The core of purity culture is teaching young people to take God’s commands for personal purity seriously—no lust and no premarital sex. Christians who follow God’s Word will continue to preach and teach this.

I grew up during purity culture. I didn’t know it at the time, because purity culture was all I knew and a fish doesn’t know he’s in water. I have since learned that what I was surrounded with growing up was something called “purity culture,” and that it was apparently very, very bad. I didn’t think it was bad at the time, of course. But later the rumblings of the internet let me know the many problems that existed in purity culture. Some of them I didn’t know about, because I never saw them. At times I hear of the horrors of purity culture and it’s like looking at a memory in a funhouse mirror. You can make out the shape, but that’s not what you remember.

Other times I have heard criticisms that I thought were valid. No good deed that a culture or subculture sets out to perform will be without flaw. There were excesses in the movement, and those excesses resulted in real hurt to real people. But I think purity culture was a net good. I think it was on the right track, and I think that the best parts of purity culture should be and have been absorbed by the church as we hold up purity as an ideal for the next generation.

So despite the arrows being flung at the movement, despite the total collapse of its preeminent prophet, and despite the seeming success of the sexual revolution, I stand on the side of purity culture. Not because it was a perfect movement, but because it was a good movement. And because, like the sexual revolution, it never really went away. Instead, it became embedded in our Christian subculture, and I think that’s a good thing.

Defining Purity Culture

Saying exactly what purity culture was can be a challenge, because purity culture is a label used to cover a wide variety of conferences, books, teachings, and ideas. As the kids today might say, purity culture was a vibe. If we were to boil purity culture down to a simple sentence, we might describe it this way: “Purity culture was the belief that young people should be encouraged to save themselves for marriage because God’s plan was best.”

Now, to accomplish that singular goal a host of strategies were suggested and implemented. There was preaching and teaching on the dangers of immorality, and not just immorality, but lust. There were conferences and purity pledges and purity rings. Men were told they should be pure in their thinking. Women were told to be modest in what they wore. Dating was kissed goodbye in favor of courtship. The goal of dating in the world was just to have a good time. The goal of dating and courting within purity culture was marriage.

As I’ve already suggested, there were a lot of different groups in this movement that emphasized different things and implemented these ideas in different ways. Some grudgingly allowed dating so long as it was pointed toward marriage. Others thought courtship was the only way. Some pushed hard on purity rings and pledges. Others just preached Scripture and warned about the damage of premarital sex. For this reason, defending the movement is hard, because some parts of it I think were more defensible than others. Still, we will throw everything into a giant package and consider both the good and the bad. Let’s start with the bad.

The Accusations Against Purity Culture

From the random things that The Algorithm™ has decided that I should see, I have come across several critiques of so-called “purity culture” over the years. I wish I had taken careful record of each post, tweet, and meme so that I could show first-hand examples of people actually saying this, but I didn’t. You’ll have to take my word for it, or do a little googling. Some of these critiques come from people who, from what I can tell, are genuine Bible-believing Christians. Others come from people who have long ago thrown off everything about Christianity, with a special place of contempt for purity culture. Others stand somewhere in between.

The main critique seems to be legalism. Purity culture, it is alleged, taught that the ultimate sign of moral perfection was to be a virgin upon marriage. In pursuit of this goal, Christian young people were given lots and lots of rules, many of which can be found nowhere in Scripture. What might have been helpful boundaries (no kissing, no dating alone) were made to be iron-clad commands with the weight of Scripture. Signing pledges and buying rings became the path to holiness. So much attention was given to the outside of the cup, or so it is argued, that the real heart problem was not addressed. Or if it was, it wasn’t the focus. “Do these things and God will bless you” was the contract.

At times purity culture did put up barriers that were extra-biblical. A large swath of purity culture insisted that dating itself was wrong and that the answer was courtship. While courtship itself isn’t wrong, Scripture itself doesn’t give us the “best way” for a couple to proceed from interest to marriage. At other times, advice was given and rules were developed that might have been wise, but certainly weren’t Scripture. There can be a fine line between wise counsel and legalism, but we slip past that line to our own peril. Purity culture at times slipped past that line.

A final way that this legalism could spread, and to me this is the most serious and legitimate critique of purity culture, is the lack of hope given for failure. When the goal set up is virginity on your wedding day, you have to think about who in the room might have already failed. If we only preach the commands of the New Testament but don’t give the hope of God’s grace and forgiveness, we will end up with teens who give up because they’ve already slipped up. One summer I worked at camp and noticed this important, glaring omission as speaker after speaker warned about the dangers of immorality but gave no hope for the teen who had already sinned. One week the preacher of the week, who was about as old school as you can get, began preaching his purity message. About halfway through his message he took a five-minute detour to explain that if you’ve messed up, it isn’t over for you. His outline was very simple, something like “Recognize, Repent, Return” and then he concluded that section with a brief story giving hope: “I know a young lady who got pregnant as a teen, had an abortion, and today she is a youth pastor’s wife and you would never know it. God can forgive any sin and you can have a fresh start with Him today.” I think the lack of such hope might be the biggest strike against purity culture.

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