The Rise and Fall of Purity Culture

LES SILLARS, HOST: From WORLD Radio, this is Doubletake.

I understand you were somewhat of a Disney fan. You saw all the …

CLARA YORK: Yeah, we were the risque homeschool family that were allowed to watch The Little Mermaid. A lot of our friends were not allowed to.

SILLARS: Clara York is one of our Doubletake correspondents for Season 3. When she was about 11 or 12, with her sister and some friends...

YORK: We were playing Disney music and “Kiss the Girl” came on from The Little Mermaid. And so we all started singing along and we're dancing and you know, the line is “Kiss the girl” and we'd all shout, “When you're married!” after every single line.

SILLARS: Clara grew up in Orange County, California, immersed in what she would call “purity culture lite.”

When you were growing up, what was your attitude toward dating and marriage?

YORK: So when I, when I was 11, my parents took me on a like a purity weekend or my mom took me with the Passport to Purity curriculum by the trainees. And there was like a contract in there that it said, like a “wait to date” contract. And we crossed the word date out. And we wrote court instead. Because my parents wanted us to, at that age, it was like courtship was the way to go, not dating.

SILLARS: “Courting” is a very intentional and chaperoned process intended to lead to marriage. Parents are heavily involved.

YORK: And I happily signed my name.

SILLARS: She watched the Duggars all the time.

YORK: I loved watching the Duggars.

SILLARS: The popular reality show 19 Kids and Counting followed an ultra conservative Christian homeschool family. They followed a very strict courtship model. Their kids didn’t hold hands with a romantic interest until they were engaged. They weren’t even allowed to be alone together until they were married. The show aired for 7 years while Clara was growing up.

YORK: So I liked that idea. … Like, I want to save all physical contact until marriage, because I thought that was just like, the best way, the safest way to approach dating.

SILLARS: Is that what you gathered from all of these materials, that the most important thing is to be safe?

YORK: Yes, absolutely.

SILLARS: She entered her first romantic relationship soon after graduating from high school. With a young man she met through debate. Nathan York. He was starting his first year of college.

YORK: And so I told him in the car one day, I said, just so you know, I want to save my first kiss for my wedding.

SILLARS: Nathan was fine with that. They even wrote out a list of physical boundaries. They would do this in certain situations, but not that.

And you were very concerned that if you didn't have your boundaries laid out clearly, then things would just escalate.

YORK: Yeah, exactly. It's like a slippery slope.

SILLARS: Most Christians teach biblical principles about sexual purity. Always have. But in the early 1990s a movement started mostly among evangelicals that became known as “purity culture.” That’s where the slogan “True Love Waits” came from, for example. It was partly a reaction to the Sexual Revolution that began in the 1960s.

Purity culture spread rapidly through books on how to date, or not to date. There were conferences and trendy purity rings. It flourished in the 90s and early 2000s. But since then it seems to have faded away.

Clara has been watching all this happen. She says her own experience with purity culture was generally positive, even though she’s modified her own views over the years. She married Nathan in December of 2022, while they were both still students at Patrick Henry College.

A little over a year later they had their first baby.

But a lot of people say they’ve been deeply damaged by their experience in purity culture. There’s a growing genre of books by the “survivors” of purity culture. These are often bitter tales written by ex-evangelicals who use the term “deconstruction” to describe leaving orthodox Christianity.

Today on Doubletake, Clara is going to tell the story of the rise and fall of purity culture. Through the eyes of a couple who lived through some of its best features–and some of its worst. And, just a note: this episode involves relationships and sexuality. Nothing inappropriate, of course, but maybe not for kids.

I’m Les Sillars. Here’s Clara.

CLARA YORK: Millie and Michael Shipe are a Christian couple in their early forties, living in Charlottesville, Virginia. They’re raising three kids. They came of age alongside purity culture. It shaped their clothing choices and relationships. And it played a unique role in their love story.

In college, Millie read Joshua Harris’s book Boy Meets Girl. Harris also wrote I Kissed Dating Goodbye. It was very popular and influential in homeschool and conservative Christian circles. One story caught her eye.

