This one may wind up in the print version at some point. I did a speaking gig out at Lancaster Christian School last week, which might not be as strange as it sounds; it’s actually the second year I’ve been out there, one of the teacher reads the strange things I write in the newspaper, agrees with some, disagrees with most, but says it makes him think. Which is about the best praise I could ever get.

In any event, he brought me out to provide a bit of a different perspective for the kids, which I did. The group of 11th and 12th graders was extraordinarily sharp, and had some pointed questions. Some of them disagreed with me pretty strongly on things like the Iraq war, abortion, stem cell research (we hit all the high points). Others seemed to come from pews on the left side of the aisle.

But some of the most curious questions, posed to two girls, had to do with how I - a professed agnostic who has been almost entirely unchurched - can claim any source of moral grounding. If I don’t read the Bible, if I don’t take my morality from the Bible - can I be moral?

Initially, I think I sort of resented the question. But the more we talked about it, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was an honest query, not an accusatory one. These are kids who - by their presence in the Christian school - have been brought up steeped in faith, to whatever degree. And for Christians, the Bible is necessarily the fount of a moral worldview. I commented here a few weeks ago on something Jerry Falwell once said, that medical research in this country needs to pass a three-part test: Is it ethically correct? Is it Biblically correct? Is it morally correct? And I opined that as for one and three, yes; but I do not see where this country’s medical research, or anything else, needs to be “Biblically correct.”

But for these kids - a few of them, anyway - you can’t separate the three. If it’s ethically correct then it’s Biblically correct; if it’s Biblically correct it’s necessarily morally correct. And vice versa. And if the Bible is the fount of morality and ethics, how can I - how can anyone - who doesn’t explicitly embrace its tenets claim to act morally or ethically?

I started in on a rant about the things we teach our children, the things I was taught and you probably were as well - be kind to others. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The religious origin of these sentiments notwithstanding, they are the things I believe and have tried to impress upon my son. At the same time - and my kids are too young to go here, though I’m sure we someday will - I do not consider a single fertilized cell to be the moral equivalent of an actual human being. I do not consider the morning-after pill to be tantamount to a third-trimester abortion.

And I do think for some people it’s all part of the same package; you’re not ordering a la carte. You get the main dish and you get what comes with it, or you go to another restaurant altogether.

In restrospect, it strikes me that I might have challenged the kids more by flipping this question on its head. Some of them may think that the likes of unchurched me may be incapable of living a moral life as they understand the term. But even with their grounding in the Bible - do they, do Christians on average, live a more “moral” life than the unchurched?

A new book suggests the answer is, not necessarily.

to be fair, Mark Regnerus’s Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers apparently does suggest that the stronger your faith, the greater your religiousity, the better the chance you can resist temptation.

But of that group of kids I spoke with last week - are they ultimately less likely to, say, get divorced than “secular” kids? If I go to the average conservative evangelical megachurch in Lancaster County, am I going to find a smaller percentage of people who have been divorced - people who have had a child out of wedlock - than I would if I went to Park City?

That’s impossible to quantify, and perhaps a lot of people in the congregation at one time might have engaged in “immoral” behavior that they try to resist now. Good for them.

But the point is that the general assumption, and I tend to think Christians make it more than others, is that Christians ultimately make more moral choices in life specifically because they have this grounding in the Bible. That if conservative evangelical Christians were to go off and found their own country, that divorce, infidelity would be unknown, or less known, than it is here and now; that crimes of passion, such as murder, would be far less of an issue.

Would it? We can go to areas of this country that might qualify as that type of country, and we get back to Rosin’s piece in Slate:

Evangelical teens are actually more likely to have lost their virginity than either mainline Protestants or Catholics. They tend to lose their virginity at a slightly younger age—16.3, compared with 16.7 for the other two faiths. And they are much more likely to have had three or more sexual partners by age 17: Regnerus reports that 13.7 percent of evangelicals have, compared with 8.9 percent for mainline Protestants.

How is this possible? Rosin explains that it’s because the “born again” demographic ”includes more teenagers of a lower socioeconomic class, who are more likely to have had sex at a younger age. It also includes African-American Protestant teenagers, who are vastly more likely to be sexually active.”

So is Christianity - is the Bible - the antidote?

How about, it could be. But I sometimes think Christians need to understand that just because they are steeped in it does not necessarily mean that the outcome - the ultimate behavior of Christians - will be “better” than those of us who have been unchurched.

I certainly couldn’t and wouldn’t claim to be any sort of saint, but I do indeed have a fairly well-developed sense of what I consider moral, the things I will teach my kids. That ultimately will include the Bible - but also viewpoints that differ considerably from those who live their lives in strict accordance with what they read there.

I respect their choice. I suspect they want to believe that this choice makes them morally superior to those of us who haven’t made it. I hope they’re cognizant enough to see that this isn’t always the case.