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Notes -
How do Faiths and Philosophies Deal with the Convert who is a Satiated Sinner?
We all know Augustine’s famous formulation: Lord, make me pure, but not yet. How should we deal with someone who applies this strategy successfully: they sin for as long as anyone would reasonably like to sin, then with perfect timing they find religion, live an ordered an righteous life, and tell anyone who will listen that their prior life was bad and sinful. And on the one hand, I might agree that they are correct: their prior life was sinful, their current life is better ordered; but on the other hand there’s something annoying about someone “having their fun” and then turning around and telling you not to have yours, or claiming their objectively enviable life as some form of tragedy they were forced to endure rather than a result of their own choices.
The classic, Augustinian example is the born again Christian who sleeps around when they are young and then finds Jesus right around the time that most people get bored of sleeping around anyway. Inasmuch as one can point to anything like a secular liberal life-path it looks something like HIMYM : date and sleep around and party from college through your mid-late 20s, at which point you’ll be ready to settle down and switch your tax light to available. As the joke goes: how do you find your soulmate? Turn 27, it’ll be the next person you date. Most people, even without finding any religion, tend to get tired of sleeping around, and get married. But the difference is that the born-again Christian goes through this process, attributes their change to finding religion, and lectures everyone in range about how they should never do the things they did. And it’s hard to take them seriously and not say: You had your fun and now you want to keep me from having mine.
The feminist example was one brought up by my wife: women who earn celebrity exploiting themselves in ways that they later write oh-so-thoughtful-thinkpieces with all the right feminist verbiage self-victimizing and finding all the ways that the thing they made money off of was horrible; conveniently right around the time when they can’t exploit their ill-gotten hotness anymore. Emily rat-polish-nonsense is trying for a second career as a feminist crusader, starting with getting angry about the modeling career that helped her net a rich man that would enable her to pay to play in publishing. But my wife brought up Callista Flockhart, who has tried to do advocacy around the eating disorder she had throughout her early 2000s acting career, without really reckoning with the damage that starving herself did to girls watching to benefit herself; Bella Hadid who says she regrets her nose job because it took away her Palestinian nose, while living off the results of the plastic surgery she’s gotten; and [the Kadashians]](https://people.com/kylie-jenner-regrets-getting-breasts-done-7565553) of all people try to self victimize about the “pressure” they felt to get Darth-Vader quantities of plastic surgery, pressure they themselves have done more than anyone else to create. And my wife’s feeling is that these women want to have their cake and eat it too: hit “betray” on feminism when their young and exploitation pays, then find Feminism when their career is starting to flag and cry a river of tears about how they were mistreated when they were making money.
The problem in either case being that while Augustine’s plea is deeply human, and fairly normal, the message such a convenient conversion sends is undermined, it’s at cross purposes, it will come across as “do as I say not as I do” to the young, who will take the whole story as permission to sin with an assurance of later acceptance after conversion.
Possible solutions:
There is no problem, they’re probably mostly sincere, you’re just jealous. This might be accurate, I have a teacher’s-pet personality and an autistic focus on fairness in some things. The first time I remember thinking this was as a virginal high school junior-senior, when I went through a weird phase of dating like five girls in a row who all gave a variation on the same story: she wasn’t a virgin, she had lost it to a boyfriend she thought was forever some time last year, but she didn’t want to do it again until she got married, and she was willing to give me a try out for that job. And as an immature seventeen year old boy, I would have probably happily dated a fellow virgin who wanted to wait until marriage, but working toward marrying a girl who had sex with other guys before but made me wait was out of the question. Looking back, I was immature, my analysis of the situation was incorrect, and my jealousy was asinine. Maybe I’m just emotionally wrong about this.
They might not really be sincere, but this is the best case scenario path for them. We want to encourage conversion to our religion, and that means accepting converts where they are. The Prodigal son and all that. Though I find this mostly dissatisfying, in that the Prodigal Son comes home after eating pig slop, rather than having a great time and just sorta coming home one day. His conversion from rock bottom is sincere, it doesn’t tell us what to do with insincere converts.
This is the actual path for converts, growing up. Not everyone is a saint from day one, and really a life path where you have your fun and then mature is the ordered life path we’re aiming for. We don’t actually expect to convert young people, they’re too busy having fun, we just want them to wander back when they’re old. This I find dissatisfying, in that nobody actually preaches this, and accepting it from converts undermines the message to the young by observed example.
