear on this matter. Matthew 5:28 states:
But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
Surely Baird would agree with me that a longing desire to kiss is no different from “looking on a woman to lust.” Surely, if Christian young women entertain the thought of being kissed and give off the I’ll let you kiss me vibe, they are committing, in thought and deed, fornication. If this is so, then these lustful, vile hussies shall NOT inherit the kingdom of God.
I feel sorry for Evangelical teenagers and young adults who have bought into the fundamentalist lie about pleasure and sexual gratification. There is a vast chasm between kissing a young man and starring in a Girls Gone Wild video. A look or a kiss does not lead to sexual intercourse unless a person wants it to. Evangelical parents emotionally cripple their children when they teach them that sexual desire and gratification must be avoided until marriage. Even masturbation, a sure-fire way of releasing sexual tension, is frowned upon, and is, in some dark corners of the Evangelical world, considered a horrible sin.
If I were given the opportunity to give sexually-aware Evangelicals a bit of advice I would tell them this:
Pleasure is not a sin. Having sexual feelings and desiring to act upon those feelings is not a sin. Being physically intimate with someone is not a sin. Forget all that you have been taught in church about sex and sin. Instead, educate yourself about human sexuality, especially birth control. You are in control of your body and sexuality. You decide when, where, how, and if you will have sex or do any of the things that lead up to sex. You do not have to do anything sexually you are not comfortable doing. Do not give in to peer pressure, nor allow anyone to pressure you into do anything sexually you don’t want to do.
Above all, remember, you are the master of your sexuality. Choose wisely.
Let me conclude this post with a no-kissing video by Nino Guarisco, pastor of H2O Campus Church (Assembly of God) at the University of Michigan. Guarisco is married, has 4 children, and freely admits that he was once a fornicator. In but a few minutes, Guarisco piles a mountain of guilt on teenagers and young adults who have already done the dirty (kissing) or are contemplating doing so. By far, this is the worst video I have ever seen on this subject.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Besides, what even makes a marriage a marriage?
“And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife.” Gen 24:67
Not once does the Bible spell out what rituals or formulations have to be followed to legitimately inaugurate a marriage.
Mikespeir brings up a cogent point: What fundagelicals do, rather than look at all the potential interpretations of scriptures and allow all points of view, is assault the bounds of common human decency by freely interpreting to support patriarchal control, the subjugation of women and their disdain for children. While exposing their shiny teeth as they talk, they say all kinds of nonsense and occasionally give biblical references as if they somehow apply to the nonsense inserted into us because of their lust to control, to give all to Control.
You thought your underwear was your own? Forget it. They want your underwear too. They will not stop. Doug Wilson, long after his ex-parishioner, Natalie Greenfield was abused over a long period by a lad training under Wilson’s ‘Way’ at college, got her into his office and started asking her about her sex life with her boyfriend at the time and demanded to know exactly what the sex acts were, whether it involved oral sex and so forth. Wilson did this to a woman who had suffered rape and abuse for years before! This was his need as a man in charge. Pastor sic professor sic Wilson believes he is ordained to interfere with our boundaries as decent people. By attending his church we are liable to be asked just how we ‘sin’ and ‘turn over’ our underwear. (I say this metaphorically, the metaphor of underwear that is snatched as evidence…. you get my drift.) Evangelical Christianity is a scourge on human freedom. It preys on our fears and the damage we have suffered in childhood or later. It is a vampire far more onerous than any we have invented in literature and folklore. (I say this knowing full well that many Christians fully believe their particular church is just about helping the helpless and would say that Doug Wilson is not a worthy pastor.
Still, the business of religion overall, is harmful in my assessment after a lifetime inside and now out. I used to support a missionary work that dug wells in the third world. I can still support wells being dug without the surrender of my boundaries, while keeping my favorite underwear and without having to listen to ‘Doug Wilsons’. Whenever some person who claims to love God, attacks your decency with a Bible in hand (you will know this is happening because of the flood of guilt and shame you are good at feeling) do yourself a favor, and walk away. Tell yourself, I am not perfect. I make mistakes. I deserve respect (even if I was never given it even as child) and I am going to live as me. (If you want to believe in God(s) or whatever, then do me the respect of allowing me the same choice on the other side of the fence. If you preach, you abuse me.
