File #8
“What was going on with Purity Culture? Like…what the BLEEP was that about?”
I attended a Silver Ring Thing event about 10 days after becoming a Christian with my girlfriend at a leisure center in some obscure little town in N.Ireland. For someone culturally uninitiated it was equal parts shaming, hilarious and … dorky. Needless to say I left with a ring - because not buying a ring in this context meant you were automatically a pervert ( an INCREDIBLE merch pitch). I discarded the ring within about 90 mins as I realized that I had already “come out” as Christian to my rugby team last week and that the decision to wear any jewellery, let alone a “virgin and proud ring” was going to be the final nail in my social coffin.
Incidentally, I did ultimately save sex for marriage and I still think that was the right decision for me. (That’s an important qualifier.) The result for us was that it felt special and it gave us both a freedom to be inexperienced and to just explore the whole thing together. Purity culture never really got its hooks into us in the ways that it seems to have for others. It didn’t really hurt us. (My therapist would say it’s because we didn’t close off all avenues of physical intimacy). There was no difficulty for us in terms of rebranding sex as “holy, sacred and awesome” even after a long term campaign of church officials determining it “disease-ridden, filthy and shameful” - but it’s no wonder many evangelicals never really form a healthy understanding of sex. Especially when so many leaders of purity based religious movements are involved in sexual abuse scandals.
I feel for those who never recover a positive connection with their bodies. Or who have an outsized sense of shame over their sexual history. There is undoubtedly a difference between the male and female experience of purity culture that I won’t be able to ever fully understand. The fetishizing of virginity and the holding up of romantic ideal that could be called “17th century Amish” with some justification (the most popular category in Christian fiction is “Amish romance” … no word of a lie 😳), is of course going to create some kind of psychosexual dissonance given that we live in a totally different world. The real world. In the 21st century. I wonder if our time might have been better spent trying to understand sexual ethics in our current moment in history, rather than yearning for an idealized version of the past that probably never existed?
Because the result is that we have now quite rightly jettisoned the shame associated with sex - shame doesn’t achieve anything useful - but without having rebuilt any kind of framework of what Christian sexual ethics actually ought to look like. We’ve been so burned by purity code that we are living without a code. It seems like we’ve reduced it down to “if it’s consenting, it’s good to go”. Obviously consent is essential but I wonder if consent alone is enough. And I openly admit that I’m still a product of purity culture, having steeped in it for years, even if I dissented to a large degree. Maybe my perspective is old fashioned. Or just plain wrong. I certainly am not positioning myself as authorized to craft a new dogma.
But I THINK for an approach to sex to be labeled “Christian” it needs to go beyond consent to an approach defined by love and self sacrifice. I think it needs to appreciate the divine image in the other - it can’t be transactional or devaluing in any way. On those grounds (and again I DO NOT believe in shaming or in the infallibility of my opinions) I think porn culture is problematic, not least for its associations with trafficking but also because it disconnects love from sex.
If I’m totally honest maybe the main thing I reject about modern sexual ethics is simply that it’s making the something I consider magical into something a bit mundane. Like getting your tires rotated. It’s probably rooted in sentimentality but I think treating sex as something special, something hallowed makes it better rather than worse. As I’ve got older so many things have lost their magic. I don’t want that to happen to sex. I want it to retain its status as transcendent and Holy. I might suggest that rather than constructing a sexual ethic that is based on the avoidance of shame, that we would be better served by an ethic that is focused on the conservation of magic. The monogamous, lifelong commitment of marriage has achieved that for me.
What do you think?
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Thanks for sharing your experience in good humour but also making it so honest and raw. It's really interesting, and almost feels unique, to hear a perspective on purity culture from someone who waited until marriage and sees the benefits, while also recognising the flaws. I have similar feelings, thoughts and concerns around it and really value your attempt to normalize the topic, and start a conversation around the juxtaposition of it all. Lots of food for thought!
Amish Romance is actually a real fiction category... man, who knew?!
Christine Emba actually has a similar sentiment to "there surely must be more to this than just consent." In fact, she has an entire book that's on my to-read list: Rethinking Sex. I first learned of her when she was on episode 510 of the Holy Post to discuss that book. Definitely recommend anyone who's interested check that interview out.
It is interesting, though. My wife and I share very similar sentiments to yours, Chris, and aren't entirely sure how we're going to approach that discussion with our kids when the time comes. While I agree society at large has (thankfully) mostly jettisoned the purity culture of yore, I've no doubt there are still plenty of local churches stuck in the 90s and early 00s who will be taking the exact same approach, and thus I'm sure my kids will have friends parroting those same talking points. We want to be sure to equip our kids with the tools to understand and respect their friends' differing views, while also giving them the critical thinking skills to evaluate those differing views and not get sucked into group think. It's tricky!