MILLIE SHIPE: This boy and this girl, they meet, are youngish. And they're like instantly infatuated and the dad steps and and he's like, You guys are just too young.

The boy and girl wrote love letters for a while, but her dad put a stop to that, too. Long story short: the boy saved their letters and secretly buried them in a box on her family’s property. Years later, the dad consented to their relationship. The boy gave her a tree for Christmas. When they went out to plant it together, he dug up the box of letters. And at the very top was a letter asking her to marry him.

Millie had been in several relationships that didn’t end well. Sitting there holding "Boy Meets Girl," she prayed for a relationship similar to the one in the book.

MILLIE: I want to marry this man, Lord. But I guess I can't because he's already married. So I would like to marry as close to this man as possible. And that was it.

Except that it wasn’t. Michael asked her if she knew the book soon after they started dating.

MICHAEL: Like, “Oh do you know this book by Joshua Harris called 'Boy Meets Girl'?"

MILLIE: Yes, I know that book! Guard your heart, Millie, guard your heart! Yes, oh, it’s a good book!

Then Michael told her that the guy in the story? That was his older brother.

MILLIE: So I literally did marry as close to that man as possible. 

CLARA: Joshua Harris gave you something. 

MILLIE: He doesn't know it. But he did.

Millie’s church didn’t talk about relationships or sex, but she knew her family had expectations about saving certain things for marriage. One day she discovered that her brother had gone to an event and signed a “purity pledge” that he wouldn’t have sex before marriage.

MILLIE: I was like, Okay, that's cool, and then being like, "Well, if he's doing it like, of course, then like, I should do it."

Of course, reserving sex for marriage is a biblical imperative that began long before the 1990s. But something happened in the Church in this period, and it even spilled into the broader culture. It left some people with a lot of odd memories, confusion, and even pain.

It’s incredibly complicated to pinpoint all the reasons why a social movement catches on. But one is probably generational.

ANNOUNCER: … its historic status is celebrated at the Smithsonian, which pairs the Pill with images from the Summer of Love …

The radical sexual revolution. It’s no wonder it prompted a pendulum swing away from worldliness towards a radical commitment to Christ. Parents wanted to protect their kids from the damage of promiscuity. Heartbreak. Teen pregnancy. And skyrocketing cases of sexually transmitted diseases. Purity culture promised a better way.

Griffith Vertican is an attorney and debate coach who helped found the True Love Waits branch in Arrowhead, California.

VERTICAN: This would have been like late 90s, early 2000s. The movement really began to gain traction and the idea of getting purity rings, and making, you know, a commitment either to, like, courtship, or at least to, you know, remain abstinent, became a very popular youth driven topic.

Griffith is in his forties. Single. He’s still wearing his purity ring.

VERTICAN: So this this kind of ring, the kind I'm wearing right here is, ... It's the classic one that still says true love waits. I had this one for many, many years.

Griff helped lead True Love Waits ring ceremonies. Picture four to five hundred people in a sanctuary, with seventy or so students who have just finished a twelve week course on lust, dating standards, and even abortion and abuse. The students write purity vows on paper cards. Media coverage focused on the weirder purity ceremonies.

VERTICAN: I remember like, The Huffington Post had this one, where like, all the dads kind of dressed up like a groom and like the daughters were like, in there, kind of like a bride's outfit. And then they did this dance, like around a crucifix.

Griff said the True Love Waits ceremonies were not that bizarre. There was often a pastor.

VERTICAN: You had the the person who was leading who was like the pastor, and he would say, you know, do you commit to abstinence until marriage? And then the student would say, you know, yes, I do out loud.

The movement met in small chapters like Griff’s, but it gained national momentum. In December 1994, twenty thousand teenagers hammered stakes with paper purity vows into the grass at a rally in Washington DC.

ARCHIVAL: Washington DC at 7:00 a.m. Thousands of teenagers from all over North America and from every walk of life have a job to do today they're staking a claim for their future and the future of this country today they're pledging their sexual abstinence until marriage

And the purity vow and purity ring weren’t confined to Christian circles.