OOPS, a sermon 🙁
Agreed. People place too much emphasis on a tax and piece of paper from the government. Two people committed to each other makes a marriage, the certificate just shows it is recognized by the government.
If you have a piece of paper from the government, yet one partner is consistently sleeping around, are they truly married?
Sorry, I couldn’t make it past 2 minutes and the “hands touch the hips” crap.
Isn’t it amazing that most of the people dishing out the purity advice are married or people who previously did all that stuff, and are now saying YOU shouldn’t? Hmmmm…..
In any case, this truly is garbage. Too bad so many are falling for it. Glad I was able to escape from it.
Miss Baird might want to wait until she’s actually married and has finally found a man with the, um, “right key” to “unlock her treasure box”, before she starts advising other people to do as she has chosen. At this point in her life, she simply doesn’t know how her experiment is going to, um, come out in the end. She’s giving very forceful, vigorous advice — really pounding it in, as it were — based, not on her own experience, but on purest speculation.
Michael Mock, it seems like you think there are some double entendres in her post. I like your analysis.
I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about. Pure-minded to a fault, I am.
I find it ironic that so many women in the fundamentalist world think they should be “pure” before marriage so their marriage will represent the union of Christ and the church. Given the behavior of many churches, and some of the leaders of those churches, I would think they should be trying to become as, ahem, experienced, as possible.
Comment deleted. Unnecessary sexual content.
I abhor the admonition that women should remain pure… that people should not kiss or cuddle pre-marriage. It’s horrid.
https://youtu.be/j8ZF_R_j0OY
Oh dear Jeebus! I love being able to laugh to educational videos… bless every step of your sole, kittybrat!
Yeah, it’s crazy to think people shouldn’t cuddle or kiss before marriage.
What would be the harm if her boyfriend got a good cup or feel-up of her breast or fingered her, or if she caressed him?
I didn’t actually have “sex” before marriage, as defined by sexual intercourse. 🙂 I did some fooling around though, not a lot. So I was technically a virgin when I married my husband. I have to say, that it might have useful to have done more before marriage. But I was hung up with the Christian teachings.
Now, I can say if I became a widow, I would probably be willing to have sex outside of marriage. HOWEVER, I’m of that variety of people who need love, affection, trust and respect before doing so. Also, fantastic sex isn’t the be all and end all. I’m approaching my 60s, my husband is well into his 60s. At our age, lovemaking is nice, and comforting. To be with the one person who accepts me and my flaws…including of course my older, fatter, broken down body. (Although I have been hit on by men, so I suspect my personality is hot heh heh.)
It’s great you understand the difference between sex and sin.
Sexual relationships inside Christian — or nonChrsitian– relationships are entirely fine and shouldn’t be looked down upon.
There is no problem with a Christian couple wanting to express their love for each other in a dating relationship.
There is no problem with a Christian, whether through love or wanting to fulfill sexual needs, wanting to make love to the person they’re seeing.
Birth control would be a priority, however, but past a certain age, it’s unlikely the sperms will conceive a child.
Again the Fundie approach to sex is: “Sex is bad, save it for someone you love.”
Scott
Okay, so he wants to know if you would be ashamed if Jesus came back while you were fooling around with your boyfriend/girlfriend with your pants down around your ankles. Come on, I would be embarrassed if that happened with me and my HUSBAND…or if Jesus came back while I was in the shower or sitting on the toilet “going number 2.” Maybe even “going number 1.” Jesus should give us all a bit of warning so we can make ourselves decent.
You are banned. Go somewhere else to masturbate
It won’t matter at the time because God originally made us to be naked.