The April issue of GQ, the magazine for dudes with elegantly mussed hair, baits us with the cover line, “The New Christian Sex Craze.” This continues a series of articles on conservative Christians, most of which have peddled fringey crackpots as just average Christian Joes. The sex craze in question, however, turns out to be the chastity movement, which writer Walter Kirn discovers with a visit to the L.A.-based Christian college Biola University and an interview with Stephen Arterburn, co-author of the Christian man’s no-sex guide “Every Young Man’s Battle.”

Kirn, who admits that he grew up a sexually repressed Mormon, confesses a lot of admiration for both the boys of Biola—who use scotch tape and paper to hide Jennifer Aniston’s curves on magazine covers and talk dirty to one another to quell urges—and for Arterburn. He’s astonished at how chastity has become a form of rebellion, in which sex is ardently hoped for but delayed: “The new abstinence is not anti-sex but pro-sex, and that’s it’s ingenious selling point,” he writes.

Strangely, Kirn is the one who comes across as anti-sex: His repeated jibe against the passionate for Christ is that they are bound to be disappointed when the real thing happens.