The old purity culture that has earned such scorn in trendy Christian circles over recent years certainly had its limitations and its problems. But it understood a couple of truths: Sex is important, not trivial; sex is sacred, not just one species of human act among others; and how we act sexually reflects how we value other people and how we value ourselves.

The last decade witnessed a sharp turn against the so-called purity culture that emerged in the 1990s American Christian scene. Emphasizing abstinence and exalting virginity, it has since been blamed for promoting unhealthy views of sex and for damaging some of its adherents. Indeed, mockery of purity culture has become a standard trope, even within Christian circles, where it is often decried for causing trauma, that most elastic term in the dictionary of modern victimhood. And apparently it must share blame for lack of sexual agency, rape culture, misogyny, and, of course, racism—without which no list of modern sins is ever complete. 

Yet for all the scorn heaped upon it, purity culture is not the most pressing threat today. Even if it proved counterproductive, it is not nearly as dehumanizing as its successor. Kathleen Stock, in an article at UnHerd last week, recounts the stories of Nikole Mitchell, a “pastor-turned-stripper and companion,” and Lily Phillips. The two young women have anonymous sex with vast numbers of random men for free, on condition that they can video the encounters and post them online. These women also display their sexual license in even more public ways, if that were possible, the details of which I will not describe in a First Things column. Stock calls this sexual extremism the “impurity spiral.” There is certainly a sense in which the women she describes represent a new extreme, a twisted descent into new depths of degradation. But I would argue their behavior is only the logic of the old sexual revolution, albeit now playing itself out in a world of technologically-enabled performance. It’s an impurity spiral, but it’s also a culture of desecration and consequent dehumanization.

At the heart of the sexual revolution was the notion that the significance of sex is primarily recreational. Sexual acts are thereby detached from any role in any ongoing interpersonal relationship, and so, the argument goes, sexual agents are liberated from old, repressive patterns of thought and behavior. The satisfaction of immediate individual desire is all that matters. 

This is a dramatic break with earlier cultures that deemed sex to be of great sacred and social significance, and for good reason. Judaism and Christianity treated it as a serious, holy matter.

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