Pure by Linda Kay Klein

Evangelical “purity” culture, roughly defined, is the belief that Christianity requires sexual abstinence before (heterosexual) marriage, especially for girls and women, and promises sexual fulfillment to those who save sex until marriage. It’s a belief system often accompanied by messages of shame for those who fail to remain virgins until their wedding day—who are not only said to be breaking God’s law but risking lifelong consequences for their sexual “sins.”

Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free, by Linda Kay Klein, was unlike anything I’ve ever read and yet, as a millennial who grew up during the height of purity culture, each page felt like a part of my own story.

While the idea of abstaining from sex until marriage has existed in various religious communities for thousands of years, in the U.S. in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, it became a movement, a theology, and soon after, a for-profit evangelical industry that exists to this day. Even the government got involved, funding purity-related sex education initiatives, such as the Christian abstinence-only group Silver Ring Thing, which received $1.4 million from the federal government until a 2005 lawsuit demonstrated that it was illegally evangelizing with taxpayer funds.¹ 

A tidal wave of purity-pushing books and Bible study materials were written and marketed to teens, parents, and pastors of teens, chief among them Elisabeth Elliot’s Passion and Purity, and Josh Harris’ cult classic I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Church youth groups began sending their teens to conferences like True Love Waits, an event started in 1993 by LifeWay, which, as the product-selling arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, had access to the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.² (The SBC’s commercialization of purity culture closely coincides with the conservative take over of the denomination in the ‘80s and ‘90s, which sharply curtailed the rights and role of Southern Baptist women.) At True Love Waits events, young people were encouraged by the thousands to pledge their virginity to both God and family. Formal “Purity Balls” for fathers and daughters,³ complete with post-dance “Purity Certificates,” drew families from further outside the mainstream conference circuit.⁴ And celebrities like Nick Jonas and Miley Cyrus donned “purity rings,” helping usher in a wave of related merchandise, from purity themed T-shirts to bumper stickers to coffee mugs and more.⁵

When Klein read Elliot’s Passion and Purity, she was left with such overwhelming guilt for having kissed her boyfriend that she felt God was directing her to break up with him. At school, a sex ed lesson consisted of a teacher passing an Oreo cookie around the class, and, after it had been touched by each person, dropped on the ground, and spat upon, warning students that if they let themselves be treated like the cookie, “no one will want you.”⁶

Klein’s experiences were echoed by dozens of women she interviewed, who were variously taught that purity meant: waiting until their wedding ceremony, or at least their engagement, for their first kiss; trying to avoid all feelings of sexual desire prior to marriage; dressing modestly; or a sliding scale of rules: only kissing in public places or only while standing up, kissing and touching while lying down but never achieving orgasm, or, on the far end, engaging in “everything but” vaginal intercourse, up to and including oral and anal sex.

The only universals, it seemed, were a heavy dose of guilt and shame, ladled on in the name of God, and the distinct lack of any actual sexual education. And the repercussions of the latter is a recurring theme in the book, leaving the women Klein spoke to filled with confusion, fear, and shame. Some told Klein of not understanding even the basic mechanics of sexual intercourse until their senior year of college or their honeymoons. As one woman in her mid-twenties explained: