Where We Go from Purity Culture
Reflections on growing up evangelical in the 90s
Last week I made the argument that we need to make a better, more aesthetic case for the creational design for sex, the body, procreation, and marriage. Part of the beauty of that story is the design, that it fits together, that it’s not just chaos or up to the individual’s will. Implied in my argument was that in the past we’ve made bad arguments or no arguments at all. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today. I know “purity culture” has been written about a lot. I’m far from the first person to tackle this issue, but I did live through fundamentalist/evangelical homeschool culture in the 90s. I do have some experience with purity culture and its effects. And unlike some critics, the memory doesn’t conjure up some horrific, abusive, controlling evangelical past. It reminds me of a time when a lot of adults were doing their best with what they had to help their kids stay holy in a culture increasingly obsessed with sex (remember, for all the pornography flooding our society, teen sex is down and even sex in films is down!). Rather than view “purity culture” in purely negative terms, I think a healthy retrospective looks back and acknowledges that people were doing their best, that chastity is actually a spiritual and physical and mental good, that our culture actively seeks to deceive us and our children about their sexuality and created design, and that a culture of permissiveness is currently leading to broken hearts and loneliness and broken identities and addictions and insecurity and inhibition.
