In each section below, you’ll hear from people who responded to my survey. I have ascribed everyone in this essay a fake name (I didn’t ask for names in my survey) to help delineate each individual response from the one before or after it.
What do we teach this new generation? (Also titled: “Social distancing!”)
When I was 15 (and every summer before or since), I attended church camp each year at a United Methodist camp called Sumatanga. (Which, by the way, was the very, very best).
The schedule wasn’t quite what you’d see at a more secular camp - no horseback riding, no zip lines. We had morning devotion, small groups, activities, vespers - all kinds of good, Jesus-y stuff. Being that it was a fairly progressive camp, one of the small group offerings that summer was a co-ed sexuality course. Our group leader, a woman in her mid-late thirties, made the wise choice to have each of us submit anonymous questions prior to the start of her class. At the beginning of each meeting, she pulled out the questions and read them aloud, writing them down verbatim on a sheet of chart paper, then going through the answers in a very judgment-free tone - no matter how silly the question, she treated it with the utmost seriousness, clinically explaining anything that came up. Everything was on the table.
This freedom and anonymity allowed for all kinds of questions that we would’ve been too afraid to ask out loud. I don’t remember what the question was, but I submitted something that contained the word “semen” and mistakenly spelled it “seamen.” I will never forget the white-hot embarrassment of trying not to reveal the question was mine as she wrote “s-e-a-m-e-n” on the chart paper!
But I’ll also never forget how rudimentary many of the questions were. Someone asked if you could get pregnant from swallowing during oral sex. Someone else asked if you could shower off an STD. There was never a day where we didn’t have a dozen new questions, and they got bolder each time we gathered. People had things they needed to know, and things they couldn’t ask anyone else.
While it may seem shocking to some that a church camp was encouraging this kind of open and frank conversation about sex, looking back, it’s an incredibly powerful testament to how we as the church can engage our young people around issues of sexuality, curb any problematic theories or thinking, and still manage to push the concept that sex is a sacred, beautiful act meant for commitment - even exclusively within marriage.
By the way, “s-e-m-e-n.” Just needed to redeem myself.
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The numbers don’t lie: abstinence-only education simply is not an effective way to keep people from having sex.
“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.’” - Pure, Linda Kay Klein, 25
In her book, Klein talks specifically about how education that centers around purity or abstinence is not only ineffective, but the correlation that its (particularly female) students draw between sex and shame only strengthens over time. She cites research being done among three conservative Christian groups: Baptists, Catholics, and Latter-day Saints.
(If you want to really nerd out, the paper is called “The Intersection of Religion and Sex: Sex Guilt Resiliency among Baptists, Catholics, and Latter-day Saints” by K.S. Beale, E. Maynard, and M. O. Bigger, and was published in 2016).
In their paper, these researches write:
“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 actually 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 tenant of evangelicalism] have more sexual guilt. ...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.
The relationship between sex guilt and...sexual satisfaction doesn’t diminish over time; it gets stronger….This is not a recipe for young women to embark on a fulfilling relationship with their partner and we predict it could be an indicator of further sexual problems and relationships issues.”
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A huge struggle for the women who took my survey revolves around a really specific theological idea that I wasn’t familiar with: the concept of “cheap grace.”
As I understood if from their definitions, “cheap grace” is when a person understands their sinfulness and repents, then acknowledges that God’s grace (and particularly the crucifixion of Christ) covers their sinfulness in perpetuity, and continues sinning with the benefit of that eternal forgiveness in mind. In other words, a person just assumes that they’ll always be forgiven, so the sinning itself isn’t so important.
If you believe pre-marital sex is sinful, then it’s a really easy sin to identify - you’ve either done it or you haven’t. That’s part of why so many churches hang their hats on it (along with attitudes about drugs and alcohol) as a major piece of identity within a community. A binary action is easy to avoid.
