Chapter 3: Pure Bullshit

From People's Chosen God, by Chad Hayes

Jun 29, 2022

If you’re fortunate enough not to know what I mean when I use the term “purity culture,” I am referring to a movement within the evangelical Christian subculture that gained massive momentum in the 1990s. There have been several books written by women about how purity culture harmed them—feelings of severe guilt and shame, negative beliefs and attitudes regarding sex, victim blaming and lack of accountability when they were sexually assaulted. Girls growing up in the evangelical church were made to feel responsible not only for their actions, but for the thoughts, temptations, and actions of the boys and men around them. I won’t pretend to speak to their experiences, and would encourage you to read their books and listen to their voices directly. But the effects purity culture had on boys were extremely harmful as well, both directly and by shaping the way that men would go on to think about women, perpetuating the harm done to everyone.

The biblical concept of virginity is rooted in a culture in which a woman was considered the property of a man. Wives are listed right alongside cattle, oxen, asses, and servants (who were also considered the property of their masters). The Old Testament is unambiguous that a girl belonged to her father and had monetary value, as he could choose to sell her into slavery or agree to a marriage transaction. Marriage required not only the father’s permission, but also a “bride-price” or dowry from the husband or his family. These dowries could be paid in the form of silver, livestock, enslaved people, or anything else of value that the men arranged—even enemy foreskins in one instance.1 The dowries were sometimes substantial, as in the case of Jacob, who worked as an indentured servant for his uncle Laban for 14 years as payment for the privilege of marrying Laban’s two daughters.

Women are vastly underrepresented in the Bible; they make up less than 15% of named characters and are almost entirely omitted from its genealogies. But they held significant financial value to their fathers, and in that culture, a daughter’s value depended entirely on her virginity—or, more accurately, whether or not she bled with sex on her wedding night. If a man’s new bride didn’t bleed the first time they had sex, he could accuse her of having had a prior sexual partner, in which case she was considered not only to have less value, but to have committed a sin against her father worthy of death. “Evidence of virginity,” fabric from the marital bed stained by blood, was collected on the wedding night and held by the bride’s parents. If a man accused his new wife of having had intercourse prior to marriage and this evidence could not be produced, the punishment was severe: “The men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done an outrageous thing in Israel by whoring in her father's house.”2

While most Christians today would say they don’t consider women property, echoes of this past remain, both within the evangelical subculture and in our American culture more broadly. Many men today still ask a father for permission to marry his daughter. There was a wave of father-daughter “purity balls” in the 1990s—formal affairs where fathers in suits and daughters in white dresses would dance together at a ceremony and the daughter would pledge to remain abstinent until marriage. And the number of jokes—assuming they are jokes—about cleaning shotguns on the front porch on prom night reveals a clear sense of possession.

Virginity as defined in the Old Testament was problematic not only as a concept, but also in its definition. The hymen is a thin membrane that protects the vagina during infancy and then may partially or fully go away by adolescence; it’s not an accurate indicator of previous penis-in-vagina sex. And bleeding on one’s wedding night certainly says nothing about any prior oral sex, anal sex, or any other type of sexual activity.

For those unfamiliar with the Bible, the Old Testament is the portion that includes a timeframe starting with creation and ending before the birth of Jesus. It makes up the first 75% of the Bible, and is...let’s say “borrowed” from Judaism. Many of its pages are devoted to laying out laws about how the ancient Hebrew people were to behave and prescribing punishments for each transgression. In addition to the laws about sex and marriage, there are Old Testament laws about not wearing clothing of mixed fabrics, not eating certain animals, and how hard one is allowed to beat enslaved people. It prescribes the punishment for rebellious children (stoning), the punishment for people who work on Saturday (also stoning), and the punishment for men who have sex with men (also stoning, because whoever wrote these laws struggled with creativity). For those sins for which stoning isn’t the penalty, the Old Testament specifies sacrifices—usually animals—by which one can atone for one’s sins.

The New Testament is the point at which Christianity deviates from Judaism. It’s also the point at which Christianity began to deviate from itself, as it quickly splintered into various sects in a place and time where long-distance communication was far from efficient. This tradition has continued until today; although there is wide (but not universal) agreement about which books should be included in the Bible, there is significant disagreement about how they should be interpreted. There are thousands of Christian denominations globally, and their theologies differ greatly.

