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- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
It's time to talk back. The generation born into evangelical purity culture has grown up, and many have started families of their own. But as time goes on, it's becoming more evident that many still struggle with purity culture's complicated legacy—its idolization of virginity, its mixed messages about modesty and lust, and its promise of a healthy marriage and great sex for those who follow the rules. In Talking Back to Purity Culture, Rachel Joy Welcher reviews the movement carefully, examining its teachings through the lens of Scripture. Compassionate, faithful, and wise, she charts a path forward for Christians in the ongoing debates about sexuality—one that rejects legalism and license alike, steering us back instead to the good news of Jesus. It's time to talk back to purity culture—and this book is ready to jump-start the conversation.
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Talking Back to Purity Culture
Rediscovering Faithful Christian Sexuality
To the hurting, the abused, and the angry; the weary, the curious, and the skeptical. To those whose faith is smaller than a mustard seed, and to those who, after experiencing the rough and tumble of life, still cling to
Contents
Foreword
Scott Sauls
It has been said that in and following the New Testament era, Christians were widely known for being promiscuous with their money and conservative with their bodies.
Their so-called financial promiscuity was directed toward the work of God and the needs of the poor, while their bodily “conservatism” reflected their belief in a vision for sex and marriage passed on to them by Moses, the prophets and apostles, and Jesus himself. This vision affirms the sometimes-scandalous belief that sexual intercourse—a glorious gift from God given chiefly for human intimacy, pleasure, and procreation—is reserved uniquely for marriage between one man and one woman.
According to many in our late modern times, such a limiting view of sex and marriage seems preposterous. According to one Harvard student in her impassioned defense of college hookup culture, “For me, being a strong woman means not being ashamed that I like to have sex. . . . To say that I have to care about every person I have sex with is an unreasonable expectation. It feels good! It feels good!”1
It may come as a surprise to some that ancient cultures were just as appalled by “Christian sexuality” as their twenty-first-century counterparts are. The sexual revolution is no recent phenomenon but is as old as time itself. Then as now, in most instances, the men fared better than the women.
From the earliest pages of Scripture, even highly esteemed patriarchs would pleasure themselves with prostitutes, accumulate multiple wives and concubines, and “spill their seed” on the ground in an act of loveless passion. Abraham, the father of all who have faith, offered his wife up to sexual predators in an effort to save his own skin. King David abused his power when he “saw” and then “took” Bathsheba, his next-door neighbor and wife of one of his closest, most loyal friends. Lacking in all subtlety, the disciple Matthew records that “David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife” (Matthew 1:6). In New Testament Corinth, a man in the church had sexual relations with his stepmother. And adultery was defined by Jesus as not only the physical act but also lustful fantasy.
That’s just a sampling from among those who did believe in God. And then there were the Romans, a brutish and godless power culture that also lived by the double standard. It was the rule, not the exception, for prominent men of Rome to be sexually involved with multiple mistresses as well as a younger man or two in addition to their wives. Women, on the other hand, were not allowed such “freedoms.” Likewise, if a woman gave birth to a girl, the husband would decide whether they should keep the child or throw her away—akin to a postpartum abortion as it were.
In our twenty-first-century context, we would like to think of ourselves as more enlightened, as if we have somehow progressed beyond such ugly human realities. But have we? The emergence of and growing popularity of pornography, nonmarried cohabitation, LGBTQ+ concerns and culture, polyamorous arrangements, and hookup culture attest otherwise.
What’s more, the #MeToo movement has arisen and emboldened women and their allies to (finally) say, “No more!” to predatory and perverted men. Many well-known celebrities and influencers have lent their names and platforms to advance the #MeToo cause. At the same time, many of these same celebrities and influencers have also, on those very same platforms, lauded and eulogized the late Hugh Hefner, the famed sex mogul who championed a climate in which the use, abuse, objectification, and subjugation of women could flourish as a civil rights hero.
As it was in ancient times, so it is today. Ours is a culture of sexual confusion, oppression, and slavery that masks itself as a culture of sexual freedom.