“I struggle with the fact that God is loving and forgives sins when we repent. But the Bible is so clear about sex before marriage. So if someone sins somewhat intentionally (ex- sex before marriage).... and keeps doing it.... will God keep forgiving their sin when they repent and truly feel bad or does this mean the person really isn’t saved or something else? I was raised to wait until marriage. But I haven’t waited and I go through periods where I will stop but then eventually have sex again and feel bad.” - Janet
“My college boyfriend and I had healthy, consensual sex. He was Catholic, and all of a sudden, one day, he decided sex was off the table. He was so guilt-stricken that he made himself sick about it. Eventually, we started having sex again, but he refused to buy condoms in advance because doing so would be premeditating the sin - otherwise, he could simply excuse it to himself as an ‘in-the-moment’ mistake that warranted God’s forgiveness.” - Rachel
I don’t have the benefit of years of scientific data or research, but I can imagine what this understanding of grace coupled with or own failure ultimately leads to. We turn off our ability to be honest with ourselves and vulnerable to a living God because what we get from church is that sexual purity (and heterosexual purity at that) is the biggest identifier we should be grappling with, and when that fails to be something we can achieve, we have two options: relent to the endless cycle of self-hatred that comes with repeatedly breaking a promise to God, or wall off that part of ourselves and decide that it doesn’t matter that much anyway.
Neither option is really a good one.
Again, this is not to say that pre/extra-marital sex as sinful is a problematic teaching in and of itself. It is to say that when we set something up as the ultimate indicator of whether or not someone is a faithful Christian, then refuse to engage young people about it beyond, “Don’t do that,” we force them into the choices I mentioned above.
There are women who waited until marriage to have sex, who have healthy relationships with their spouses, but I am willing to bet that they were taught more than “Don’t do that.”
“I am happy that I waited until my husband to have sex. It was actually pretty easy for me to say no - until I met him. Once I met him all bets were off! I never felt shame but I was concerned about getting pregnant before marriage. I think that is the ultimate “shame” in purity culture. People have sex quietly but those that get pregnant and “shamed” for basically getting “caught.” So I think purity culture really just encourages people to keep their sex life to themselves ... and you better not get pregnant!” - Maria
If your understanding of being a Christian is that being one means buying into a more legalistic lifestyle and set of behaviors (which for many is the case - and that’s great!), then it logically follows that all of those behaviors need to be viewed on equal footing and without technicality: sexual conservatism should be aligned with a charitable heart; abstinence from alcohol should go hand-in-hand with careful speech and abstention from gossip. Adherence to this quantitative and qualitative kind of life comprises a whole person, not a set of rules.
But the rules are so much easier to teach, so much easier to break, so much easier to cheat, and so much easier to judge our successes by. It seems we as people crave a yardstick for both measuring our own failure by and for beating ourselves over the heads with when that failure is discovered. Rather than teaching our children the nuances of faith, we simply hand them the yardstick.
“Don’t do that,” we say, with a stern look. And then we leave the room.
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I talked to a wonderful human being by phone about all this. She’s a longtime friend of mine who grew up evangelical, who has actually been studying this exact field for her postgraduate research. At the end of our call, I asked her what advice she’d give the church moving forward. She said:
“Changing the conversation is so rooted in ideas about gender. The church would have to get rid of, or let go of, complementarianism. The church has to let go of gender essentialism, gendered roles in the worship service and church labor overall. As long as you have this idea that women are x and men are y and that’s inherent - eg, all women are inherently nurturing and all men are inherently warriors - all of that undergirds this conversation about purity. For me, the church could ask itself, “Why are we so hung up about these ideas about what it means to be a Christian woman versus what it means to be a Christian man?”
I loved this idea and thought it held a lot of weight, particularly in the realm of eliminating the conversation about Christianity as being tied to a particular piece of identity. There are certainly specifications laid out for how to excel at being something - a wife, a minister, a husband, a single person, a mother - but we’re all drawing our basics from the same holy book. The major thesis of Christianity as described by Christ, to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself,” doesn’t come with a caveat.
Why do we seem so hell-bent on creating one?
When you think about it objectively, in a faith system that’s based on service, love, radical inclusion, and humility, why is sex/sexuality/gender even a part of the conversation? And what is keeping the focus on those things keeping us from getting to?
