Why another purity culture think piece?
I’ve been reticent to dive into purity culture on here because there are just so many think pieces and books doing that exact thing. However, I just finished reading Zachary Wagner’s Non-Toxic Masculinity (highly recommend), and he made the point that he wrote the book because there weren’t many people speaking about how purity culture impacted boys and men. Wagner believes the male perspective might be a helpful one to include.1
So that’s, in part, why this piece is here.2 The other part is that I want to try and propose the beginning of a solution to sex education in the church—at least, I want to share what has been helpful for me. So buckle up because this is a MEGA edition of Slow Faith! I’m very curious to hear your thoughts!
Part One: Repression and fear
“I had learned over the years to hate my sexual body.”
-Zachary Wagner3
Sixth grade
I attend a lock-in at my best friend’s church, and late in the night the youth pastor stands in front of us talking about how it’s bad to have sex. He shares three stories, and all I remember is one of them.
A girl and a guy in the youth group start dating and the whole church is excited for them. But then they have sex and stop going to church and eventually break up and everyone is sad. They ruined their purity.
I was still playing tackle football with girls and wasn’t the least bit interested in them sexually. But I was scared of sex. I was scared of sin. I wanted to please God.
Seventh grade
The area director for Fellowship of Christian Athletes gives us a sex talk by telling us a story about a girl who dropped a pencil in class and a guy who picked it up for her. The classic meet-cute for a middle schooler. They start dating, and they hold hands. That leads them to hug. That leads them to kiss. That leads them to making out. That leads them to getting handsy. That leads them to sex.
The moral of the story was…what? That dropping a pencil leads to sex, I guess.
Eighth grade
That same area director wears a shirt that says “I practice safe sex. Instead of crossing my fingers, I cross my legs,” which is confusing because he has a wife so why would he even be crossing his legs to begin with?
It is also in eighth grade that I get my first girlfriend. This came after weeks and weeks of conversations with my parents. My mom bought me I Kissed Dating Goodbye and had me read it while I was dating Elizabeth.4
The book talked about a woman who walked down the aisle on her wedding day without her heart because she gave pieces of it to every guy she dated before her husband. Am I taking a piece of Elizabeth’s heart?
Five months into the relationship, a moment comes when I should kiss her. Instead, I reach out my hand for a handshake.
The summer before 11th grade (at church camp (of course))
BAM.
My eyes are wide, her lips are soft, and I am lifted out of my body. The entire world glows like one of those cameras that flash really bright and leave your shadow against a wall when you move. Our shadows will be forever on these swings. They might as well make a plaque: Here is the place where Drew and Amelia kissed.
My brain spins wildly, and I might throw up all over her.
Suddenly, her lips release their vice grip and I begin to breathe.
No, don’t be over. Please!
Her lips circle back around and return; I am chum in the water of her desire. Eyes still open, this time I have time to stick my lips out like they do on tv and stuff.
—
Two hours later I am back in my cabin sitting on the toilet. My stomach is doing flips, and I don’t know if I’m going to be sick or not. Everything feels woozy. Shame rolls over my body in waves. I have just kissed a girl I am not going to marry. I felt sexual desire and said yes to it. I chose pleasure over piety, sin over sanctity.
I believe I am a sinner. I beg God for forgiveness.
The development of a general philosophy
All of those sex talks and experiences left me with clear takeaways that built and compiled to the moment I sat on that toilet at that summer camp, shame roiling through my body.
Women are perfect, and all a guy (aka me) can do is corrupt them.
Women are daughters of God and created in God’s image. Therefore, they are perfect from the beginning. Without blemish. Yes, they are human and they sin, but they are still in the image of God. I cannot do anything to add to their perfection. I can only take away from it. I—a male—can only corrupt, defile.
Women don’t want physicality, they only want emotion.
Men are physical creatures and women are emotional creatures. Women don’t actually want to have sex; it’s their boyfriends who pressure them into it. They have sex so that they can get the emotional intimacy in return. So if a girl doesn’t desire physicality anyways, then physicality can only be selfish since I’m the only one who wants it. To be perfect, I should only offer emotion and not need physicality.
Sex before marriage is one of the worst things you can do. But sex in marriage with a “smoking hot wife” is amazing.
I’ll never forget going to church camp and listening as the main speaker asked his “smoking hot wife” to stand up and wave to the crowd. She was like one of those meat cones spinning outside Greek restaurants: silent and meant to entice. Everyone told me sex in marriage was amazing, but sex outside marriage was bad. If I waited for marriage, I could wreck every hotel room in the tristate area; I could expect to love sex.5
This philosophy—not to point out the obvious—did not work. I remember explicitly praying that God would just turn off my sex drive until my wedding night.
That never happened.
You, me, and gnosticism
“Where women and girls were shamed for the sexual thoughts they caused in others’ bodies, men and boys often experienced shame for the sexual thoughts and feelings they experienced in their own bodies.”
-Zachary Wagner6
It’s here that we need to talk about gnosticism and why that built the framework for my sexual education. In the early days of Christianity, there were Gnostic sects that twisted Christianity and believed that the spirit was pure but the body was evil. Flesh was all bad, defiled, debased. The point of the human experience was to transcend the physical and embrace the spiritual.
This has clear connections to sex and sexuality.
, in her book Faithful: A Theology of Sex, writes,“For the Gnostic, flesh is bad and sex is impure. Simply to be a sexual person is to be unredeemed…. Christians, like the Gnostics, have sometimes had a hard time imagining what it could mean to be both sexual and redeemed.”7
My sexual upbringing is shot through with this gnosticism, a view which,
“Concludes that, because bodies are a problem, we should deny and denigrate them. This kind of Gnostic asceticism cannot see the body’s goodness and will take disciplining the body to punishing extremes. Here, discounting bodies and sex leads to a rejection of the goods of creation, and it plays out in a super strict ethic that leaves no room for healthy, happy sexuality.”8
I see this gnosticism in the way that I was taught that physical desire was evil and emotional desire was good. This gnosticism ran down the gender line for me: women were perfect because they didn’t want sex, but men were defiled and debased for desiring sex. Therefore, to be a perfect Christian, I needed to eradicate any sexual desire from my life.
I could tell you to your face that a desire for sex was created by God and good, but my gut betrayed me—it knew I was lying.
I could tell you that my flesh was created good by God, but my gut knew I was lying.
I could tell you that God created both the physical and the spiritual and both could be consecrated to the Lord, but my gut knew I was lying.
I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, etc. etc. etc., twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one and still terrified of my sex drive.
Interlude: Reaching a breaking point
In 2017 I reached a point of no return. Nationally known pastors who preached the sexual theology I was raised with were resigning over “infidelities” (aka abuse). #metoo and #churchtoo were all over my Twitter timeline, and I began to realize that my theology of sex was hollow—just a casing of “Wait until marriage” with nothing else inside it. I was raised on repression, and that check bounced hard. Like a cartoon character shoving all of his junk into a closet and leaning heavily against the door, one little movement could make it all come crashing down over me. It just felt so precarious.
I knew that God was not a precarious God, that God did not build a house of cards but a house on stone. So, without knowing where to turn, I began a search for truth in the only way I knew how: by reading a commentary on the Song of Songs.9 Believe it or not, that helped me in incredible ways, beginning my rebuilding journey.
Part two: Rebuilding
“When your body experiences sexual desire, it’s doing exactly what it was made to do. That’s a good thing. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s wonderful and beautiful. It’s a gift to you and to the world.”
-Zachary Wagner10
Ancient Sex
Yes, that Song of Songs, the one with lines like, “Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes that have come up from the washing” (4:2a NRSV). The book is a compilation of love poems and boasts just three major characters: the man, the woman, and the chorus of single women. It also has tons and tons and tons of sexual innuendos.
Learning about it was revolutionary for me. It dispelled so many of my fears and misconceptions, and I still don’t understand why churches don’t base their sex education on this book.
Yes, everyone can want it
Both the woman and the man are allowed to want sex and both describe the other in sexual ways.