Is there something I’m just not seeing here?
Im probably ignoring the spirit of your post, which is Christian. But I'm curious. What happened to those 5 girls after you broke up with them? Do you know if they actually abstained from further sex until marriage?
If they didn't, I think they refused to put out for you because they just didn't feel lustful passion for you. There was no repentance involved. Of course, it is awkward for them to say that. Once is happenstance and twice is coincidence, what do you think five times is?
I think your conclusion, that you were jealous, is correct by the way, regardless of their sincerity.
Man, I have a birthday and a wedding anniversary and then you ask me to reminisce? Buckle up boyo.
One I lost track of entirely. We honestly had nothing in common except her best friend was dating my best friend.
One, A, I never talked to much after high school, but a couple years later I heard A married some Russian guy during undergrad, which unkind rumors called a green card marriage, and then he more or less abandoned her while refusing to divorce her. I don't know how that ultimately ended up.
One, B, would have a great deal of drama senior year with my childhood friend Chris as he wanted to have sex with her and she didn't want to have sex. Then we graduated high school and B went off to a southern party school and had what I understood to be a lot of fun. Funny how what was so important and dramatic in high school was meaningless by second semester of undergrad.
C would start dating a friend of mine from track a week after rejecting me, they would be inseparably hot and heavy all of senior year, talked about forever. He had gotten into UMichigan, and C chose to go to Michigan State so they wouldn't be too long distance, despite having never been to Michigan. The week before we all left for college that summer, my parents told me to invite a bunch of my friends to dinner at the country club we belonged to. C and I had remained close, along with D who was a good friend of hers, and so I invited both of them, along with several of my Brown and Jew crew friends from AP classes. Dinner is nice, it's the fireworks from the summer church festival down the road and you can see them from the balcony, when suddenly C leaves the group to take a phone call. Then she comes back, upset, and grabs D, and they go off to talk. We all plan to go back to my parents' house and shoot pool after. D asks me where she can take C to be alone, they go back to a spare bedroom in the basement. Turns out, C's boyfriend, the one she was moving 12 hours away to Michigan to stay with, had dumped her via text. After that she's cycled through a pretty standard serial-monogamy process. POSTSCRIPT: Years later, Mrs. FiveHour, who I met in undergrad, would go to law school, and in one of her 1L classes a guy would walk up to her afterward and say Hey, your last name is FiveHour, do you know FiveHourMarathon? And she'd say yeah he's my husband, and the guy would FREAK out holy shit FiveHourMarathon got married I knew him in high school. And she comes back and asks if I knew him, and I said yeah that's C's old boyfriend, I've told you that story before, you know the one who dumped her via text 72 hours before they were going to move to Michigan together? And Mrs. FiveHour looks at me with horror and says, C was so upset over HIM? All that drama over THAT GUY? Mrs. FiveHour was not impressed. C laughed until she choked when I told her this story after we ran into each other at the diner back home.
Of course, when C was crying over her erstwhile boyf, D was alternating between comforting her and stealing kisses with me. We'd been very close friends, and at some point it had turned into a doomed summer fling. She had decided that her wayward days were over, my wayward days had just begun, and we both kinda knew we weren't going to do long distance: I was headed to NYC for undergrad and she was off to Liberty to be a good Christian girl. But still, we talked about it, we flirted about it, we thought about it, even though ultimately we weren't going to do it; we had a lot of affection for each other, and I'd still rank her in marriageability top 5 of any girl I've ever known. She would meet a nice boy at Liberty, and still lives out there with her husband and kids. So I guess her repentance was as sincere as could be. I still can't over that her husband's last name is Dork. Not kidding, scout's honor, hand on the bible: his surname is Dork, D's name is now Mrs. Dork.
I'd imagine all four of them thought of it as sincere. A and D certainly put forth a best effort, to varying degrees of success. C, after her own heart, tried her best: I've remained friends with her and never once has she not been sincerely disgusted by the men who break her heart afterward and swears never again. B I guess didn't do that well, but that's more a change of circumstances and social contexts than anything.
My own negative reaction was a mix of jealousy, pride and a sense of entitlement to a life I'd consumed in media rather than in reality. Given, it worked out well enough for me in the end: all were nice enough girls, but Mrs. FiveHour is the Mrs. for a reason.
Thanks for the long recap! Didnt realize it was such bad timing
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