Teen Chastity Campaign Moving Into Schools

A campaign for teen abstinence is coming out of the churches and into the schools.

This Valentine’s Day, a coalition of more than 40 church groups, encouraged by the success of its True Love Waits program, is asking young people at secondary schools and college campuses around the country to proclaim their intention to remain chaste until marriage.

“Kids in the world are actually buying into the abstinence idea,” said the Rev. Glen Whatley, a consultant to the Nashville, Tenn.-based True Love Waits program. “It’s not the nerds anymore. It’s the popular thing.”

Since its humble beginnings four years ago, when 59 teens took vows of chastity in a Southern Baptist church in Nashville, the True Love Waits campaign has inspired youths around the world to pledge to abstain from premarital sex.

At the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in 1994, there was a huge display of 100,000 cards from youths pledging chastity. Last year, more than 340,000 pledge cards, signed by youths of 75 nations, were displayed at a rally in Atlanta.

Instead of concentrating on one major gathering, program organizers this year decided to take their message directly to the nation’s schools.

Students in Christian student clubs were asked to promote among their peers the idea of pledging “to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate and my future children to be sexually abstinent from this day until the day I enter a biblical marriage relationship.”

“The difference is we’re trying to move it out of the church and into the world,” Whatley said.