Yesterday, a 16-year old girl lost ‘her’ appeal to wear a silver ring in school to show her commitment to refraining from having sex until she’s married; and – as she also says in the video – to remain “sexually pure” until she’s married, whatever that may mean.
I used the word ‘her’ above, in inverted commas, advisedly becuase her father seems to figure largely in this: he is a pastor at their Church and is someone who is running the Silver Ring Thing campaign in their area, as well as being the “Parents Programme Director” for the national organisation.
The claim is that the ring, symbolising chastity, is ‘part’ of her faith, and that she should be able to express this the same way as Muslims (for example) wear headscarves.
Yet nowhere in the Bible does it instruct anyone to wear a ring – or anything else for that matter – as a commitment to chastity, and the movement – confined within the ‘evangelical’, or fundamentalist, denominations – is barely more than ten years old. There is nothing distinctively ‘Christian’ about wearing a ring in today’s world (if not in the past). The Koran, on the other hand, does talk about women dressing modestly (in chapters 31 and 33), from which the tradition of hajibs, niqabs and burkhas clearly descend. Even if we accept that marriage rings are a Christian tradition (and its not clear to me yet that we should), there certainly isn’t a respective Christian claim that can be made for so-called ‘chastity rings’, much less one that’s based on the strict reading of the Bible that the fundamentalist denominations usually insist upon. The courts were essentially right in this respect.
Yet the Playfoots make another, non-faith based claim that appears to confuse their argument. They are quick to make a general abstinence argument, and say that the wearing of this ring symbolises that commitment. For example, on her blog Lydia says that:
Over two years ago, I was concerned at the number of teenagers who were catching sexually transmitted diseases, getting pregnant and/or having abortions.
The Government’s Sex Education Programme is not working, and the pressure on young people to ‘give in’ to sex continues to increase. This is often because of the media’s focus on sex and the expectations of others.
This is distinctly not an argument based on her faith, but a political or education argument, one that should be irrelevant if it was merely a question of faith. If this is the point that she’s making, the courts were certainly right to dismiss the case: the ring is just a ring that contravenes the school’s dress code.
