If the music I heard Friday night had been blasting from a nearby car stereo, I would have rolled my eyes and rolled up my window. Instead it was accompanying the flashes of a laser light show within the walls of my pasture-perfect suburban church.

Teenagers crowding the foyer sported wild hair, the occasional do-rag and T-shirts that said, "I'm With The Band," "Primanti Bros." and "How to Have the Best Sex Ever." I did a double-take at that last one, even though I knew what event I was there for.

The T-shirt advertised the Silver Ring Thing, probably the world's best-known teenage sexual abstinence program. Its latest "event" was staged at Christ Church at Grove Farm, a sedate congregation in Ohio Township where the amps don't usually reach 5, let alone 11.

Inside the auditorium, 325 kids put on engraved silver rings as they pledged to remain sexually chaste until marriage. Outside the auditorium, a battle rages over whether such programs are effective, safe or worthy of society's support.

From where I stand, the program's critics aren't even asking all the right questions.

Although the Moon Township-based Silver Ring Thing has a quiet local profile, it receives international attention. SRT president Denny Pattyn, who founded the program in Yuma, Ariz., in 1995, says he has given more than 250 interviews to international media in the past two years, including Good Morning America, 60 Minutes, CNN, Newsweek and Time.

MTV even sent Christina Aguilera here to tape reports for the channel's 2004 election special.

The turning point from homegrown program to multinational juggernaut arrived in the form of a BBC documentary filmed here in 2003. When the SRT documentary aired around the world, an AIDS-fighting nonprofit called Turn The Tide sent a team for training to establish the program in South Africa.

With 25 million of the world's reported 39 million HIV-infected people living south of the Sahara Desert, the new SRT South Africa managed to reach more than 67,000 people through 102 shows in its first year. (SRT-USA holds 50 events per year.)

During the same time, an American SRT event that did receive media coverage was the American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the federal government's grants to SRT. "Reporters said we'd lost," but SRT got everything it wanted from the settlement, Mr. Pattyn notes: dismissal of the lawsuit, no forfeiture of the $1 million it had already received, and the ability to reapply for federal funds (though it doesn't need to).

The ACLU's concern was that SRT didn't clearly provide a secular alternative to its faith-based approach. Ironically, a lawsuit headed soon to England's High Court involves the right of schoolgirls there to wear their silver rings to class as a religious exemption -- like Muslim headscarves and Sikh bangles -- to the school's no-jewelry policy. (Too bad the ACLU can't take that case.)

The silver ring is so widely known that it's even been, Mr. Pattyn says, a trivia question on the British version of "Weakest Link." As silver rings circle the globe, though, critics claim that abstinence programs themselves are the weakest link in society's disease-fighting arsenal.

Mr. Pattyn appeared on "60 Minutes" last year just after a widely reported medical study claimed that abstinence pledgers are almost as likely as non-pledgers to have sexually transmitted diseases and are more likely to engage in unsafe practices.

Far less widely reported was a study from the Heritage Foundation three months later, using the same data and getting significantly different results -- that abstinence pledgers, for instance, are 25 percent less likely to have an STD. The Heritage researchers criticized Yale and Columbia universities' researchers for basing their "unsafe sex" claim on a subgroup of only 21 people in the 14,116-person study.

What sets SRT apart from other programs, besides the high-tech style that caught the BBC's attention, is its conscientious follow-up -- twice-weekly e-mails, a 12-step program, internships and support groups for pledgers. Two years ago, SRT launched its own study to track the success of its ring-wearers.

"How do you measure success?," Mr. Pattyn asks. "If one of our kids goes to college, gets drunk, has sex, goes home and feels tremendous pain about his bad decision, puts the ring back on and wears it until his marriage -- we'd say that's success. The media would say that's failure.

"When abstinence fails, [critics] say shut it down," Mr. Pattyn notes. "But when condoms fail," the same people call for more education.

"We don't teach abstinence because it's the best percentage chance for not getting AIDS. We teach abstinence because we believe it's the truth."

While science should be able to measure -- and honestly report -- human illness, it cannot measure wounds of the soul. Many a scarred adult might wish that those silver rings become condoms for our kids' hearts.