SOUTH PARK: I’ve got a ring on my finger to remind me what I cannot do.

That’s South Park spoofing on the Jonas Brothers in 2009. The boy band’s purity rings garnered a lot of attention. And they were vocal about their commitment to abstinence. Here they are on CNN that same year.

LARRY KING: Is it hard, gonna be hard? Kevin you’re 21, right?

KEVIN JONAS: Of course, no one’s above temptation ... for us we’re just trying to do our best every single day. And I think we’ve said this a lot but we’re just trying to make our mom proud.

What happened? Here are the Jonas Brothers brothers again on the Andy Cohen Show a few years later.

ANDY COHEN: Okay here's a big one, the Purity Rings were a bad idea one two agree or disagree. You all agree wow why were they a bad idea?

NICK JONAS: Well in in theory they're not a bad idea, yes right, but you should know what you're signing up for.

JOE JONAS: Like when you're 12 versus when you're 16, like it's a very big difference.

COHEN: And then just remind me, how did you declare that you were done with the purity ring?

NICK JONAS: It just sort of happened.

It just…happened. To a lot of pledgers. Including Millie’s brother. Millie was doing the laundry one day, when she found an unused condom in the wash.

MILLIE: And I was like, What is this? Like? I know it's not my dad's. So I confronted him. And I was like, What is this? I never want to find this again. ...

YORK: And did that influence you at all? Because you had been somewhat inspired by what he was doing?

MILLIE: I don't know. Sometimes I wonder if it was actually good for me to see like, oh, look, there's a person who's living differently. And they're still alive. They haven't been smited, or smote, or whatever it is.

God didn’t strike down Millie’s brother for his impurity. Or the Jonas Brothers. Or other ring-wearing celebrities.

Millie wanted to save herself for marriage. But it’s possible to do all the right things for all the wrong reasons. She felt like purity was a path that the people around her approved of.

MILLIE: And I remember being totally anxious when trick or treaters came to the door. 

Millie was pretty anxious growing up. Fear drove her to hide behind couches on Halloween. And fear shaped the messages she heard about how to live. Modesty was a big one. Dress a certain way and guys are going to lust over you. You’re a temptation to them, so you need to cover up.

MILLIE: There was always this fear like, am I honoring God enough? I want to honor God, I want to love God. And I'm being told that I'm a stumbling block by existing. How do I stop that?

Millie tried to wear shorts that weren’t too short, and avoided spaghetti straps on her tops. But not really because she thought it honored God.

MILLIE: I think I was mostly afraid of like, people, not as much God, I think I was really afraid of backlash from people, criticism from people. ... And so it was easy to use clothes as like, Okay, well, that's one thing I can control to some degree.

Millie’s husband Michael Shipe grew up without sisters in a Christian, conservative, homeschool environment. His parents never talked to him about sex. When he was sixteen or so, he and a friend planned to see a movie with two girls.

MICHAEL: And I remember my mom catching wind of that and like totally squashing it, like, no, they're gonna think that this is a date.  I think there was, an undercurrent of like: "You can't be friends with a girl." Because it’s like these dominoes. 

At the end of those dominoes is premarital sex. So you don’t want to even touch that first domino.

Michael read Joshua Harris’s best-seller I Kissed Dating Goodbye. He saw Harris speak at a church conference event, and Michael was sold.

He went with a friend to see a talk on courtship put on by the Homeschool Legal Defense Association. They were the only highschoolers there.

MICHAEL: And like, all the moms are like, ooh, here's two boys who are, like, into courtship. And, and so we tried to get out of there as fast as we could, but like, I do remember, like, swallowing that, like, courtship is the right way to go.

Michael felt like courtship was almost as committed as engagement.

MICHAEL: It definitely felt like, courtship is right, dating is wrong. Because you're protecting hearts.

His first relationship was a courtship in the late 90s. They drew a line: no kissing before engagement.

MICHAEL: But like, we would do everything we could to bend that rule as much as possible. Or, you know, it was just kind of ridiculous. We felt like, as long as we don't fall over the edge. We're good.