In reaction to a hypersexualized world, the Christian purity culture was born. While well-intended in some respects, the purity movement would, not unlike its sexual revolution counterpart, overswing the pendulum and become its own version of a culture of shame. Not only would unmarried people be told to avoid sex but also all forms of kissing, holding hands, and dating. Men and boys were rightly encouraged to do battle against lust and flee from sexual immorality. To help the men succeed, women and girls were wrongly blamed for “making” men stumble by dressing immodestly (whatever that means). Likewise, married women were admonished for “not putting out enough” in the marriage beds, thus causing their (often emotionally unavailable) husbands’ eyes to wander.
In the sexual revolution climate, what is needed is not less sexual freedom but better and healthier sexual freedom. Those who are unmarried (like the apostle Paul and Jesus Christ) are free to embrace countercultural chastity as a high, holy, and praiseworthy calling. In doing so, these men and women affirm God’s unique design for sex and in so doing protect their own souls from injury. Sex works a lot like fire. When removed from its protective boundaries, it burns us and leaves scars. When brought and kept inside those covenanted boundaries, a sweet foretaste of the ultimate love feast between Christ and his Bride, the Church, is given.
But the picture God paints of healthy, life-giving sexuality is also different than the one from the old TV show Leave It to Beaver in which Ward and June shared a bedroom but slept in separate beds. Instead, the Maker of sex and marriage tells husbands to “rejoice in the wife of your youth” and “may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be intoxicated with her love” (Proverbs 5:18-19). He tells Adam and Eve, the first married couple, to fully consummate their naked-and-without-shame state by coming together as one flesh (Genesis 2:24). He brings us into the bedroom of the “she” and the “he” of the Song of Songs, where husband and wife recite erotic poetry and sing erotic love songs over one another’s naked bodies. Centuries later, Paul, the unmarried apostle, commands able-bodied husbands and wives to enjoy sexual intercourse often, except in temporary Lenten-like seasons of prayer and fasting because his body belongs to her and her body belongs to him (1 Corinthians 7:4).
Likewise, God paints a picture of compassion, grace, and empathy toward those who have been burned, even reduced to ashes, through the mishandling of sex. A mob of men prepares to execute a woman caught in the act of adultery, but Jesus steps in and shows mercy to her. Maybe Jesus steps in because of the injustice of it all, since the mob of men are making her bear the penalty of a two-party transgression all by herself. As was customary, the adulterous man escaped accountability, leaving the woman alone to bear all of the shame. Sound familiar? Or maybe Jesus steps in because the woman’s sin evokes in him more compassion than judgment, more grace than condemnation, and more mercy than justice (John 8:1-11). For as Charles Spurgeon once said, God loves to forgive our sin even more than we love to commit it.
There is also the Canaanite prostitute Rahab, who is sovereignly and lovingly placed in the ancestry of Jesus alongside Tamar, a destitute and abandoned widow who posed as a prostitute (Matthew 1:3, 5). And of course, there was the other prostitute who barged into a dinner party uninvited and wiped Jesus’ feet with her hair and her tears and anointed him with her perfume and her lips—the primary tools of her trade—to demonstrate her affection in the only way she knew how. Jesus was not disgusted by her, he was not ashamed to be called her elder brother. No, he instead delighted in her and declared that she who loved much had also been forgiven much (Luke 7:36-50).
What is needed in our late modern times . . . what is needed not only in our own culture but in every culture as well as every bedroom, every boardroom, every big screen, every TV screen, and every computer screen, is a well-articulated, biblically grounded, compelling, and life-giving answer to the shame of promiscuity culture on the one hand and the shame of purity culture on the other. What’s needed is a freshly painted yet anciently grounded vision for sex, marriage, singleness, gender, and love that upholds and advances conviction and compassion. I believe that Rachel has done a masterful job painting that vision for us in this book. I trust that you will also.
Introduction
It’s Time to Talk Back
I was in high school when Joshua Harris’s book I Kissed Dating Goodbye captured the attention of the evangelical world. It kicked off a movement and inspired countless other books on dating and sexual purity. I read many of these, internalizing messages about my responsibility as a female to keep men from lusting, the value of my virginity, and how sexual sin could destroy my future marriage. I often finished these books more ashamed of my sexuality than when I had started them. Marriage and sex were placed on a pedestal, and they quickly became an idol: something I thought would one day complete me.