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"Purity culture, in my opinion, was/is rooted in biblical truth about God's design for sex and intimacy, but it was taught in a way that a) put too much focus on this one area of obedience, leaving young women with the impression that it is the sum total of their identity before Christ and b) preloaded sex acts with so much shame that it's difficult to transition from ""Good Girls Don't"" to ""Hell Yeah Let's Get Naked,"" even in a covenant marriage. There has to be a better/more nuanced way to teach biblical orthodoxy regarding sexuality." - Michelle
Abstinence, from sex or from anything else, tends to be an easy identifier for a group of people. It’s an easy thing to teach children and young adults who may not be able to grasp the more amorphous ideals. “We don’t ______” is a lot easier to promote than “We’re people who love and give, people who value justice and mercy, and tout the benefits of radical inclusion.”
Then again, who better to get those ideals than children and young adults, who haven’t been jaded by the world? What better group of people to hammer idealism into than that demographic?
Overall, I get the sense that what we’re doing to our young people is unnecessarily hammering them with them they’re flawed, then offering them a solution. But here’s the thing about people between the ages of 11 and 20: they already know they’re not perfect. Everything in their lives is about measuring up - to the expectations of their parents, to the standards of their friends. Their lives are lived down a long, narrow hallway full of mirrors, comparison, and self-criticism. Christ can still be the solution to their problems without us planting the seeds of guilt within them - those seeds are already sprouting. No one is harder on them than they are on themselves.
But no one smells bullshit faster than kids:
“I’m still in high school and I had a mandatory “purity class” my freshman year. I would like to note that the boys didn’t have a purity class and got to do PE while the girls participated. Every time I would question why the boys don’t have one I was told they couldn’t find a male teacher to lead it. That’s bull. If they wanted to they could find a male teacher to lead this once a month class teaching from a book, they easily could. We read from a book called “and the bride wore white”. I couldn’t tell you if it was good or not because I quit reading after I saw the purity vs. cup scale [an object lesson comparing sexual experiences to chips in a teacup] while thumbing through it. I figured I didn’t really care what it said if it could pose such a biblically flawed scale of self-worth to the women and girls who would inevitably read this book. I’m not sure if you could even call what we did sex Ed because we mainly discussed the spiritual and emotional side of sex. All that aside, I have several friends who have told me that they are scared that when they do get married they won’t be able to separate sex from shame in their heads despite whether or not they will have waited by then.” - Carrie
It is no accident that young people are moving away from churches all over the country. Attendance among millennials, my peers, is at an all-time low. According to the Washington Post last year, “At the Pew Research Center, studies tracking America’s religious landscape found that although religious beliefs and practice have been declining at a rapid pace for people of all ages, the drop-off has been most pronounced among people ages 23 to 38. In 2019, roughly two-thirds attend worship services “a few times a year” or less, and 4 in 10 say they seldom or never go. A decade ago, it was more than half and only 3 in 10, respectively.”
We were brought up on doctrine and dogma, many of us raised deep within purity culture. The church, rather than being centered around the teachings of Jesus, was often centered around rules and a collective identity of following them.
What if, instead of scaring our kids into abstinence, shaming them into judging their own biological urges, or hyper-gendering their church involvement, we instead gave them a place to be TRULY vulnerable? To share their deepest fears and concerns? More tangibly, to mis-spell the word “semen” and ask whether oral sex can get you pregnant? To admit something they’re ashamed of or embarrassed about having done?
What if we allowed the inside of a church to reflect what’s happening on the outside? What if there was no performance needed? What if stepping through the doors became a relief instead of a restriction?
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Okay, so: practically speaking - what do we do to get there?
