purity culture

Jack Rakove, the Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, is back with another prize-worthy book, Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience , a history of religious freedom in America. While Rakove warns readers that…

Have white evangelicals been unfairly demonized by scholars and pundits alike in the run-up to November’s election? True, white evangelicals have distinguished themselves by throwing their support…

The 2020 results of Ligonier Ministries’ and Lifeway Research’s State of Theology Survey, a project published every two years since 2014, are causing a minor moral panic in the evangelical information…

Though he’s embarked on an apology tour and starred in a documentary examining his mistakes and the damage they’ve caused, Joshua Harris has yet to face the hard questions about the patriarchal ideology that shaped the purity movement and his own path.

Attitudes about sex have come to signal a person or group’s attitudes about modernity itself. Arguments about gender roles, birth control, abortion, sex education, and LGBTQ rights have become central to the religious and political identity of American Christians.

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.

Those in the throes of “son panic” contend that the greatest danger regarding sexual assault is to the reputations of innocent men. But there’s a problem here.

In ‘Pure,’ Klein tells the stories of women wrestling with anxiety, sexual dysfunction, crises of religious identity, and even a kind of religious-based PTSD.

A Q&A with author Sara Moslener about “Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence”

Josh Duggar, the oldest son of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, stars of “reality” TV and the real life conservative movement, has resigned his position as executive director of FRC Action, the political…