Frederica Mathewes-Green has an essay coming up in “Christianity Today” that seems to me to provide some of the purest wisdom around on the nature of the battle Christians have today with making our voice heard in the debate about morality. Christians know the rules, and hopefully we practice them, but can you imagine actually making progress about whether or not two consenting unmarried adults ought to sleep together?

Frederica acknowledges the problem in talking to college students about abstinence. There are various plans of attack, and to be brutally honest with ourselves, none of them work.

All the warnings about the dangers of promiscuity, all the vaunted bliss of marriage, can be irrefutably countered by somebody’s experience. Doing the right thing is not guaranteed to make you happy, and the wicked sometimes thrive. But because the love of God constrains us, because our bodies are not our own but bought with a price, we persevere in a difficult path, pressing on toward the light ahead.

Now, this is a difficult sell to people who don’t believe in God. For them, this is like a shiny new car with no engine. If you don’t have the motive of love for God, passion for purity looks like an empty shell

This is a difficult thing to admit to ourselves, but deep down we know it. The reason Christians don’t have a voice in this debate is because we refer to the Bible, Church teaching, traditional values … in a culture where those things are empty words. We’re asking young people to abstain from something that their culture tells them is everything in exchange for words that have no meaning to them.
So what’s to do?

I believe that the only conversation that will currently make sense begins with faith in God. The best we can do is speak passionately about our own experience — our own transformative contact with God, and how it has reordered actions and relationships, and empowered ever-greater deeds and greater love. It’s not a bad story, actually, and authentic passion has a way of connecting with an audience that theoretical propositions cannot.

This is a much harder approach, but it’s a completely Orthodox one. The Orthodox believe that one of the most powerful evangelical tools isn’t a publication or an exciting event — it’s one living example. In other words, the fight is always in my court. If I live as I should and fight as I should, I may be able to speak from the heart in a way that makes an impression on someone sometime when pamphlets and seminars can’t. And since I don’t know when I may get the opportunity, I have to work every day.