With my first serious relationship, I tried to follow all I’d been told in the books. We were friends first. We dated for years before getting engaged and were engaged for six months before getting married. My father officiated the ceremony. My best friend made the cake. I even saved my first kiss for him. But before our fifth wedding anniversary, he had a crisis of faith and walked away from God and our marriage. The books I had read promised that premarital purity would result in a flourishing marriage. They told me that sexual obedience would secure a specific blessing. When the reward didn’t come, I was left to wonder what I had done wrong and whether others who had grown up reading the same books and hearing the same messages were wrestling with similar questions.
I taught English in private Christian high schools for a decade. Studying literature with teenagers creates a depth of conversation that small talk never could. As a class, we would reflect on the joys and struggles different characters faced, and this naturally led my students to open up about their own stories: what they feared, what was going on at home, and their hopes for the future. This dialogue also created space for students to share about sexuality. Over the years, I have talked with students who were sexually abused, addicted to pornography, wrestling with same-sex attraction, worried about sex, excited about sex, sexually abstinent, and sexually active. What I noticed was how many were living in shame, afraid to talk about their God-given sexuality in anything above a whisper.
The classroom isn’t the only place I heard these confessions. I grew up in a pastor’s home, and I watched my parents love the vulnerable. There were often people in our living room or at the kitchen table who were heavy with the trials of life. My parents would feed them, listen to them, and pray over them. And as I grew into adulthood in the church, I began a similar ministry to the hurting. People sought me out for prayer, counsel, and friendship. Their stories in relation to sexuality were just as complicated as my students’—filled with guilt, abuse, fear, and hope. And when my peers and I were honest with one another, we shared similar stories.
So when it came time to pick a dissertation topic for my master’s thesis in divinity at the University of St. Andrews, I thought about these questions and struggles. I wondered how teachings that I had internalized, such as the idea that women are responsible for the purity of men or that you can earn a perfect marriage by practicing chastity, held up next to Scripture, and I decided to wade back into the purity teachings of my youth to find out.
This book isn’t a new I Kissed Dating Goodbye, nor is it meant to be the ultimate source or guide for sexual purity. My hope is that it will push Christians to engage with these topics together, in community. This book is for anyone trying to sort out what sexual purity means and how to talk about it—youth leaders, pastors, parents, teenagers, and those who grew up in church during the high tide of purity culture. It is for those who want to reevaluate what they were previously taught (or have taught others). It is for the hopeful and the bitter; those who underlined every other line in I Kissed Dating Goodbye and those who burned the book in college. It is for Christians who want to honor God and want to see the church do better.
As I wrote this book, I found myself filled with a righteous anger at a Christian subculture that, for years, has made false promises and worshiped the idol of chastity rather than the Lord Jesus Christ. We have so much to uproot. We have so much to talk about. But I need you to know something before I go any further: I love the church. If I critique her, it is as a member of the body of Christ and a fellow sinner-saint. I pray for her flourishing. My desire to reevaluate purity culture teachings is out of love for the church, not a vendetta against her.
I will not be proposing a new sexual ethic for Christians or calling into question the validity of Scripture. God is above critique. But we are not. And I believe that humility demands regular reflection on our spiritual practices and biblical interpretation. This is not “wishy-washy” but rather a recognition of our proneness to wander, an acknowledgment that we all have a human weakness and fallibility and that everyone is susceptible to getting so caught up in something that we forget to tether ourselves to God’s Word.
Evangelical purity culture was not a wicked movement but rather an earnest response to the age-old problem of immorality and the modern crisis of STDs and teenage pregnancy. As with most earnest, human responses, we didn’t get everything right. Surprised? I’m not. I won’t get everything right in this book either. But it’s time to step back and look at the movement that shaped so many of us—our relationships, our self-image, and our Christian faith. It’s time to talk back to purity culture.1
1
From Rings and Pledges to Conversation in Community
I recently spoke at a conference on sexuality at a church in North Tulsa. At every plenary session, workshop, and panel, I heard people address topics out loud that most of us deal with in private. A young woman shared about the years she spent being sex-trafficked by her own father, and how Jesus transformed her life and gave her hope. There was a panel discussion about same-sex attraction, one about singleness, and another about how the church responds to sexual assault. Words like masturbation were spoken aloud instead of being merely hinted at, and in all of this there was no intent to titillate or create shock value or cause nervous laughter. The mood was one of contrition and compassion.
