I grew up in evangelical purity culture. Well-thumbed copies of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Every Young Man’s Battle, and For Women Only lay on the nightstands in my house. My parents consulted Focus on the Family’s movie reviews—which chronicled every sexual line or scene—before deciding whether to let us kids see a new theatrical release. When the Duggar family became famous through their reality show 17 Kids and Counting, we knew they took things further than we did, but we felt that what we shared with them was more important than what we didn’t.
Evangelical purity culture is tricky to define, but it usually refers to a trend of the 1980s and 1990s that prioritized sexual abstinence and modesty and expressed this emphasis through preaching, parenting, and publishing. Purity culture put theological and cultural pressure on families to fight for virginity and temperance.
This pressure was good in many ways; it contrasted sharply with an era characterized by peak teenage pregnancy and soft-core pornography on cable. But it also left some people bruised and confused. The challenge for evangelicals today is to learn from both the good and the ill of purity culture and live more wisely in light of its lessons.
Joshua Harris’s 1997 book I Kissed Dating Goodbye is one of the representative artifacts of purity culture. Harris wrote it when he was twenty-one, and the book—which Harris, no longer a Christian, has disowned—has all the urgency, zeal, and lack of nuance one would expect from a devout young person. Many evangelical families were persuaded by Harris to forbid their teens from dating and to allow romantic interactions—in strictly chaperoned settings—only when marriage seemed a realistic outcome. “Intimacy is the reward of commitment,” Harris famously declared.
Purity culture had many expressions. The True Love Waits campaign encouraged Christian teens to commit themselves to virginity until marriage, and to demonstrate their commitment through chastity pledges, purity rings, and other rituals. By the late 1990s, internet pornography was an urgent topic within evangelical culture. Stephen Arterburn, Fred Stoeker, and Mike Yorkey’s Every Young Man’s Battle, which advised the regular confession of porn use to “accountability groups,” sold millions of copies. Christian contemporary music caught the wave. Rebecca St. James’s pro-abstinence song “Wait for Me” was a number two Christian radio hit in 2001. The 1990s arguably represented the peak of youth ministry, and much of youth ministry focused on getting teens to remain sexually chaste.
There are many valid criticisms of purity culture. The stress on purity sometimes led to an excessive stigmatization of sexual feelings and sexual fallenness. Many women recall that girls who lost their virginity often felt like second-class Christians. Conversely, the pleasure of future marital intimacy might have been talked up as an incentive for teen abstinence and resulted in unrealistic expectations for sex. Several writers who grew up in purity culture have testified that their marriages were burdened by either shame over libido or disappointment in a much-heralded experience.
Another valid criticism holds that purity culture generated undue awkwardness and tension. Teen boys and girls sometimes struggled to relate normally to one another, given their hypervigilance against lust and immodesty. In her memoir Counting the Cost, Jill Duggar tells of how her parents required all their kids to look at the ground whenever a woman wearing a crop top came into view. Was Jill’s older brother Josh disposed toward sex addiction and criminal behavior by this paranoia about sexual temptation? (Josh has confessed to molesting his sisters as a teen and was convicted of child pornography possession in 2021.) The memoir suggests he might have been.
Teens raised in purity culture might reasonably have concluded that everything depended on getting the sex issue right. It would have been better if the chief scribes of purity culture had heeded C. S. Lewis, who wrote that, important as chastity is, violating it is not the worst sin. Pride—even in our purity—is worse.
That said, most published criticisms of evangelical purity culture—many of them authored by self-described “exvangelicals”—are not compelling. Much of the anti–purity culture literature calls on Christians, especially women, to abandon traditional teachings about sex and marriage. Jen Hatmaker, whose Christian books for women sold well a decade ago, is now divorced and has written about her youth in purity culture and the sexual freedom she enjoys with her current boyfriend. Likewise, Nadia Bolz-Weber, a writer, preacher, and a “pastor of public witness” of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, urges Christians to reject purity culture and embrace extramarital sex and “ethically-sourced pornography.” A search of “purity culture” on Substack yields hundreds of articles, many by women, offering first-person perspectives on the harms of purity culture. A high percentage of these articles also advocate positively for LGBTQ identity.
These critiques fail from the start because they don’t heed Scripture’s clear teachings about sex. They discard these doctrines as repressive or patriarchal, conflating purity culture’s excesses with its biblical origins. The authors may have valuable psychological insights, but their rejection of Christian teaching puts a hard limit on the usefulness of their testimonies.
The best critiques of purity culture hold firm on traditional sexual ethics while calling on Christians to minister better to the sexually broken. Unfortunately, even the best orthodox contributions have fallen short of offering a viable alternative.
One problem is forgetfulness of the past. Theologically faithful writers who criticize purity culture often raise crucial points about the centrality of the gospel. But rarely do they articulate a positive vision of what Christian discipleship should look like. They speak of their evangelical forebears as well-meaning but clueless, writing and speaking as if their parents and youth pastors should obviously have known better. “Morality tales and false identities aren’t the stuff of a real marriage,” writes one Christian feminist author. “The sheep and the goats are not divided on the basis of their virginity.”
But evangelical purity culture did not appear out of thin air. Evangelical Christianity in the early 1990s was responding to a spike in sexual libertinism and a coarsening of the public square. In a helpful essay, Joe Carter summarizes what evangelical parents and pastors were staring down:
By the early years of 1990s, AIDS had become the number one cause of death for United States men ages 25 to 44, and the teen pregnancy rate had reached an all-time high. The number of premarital sex partners had also increased substantially since the 1970s. For example, in the 1970s only 2 percent of American women had more than 10 sexual partners before marriage; in the 1990s that percentage had increased to 10 percent (in 2010 it was 18 percent).
