“Claire” was a member of my youth group in high school. With her brown hair and round bosom, she was easy to notice. I was too shy to speak with her, but she was a faithful presence in youth group until our junior year when she suddenly disappeared. Her absence puzzled me until I heard why she had left the group.
“She had sex,” I heard it whispered.
Claire had tearfully confessed to some of the other girls in youth group that she had sex with her boyfriend. Her mother had discovered evidence of her transgression via a discarded condom wrapper on her bedroom floor and lacy thong panties in her drawer. She forced Claire to publicly confess her sin. Then Claire’s family left the church.
Claire had “fallen.” My young mind was confused as to how she could present a façade of righteousness in church each week while engaging in sexual impurity. For a young Christian girl, sexual transgression cast doubt on the sincerity of her faith and imperiled her salvation. Ye shall know them by their fruits (Mt 7:16). While I expected the provocatively dressed secular girls who attended the public high school to egregiously sin, I hadn’t expected that of a good church girl like Claire. And she was irrevocably tainted. No Godly young man seeking a wife would be attracted to any young women stained by impurity.
I recently thought of Claire and Beth, girls I knew who failed to live up to their pledges of purity. Undoubtedly there were more who had fallen of whom I remain unaware. One assumption, both spoken and unspoken, in the culture I grew up in was that females, by dint of design, had it easier than lascivious males in controlling their sexual urges. Those girls who couldn’t were simply categorized as “sluts.” Despite some maturity on my part, this schema somehow still remains embedded in my erotic imagination, which I’m certain helps account for my Madonna-whore complex.
Lutheran Guilt 