Alongside conviction, I felt years of sexual shame sliding off my shoulders. As I looked around, I saw tear-streaked faces. A hush bathed the room not because of guilt but because dark things were coming to light. Burdens, lies, questions, and struggles were being brought from the chill of isolation into the warmth of community. I have never experienced anything quite like it.
Modern Evangelical Purity Culture
The Christian community I was raised in, in late twentieth and early twenty-first century America, tried to tame teenage sexuality by promoting an “evangelical Christian purity culture”—a movement that utilized pledges, books, and events to promote sexual abstinence outside of marriage.1 Although the idea of a purity culture certainly exists in other places besides America, and in other religious contexts, Christine Gardner, author of Making Chastity Sexy, sees American evangelical Christians “at the center of the promotion of sexual abstinence.”2
In her book The Scarlett Virgins: When Sex Replaces Salvation, Rebecca Lemke points out that purity culture “allowed many [parents] to skirt the responsibility of discussing sex with their child while simultaneously believing that the issue was being addressed through ‘role models’ and purity events”—and, I would add, through books.3 Our choice to detach the topic of sexual purity from regular conversation has isolated it from the whole of Scripture and life, turning questions that are meant to press us further into prayer, the church, and God’s Word, into books, conferences, and websites. But the subject of sexual purity is too nuanced to squeeze into one book or conference. It must be integrated into our regular conversations.
The Books That Made Us
Too many of us are weighed down by sexual expectations, pressures, and shame. I interviewed a woman who lost her husband to cancer when their first child was just two years old and she was pregnant with their second. She told me that she has spent more time in counseling working through damaging purity culture teachings than she has dealing with the pain of widowhood. How is that possible?
The answer is nuanced. There were conferences. Camps. Youth group messages. True Love Waits rallies. Stories and songs. Purity rings. But for many of us, we need look no further than the teetering stack of purity-themed books on our childhood nightstand. Books. We read about it in books.
One year, I put a quote by Francis Bacon on my classroom wall that said: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Books that were meant to be tasted began filling the shelves in Christian bookstores, and parents bought them for their teenagers, who swallowed them whole. There was an assumption that anything about purity written by a Christian would be not only safe but helpful.
But we didn’t read these books the way we were forced to read Hamlet or The Grapes of Wrath in English class, laboring over themes and analyzing worldviews. Instead, we picked up Wild at Heart and I Kissed Dating Goodbye, never bothering to chew a word before we made it part of ourselves. We read Every Man’s Battle and For Young Women Only by ourselves, interpreting and internalizing messages in isolation from community, without any discussion or debate. We carried them like Bibles.
During my graduate research, I studied those popular Christian books on gender and purity written in the late 1990s and early 2000s—books like I Kissed Dating Goodbye, And the Bride Wore White, Every Man’s Battle, Romance God’s Way, and Wild at Heart. Some of you are familiar with these books. Maybe you wore a “purity ring” or remember hearing Rebecca St. James sing “Wait for Me” on the radio. Maybe there’s a True Love Waits pledge card tucked into your Bible from junior high. Or maybe you didn’t grow up in the church during this time and your exposure to purity culture has come from little snippets you’ve heard from other Christians or those who have left the church, complaining or rejoicing about how the movement affected them.
I posed this question to my Twitter followers not too long ago: What do you think of when you hear the term “purity culture”? Here are some of the responses I got.
