* * *
Purity preaching is not new, nor is it exclusive to evangelical Christianity, but evangelicals have played—and continue to play—an important role in bringing this message to the mainstream. After the sexual revolution, Americans were scared. AIDS was killing people by the thousands, there were growing concerns about other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and many conservatives believed a return to traditional values, including chastity, was the only solution. Spurred by this perspective, federal money for abstinence-only-until-marriage education began to flow—first under Reagan,XIV then more under Clinton,XV then still more under Bush.XVI11 This influx of government money catalyzed the purity industry.
According to the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), over $2 billion in federal funding has been allocated for abstinence-only programs in the United States since 1981.12 Much of this funding came through the Title V abstinence-only-until-marriage program, which is still in place today. This program requires states to match every four federal dollars they receive with three state-raised dollars, presumably increasing the state-level contributions made toward abstinence-only programming in the process as well. The money is then redistributed to community-based organizations, faith-based organizations, local and/or state health departments, and schools. Every state but one (California) has at one time accepted Title V federal funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage programming.13
With money like this just waiting to be spent, purity purveyors previously focused on small religious audiences moved into the mainstream marketplace, selling events, speakers, and curricula. This is when we began to see purity-themed rings,XVII bracelets, necklaces, shirts, hats, underwear, books, journals, devotionals, magazines, Bible studies, trainings, guides, DVDs, planners, and other products. I have come across purity-themed, posters, coffee mugs, key chains, buttons, stickers, water bottles, mints (on which the words “sex is mint for marriage” are printed), and have even read references to purity-themed lollipops (which I assume are sold to remind people of the lollipop object lesson in which every sexual experience is compared to a lick on the lollipop of one’s life, making them less and less attractive to potential suitors who would prefer an unlicked and unwrapped lollipop for their sole consumption). It is nearly impossible to assess who purchased each of these products and with what money, but the government certainly wasn’t the only buyer. Many of these products were ultimately bought by the audience for whom they were originally intended—evangelical Christians. As Doug Pagitt, pastor of the progressive evangelical church Solomon’s Porch, explained: “When it came to sex, churches had gotten quiet. Too quiet. We wanted resources. We needed resources. So when someone made them, we used them.”15
Within the evangelical Christian subculture, the purity industry gave many adolescents the impression that sexual abstinence before marriage was the way for them to live out their faith. This is perhaps best illustrated by the production of purity-themed Bibles. The Abstinence Study Bible produced by the Christian group Silver Ring Thing, for example, includes sixty pages of non-biblical material such as dating advice like “avoid the horizontal” and “keep your clothes on, in, zipped and buttoned.”16 When about one-sixth of an adolescent’s Bible is marketing about the importance of abstinence, how could she not reach the conclusion that her sexual thoughts, feelings, and choices determine her spiritual standing?
Products like these integrate purity messaging into a young person’s daily life. Imagine a seventh-grade girl arriving at her middle school on a snowy day. She takes her mittens off and her attention is caught by the sparkling ring that she has promised to wear until the day she gives the gift of her virginity to her husband. This, she recalls being told, will ensure your husband will never leave you. But if you ever break your promise . . . An eighth-grade girl kisses a boy for the first time. Skipping home on a high, she is sure the sky has never been so blue or the light quite so clear. Approaching her front door, she pulls out her keys, noticing her purity-themed key chain. She stops in her tracks. Will my husband be upset when he finds out my first kiss wasn’t with him? she asks herself, her anxiety rising. A ninth-grade girl brushes her teeth in front of the bathroom mirror where she has taped her copy of the purity pledge she signed at a rally. (The other copy of the contract was sent to the True Love Waits headquarters.) Her youth pastor had suggested she put the contract somewhere she would see it every day, especially since she started dating Mike.
When products are purchased using government money, the teachings are supposed to be non-religious, but sometimes, things get messy. The group called the Silver Ring Thing, launched in 1993, offers an example. They received $1.4 million in federal funding.17 In 2005, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit contending that the Silver Ring Thing was evangelizing at its government-funded events. A settlement was reached and the government stopped funding the Silver Ring Thing in its current form.18 Now solely supported by private money, the Silver Ring Thing’s events, which continue to be offered to this day, culminate in an invitation for adolescents to sign a purity pledge and give their life to Christ at essentially the same time, again connecting the concepts of salvation and sexual purity.19 The Silver Ring Thing reports having hosted nearly 1,300 of these events and having reached more than 684,000 people.20
Also launched in 1993, this time by the Southern Baptist Convention, True Love Waits is generally considered the most powerful player in the purity industry. True Love Waits never received federal funding, but its relationship with the government was robust nonetheless. True Love Waits actively campaigned the government to allocate money to abstinence-only-until-marriage programming and, a year after its launch, startled the country by bringing 20,000 adolescents to the National Mall, where they staked 211,156 signed purity pledges on the lawn. Afterward, 150 purity activists had a special session with President Bill Clinton.XVIII Two years later, Congress allocated $50 million a year for the aforementioned Title V abstinence-only programming.
