Excitement was in the air.
There was a youth event at church that night. I took my time primping, doing my hair and makeup, choosing just the right outfit.
Any time there was a youth event, your chances were pretty high of seeing that boy you were crushing on.
My Mom dropped me off at church and I quickly found my group and we shuffled into the church. Giggles rang through the foyer.
We were ushered into the sanctuary, all sliding into the pews with our tribe of friends.
The excitement ended once the video began. It was a video on purity.
I grew up in the 90’s, right in the thick of purity culture.
Any activity tied to the church, whether a youth event or a week at church camp, boasted the same loud rule…NO PC! No physical contact between boys and girls.
Hand-holding, hugging and kissing were all forbidden. Even sitting too close to a boy was frowned upon. Crushes weren’t really discussed, because it meant you had “given your heart away”.
It was all viewed as the gateway drug to sex and obviously forbidden before marriage.
Your sexuality was viewed as dangerous.
Teens were encouraged to wear purity rings, sign virginity contracts and pledge chastity during public ceremonies.
We were given a multitude of different analogies used to describe girls who had sex before marriage. Flowers that have been plucked. A chewed stick of gum. Chipped teacups. Tape that’s lost its stickiness. Rotten fruit that fell off the tree. Stained napkins. A torn-up piece of paper. Unwrapped gifts. Spit in a glass of water. Dirty chocolate. Mucky water. Used garbage. Bruised apple.
And all of them equate to the same message: A girl’s worth is completely tied to her sexual purity.
We were taught that our purity was a large part of our identity. Perhaps even more important than our faith in Jesus.
As women, it feels as if our worth is often reduced to what we have or haven’t done in the bedroom. We wear white dresses on our wedding days as a symbol of innocence, purity and virginity. But yet signs of our spiritual health and our walk with Jesus are treated as secondary to virginity.
I remember as a teen I liked to be different, I still have that craving in my heart. I finally talked my Mom into letting me get second holes pierced in my ears. I was the first girl at church to have that done. I was so excited to go to church the next Sunday and show my friends. My friends Mom, an adult who clearly knew better, told her that only girls who have had sex get their ears pierced twice. When my friend told me that I was devastated and felt such shame. I knew it was untrue, because I was a virgin, but I was so ashamed for the adults in the church to think that of me. From that point on I would often wear my hair down when I went to church so no one would see my ear piercings.
Purity being used to gauge your spiritual health breeds pride and judgment among believers. Judgement that wasn’t hidden. Anything from ear-piercings to your crushes were judged. And that taught me one thing, secrecy. If you didn’t want to be scolded for having a crush on a boy, you kept it a secret.
There was a lot of in-your-face rhetoric with the analogies, purity rings and concerts, but the fear we learned was subtle in a lot of ways. It crept in on us more through the undertone within the culture and the way people acted than what was actually said.
The words I would associate with purity culture are shame and fear-mongering.
And we were promised that somehow the shame and fear would magically disappear on our wedding night. It would just poof, be gone. Because we paid the price of waiting until we were married, we would have amazing honeymoon sex. And the teachings we received that sex was dirty would just be vanished from our minds in that very instant. Sex was bad until it was supposed to be good.
What those of us who grew up in purity culture have realized is that shame and fear doesn’t instantly disappear. The harmful, sometimes PTSD-like consequences are something we have to unpack for years.
Linda Kay Klein, author of Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Women and How I Broke Free had this to say about the purity movement:
Shame is baked into the latest round of purity teachings. Since those teachings are formalized in adolescence, they become a virtually intractable part of a person’s identity.
How do I wish the church would have handled purity and sex differently?
Don’t shame abuse victims
While I don’t think this shame was intentional, it still happened, nonetheless. If purity is something you can lose because of sexual activity that means those who are abused or raped are no longer pure. Remember those analogies purity culture loves to throw around? Rotten fruit that fell off the tree. Can you even imagine the heartache and burden that puts on rape survivors?
Elizabeth Smart, a kidnapping victim, remembered hearing one of those analogies. This is what she told a panel about it.
For me, I thought ‘I’m that chewed-up piece of gum,’. Nobody re-chews a piece of gum. You throw it away. And that’s how easy it is to feel you no longer have worth. Your life no longer has value.
Even if it isn’t a child from the church that has been raped or abused, it very well could be someone around them or you. And if purity culture is something you often speak of; you could be spreading that message to them.
A rape survivor is already dealing with so much trauma, to also have that compounded on top of that is almost unbearable.
You aren’t used goods no one will want
Listen to me carefully, this couldn’t be further from the truth. You are not damaged goods. And I fully believe if Jesus were speaking to a room full of teenagers who had premarital sex, He would say the same thing.