In the Christianity that I believed and practiced, God sent his son Jesus to be crucified and die as a final sacrifice. Any person who accepts this sacrifice for themselves and decides to become a follower of Jesus can be forgiven of their sins. One can commit the most horrific crimes imaginable, but then ask for forgiveness and trust in Jesus for salvation, and the slate is wiped clean. Often, these stories are celebrated. The worse the historical transgressions, the more compelling the story. People are sometimes invited to speak at churches or conferences exactly because of how depraved their lives were before they found Jesus.

And no other sins, once they are forgiven, leave a person with the lasting stigma of a girl or woman who “loses her virginity” prior to marriage. It’s easy to see the path that has led from the Old Testament attitude towards virginity to modern purity culture because it’s not a very long path, and it’s pretty much a straight line. In evangelicalism, it is taught that a girl’s virginity is a priceless treasure, a gift that she is to hold tightly and preserve until her wedding night so that she can give it to her husband. Girls are told that entering a marriage as a virgin is the key to a happy marriage and a fulfilling sex life. Just like in the Old Testament, girls in purity culture are made to feel that their value—to their future husbands and in general—depends on their virginity.

As a student from Bob Jones University in the 2000s explained, “Virginity was the ultimate ideal. It was praised. It was talked about. And if you had lost it, then you would never be good enough. It was encouraged to the guys that you only marry a girl that is a virgin and chapel talked about purity, constantly.”3

But “purity” goes much further than virginity. Depending on who you ask, the definition of sexual purity may fall anywhere along the spectrum of having no physical contact at all before marriage to avoiding only the sacred penis-in-vagina sex, with oral or anal sex being rationalized by some individuals as perfectly acceptable. As a teen, I fell somewhere in the middle here. I was definitely fine with kissing and holding hands. Any type of genital contact was off limits for sure. And I felt extremely guilty after touching my girlfriend’s breasts, although it didn’t stop me from doing it again at the next possible opportunity.

For many, the concept of sexual purity even goes beyond the physical. There is an enormous focus on keeping one’s mind pure as well—this time, targeted more towards men. This comes from Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 5:28 that “everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” This verse was a source of continual torment to me as an adolescent. I was a teenage boy with plenty of testosterone flowing through my veins, struggling to reconcile my natural and unavoidable sexual desires with verses like this that—to me, at least—prohibited even thinking about sex. This caused a tremendous amount of shame for me as an adolescent, as I placed the same amount of blame on myself for simply having normal sexual desires as I would have for acting on them. With this one sentence, Jesus had raised the bar from “don’t have sex outside of marriage” to “don’t think about sex outside of marriage,” and for the majority of people, going a lifetime avoiding sexual thoughts is simply impossible.

In evangelical circles, a variety of object lessons were commonly used to demonstrate the concept of purity. A teacher might pass a cup of water around the room and ask each student to spit in it and then ask at the end who wanted to drink the water in that cup. Or they would tell students that they were like roses and that each time they were “impure,” it was like tearing off one of the petals, leaving them permanently less desirable and eventually undesired. Or they would liken a person to a piece of tape, that, after it has stuck to a few things, no longer sticks to anything, indicating that a teen who had sex wouldn’t be able to have a healthy bond with their future spouse.

Analogies like these, reinforcing the idea that sexual activity permanently and irrevocably defiled a person were applied more frequently to girls than boys, and they were extremely harmful. But they are harmful to boys as well, not only directly, but perhaps more by shaping the way those boys grew up to view women. I remember an object lesson comparing people who had pre-marital sex to chewed bubble gum in my church youth group. I reasoned that if consensual sex made a girl less pure, that would almost certainly be the same with rape, and working through in my head whether I would be ok marrying a women who had been raped in the past. It didn’t take me too long to get to yes, but looking back, the worst part was that I was proud of myself. In evangelical circles, sexual abuse is frequently miscategorized as a subset of sex, which is considered sinful, rather than a subset of abuse. Having a history of vaginal penetration, whether consensual or not, had been so demonized that I felt that marrying a rape survivor would be a noble act. And I was sure God would forgive me.

