Who’s Afraid of Their Big Bad O?
Growing up in strict purity culture screwed up my sex life
Back in the mid-1990s, purity culture infiltrated practically every Christian circle. It was an entire movement. Evangelical teens signed pledges that we wouldn’t have sex until marriage. There were songs, conferences, and devotionals all about how “true love waits.” Some churches even held daddy-daughter dances where the fathers vowed to be the keepers of their daughters’ virtue. A lot of us wore “purity rings.”
Nah, that’s not creepy at all.
Christianity has always had a thing for demanding purity from its members, particularly from its women. But the ’90s and early 2000s saw something of a more frenzied and mainstream purity push—much of which could be traced back to a young and single white guy named Joshua Harris.
Harris was the epitome of the boy your Christian mother wanted you to bring home for dinner. Clean-shaven and on fire for Jesus, he wrote the handbook on modern-day purity culture: I Kissed Dating Goodbye. In his book, Harris asserted that Christians shouldn’t be dating at all. Instead, he urged them to pursue a “courtship.” The point, he insisted, was to find a marriage partner and avoid giving away any part of yourself before marriage.