If I follow a certain set of rules, most of which aren’t even Biblical, I’m guaranteed a wonderful marriage with a great sex life.4
His lust is your fault.5
The well-meaning desire for protection with a list of what-to-do’s buried among deficient whys.6
A culture of fear that doesn’t tell the truth about sex or the character of God.7
Preemptive punishment that follows from placing unfair and inappropriate responsibility on others.8
Fear and shame. It brought men’s struggles with lust to the forefront but offered no hope for women with similar struggles.9
It is safe to say that modern American evangelical purity culture is a trigger topic for many, and critique of the movement is gaining momentum. Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, author of Shameless: A Sexual Reformation, recently tweeted a call for women to send her their old purity rings so she could have them melted down and made into a “sculpture of a vagina.”10
Even former leaders of the movement, such as I Kissed Dating Goodbye author Josh Harris, are reevaluating the messages they made popular. Harris recently wrote a public statement saying: “While I stand by my book’s call to sincerely love others, my thinking has changed significantly in the past twenty years.” He went on to admit that he now thinks “dating can be a healthy part of a person developing relationally” and that his book “emphasized practices (not dating, not kissing before marriage) and concepts (giving your heart away) that are not in the Bible.”11
Harris’s book defined an era. What changed his mind? Listening to others. He began hearing stories from people who had been hurt by his book, and instead of ignoring the criticism, he leaned into it. In Jessica Van Der Wyngaard’s documentary I Survived I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Harris says: “You can change your mind about things.” And while Harris went on to change his mind about more than just purity culture—recently announcing his divorce from his wife and his departure from the Christian faith—I believe that reevaluation has value for the Christian.12 It’s part of being human, and it’s necessary for our growth, which is what this book is about: leaning into tough questions together.
Rethinking Purity Culture
At the end of my seminar on purity culture myths at that conference in Tulsa, a father raised his hand and asked: “What books can you recommend?” He had a teenage daughter. And his question made sense. I had spent the majority of my lecture quoting from popular purity books, pointing out their damaging messages about sex, marriage, and gender. If not those books, which ones could he hand his daughter? Which were safe? I paused. And at that moment I realized the answer to sexual purity will never be found in a book slid under a teenager’s door.
So I told him: “There are good things in many of these books.” And I meant it. “But,” I said, “I can’t think of a single one that I would recommend reading in isolation. What we need more of is conversation. Instead of trying to find the perfect book, let’s keep talking about sexuality and purity out loud. Together. In community. Pick up any of these books, but read them with someone else and, whatever you do, keep the dialogue going.”
In the following chapters, I will ask you to join me in reevaluating certain purity culture messages such as the idolization of virginity; marriage and sex as the reward for chastity; men as lust machines, and women as responsible for the purity of men. And I will ask you to consider ways we can move forward from these teachings as a church, specifically regarding how we talk about sex and sexuality; overcome unbiblical stereotypes about men and women; address the neglected realities of female sexuality, same-sex attraction, perpetual singleness, painful sex, and infertility; define sexual abuse and treat its victims; respond to sexual sin; talk to our children about their bodies, friendships, dating, masturbation, pornography, and so on; and move forward from hurtful purity culture messages into truth, grace, and community.
In the first few chapters, I lay a foundation of what purity culture taught us about these questions. Rather than merely telling you, I want to show you by drawing from some of the most popular Christian books of the late 1990s and early 2000s. This will involve some active reading and, I hope, plenty of conversation. I will add my own commentary and pushback as the chapters build, and I will eventually lay out for you what I believe to be a biblical sexual ethic and some practical ways we can faithfully and graciously live it out as a church.
I cannot stress enough the importance of taking any thoughts, confessions, or hurt that this book brings out into the light of community and God’s grace. If you are reading alone right now, please make it a goal to bring at least one of these topics into real-life conversation with someone else. I can’t promise it will always be comfortable, but we have to start somewhere. In writing this book, I have forced myself to have these conversations. In fact, I have interviewed over one hundred people at this point—formally and informally—asking about their experiences with purity teachings and how they feel about those messages now. I talked with some people over coffee and others via email or video chat. Just last month, I talked to three young women for an hour in the kitchen during a baby shower. People want to talk about this subject, but it’s difficult to start the conversation.
Discussion Questions
1. What were you taught about sex and marriage growing up?
2. What comes to your mind when you hear the term “purity culture”?
3. What connection (if any) do you have with the purity movement? How did it affect you?
4. Which teachings from purity culture do you appreciate and/or believe are biblical?
5. Which teachings from purity culture do you find troubling? Why?
6. What do you think of the ways people are critiquing/criticizing purity culture today?
7. What keeps us from having an open, honest dialogue about sexual purity?
Activity
One way to start this conversation is to get a group together to watch Jessica Van Der Wyngaard’s documentary starring Joshua Harris called I Survived I Kissed Dating Goodbye.13 It’s a good introduction to the topic of purity culture for those who didn’t grow up in it, but it also holds meaning for those who did. The more diverse your group, the better. For example, if everyone is married, you’ll miss out on the valuable perspective of singles and how purity culture has affected them and the way they view their singleness. Likewise, if your group is only made up of singles, you’ll miss out on the perspective of those who are married, and how purity culture messages line up with the reality of marriage. Invite widows and teenagers. Consider opening up your home for a viewing party and a discussion afterward.