One night, Michael and his girlfriend got back from a fancy outing. They lingered over their goodbyes in her family’s basement. He really wanted to kiss her, but they still weren’t engaged. So he got down on one knee and asked her to marry him. She seemed surprised, but she said yes. But it wasn’t a serious proposal.

MICHAEL: Yeah, it was really embarrassing at the time because like, Okay, well, not only are we like, making a mockery of this rule that we had set up in ourselves, but we're also making a mockery of the institution of marriage, engagement and all that stuff.

After they started kissing, their physical relationship started to escalate. They felt like they weren’t honoring God. It was also Michael’s first serious relationship, and he slowly realized that they just weren’t a good match. A few months later, they broke up.

Before she met Michael, Millie Shipe struggled with relationships in college. The first guy she dated pushed her boundaries. She did things with him physically that she hadn’t wanted to. And she believed that the people in her church would tend to blame the girl, not the guy, when things went wrong. She didn’t know how to get out ... and she saw marriage as the logical next step.

MILLIE: And I just felt so entangled at that point, even though we hadn't slept together. I just felt entangled. Like, oh, well, I've compromised too much. You know, I didn't know anything about consent back then, either.

Millie attributes the pressure she felt—a pressure to get married because she’d already gone too far—to purity culture. There was a narrative in books and talks about courtship. Once you’ve gotten emotionally or physically involved, you've done permanent damage.

MILLIE: You know, you just feel stuck. I felt stuck. And I probably would have married him if his parents hadn't intervened, honestly.

But her boyfriend’s parents did intervene. They realized the relationship was unhealthy and broke it off. This idea of permanent damage done crops up a lot in books and object lessons from purity culture’s heyday.

Like the opening of I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Joshua Harris wrote a dream wedding scene. The bride gazes into her groom’s eyes at the front of a church. But wait a minute. A girl gets up from the pews and stands next to the groom. Then another. Soon a whole line of girls stands behind the groom, and they all grab hands. Joshua Harris directed a dramatization of the scene for a 2017 documentary called “I Survived I Kissed Dating Goodbye”

I SURVIVED DOCUMENTARY:

BRIDE: Is this some kind of joke?

GROOM: I’m sorry Anna.

BRIDE: Who are these girls, David, what’s going on?

GROOM: They’re girls from my past. Anna they mean nothing to me now but I’ve given a piece of my heart to each of them.

BRIDE: I thought your heart was mine.

GROOM: It is. Whatever is left of it, is yours.

Millie hit rock bottom after her second college relationship. This guy also treated her badly. And she was dealing with other stuff at the time, like finally processing her brother’s death from cancer years earlier.

MILLIE: And at the moment, I was, I was just a depressed wreck. I was crying all the time, because I felt like I'd ruined myself with this guy.

Millie was in her bedroom when she finally got honest with God.

MILLIE: I was like, I've been so good. I've toed the line, I've tried to do all the right things, and life is still really, really hard.

Lord, if you are not going to have my back, then I'm not going to hold myself to these ridiculous standards, because I'm killing myself trying to hold myself to these standards.

She told God that if He didn’t have her back, she was going to do what she wanted.

MILLIE: And in that moment, I was like, I can't believe I'm being this, like, sassy with the Lord and so honest. But I really feel like the Lord was like, I've been waiting for you to be broken and raw, and finally honest with me.

Millie opened her Bible and it fell open to Psalm 31. David was talking about his grief, how he felt it deep in his belly.

MILLIE: And when I read that, it was the first time I felt like the Bible wasn't just this like, rules to live by. I finally felt like oh, there's the living, breathing God who sees me and knows me. He's not a dead god, he's very much alive. And that was a big turning point.

After that, Millie also went to therapy on campus.

It would be nice to think that everything got easier from there. But Millie had a long way to go to unravel the purity culture messages from biblical truth. Still, for her, that was where the influence of purity culture started to wane.

Today, Griff says, True Love Waits barely exists.

VERTICAN: Where it does still exist, it's a shadow of its former self. If I go to my local church, same church that used to host this, this event, say, Hey, have you guys heard of True Love Waits? By and large, they would have no clue what I'm talking about.