These trends were discernible in pop culture, too. Movies like American Pie and There’s Something About Mary topped the box office despite their soft-pornographic content. Even tamer fare, like the PG-13-rated Pleasantville, evangelized for masturbation. Cable television, which was reaching its zenith in the late 1990s just as most of the nation was getting home internet, put a bourgeois veneer on explicit sexual content. In other words, the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal wasn’t just a political story. The fact that the entire country spent years discussing the details of the president’s receiving oral sex was a fitting symbol of the state of the union.
The urgency and intensity of purity culture was an attempt, however imperfect, to counter the urgency and intensity of the sexual revolution. Honest assessment of this phase of evangelical history is necessary if parents and churches hope to counter the intensity and urgency of our own secular moment. The time for litigating the old purity culture is over. Our task now is to create a new one.
If the evangelical purity culture of the 1990s had issues, why use the term “purity culture” at all? Isn’t it too compromised? “Purity culture” is a term worth salvaging, because purity culture was a worthy endeavor. The word “culture” denotes something bigger than one best-selling book or theological tribe. Purity culture encompassed families, denominations, parachurch organizations, and popular music.
What I experienced as an evangelical teen was not fundamentalist separatism, but a habitat that made Christian conviction feel natural and normal. Christian books, music, and conferences are often accused of watering down difficult or unpopular doctrine in order to make Christianity cool or relevant. But the best expressions of Christian subculture beautified theology, trying to bridge the gap between the truth we confessed and the experiences we felt.
The purity culture of the 1990s was a plausibility structure, a system of language and habits that made chastity and faithfulness feel good, true, and beautiful. A new evangelical purity culture must do the same. It must captivate, not just condemn.
In the 1990s, purity culture emphasized the physical and spiritual risks of sexual impurity—a rational emphasis in view of the rates of teen sexual activity and pregnancy at that time. But American culture looks different now. Generations Z and Alpha are far less likely to date, pair off, party, or experiment than their Gen X parents were. The cause is not spiritual awakening but digitally conditioned risk aversion. Today’s teens don’t need to be warned off sex; they need to be taught the beauty of conjugal love.
The most effective way to promote purity is by promoting marriage. A new evangelical purity culture can promote marriage by facilitating friendships between men and women and training consciences to prioritize family formation over economic concerns or career ambitions. Too often, the old evangelical purity culture accepted secular society’s preference for late marriage, all the while insisting on chastity. A new purity culture will not only insist on chastity but help Christians achieve it by treating marriage as an absolute good, not an accessory to material life.
A new evangelical purity culture must take a new approach to shame—using it as a protective tool when necessary, but never as a motivational tool. Shame is legitimate when it is just. Men who cheat on their wives and abandon their children should be shamed. Women who use their sexuality to entice men should likewise feel shame. But when shame is unjustly applied, the results can be devastating.
My experience of men’s “accountability groups” fits this description. To help men resist pornography, many church cultures encourage regular meetups at which men confess their weekly lapses. Fear of having to confess is considered a motivator to purity. The fact that such groups are devoted exclusively to pornography (I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a man confess anger or laziness in these contexts) reinforces the sense that porn consumption is a special sin. Likewise, immodesty effectively ranks as a special sin for women, so that policing swimsuit style or skirt length becomes a way of sorting the acceptable girls from the unacceptable girls.
This kind of shame is counterproductive. Nobody wants relationships that are grounded in embarrassment over one’s vices. By contrast, the deeper a friendship goes, the more likely it is that honesty and mutual care will follow. Isolation and habitual sin often go together. Rather than suppress sin so that people can be pure enough to join a community, Christians should see community as part of the cure.
Community will be especially important as we enter the era of AI. It is likely that in five years, just about every evangelical church will have at least a few members who are in relationships with chatbots. Simply anathematizing those members will not do. A Christian purity culture for the AI era must recognize that digital philandering is often a symptom of aloneness.
Finally, a new evangelical purity culture will recover a holistic theology of sexuality. Joshua Harris’s observation that “intimacy is the reward of commitment” was true but incomplete. Intimacy not only follows commitment but creates more of it. The evangelical purity culture of the 1990s tended to approach sex as an isolated phenomenon. Many evangelicals asked their teens to show impressive self-control by delaying sex until marriage—and delaying marriage until the establishment of a career. As one evangelical pastor observed, many Christian parents seemed more afraid of their children’s failing than of their fornicating.
Sex does not happen in a vacuum. It is the consummation of marriage, and marriage is the foundation of society: the first covenant, the primal relationship, the metaphor for Christ and the Church. Sexual purity exists not for its own sake, but to preserve the husband for the wife, the wife for the husband, and both for the children—who reward intimacy with more commitment.
Regarding sex as integrated with community and commitment, rather than as a discrete good that must be “paid for” by the marriage vow, is a way to motivate purity without invoking shame. Purity is worthwhile because there will be a spouse and, Lord willing, children to be blessed by it. Nor is it something that can be lost forever in one sinful act. Though virginity is precious, it is not more precious than love, and love comes to every sinner who repents. Impurity is not cleansed by self-loathing. It is washed by the blood of Christ.
As Christians who were raised in evangelical purity culture raise our own children in a different but no less broken world, we should feel what’s at stake. Our goal should be to protect our children from harm, and to help them see sexual love not as either animalistic or angelic, but as a celebration of our Savior’s desire for us. We must not only teach these things in our households, but create a community of forgiven sinners who can live out God’s narrative of salvation through the symbols of marriage and sexuality.