It’s hard to estimate just how many young people have been impacted by the purity industry, but one purity curriculum provider approved for federal financial support boasts on its website of having reached over 4 million students in forty-seven states.21 That’s about 10 percent of the total number of ten- to nineteen-year-olds living in the United States and its territories today!XIX If that many young people have been reached by just this one curriculum, we can only begin to imagine how many have been reached by the vast array of other products.
In 2008, federal funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage programming was curbed under the Obama administration after a congressionally mandated, comprehensive nine-year study showed that students who experienced abstinence-only education in public schools were “no more likely than control group youth to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age.”23
But the purity industry may be making a comeback.
Dedicated federal abstinence-only-until-marriage funding meaningfully increased again in 2016, bringing the total federal funding to $90 million for 2017.24
But this time, even evangelicals don’t seem so excited about that, at least not those that are working on the ground.
“It made youth workers feel like they were doing good work because they were talking about these taboo issues like sex that the church never talked about before and that needed to be talked about,” said Pastor Doug Pagitt—who I cited previously—about the purity messaging. “Then, after a few decades, people were like, ‘Oh. This stuff is bad.’ ”
“Progressive evangelicals realized that?” I clarified. “Or mainstream evangelicals?”
“Across evangelicalism. Not just progressives.”
“So where is mainstream evangelical sexuality education today?” I asked him.
“It’s in huge flux. It’s a changing landscape. Everyone is confused.”
“So, it’s a moment
of ‘not that . . . but now what?’ ”
“Yes,” he answered definitively.25
* * *
Not every adolescent who consumes purity messaging will have the same experience. It’s one thing to receive a shaming message at a public school assembly while your friends snicker, and quite another to receive it from inside a closed community where the messages are deeply revered by all. As Dr. Curt Thompson writes: “When I perceive that I am receiving the shame from a community of voices, the pain can become unbearable. When the collection of the voices of an entire community shames us, it is more unwieldy due to our inability to locate it centrally in any one place. And so when I feel shame in my family or my church, addressing it feels quite overwhelming.”26
Perhaps this explains why the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health found that evangelical adolescents are more likely than their peers to expect that if they have sex, it will both upset their mother and cost them the respect of their partner. Evangelical adolescents are also among the least likely to expect sex to be pleasurable, and among the most likely to expect that having sex will make them feel guilty.27 Yet one’s level of religiosity (there is a 30 percentage point gap in anticipated sexual guilt between the least and the most religious youth)28 and one’s gender (girls are a whopping 92 percent more likely to experience sexual guilt than boys)29 have even greater impacts on one’s likelihood to experience sexual shame than one’s denominational affiliation. Considering my interviewees and I were all at one time 1) highly religious, 2) evangelical, 3) girls, it is likely that our reactions to the purity movement’s messaging is in some cases more extreme than those of individuals outside our demographic might be. Yet our stories illustrate intensified versions of experiences I believe almost all women and many others have had.
Right now, groundbreaking research is being performed among young adults raised in three conservative Christian communities—Baptist, Catholic, and Latter-day Saints. This research that reiterates many of the previously mentioned findings and posits several new ones that can help us better understand just how and why purity messaging is impacting girls. The researchers write in their brief:
There is little support indicating that the mechanisms currently used in our society (abstinence education, chastity pledges, and religious grounding) to curb teenage sexual activity actually work. The question remains, “Is our focus on sexual abstinence doing anything?”
It turns out that those who are sexually active and have experienced abstinence education and/or have stronger beliefs that the Bible should be literally translated [a core tenet of evangelicalism], have more sexual guilt.XX . . . females report significantly higher sex guilt than males (and) sex guilt from the first sexual experience is predictive of higher sex anxiety, lower sexual efficacy, and lower sexual satisfaction. So, females, in particular, who have strong religious beliefs and are engaging in premarital sex, are having unsatisfactory sex, they have high anxiety about it, and don’t feel that they are capable of changing their situation.
Lastly, the relationship between sex guilt and sex anxiety, sexual efficacy, and sexual satisfaction, doesn’t diminish over time; it gets stronger.XXI . . . This is not a recipe for young women to embark on a fulfilling relationship with their partner and we predict could be an indicator of further sexual problems and relationship issues.30
To summarize, first, the researchers are finding that purity teachings do not meaningfully delay sex. Second, they are finding that they do increase shame, especially among females. And third, they report that this increased shame is leading to higher levels of sexual anxiety, lower levels of sexual pleasure, and the feeling among those experiencing shame that they are stuck feeling this way forever. Oh, and it doesn’t get better with time . . . it gets worse!