I spoke by phone with my friend Emily who grew up evangelical and is now still very much a Christian, though no longer an evangelical one, about what she would’ve liked to have seen growing up. I asked her how she’d like to see sex discussed as sacred without the shame factor. Here’s what she said:
“I have not personally found voices in a public space that are telling a good story about sex in a way that models sex in a way that I want to teach my children. I want to try really hard not to judge people who have one-night stands, or who have lots of sex with whoever they want - I am trying to get to the point where I accept that as a valid choice. To be totally honest, I’m not there yet. I don’t know how much of that is purity culture rearing its head and me being judgmental and and puritanical about sex, but I’m hoping that it’s more indicative of the reality that we are still so far off the mark when it comes to honorably discussing women’s sexuality. There doesn’t even seem to be science about it, or attention paid to it medically - how do we teach our sons and daughters about pleasure and consent, but also about how it’s sacred and important? You’re not a sinner if you have sex before marriage, but you’re not ready at 14.”
As I listened, I tried to conjure anyone in popular culture who promotes a sacred view of sex without touting that sexual mis-steps are a dogmatic deal-breakers, and came up empty. A seemingly unbreachable dichotomy exists. On one hand, there are people who identify as sex-positive and unapologetic about their choices - some of whom even declaring sex positivity and adherence to faith in the same breath (harkening back to the origin of this series, Hannah Brown’s declaration that “I had sex and Jesus still loves me.”). On the other, there are strict rule-followers holding the line of pre/extra-marital sex as sinful.
I submit that the church has an incredibly unique opportunity to bridge that gap.
Here’s Emily again, with a truly brilliant observation:
“I think one of the reasons that it was so easy for us (as evangelicals) to demonize sex outside of marriage is because we’re such a disembodied faith tradition. There’s a lot of “spirit is good, flesh is bad.” Starting there, and talking about the fact that God became flesh, God had a body, bodies are good and sacred - from there, we can get more into the ways that, just like everything else, sex and our bodies can be used to foster connection, but can also be used to harm.”
Just like everything else, can be used to foster connection, but can also be used to harm.
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I’ve asked a lot of questions throughout this series, and the most important one may be this: are we, the grown ups, willing to do the risky work of stepping away from the rulebook in favor of actually engaging the players in the game?
Getting at the heart of purity culture requires that we step away from the things that are simply not working. Young people don’t need coffee in worship - they just need somebody to shoot them straight. And the only people who can do that are the adults who’ve decided that it’s okay that they will, inevitably, run up against a question they don’t know the answer to. It will be the adults who decide if nuance is comfortable and if stepping away from the old guard is worth the risk to keep younger people interested and invested in their religious communities (which have so, so much to offer and can be so very formative to their development).
What has been made incredibly clear to me is that this is that purity culture is layered - often lined with good intentions and executed with unintended (or unconsidered) consequences. To dissect it means to delve into the world of gender normativity, sexual politics, rape culture, and discrimination - again, not always intended, but often produced.
What has also been made clear is that this is an amazing, pivotal moment for the church. It shouldn’t be viewed with dread, but with excitement, and with tons of hope for change. There is a way forward. There is room to grow. And in some cases, there is space for a much needed apology where harm has been done.
It seems the best we can do may be to take everything back to basics. We must stop pre-supposing we know what’s best for people and allowing them to have some agency in making that choice; to stop prescribing labels and allowing the fullness of God to spring to life in one another. Living a Christian lifestyle and living with empathy, understanding, and willingness to grow shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.
Maybe, as a last thought - whenever we’re sure we’ve got it all figured out, we might check ourselves by looking to the unending and radical heart of God, who has a sneaky way of reorienting even our most certain ideas.
(And, at the risk of sounding trite, hallelujah for that.)
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Acknowledgements:
I was bowled over by just how many women (and men!) wanted to talk to me about this topic. In the last 6 months, I’ve had 7 hour-long phone calls, 240 survey responses, and countless coffee conversations where friends (but mostly perfect strangers) were willing to tell me what they thought: their stories, their pain, and their hope for a better future. So many took time to write paragraphs of academic paper-level discourse on this subject, to the point that they really should’ve written this series themselves. Thank you so much to all who were up for telling me some pretty intimate things, and especially to the people who told their stories of sexual violence for the first time to me. I am humbled by your openness, and I hope this series has honored your experiences.