2
The Idolization of Virginity
Amy Deneson was given her first purity ring when she was thirteen years old. “Accepting it meant I promised to stay a virgin until my wedding night—to keep my mind innocent, my body untouched, my soul blameless—so that I could one day present my husband with the ultimate gift,” she said.1 Deneson viewed her ring as a visible sign of her countercultural commitment to remain a virgin until marriage. When the heart-shaped stone fell out of the ring one day during basketball practice, she panicked, concerned that a damaged purity ring might foreshadow some threat to her sexual purity.
Virginity as Worth
If purity culture were a throne, virginity would be the queen sitting on it. It’s presented not only as a God-honoring pursuit but as a determinant of personal value. Roses are passed around rooms full of nervous teenagers, then held up, crumpled and bruised, with fewer petals, as an example of what happens to those who give their virginity away. Paper is ripped in half. “The pastor explained that we could never get our purity back—it was like water that had been spit in or gum that had been chewed,” Rebecca Lemke writes.2 This idea was especially emphasized to women. Sara Moslener, purity culture historian and author of Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence, notes how James Dobson painted a picture of “female sexuality as a commodity that reach[es] the height of its value on the wedding day.”3 A woman’s worth rests not in her soul but between her legs, as if virginity were some remnant of pre-fall righteousness, untainted by Adam and Eve’s sin, which a woman can protect if she is hypervigilant enough.
When virginity is painted this way, as the greatest gift one can give their spouse, those who lose their virginity before marriage are seen as having less to offer. Their only choice is to try to gather the fallen petals of their personal worth into the shape of a bouquet as best they can. The concept of “second” or “renewed” virginity is a common theme in purity rhetoric, but the trauma of these visual metaphors speaks louder than any footnote about second chances. One might be able to seek forgiveness and recommit to chastity but “it’s difficult to repair a broken china cup.”4
I love what Debra Hirsch says in her book Redeeming Sex: “Every human being on the planet is sexually broken . . . all of us are on a journey toward wholeness; not one of us is excluded.”5 Whether someone is a virgin, has been raped, or has “slept around,” we are all broken from the fall. We all need Jesus. And thankfully our value as image bearers is not dependent on our sexual past. In his recent book The Dignity Revolution, Daniel Darling writes: “You were valuable before you did anything.”6 And I would add, you are just as valuable, even if you have done many things that fall short of the righteousness of God. Jesus has taken those failings and abuses on himself, crucifying them on the cross.
Virginity as Purity
I am thankful that in this sex-saturated world my parents told me where sex belongs—in marriage—and my church reaffirmed it. I am glad that I had sex for the first time on my wedding night. If I ever have children, I will teach them what the Bible says about sex, that it was created by God to be an act of unifying self-giving within the marriage covenant between one man and one woman. I will teach them that, in marriage, sex is a God-honoring good, but that extramarital sex is a sin against a holy and loving Father. But I will not tell them that virginity makes them pure.
I may have been a virgin when I got married, but I was already a sexual sinner. As a young believer, my virgin status kept me from recognizing this. It was so easy to justify my lust and selfishness by telling myself: “You have never even kissed a boy.” I knew plenty of others who had not only kissed their boyfriends but had done a lot more. My childhood best friend was pregnant by the age of fifteen. Surely I was sexually pure by comparison.
But I was not. Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount are chilling in their inclusivity: anyone who looks at another person with lust has committed adultery with them in their heart. I may have been a virgin when I got married, but I was also an adulterer. Virginity means only that an individual has never decided to or been forced to have sexual intercourse with another person. It is not a badge of holiness, a sign of sexual purity, or a ticket to heaven.
The term “technical virginity” exists because of how inventive we are when it comes to finding sexual activities outside of sexual intercourse. While I have known Christians who refuse to even hold hands before marriage, others, pointing to virginity as the definition of sexual purity, are willing to engage in anything from mutual masturbation to oral sex, avoiding only the act of genital penetration. Virginity as purity neglects Jesus’ call for the pursuit of whole-person purity, which includes not only the hymen but our whole body, mind, and heart.