Yep. Sounds about right.
* * *
I have seen the Bible used against people many times. For some of those I’ve spoken with, it is the literature of their trauma and I feel no need to redeem it for these individuals. But I take comfort in knowing that when I read the Bible today, I find more liberation in its pages than I was taught to see in it growing up. Take stumbling blocks. Interestingly, the verse most purity preachers point to when accusing girls and women of being stumbling blocks isn’t the one about sexuality that I referenced earlier. It’s a verse about food. In Romans 14, Paul suggests that his readers not eat unclean food in front of those they think it will distress: “Let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding. Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for you to make others fall by what you eat; it is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that makes your brother or sister stumble.”31
Those who call women and girls stumbling blocks interpret Romans 14 as a metaphor: Girls and women are technically free to dress how they want, just as we are all free to eat what we want, but if girls and women care for their brothers, they should dress and behave modestly so they don’t become stumbling blocks to them.
But look a little earlier in the chapter and it becomes clear that Paul’s larger point is that we should spend less time judging others’ choices as right or wrong—arguing that a multiplicity of choices can honor the Lord depending on the heart of the individual—and that we should spend more time loving one another:
Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat; for God has welcomed them. Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand. Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds. Those who observe the day, observe it in honor of the Lord. Also those who eat, eat in honor of the Lord, since they give thanks to God; while those who abstain, abstain in the honor of the Lord and give thanks to God.32 . . . Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or you, why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.33 . . . So then, each of us will be accountable to God. Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of another.34
I don’t know about you, but within the larger context of the chapter, it seems to me that judgmentalism is the stumbling block Paul is most concerned with here, not modesty. Reading these verses as an adult I cannot help but shake my head—the whole time my childhood friends and I were being told that we were stumbling blocks, our accusers were, even then, placing the real stumbling blocks before us: purity-based shaming and judgmentalism that pushed many of us right out of the church.
* * *
This book is divided into four sections. The first section describes four purity culture stumbling blocks for girls. These stumbling blocks are: 1) the accusation that if purity culture doesn’t work for you, it’s you (not its teachings) that are the problem; 2) the requirement that all girls and women must perform a stereotypical gender role to be acceptable; 3) the expectation that all unmarried girls and women must maintain a sexless body, mind, and heart to be “pure”; and 4) the systematic mishandling of sexual abuse cases and survivors.XXII The second and third sections of the book delve into the challenges these stumbling blocks pose to girls as they become adults inside, and outside, of the church, respectively, and the ways they find to break free from the purity message in both places. The fourth section of the book explores how individuals raised in the purity movement are personally hurdling these stumbling blocks and charting new pathways for those who come after them. Each of these four sections opens with a chapter highlighting a story from my own life. Chapters that follow feature the stories of my interviewees.
The individuals whose stories are shared in this book are between their early twenties and their early forties, having been raised as evangelical Christian girls sometime between the late 1980s and the early 20
00s. Many, but not all, grew up in my hometown, where my interviews began. Most are using pseudonyms and, unless otherwise noted, all are white Americans.
When I started interviewing people twelve years ago, it felt important not to muddle all of the racially and ethnically distinct evangelical subcultures together in an attempt to “speak for all” when—as a white woman aware that her race and ethnicity protects her from other forms of oppression that intersect with the purity message—I can really only speak for one. So, I stuck to collecting the stories of white American evangelical girls, like me, as they grew up. Yet over the years, I have faced the reality that the purity industry has impacted many more people’s lives. I have heard stories similar to mine and those of my interviewees from many outside of our demographic. From Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and many with no religion at all. From African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and other Americans of color. From people around the world. And from men. Lots and lots of men.
As recent conversations spurred by #MeTooXXIII and #ChurchTooXXIV have made plain, the evangelical Christian church is not alone in shaming and silencing women and others. As such, I expect the stories in this book will be unfortunately familiar to many.
For more information about the individuals featured in this book, please see page 291.
* * *
Some of my critics will say, “I grew up in purity culture, and had a great experience.” I wouldn’t want those for whom this is true to change a thing about their lives. Except, that is, the belief some hold that because purity culture worked for them, it ought to work for everyone.
Other of my critics will point to people raised in the purity movement who do not represent its messaging in adulthood, arguing that the movement obviously didn’t impact them. “I can think of half-a-dozen women off the top of my head who are evangelical, but whose lives do not fit the purity model,” one evangelical man informed me, for example. “I can’t imagine that these women are experiencing or ever have experienced the things you are talking about,” he added with finality. I wonder if this man has ever taken the time to ask these half-a-dozen women about the impact the purity movement did or did not have on their development. I urge us all to consider that everyone around us is dealing with things they are not showing to us. Some may have never been asked about their shame; some may be making the choice not to share about it even when they are asked about it; and others may experience shame so regularly that they don’t even notice it . . . but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
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