While, in retrospect, the pride I took in my hypothetical willingness to marry a sexual abuse survivor seems shocking, I wasn’t alone in considering it, and the decision I reached was more progressive than some. In a report about sexual abuse and institutional responses at Bob Jones University (discussed in detail in a later chapter), one sexual assault survivor “stated that the ‘damaged goods’ message was so much a part of her experience at BJU that she eventually asked her husband, a BJU graduate, if he also viewed her as ‘damaged goods.’ She explained that she later regretted asking him because ‘he said that he would not have married me if he would have known I was abused prior to our marriage.”4 Another survivor interviewed “said that two different young men that she dated while at BJU ended their relationship with her after learning of her abuse.”5

These object lessons were effective, but the essence of purity culture was perhaps best communicated by the pervasive, subtle messaging inherent to the culture. Describing this phenomenon, one sexual abuse survivor stated: “It is like air. You just breathe it in. It is hard to say this person said this and this person said that because it is just air.”6 Strict dress codes emphasizing women’s modesty serve to make them feel responsible for men’s sexual desires, and cause many to feel shame about their bodies that lasts decades, if it’s overcome at all. This notion that women are responsible for dressing modestly to avoid being a “stumbling block” and to “protect their Christian brothers” from lustful thoughts that could lead to sexual sins—mental or physical, consensual or otherwise—results in pervasive victim-blaming when women report sexual assaults. The same messaging objectifies women as the targets of men’s sexual desires and removes blame, partially or entirely, from men.

The indoctrination was powerful. It wasn’t until well into adulthood, after I’d left the church and rethought every moral, ethical, and political view I’d had, that I was able to completely shed the internalized feeling that a woman who had been with another man was somehow contaminated—that because a vagina had once been penetrated by a penis, it was somehow permanently altered, leaving the human being even the least bit less desirable.

Purity—and by extension, impurity—as a concept has been around forever. But in the mid-1990s, it became an industry. In 1993, LifeWay Christian Services founded a program called True Love Waits that encouraged children and teens to take a pledge and sign a commitment card stating that they would keep their bodies pure until marriage. This pledge, usually made publicly during a church service, a Christian rock concert, or some other event was a promise to “God, myself, my family, those I date, my future mate and my future children to be sexually pure from today until the day I enter a covenant marriage relationship.”7 After taking the pledge, each participant would sign two commitment cards—one that they were to keep somewhere they would see it frequently as a reminder of their pledge, and another to return to the True Love Waits program to be displayed along with thousands of other commitment cards at rallies around the world.

True Love Waits was loosely affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, but it spread quickly to the broader evangelical world and beyond—hell, even the Catholics wanted a piece of this action. In July 1994, 25,000 young people met at the National Mall in Washington, DC for a True Love Waits rally, where 210,000 signed commitment cards were on display from children and teens around the country. The program continued to spread from there. In 1996, True Love Waits hosted a “Thru the Roof Display” at Atlanta’s Georgia Dome, where they stacked 340,000 commitment cards higher than the roof of the stadium.8

I first encountered True Love Waits not long after its inception, when I was roughly 9 years old. My family and I attended a Southern Baptist church where my grandfather, who was the pastor, had decided to have a True Love Waits ceremony. It was a relatively small church with an age range that skewed heavily northward, and while there were some children, it didn’t have a particularly vibrant youth scene. Basically, they needed as many participants as they could get. I was so young when I made this pledge that my parents had to have an abbreviated version of “the sex talk” with me just so I’d know what I was promising not to do. Honestly, it wasn’t a big ask at that point; it was a thing that 9-year-old me had no interest in whatsoever. Sure, where do I sign?

A few years later, I would repeat this pledge at the next church my family attended—a much larger Southern Baptist church with similar beliefs, but slightly more exciting music and an active youth group. This time, my pledge was represented not only by a card I signed, but also, like many of my peers, by a “promise ring.” I had picked mine out with my parents. It was pretty heavy, sterling silver, mostly round, but with three angled facets on top, and a cross engraved into the middle facet. I was older this time, maybe 14, and sex was actually a thing that was on my radar. Nothing imminent, but I had figured out enough about my body to know that I’d enjoy it.

While I truly believed that God wanted me to avoid sex until marriage and fully intended to wait, I never even considered that not taking the pledge was an option. I suppose this isn’t all that dissimilar from religion in general. I certainly didn’t know enough at 6 years of age to determine that Christianity was the one true religion, or at 20 to know that the woman I proposed to would be my one and only love. So I took the pledge. I wore the ring. Because that’s what you do.

A Google search today for “True Love Waits” returns mostly results about the identically-named Radiohead song. But the program was wildly popular in the 90s. It expanded around the country and around the world. By 2004, 2.5 million children and teens would sign the True Love Waits pledge.

