Chastity Connoisseurs

It’s the age of experts—in everything. And apparently this includes even the virtue of Christian chastity. Yet some things don’t warrant experts, nor even deserve them. And chastity above all is one such case.

The “chastity connoisseur”—a term I’ve invented but that many will recognize—is just what you’d imagine: a relatively new and very real occupation (not quite a job) that centers on tasting and judging the diverse flavors of sexual virtue. In one way, it’s strangely asexual—just like a wine savant is strangely sober. Professional chastity demands rigorous posturing, delicate interactions, but ultimately not a whole lot of investment in the subject of one’s meticulosity. Being chaste—and especially with any track record—isn’t really part of the job description: minimal experience required.

The point of such expertise is laudable: A world suffering from the destabilization of social and personal community has lost the meaning of self-gift. Chastity connoisseurs focus attention directly on this forgotten meaning, and work to draw attention to examples of chastity in action.

The trouble with this approach, however, is that chastity is not an action, but a habit of action situated atop other more basic and prerequisite things. As far as chastity connoisseurs are actually chaste (which for all I know is 100 percent of the time), they provide a fine example and a credible witness to personal dignity. It’s important to remember, though, that habits aren’t communicable through snapshots, and they most certainly don’t exist in vacuums.

Which raises another point: the de facto visibility required for chastity connoisseurs to perform their craft. As far as medium goes, almost no day job is off limits to the true aesthete (although some are more conducive than others). A common denominator is finding a way to show—rather than simply tell—the beauty of chastity. Part and parcel to engaging a world engulfed by media is adopting it as a necessary method for communicating good in the face of many evils. An array of disjointed media, however, means that chastity is just as likely to appear broken as it is relevant. To continue the McLuhan-esque analysis, there’s also the causal relationship between medium and message, of which BuzzFeed is a consummate case.

The final product—as you well know—is a relatively tech-savvy, fashion-conscious, photogenic twenty-something ambassador of Christian ideals to a de-Christianized culture. A less obvious trait of chastity connoisseurs includes being well rested (it’s hard to appear chaste when you look rabid). And all of this, as far as it goes, is wonderful.

It’s not, however, chaste.

The flip side to apostolic epicurism is the popular sexual degradation we love to hate. What both share is a vocational disintegration that permits one’s final end to somehow detach from the small fulfillments of everyday life. “Chastity connoisseur” is a category mistake, just as odious as “empowering exploitation.”

Christian chastity is a much richer tradition than experts would or could ever make it out to be. (This is true of sex in general.) And the alternatives to a passionate display of self-control are much more convincing than even the most well-timed photo op mixing unmistakeable come-hitherness with a captioned quote from Padre Pio. The key to realizing such tradition, of course, is to recover a strong sense of Christian vocation—something worthy of its own discussion and susceptible to its own dangers.

Expertise inevitably narrows. Chastity, on the other hand, is something we should work hard not to contain. That is to say, we should work hard to think and talk about it as little as possible. That is to say, quite simply, we should work hard.