Several Women Betrayed by Christian “Purity Culture” Are Speaking Out Against It
By Sarahbeth Caplin, February 7, 2019

While Joshua Harris, author of the infamous pro-abstinence book I Kissed Dating Goodbye, has been on an apology tour of sorts for the harm his advice caused, four women spoke to Cosmopolitan about what it was like to have their churches use this book in place of sex education.

“I started romanticizing the idea of not being physical,” Lyvonne says. “My relationship would be ‘pure’ and perfect. I totally bought into it.”

She and some friends from her gospel choir set about following Harris’s dictates, trying to “keep my legs closed,” she says, so that “God would send me a chocolate man who was 6 foot 3 with a killer smile.” It wasn’t always easy — in the eight years that followed, she had slipups, each ending with a burning rush of shame.

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That she was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse only intensified her regret. “I felt ashamed of my body and trauma,” she says. “I didn’t know how to reconcile it with my faith.”

That’s just one issue (on top of several) with purity culture: There’s no room for healing for assault survivors. Sex — unwanted or not — essentially tarnishes and stains a person’s soul in ways that other sins do not. The enforcers of purity culture might object and say otherwise, but the proof is in the way they treat sexual transgressions differently than any other behavior they deem sinful.