A similar abstinence-until-marriage program called Silver Ring Thing (expanded and rebranded in 2019 to Unaltered Ministries), was launched in 1995 to challenge “a generation of teens to live with sexual purity and integrity through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” While they didn’t have quite the same reach as True Love Waits, they had a significant impact as well, with over 265,000 teens receiving rings “as a symbol of their commitment to pursue purity.”9

And then there were the books. In 1997, Christian author Joshua Harris, 21 years old and single at the time, published the book I Kissed Dating Goodbye. This book, in which Harris writes, “When I don’t feel close to a person, I rarely dive into a discussion about my views on dating,”10 would go on to be endorsed by seemingly every youth pastor in America and to sell 1.2 million copies, shaping the romantic lives of a generation of teens. Harris’s parents were pioneers in the Christian homeschooling movement, and he was homeschooled his entire life, getting his publishing feet wet with New Attitude, a magazine he created for fellow home-schoolers. I’ll note here that Harris has since disavowed IKDG, as his book had come to be known, and discontinued publication in 2018, later announcing separation both from his wife and from his Christian faith.11 And I’ll also note, in fairness, that I believed, said, and did a lot of dumb shit when I was 21.

IKDG opens with a scene in which a girl named Anna is walking down the aisle on her wedding day towards her betrothed, David. As they are reciting their vows, six other girls slowly walk up to join David. When Anna asks David, “What the fuck?” (in essence), he replies, “They’re girls from my past…they don’t mean anything to me now…but I’ve given part of my heart to each of them.” Realizing the hole he’s dug, David reassures Anna, “Everything that’s left is yours.” The whole thing turns out to be a dream that Anna had told Harris about in a letter.12

And that’s the basic premise of the book. Harris views any sexual activity before marriage as harmful to the individual, to their relationship with God, and to their relationship with their future spouse. He warns that if a guy has sex with his girlfriend, it “will scar her emotionally and damage her relationship with God.”13 Because people will “carry the memories of our past physical involvements into marriage,” those physical involvements should be eliminated entirely.14

Harris takes the purity message to a new level, suggesting that young people should reserve not only sexual activity, but also all of their romantic energy for their future spouse, as if this is a limited commodity. For Harris, any time and energy invested into a relationship that doesn’t end in marriage is viewed as wasted. His concern with dating is that it “does not always lead to a lifelong commitment.”15 And if two people aren’t ready for a lifelong commitment, “they have no business pursuing romance.”16

Relationships without commitment can result in heartbreak, so in Harris’s view, it’s best to avoid them altogether. He ignores—or more likely, was naively ignorant of—the benefits that people gain from relationships that don’t last forever. Romantic relationships, whether positive or negative, are formative experiences. Engaging in these relationships is the way that people learn what they enjoy about a partner and what boundaries they need to set. Even relationships that cause pain are learning experiences that can allow one to grow in ways that make future relationships better.

His solution, as you may have gathered from the book’s title, is to avoid dating altogether until one is ready for marriage. He encourages young people to spend time in mixed-gender friend groups and to develop opposite-gender friendships that focus on shared interests or activities but stop short of intimacy, which he defines as a focus on each other. All physical contact, as well as all romantic interactions or conversations should be avoided until one is ready for marriage.17

Referencing the biblical account in which God acts as a supernatural matchmaker between Isaac and Rebekah, he ensures readers that God will do the same for them. When that happens, the man should consult with his parents, a Christian mentor, and trusted Christian friends. If they agree that moving towards marriage would be a good idea, he can then run the plan by the woman’s parents, and then—with their permission of course—approach the woman to ask to court her. Unlike dating, this process of courtship is conducted mostly in groups of friends or with their families, with perhaps some private conversations here and there, but certainly no alone time where things might go too far. Ideally, in his view, the first kiss should happen on the wedding day.18

Harris writes that someone had expressed concern that this strategy might not allow one to get to know a partner well enough prior to marriage, and kind of just acknowledges that it’s true: “Marriage will always be a step of faith. Not a blind leap, but a step just beyond what we can see for certain.”19 This makes some amount of sense in a world where one believes, as I did, that there is a good and all-knowing God who has a plan for their life, including a specific person that they are to marry, and will reveal that plan as one goes through life. I never kissed dating goodbye, but when a girl that I’d been attracted to in high school told me she was looking for someone to marry and asked if I was in or out, I didn’t hesitate to jump right in. It had to be God’s plan.

Also, sex had become really appealing by the time I turned 20. By that time, I’d had a handful of non-penetrative sexual experiences about which I felt extremely guilty, but which felt extremely good. It wasn’t just the allure of guilt-free sex, though. While my parents never pushed me to marry early (tried to warn me against it, even), it was still clear to me that in the subculture I grew up in, marriage and children were expected to closely follow college graduation. And I stuck to the script, getting married a week after I graduated.