Most in the church would say true love still waits … but waiting to date, kiss, hold hands, or be alone? Not so much anymore.

There are many factors that probably contributed to the fall of purity culture. We’re just going to be able to cover a few of them.

First, there were the scandals.

In 2015, the tabloid InTouch released the details of a 2006 police report. Josh Duggar from TLC’s hit show 19 Kids and Counting had inappropriately touched his sisters and other young women.

OFFICER: It was a total of five victims and the ages, if you do the math, the ages range probably between 5 and 12 years old.

Josh was never charged in those incidents, but has since been convicted of child pornography charges.

Vision Forum was a major player in homeschool circles, promoting biblical patriarchy and courtship. Founder Doug Phillips confessed to an inappropriate relationship with a woman who wasn’t his wife in 2013. He resigned.

In 2018, author and former pastor Joshua Harris denounced his own book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. The next year he kissed his faith and marriage good-bye. He talked about it in 2019 on a CBN interview:

HARRIS: I think I came to the point of recognizing, you know what, I’m not living in accordance with this and I held other people to this standard and, you know, I excommunicated myself, essentially.

Leader after leader fell from their pedestals in hypocrisy. For people like me, who grew up watching the Duggars and reading the Vision Forum catalogs, this was jarring.

Sexual abuse is certainly rampant outside of Christian institutions. But these abuses tarnished the shiny face of the movement. Here’s Griff again.

VERTICAN. That's a legitimate reason for the movement to have been severely diminished and died because there was just too many of the leaders who are involved with scandalous behavior.

The rest of the reasons for purity culture’s fall are murkier. What seems to have happened is that after around a decade, the deeper effects of some of these ideas started to show up in people’s lives. Purity culture made a lot of promises it couldn’t always keep. People grew up trying to follow all the rules so they’d eventually have a happily ever after marriage with an amazing sex life.

But that didn’t always happen.

MUSIC: SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME 

I read a book on courtship that my parents bought me when I was twelve or so. It was called "Before You Meet Prince Charming."

Each chapter started with part of a story about a princess hearing lies from an alligator in the castle moat. She wrestles with the lies but gets wise advice from her parents and eventually chooses to follow God to her happily ever after.

I recently spoke with the author of that book, Sarah Mally Hancock. In 2020, she finally married her prince charming not long after she turned 40. A few years ago, she published a revised version of the book that removed the word “courtship.”

HANCOCK: People are believing certain lies, like, well, if I do everything right, then everything is going to turn out according to my dreams. Well, that's certainly not -- that's certainly not what I was wanting to teach.

Marriage became the destination and everything before marriage is just ... waiting. But what happens if your prince charming never comes? Here’s Griff again.

VERTICAN: I think there was disillusionment, especially among some of my peers, who are like, well, that didn't work out for me. God didn’t bring my Prince Charming.

And some were disillusioned who did get married.

MICHAEL: I don't think the greatest sex life in the world could live up to the expectations that is built up in 18 year men in the, in the purity culture ...

Marriage and sex are beautiful gifts from God. But they’re not everything. And they’re not the end goal of purity. Sarah Mally Hancock said this is where purity culture went wrong.

HANCOCK: And the focus became so much about the beauty of purity and marriage, that they forgot that that's really only a shadow of the real thing, which is Jesus Christ.

For others, especially women, teachings on purity portrayed sex as a man’s need and a woman’s duty. Millie didn’t realize how strongly purity culture shaped her view of sexuality until she married Michael.

MILLIE: And I was putting weird pressure on us too, like, on our honeymoon, I was, like, we have to do it twice a day, because that's what a good Christian wife does. Oh, we have to have sex twice a week so that you don't cheat on me or, like, have to look at porn or something. And he's like, but I don't want to do those things. And I'm really tired. Can we go to bed? And so I was so confused because all the literature said.

In their first year of marriage, Millie often cried when they undressed together.

Millie says one big problem was that she hadn’t been educated on sexuality. On what was normal and what wasn’t. She didn’t know women could have a higher sex drive than men. She had trouble understanding her own anatomy. Millie's crying episodes became an inside joke. Instead of addressing her shame, they brushed it aside.

