Jimmy Akin gives a young questioner advice on how to explain her pursuit of modesty and abstinence to her non-Catholic friends, and explains why God commands these of us in the first place.
Transcript:
Host: Arabella, on YouTube, watching on YouTube Live, writes the following: “As a 21-year- old female college student, how do I explain to my non-Catholic friends why modesty and abstinence are so important to me?”
Jimmy: Well, um…it depends on who your friends are, but there are a number of approaches here. One thing you could say is, “I’m a Christian and this is part of my faith and my faith is important to me. And if you’re my friend, you should be able to respect that, whether you agree or not. Whether this is important to you or not, it’s important to me because it’s part of my faith, it’s part of my spiritual heritage, and it’s very close to my heart.” And so that’s one way of dealing with the question.
Another way is to dig into the reasons a little bit more. The reason that this is important to Christians is not just because it’s a rule. You know, rules are important, but this isn’t just because it’s a rule. Ultimately the rules that God gives us are to make us happy. And if you are modest in dress, and if you are abstinent until you’re married, you’re gonna save yourself a lot of headaches.
You know, Cy and me, we’re a little bit older, and we’ve seen a lot of people our age who have not lived according to these rules and have ended up badly hurt. And so it’s something that…life experience teaches people: if you stick with the way we’re designed, which is to have one spouse and save ourselves for that spouse and not play around in other ways, either mentally or physically or whatever, you end up saving yourself a lot of pain and you end up happier in the long run.
Also, one of the reasons you’re happier is because you have demonstrated integrity and respect, and you’ve insisted on respect from other people. So rather than flaunting your physical assets and encouraging others to mentally degrade you in their minds, you’ve insisted on respect, and you can feel confident and good about that.
And so those are some additional reasons. So you can be happy even now by this. You can always take pride in the fact that you’re doing what you should, and that gives you a good feeling, and when you know you’re doing right, you feel right. And so you’ll be happier even now doing this, and you’ll certainly be happier later when you look back and say, “I’m so glad that I didn’t do those other things that would have led me to be unhappy now in my life.”