Within purity culture, it is taught that there is an instant transformation on the wedding night, in which sex goes from completely prohibited to absolutely allowed. Nowhere in the Bible is any type of sexual activity prohibited between a wife and her husband. Hebrews 13:4 reassures Christians that “marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled,” giving clear license for whatever kink two cis-gender, heterosexual, strictly monogamous, married children of God may be into.

But while all kinds of sex are fully allowed within marriage, the negative effects of purity culture persist. Purity culture teaches that sex before marriage should be so fervently avoided because it will decrease the quality of sex within marriage. As a result, those who have followed the plan arrive to their honeymoon suite knowing little to nothing about how their partner’s body—or even their own—works. Because purity culture and abstinence-only sex education tend to go hand-in-hand, there is often a lack of understanding about one’s own anatomy or that of their partner, or the basic mechanics of sex.

In her book PURE, Linda Kay Klein tells the story of her own experience growing up in and leaving purity culture, along with the experiences of several friends that she interviewed. One of her interviewees talked about her wedding day, the first time she had ever seen a naked man or been naked with a man. When they attempted sex, she had “no idea what hole or where anything is.” Her husband, also lacking basic knowledge about sex, tried something and asked if it felt good. She said, “I have no idea. I’ve never let anything down there try to feel good before.”20

The expectation that decades of physical and mental “purity” will culminate in mind-blowing wedding night sex is simply unrealistic, and frequently leaves newlyweds disappointed with their own experience, or with feelings of guilt or inadequacy about not being able to satisfy their partner. Another of Klein’s interviewees explained, “There are two messages happening. Somehow you have to be a lamb—chaste and pure as the driven snow until you are married. And then you have to be a tigress in bed. The vows make that instant transformation somehow.”21

Marriage is supposed to be a light switch moment, but it can be difficult to find the light switch when you’re in a dark room you’ve never been in before. There are psychological hurdles to overcome. A person that has been told for decades that sex is dirty, shameful, and off-limits can have psychological blocks that interfere with sexual function. Vaginismus is a condition in which the vaginal wall muscles contract involuntarily, rendering penetrative vaginal sex painful or even impossible. This can be the result of past sexual trauma, but is often caused by the negative attitudes towards sex internalized by those that grew up in sexually repressive environments. Erectile dysfunction can also be the result of growing up in a sex-negative environment or because of anxiety about not knowing how to please one’s partner. And because heterosexuality—or at least the performance of it—is mandated, many that grow up in purity culture find themselves in marriages that don’t align with their sexual orientation, sometimes not realizing this for years.

In The Act of Marriage, a Christian sex manual written in 1976, Tim and Beverly LaHaye compare the results of a survey they did to the results of a survey that had been published in Redbook. They wrote that 81% of the women in their survey reported above average sexual satisfaction, compared to 71% of those surveyed for the Redbook article, concluding that good Christian women have more fulfilling sex than their secular peers.22 Leaving aside the issue of the percentage of things that can be above average, there’s a deeper problem with taking this at face value. Because evangelical women are told both that sex should be reserved for marriage and that sex within a marriage is always amazing, they are less likely to have any prior experiences with which to compare sex with their husbands. Divorce isn’t an option, so they might as well believe that what they have is great; they’ve been told their whole lives that it would be. Given some of the other results from the LaHayes’ survey, my explanation seems more likely: 24% of wives and 29% of husbands didn’t see each other undressed on their wedding night; 9% of respondents did not attempt intercourse the first night; and 12% of wives and 22% of husbands attempted intercourse, but “could not make entrance.”23

Evangelical writers in recent years, having recognized some of the harms done by purity culture, have written books claiming to offer a new approach to sexuality. But these have turned out to be, for the most part, a repackaging of the purity culture from the 1990s. Many of the harmful aspects remain. Only heterosexual sex is allowed. Sex is permissible only in marriage. Modesty is emphasized. And even impure thoughts are considered sinful. The reason these aspects of purity culture remain in more recent evangelical approaches to sexuality is because they have to. They are a core component of evangelical teachings. Because as I will discuss in a later chapter, individual sexual purity isn’t primarily a goal, but rather a tool used to achieve other types of purity within the evangelical church and in society as a whole.

Turn the page to Chapter 4: If Your Right Hand Causes You To Sin, or go back to the beginning and start with Chapter 1: Original Sin.