Fear and shame often crop up in purity teachings. Much less common is the idea that Christ’s grace can bring healing for sexual brokenness. For example, pastor Matt Chandler of the Village Church told a story at a Desiring God conference in 2009 about a sermon illustration he heard years earlier.

MATT CHANDLER: It was fear-mongering at its best.

The speaker was discussing sexually transmitted diseases. He sent a rose into the audience of about a thousand young people. Everybody was supposed to smell and handle it.

CHANDLER: And then as it wraps up he goes, “Where’s my rose? Where is it? Where’s my rose?” And some kid came up, you know, the rose is completely jacked up, you know, it’s broken, the things are off, the petals are broken, and he lifts it up, and the big crescendo, I mean his point, is to hold up that rose and go, “Now who would want this?”

That’s the message a lot of young Christians, especially women, took away: “After what I’ve done, who would want me?”

Instead of...

CHANDLER: Jesus wants the rose! That’s the point of the Gospel! …

Only in the last few years has Millie started to confront and unravel a lot of the ideas from purity culture that hurt her marriage. For years Michael had a hard time understanding his wife’s shame over body image and clothing. But he’s starting to understand her upbringing. And he’s confronting some of the lies he’d been believing, too.

MICHAEL: A lot of the well intended Christian messages that has got I was getting was, you know, women equals lust. That's kind of like, taking one sliver of a person, and we're gonna throw the rest away, and we're gonna, like, deal with that one little sliver.

Michael was taught strategies for avoiding lust, like “bounce your eyes.” If you see a woman dressed immodestly, you look away to avoid lusting. While the messages were well intended and helpful for many, he started to think of women as objects to deal with strategically, not humans made in God’s image.

Many stories like Michael and Millie’s end with deconstruction. So-called purity culture survivors are leaving orthodoxy. And these voices tend to dominate the conversation. For example, YouTube channels like:

Ex-Fundie Diaries: Purity culture is misogynistic, racist, transphobic, homophobic, super-harmful, and it hurts everyone.

This trend is really discouraging, but it sheds light on the final factor for purity culture’s fall.

People are left empty after trying to find fulfillment in a false, works-based gospel. Maybe they didn’t all walk away from the good news of Christ’s grace. Maybe some of them never understood it in the first place.

MICHAEL: The conversations about purity and relationships and commitment and was all kind of speaking to a God who was like, if you don't hold up the standard, then I'm gonna smite you.

Like Millie learned, the life of a Christian is not a life of fear. And they want to teach their kids just that.

I scoured the internet for a purity conference to attend for this story to hear what messages young people are getting on the topic these days. I found only two conferences in the entire year in the whole country. In 2023 we sent a reporter to one: the U-Turn Purity Conference in Radcliff, Kentucky.

This conference has been going for fifteen years. It used to end with a marriage-like ceremony. But since then it’s lost the trappings of purity culture.

REPORTER: How would you define purity? 

STUDENT 1: I would define it as being not just sexual purity, but being different from the world, you know, having like a pure heart, you know, like having like a pure heart, like being more like Jesus.

STUDENT 2: Just like what they were saying, like, to be like, at the purity conference, like it talks about like sexual immorality, but it goes way deeper than that …

Elijah Linscott, the leader of the conference, pretty much summed up the conference’s perspective on purity.

ELIJAH LINSCOTT: What I really want people to take away, is, purity is all about, what is my heart’s desire? Even though I make a wrong decision, am I still running back to the Father …

It’s not clear where purity culture is going from here. It seems that things often happen in pendulum swings, and I’m not sure that’s healthy. We shouldn’t replace a false gospel of legalism with a different false gospel of license.

Millie and Michael’s kids are approaching puberty. Michael wants his kids to hear different messages than he did growing up.

MICHAEL: I think moving forward, the message should be about Christ and the purity and beauty of him, and how everything else is going to seem dim, strangely dim, in the light of Christ.

Clara York reported and wrote this episode, and I produced it. I’m Les Sillars. Thanks for listening.

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