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Japanese Purity culture is the name for a movement in evangelical churches that urged young people to save sex for marriage, and it was strongest in America in the 1990s and 2000s. Its signs were pledge cards, purity rings, purity balls and courtship in place of dating. Many raised in it now debate what it got right and what it harmed.
Its best-known day came in Washington. On 29 July 1994, teenagers covered the National Mall in Washington with an estimated 200,000 signed cards, each one a promise to wait. A promise like that can be a good and brave thing. Scripture, though, finds the spring of purity deeper than any card. “Blessed are the pure in heart,” Jesus said, “for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). And John tells us how such hearts are made: “every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure” (1 John 3:3). Purity, in the Bible, grows out of hope in Christ.
Where did purity culture come from?
One of its best-known beginnings was a Southern Baptist campaign, True Love Waits, founded by Richard Ross and Jimmy Hester. The country was still, in NPR’s words, “in the shadow of the AIDS crisis, and teen pregnancy rates were up,” and teenagers answered in numbers few adults expected. One early card read: “Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment 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.”
Government money for abstinence teaching soon followed, though Ross told NPR that True Love Waits took none of it: “We were doing this entirely for the glory of God.” In 1997 Joshua Harris, then 21, published I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which told young people to give up dating and wait for God to bring them a spouse. The writer Rachel Joy Welcher, who grew up in the movement, sums it up as an American movement of the late twentieth century “that utilized pledges, books, and events to promote sexual abstinence outside of marriage.”
What did purity culture teach?
At its centre was a sound and ancient teaching: sex belongs in marriage. Around it grew a set of customs. Young people signed pledges and wore purity rings, and some attended purity balls. Harris’s book taught readers to avoid dating altogether. He later named its practices himself, “not dating, not kissing before marriage”, along with the idea of “giving your heart away”.
Two further messages drew much of the criticism later. The first put much of the weight on girls. The publisher’s description of Pure, a book by Linda Kay Klein, who grew up in the movement, sums up the lesson as “girls are potential sexual ‘stumbling blocks’ for boys and men.” The second was a promise. Wait, the message went, and God will give you a happy marriage and a good sex life. Harris came to see that his book “gave some the impression that a certain methodology of relationships would deliver a happy ever-after ending—a great marriage, a great sex life—even though this is not promised by scripture.”
Why is purity culture criticised?
The strongest criticism came from inside it. In October 2018 Harris withdrew his own book. “I no longer agree with its central idea that dating should be avoided,” he wrote, and he said the book had emphasised practices “that are not in the Bible” and “instilled fear for some.” To readers it had hurt he wrote, “I am sincerely sorry.” His publisher agreed not to reprint it. The next year he announced that he and his wife were divorcing and that he was no longer, in McDowell’s report of his words, a “conventional Christian.”
Klein’s book, in its publisher’s words, argues that the message “traumatized many girls—resulting in anxiety, fear, and experiences that mimicked the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—and trapped them in a cycle of shame.” Welcher keeps the church’s historic teaching on sex and still faults the culture built around it: “Purity culture’s main problem is not that it is too conservative but that it is too worldly.” She asks whether “one reason people leave the church is because we tell them purity is about sex, when really it should be about God.”
Research raised a further question. A study by Janet Rosenbaum in Pediatrics in 2009 followed 289 teenagers who took a virginity pledge and 645 closely matched teenagers who did not. Five years later the two groups did not differ in sex before marriage, and the pledgers were less likely to have used protection. By then 82 per cent of the pledgers said they had never taken a pledge.
Did purity culture get anything right?
One of its founders still remembers his surprise. Ross told NPR it was “a complete surprise to the adults that teenagers on their own, without any coercion from adults,” would choose to wait for marriage. Even a critic like Welcher calls it “an earnest response to the age-old problem of immorality and the modern crisis of STDs and teenage pregnancy,” not “a wicked movement.”
Sean McDowell, who teaches apologetics at Biola University, weighs both sides. He grants that purity culture “overplayed marriage, took a formulaic approach to relationships, ignored the value and beauty of singleness.” He also says “there was both good and bad”: it made churches talk about sex, it “highlighted that sex is a big deal,” and it taught girls “that they are worth waiting for.” His counsel is “not to uncritically toss out purity culture nor to blindly defend it.”
Some who signed the cards are simply glad they did. One of the first teenagers to sign, interviewed by NPR thirty years later, was still happy she had waited and hoped her children would too. True Love Waits itself has changed. It stopped selling pledge cards in 2017, and its newest commitment asks young people to give themselves to God “in the lifelong pursuit of personal holiness.”
Is purity culture the same as biblical purity?
They overlap, and they are not the same. The Bible’s teaching on sex is plain: “this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication” (1 Thessalonians 4:3), and “Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled” (Hebrews 13:4). Catholic, Orthodox and evangelical churches all keep sex for marriage, as what the Bible says about sex before marriage sets out. Purity culture did not invent that teaching. It inherited it.
What Scripture adds is depth and reach. Jesus placed purity in the heart and gave the warning to men: “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). When Paul told young Timothy to “be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12), purity came last in a list of six, beside love and faith. Purity is also not only for the young and unmarried. “All the baptized are called to chastity,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, and “Married people are called to live conjugal chastity; others practice chastity in continence” (paragraphs 2348–2349). And Scripture never makes purity a ticket to a happy marriage. Paul’s reason is simpler and stronger: “ye are not your own… For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).
What if purity culture hurt you?
Some who grew up with it carry shame years later, about a past, about a body, about desires that are part of being human. The God who asked for purity is the God who gives it. “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18). “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Paul wrote to believers in Corinth who had every kind of past, “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified” (1 Corinthians 6:11). No one in Christ is beyond his washing. “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1).
If someone forced or abused you, their sin is not your impurity. The shame belongs to the one who did it, never to you. “The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit” (Psalm 34:18). A pastor, a counsellor or a doctor you trust can help you carry what happened.
How can parents teach purity without purity culture?
Start where Scripture starts, with the heart and with the whole person. Teach sons and daughters the same standard; when Jesus warned against lust, he was speaking to men. Talk about bodies plainly and early; Welcher urges parents to use the correct words for the body, so children can tell an adult about pain or abuse. Promise nothing Scripture does not promise. Point them instead to the old question and its answer: “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word” (Psalm 119:9). The Bible verses about purity make a good place to begin together.
Two hundred thousand cards on the Mall were a brave sight. A card can hold a promise for a season; hope in Christ holds it for a life. John tells us what that hope is: “We know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). Whoever has that hope is made pure, and Jesus promised the pure in heart that “they shall see God.”
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