To understand purity culture’s emphasis on virginity, we must recognize that the Bible has not been the only influence behind the movement. Much of modern purity culture has been shaped by our nationwide reaction to the threat of STDs and teenage pregnancy, brought on by the sexual revolution of the 1960s to the 1980s. Linda Kay Klein, author of Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free, points out: “Americans were scared. AIDS was killing people by the thousands, there were growing concerns about other sexually transmitted infections. . . . And many conservatives believed the return to traditional values, including chastity, was the only solution.”7
One of the greatest tensions in the modern Christian purity movement has been federally funded abstinence education. Groups like Silver Ring Thing (founded by Christians) recognized that their message could go much further if they accepted government help. While Silver Ring Thing accepted the funds, founder Denny Pattyn was “disgusted by the government’s insistence that his abstinence work be devoid of all religious content,” believing that true change takes place in individuals through the power of the Holy Spirit.8 Still, federal funding meant that more teenagers would be exposed to abstinence as an option.
Abstinence education has been supported with federal funds under the last four presidents, and according to The Hill, abstinence-only education is “making a comeback” under current president Donald Trump.9 One question Christians need to ask is: What happens to the message of sexual purity when it is taught apart from Christ? Whether one is for or against government-funded abstinence education, it is a question worth pondering.
Virginity as Identity
Appealing to modern American teenagers meant emphasizing rebellion and identity. Strategies for attracting teenagers to chastity had to focus more on individual benefits and consequences than the glory of God. Christine Gardner says that the abstinence events she attended were full of live concerts and personal testimonials.10 The books I read growing up focused on how my sexual behavior would impact my life, my reputation, and my marriage.
The American shift toward individualism, with our “army of one” commercials and our idolization of the “personal journey,” seeped into evangelical culture. Growing up, the emphasis was on “me and Jesus” more than my role as a member of the body of Christ. I didn’t even become familiar with the term “common good” in regard to Christian theology until I began graduate school in my early thirties.
Modern purity teachings harnessed individualism, depicting sexual self-restraint as a choice for “self-care” and a way to ensure a future satisfying sex life within marriage.11 And for a time, abstinence was trending. I remember celebrities such as Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson wearing purity rings. Later, young stars such as the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus kept the trend going. Gardner notes that purity rhetoric essentially borrows the feminist message of “my body, my choice” in order to convince teenagers that sexual abstinence is about asserting their agency.12 The purity movement tried to make chastity attractive by highlighting the rebellion required to say no to premarital sex in a culture so used to saying yes.
The emphasis on personal choice included a public element. This is where purity rings, necklaces, and events like father/daughter purity balls came into vogue. One woman I interviewed said her dad brought home a ring from Italy for her to wear, to symbolize her commitment to chastity. The purity ring given by one’s parents or purchased at abstinence events such as Silver Ring Thing even became a part of some wedding ceremonies.
Another woman, Nicole, told me that she viewed her virginity as “a badge of honor.” She wore a purity ring until the day she got married and on her wedding day, “my dad took the ring off, then handed it to my groom.” “I cringe to think of that now,” she added.
“What about that memory makes you cringe?” I asked. She responded:
My motivations were off. My husband and I met in high school and dated for several years before we got married. I think part of me wanted to protect my reputation. See, everybody? We really did wait. I also think so much of my identity at the time was wrapped up in being the good Christian girl. The whole ceremony reminds me of the Pharisees. I feel like I was saying, “Look at me—I’m so pure, I’m so holy,” when my heart was full of pride and fear.
Also, I no longer see purity as a gift one spouse gives to another. God has made me pure through Christ, and he alone keeps me pure. Purity, then, is mainly about me and God, not me and my husband. Sexual purity is the natural overflow of humbly placing myself under God’s authority, acknowledging my own sinfulness, and depending on Christ to help me walk in holiness. When I am living in purity, my husband and my marriage definitely benefit. But that is God’s grace, not my own doing.
Nicole describes exactly what can go wrong when sexual purity is motivated by personal identity and the approval of others more than the glory of God. While she made it to the altar a virgin, her story still holds regret due to wrong motivations for right actions.