It is interesting when Jesus walked on this earth, He talked to a lot of women who were “damaged goods”. Women who had a past, a background, a life before they met Jesus. Not once did He ever use a phrase like damaged goods or rotten fruit. He used words of love and forgiveness, He used words that gave life and asked them to leave their life of sin, but He didn’t condemn them.
Take a look at the account of Jesus’ ancestors in Matthew 1:1-16. First, we see Tamar who solicited sex with her father-in-law. Then we see Rahab who was clearly a prostitute. Ruth is next, identified as a true woman of virtue. The fourth woman is identified as Uriah’s wife, she was seduced by David while her husband was at war. Last is Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mary is a virgin and wasn’t part of any sex scandal. Five women are included, mostly poor, mostly misfits, widows, unimportant, unknown, sinful women who changed the course of history by their simple, obedient lives. This is no oversight on God’s part! I think He intentionally chose women we can relate to. In this list are women and men who are like us. Some sinned sexually. Others were deeply affected by the moral climate around them. But these were the people in the lineage of Jesus.
I want you all to know: if you had sex before you were married, that does not make your marriage any less valuable in God’s sight, and you are not a failure. Your purity is not based on what you did with your body, but on what Jesus did with His.
Sex is powerful but sexual sin is not more powerful than God’s grace.
Sex isn’t dirty
Many of us who grew up in purity culture have heard something similar. These statements stick in our brain and we bring that mindset into our marriages, and our intimacy suffers as a result.
Sex is good. Hello, God created it…He called it “good,” and it existed before there was any sin in the world. Sex was not created by Satan, Playboy, the internet or some creepy pervert lurking in the shadows of a porn shop.
But when you are told that sex is dirty and losing your purity is bad, it also makes sex something bad. Many married women find sex difficult to enjoy because we’ve been fleeing from it our entire unmarried life. Once we’re married and able to have sex, it’s a letdown. And can feel like a failure. Which in turn impacts your marriage.
Women aren’t responsible for men’s sin
I remember how odd I thought it was at church camp when we would go swimming that I had to wear a long shirt over my suit, but boys could swim shirtless.
The modesty culture goes hand-in-hand with purity. Women are to dress modestly so we don’t become a stumbling block for men. We are told it’s our responsibility to keep their “eyes up here”. We are the gatekeepers of men’s sin. We say there is no excuse to lust, but then we lay the blame on women’s clothing choices.
Sadly, I’ve also heard a time or two “She was asking for it by what she was wearing”. Let me just say victim blaming has to stop. We also cannot say there is no excuse to rape, but lay the blame on a woman for her clothing choices.
Jesus lays the blame for lust at the feet of the man. We see this clearly in Matthew 5:28. Nowhere in that verse does He say it’s the woman’s fault.
But, and there is a but, if we are deliberately dressing in a way to intentionally entice men to lust then I do believe the blame lies with us (this does NOT apply to rape, period).
I’m not saying that modesty doesn’t matter, so please don’t take that from my statements here. But we need to stop teaching girls their bodies are bad, dangerous and a source of shame.
How your body works
Hormones, puberty, attraction, male and female reproduction systems, what impacts libido, pregnancy…those are all normal things that teenagers need educated on. And for goodness sake, teaching them the proper terms for body parts (penis and vagina) isn’t going to send them directly to hell.
When we give them appropriate information, they won’t feel as if we are hiding anything from them. And we can teach them that sex is a good thing! We can give them the foundation, answer questions they may have and teach them that sex is God-pleasing when it’s within the bounds of marriage. We need to answer questions with integrity, not simply giving a moralizing lesson.
Walking alongside you
While I do believe that God wants us to keep sex within His intentions I also believe we need to reshape how we talk about it and understand that people are complicated; it’s not just behavior vs. sexuality. The more we can support one another and talk openly, the stronger we become.
Our teens live in a society which is inundated with sex everywhere. I think it’s really important for us to walk alongside of them rather than throw the “just don’t do it” answer at them. We need to encourage open conversations where we can pour honesty and God’s love into them.
Jeremy Roloff said:
Teens need a God-centered perspective; they need to understand that sex is designed to be perfect and beautiful. It’s the way we engage with a specific human to experience a relationship. It’s designed by God for communication and oneness. We need role models to offer this hopeful perspective.
And you know who does want that rotten fruit, plucked flowers and chewed gum? JESUS!
Join me next week for another post in our series on intimacy. In the meantime I’d love to hear your opinions on purity culture. How are you planning to talk to your children about sex so they can have a positive view of it? Did purity culture negatively affect you?
