The other day we looked at how high control religions can distort Christian teachings on suffering and pleasure to keep their adherents spiritually immature and dependent on them. But while it’s true that many expressions of Christianity have a ‘pleasure problem,’ we all know there’s one specific aspect of pleasure that gets a lot — obsessive amounts, really —of religious attention, and that’s sex and sexuality.
This was particularly true in the late ‘90s and ‘00s, when many churches became so obsessed with sexuality that ‘true love waits’ dominated their whole messaging to tweens and teens. This is particularly relevant today since the kids who were raised in that environment are today’s adults. Dr. Laura Anderson, my primary dialogue partner for this series, calls this kind of purity culture a form of sexual abuse (167).* While this is extreme, I agree with her. As I’ve previously noted about my second-hand experiences with this culture:
More surprisingly, what comes up most often in the stories I hear is not tales of sexual abuse, but the “purity culture” that was so prominent in the evangelical world in the 1990s and 2000s. Ostensibly, purity culture was about promoting a healthy, if traditional, Christian understanding of sex, sexuality, and marriage. But what it did in many cases was create a community governed by fear and coercion, where belonging was contingent on following increasingly strict rules against any kind of romantic touching. It left a lot of young people cut off from their bodies and afraid of pleasure. (A good friend of mine who works in reproductive health and who grew up in that subculture has had numerous friends call her up traumatized by their wedding nights.) Worse still, many of the people I come across who grew up in this culture — again, many, not all — report that purity culture was the Christianity they grew up in. They have no associations of Jesus beyond “purity rings” and coercion to “true love waits” pledges.
This last piece is critically important. Not only does purity culture rob people of a healthy sexuality, but it also robs them of healthy spirituality, replacing the gospel with a legalistic worldview that has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus.
The problem got even worse because in many jurisdictions, the political allies of these movements replaced responsible, science-based sex education in schools with messaging about abstinence, leaving people not only fearful of sex but also ignorant of the mechanics of their bodies.
None of this to say that Christianity doesn’t have expectations when it comes to sexual behaviour or that teachings these is out of line. The problem comes from where those boundaries are placed and how they’re framed. At its worst, purity culture can create a sort of sling-shot effect: The tighter the boundaries, the greater the tension, and this tension will have consequences. For some people, the tension snaps and they get slingshot to the opposite extreme of behaviour: Without exception, the people I know with the loosest sexual boundaries grew up in fundamentalist environments. But even if the tension doesn’t snap, it still gets released, either in abusive behaviours (the shadow will always come out), or onto the body itself. (This is what happened with me, as my anecdote about my massage therapist shows!)
In my series a few years ago on gender and sexuality in Christianity, I made a case for acceptance of sexual and gender diversity that I think applies to people more broadly:
By turning the attention away from the question of whether homosexuality itself is sinful or not, [an affirming perspective] also allows gay and lesbian Christians to face the far more compelling and challenging questions of how to use our sexuality wisely and in ways that honour the values of God’s kingdom. To paraphrase Paul, it allows us to move beyond the question of “Is this permitted?” to the more important questions of “Is this edifying?” and “Am I being controlled by this?” (1 Corinthians 6:12). And in this way, it can bear much better fruit in the lives of queer Christians than a strict, quixotic prohibition. As it happens, this also makes the passage newly relevant to straight Christians, since the questions of control and excess in sexuality that Paul asks here are just as applicable to them.
Part of being an adult is learning how to handle our impulses and drives. For most of us, this doesn’t mean complete prohibition, but learning our boundaries, through religious instruction, prayer and reflection, but also through trial and error. It’s far healthier — both psychologically and spiritually — to give teenagers the tools they need to survive in a complex world than to keep them as young and dependent as possible and then to expect them to thrive and be healthy when they go out on their own.
* All references, unless otherwise noted, are to Dr. Laura E. Anderson, When Religion Hurts You (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2023).