Here’s one from the man: “Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that feed among the lilies.” (4:5, NRSV). I mean, that’s sexual—the author isn’t even trying to hide the sexuality. There is no sense of shame in the man desiring her breasts, desiring sex.
And one from the woman: “His body is an ivory panel, decorated with sapphires.” (5:14b, NRSV) Tremper Longman III, in his commentary, translates the verse differently. Instead, he writes, “His member is an ivory tusk” and suggests she’s poetically talking about the man’s erect penis, concluding,
“In such an erotic poem, the line at the least is suggestive of, if not explicitly referring to, the man’s member.”11
This echoes what Zachary Wagner writes in Non-Toxic Masculinity. During a session with his therapist, he cried as his therapist told him,
“The male body in a state of arousal is a wonderful thing. There’s so much vitality. There’s a type of anticipation, expectation. There’s a hope for a transcendent experience of relationship, of pleasure, of life. There’s the potential for new life, as well as the potential for a beautiful type of risk, vulnerability, and adventure. When your body experiences sexual desire, it’s doing exactly what it was made to do. That’s a beautiful thing. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s wonderful and beautiful. It’s a gift to you and to the world.”12
Purity culture imported to me the gnostic idea that God turned his face away from me when I experienced sexual desire, that somehow desire was less than God’s design for humanity. Song of Songs, however, strongly and explicitly denies this dualistic prudishness. We are allowed to desire; it is not a sin. In fact, it is beautiful.
Yes, that means women can want it too
My sexual education didn’t have any room for female sexual desire. Women only wanted emotions, and the male pastors who educated me affirmed this fact over and over again, their “smoking hot wives” smiling silently in the crowd.
But Song of Songs says this dichotomy isn’t true. Out of the 117 verses, the woman speaks sixty-one of them.13 She says things like,
“Sustain me with raisins,
refresh me with apples,
for I am faint with love.
O that his left hand were under my head
and that his right hand embraced me! (2:5-6, NRSV)
That woman wants sex. Period.
Whoever got the idea that Christian women don’t have sexual desire was wrong. Whoever made women feel shame for sexual desire was wrong. Whoever suggested that women focus only on emotions like some libido-less creatures was wrong.
Not only does the woman in Song of Songs enjoy sex, she also initiates and pursues sex. She isn’t just submissive putty for the man’s inclinations. No; she is autonomous and practices initiative (she has the majority of lines in the book!). Any submission is mutual submission.
Women and men can both want sex. Period.
Yes, that means single people can want it too
If you’re like me, it’s easy to read this and think, “That’s great, but they’re in an Old Testament marriage-type-thing so they can want all the sex in the world. I’m single and should feel ashamed for wanting anything looking like sex.” Nope, nope, nope. You, my dear single friend, can want sex too.
The third “character” in the Song is the chorus of single women. They spend the entire song celebrating the sexual union of the woman and the man. The single women are active and aware that sex is real and celebrate the woman and the man’s ability to do it.
The woman responds to the single women often by saying, “Do not awaken love until it’s time.” She doesn’t shame them for desiring it, but she advises them to practice self-control.
And self-control is the opposite of repression. Repression lives in shame, making sexual desire outside of marriage evil. Self-control lives in freedom, recognizing the worth of sex and waiting until it can happen most beautifully.
**a short interlude about virginity**
“The trouble with over-hyping virginity and sexual purity as a gift is that it makes non-virgins and the not-so-pure feel less valuable to their spouse.”
-Zachary Wagner14
This probably belongs in a footnote, but I don’t want it to get skipped over and missed: I am about to start talking about waiting for marriage, but I want to make sure you know that when I talk about waiting for marriage, I am not talking about a one-and-done, zero-sum virginity. I am not talking about a virginity that is lost once and never returned. No. I am talking about redeemed beings deciding to wait regardless of their sexual history.
The way purity culture talks about virginity—this thing that can be lost once and forever mark you with impurity—is anti-Christian. Christ came to the world to remind us that, despite our sin, we can be made new. Forgiveness is here. It is available. There is a love that is lavished on us. And it is lavished over all of us.
Purity culture’s concept of virginity is a yoke of shame, but Christ’s understanding of sexual purity is one of redemption. We are made new, sexual history and all.
It is never too late to practice self-control. It is never too late to begin waiting for marriage.
Waiting for marriage out of beauty, not repression and fear
Eugene Peterson writes in As Kingfishers Catch Fire that some unknown Jewish priest ordered that the Song of Songs be read aloud after the Passover meal each year. The Passover—the central act of God saving the Israelites in the Old Testament—would be joined together and commemorated with the most vulnerable and open of human acts.15
Phyllis Trible, in her book God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, proposes that, for Jewish audiences, the Song of Songs acts as the completion of the Garden of Eden narrative in the Old Testament. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they immediately became ashamed of their nakedness—their sexuality was broken by pride. Trible argues that Song of Songs is the happy ending: humans back doing what they were designed to do, free from the shame of their nakedness.16
These two interpretations of the Song, for me, point to and underline the ethic of waiting for marriage, but for reasons far different than shame and repression. They point to the deeper reality of sex. They say that sex is the ultimate act of commitment you can do on this earth, and it signifies a depth of beauty and vulnerability rarely glimpsed this side of heaven.
Sex is bringing all of one’s physical and emotional and relational strengths and flaws into congruence with all of another person’s physical and emotional and relational strengths and flaws. This reaches its apex under the banner of commitment; it is safest in the overarching knowledge of covenant.
To a purity culture that preaches shame and fear, Song of Song preaches freedom and self-control. Perhaps we don’t need a new approach to sex; perhaps we need to simply read the ancient words of the Bible and recognize them for the freedom that they are.
Thank you for taking the time to read all of this (it was a LONG one!); it really means the world to me. If interested, I’d love it if you subscribed or shared this piece. I’ve opted out of social media, so word of mouth is my one way to grow my newsletter. I’m grateful you are here!
He writes, “Several books have been published critiquing purity culture in recent years. Thus far, these have been almost exclusively written by women, which is perhaps not surprising, as women have suffered the worst fallout from the Purity Movement. It’s high time for men to follow in their steps and join the conversation.”
Wagner, Zachary. Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality. Downers Grove, IVP, 2023. 12.
Sexuality and purity are personal realities, so if my story is helpful in connecting dots for you, that’s wonderful! But if it’s not the same as your story, that is completely, completely okay: set it aside with the simple knowledge that there is another human struggling through the rubble of the Purity Movement in his own life.
Wagner, Zachary. 159.
Looking back, my parents made a few missteps in my education, but I was the oldest kid and they were doing their best. In fact, a year or so into college, I had a conversation with my parents about the negative ways I was impacted by purity culture and some of their parenting decisions. They listened to me, apologized, and actually told me they were going to change how they parented my younger siblings because of our conversation. That meant the world to me. My takeaway from that: good parents try their best and recognize when their best was misguided. I am eternally grateful for my parents and their willingness to learn along with me :)
Wagner, Zachary. 69.
Jones, Beth Felker. Faithful: A Theology of Sex. Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2015. 24.
Jones, Beth Felker. 25.
To be exact, Tremper Longman III’s New International Version commentary Song of Songs.
Wagner, Zachary. 98.
Longman III, Tremper. Song of Songs: New International Commentary on the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2001. 164.
Wagner, Zachary. 98
Longman III, Tremper. 7.
Wagner, Zachary. 163.
Peterson, Eugene. As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God. New York, Waterbrook, 2017.173-175.
Trible, Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1978. 144.
As someone raising boys, this is an insightful read. Thank you for putting the time into it.
It seems like I grew up about 10 years before you did, so it's possible that the movement evolved over time, but I never understood purity culture the way you describe it. In fact, I understood it much more along the lines of the better alternative you suggested. I'm not sure if, as I said before, it evolved, or maybe my parents/church (kinda the same thing) did it better than some others, or maybe I was just too dense to pick up on the subtext. Regardless, I keep hearing people talk about how bad purity culture was, and I always scratch my head at that. But IF the way you explained it is what many other people experienced as well, I guess I get it now.