Chastity Culture

thinking about purity culture, and what comes next

Much of my little corner of the world has been consumed in conversations about “purity culture” over the last few years.  Purity culture is unfortunately not well defined.  Some define it as simply the teaching that we should abstain from sex before, and outside of, marriage.  Others say that that teaching is fine, but that the problem with purity culture comes when we attach fear and shame to sexuality in an effort to get single people to following that teaching.  Many have shared horror stories of youth pastors teaching that having sex before marriage makes you “damaged goods” in some way, that your virginity is a gift that you give your future spouse.  Most often, these messages are directed at young women, who also are often taught that they need to be gatekeepers for their boyfriends, whose sexuality may be harder (or impossible) to tame.

I do think this second version of purity culture is really a problem in the church.  Most of the writing about it has focused on how this version of purity culture has discouraged young people (especially women, but men too), leading them to feel ashamed about totally normal sexual feelings.  At the very least, it leads to ambivalence about sexuality, a sense that it is dirty, polluting, shameful. It can be difficult for a person raised in purity culture to really sort out their feelings about sex, to come to grips with sexual feelings and compulsions that they have carefully kept hidden away because of the deep shame they feel about them.

Yet I still think that it is best for people to only have sex within marriage.  Marriage provides a safe, secure environment that is essential for that level of vulnerability with yourself and others.  To really know yourself and to know others needs commitment.

How can we keep the ideal of sex within marriage without stooping to all of the shame and harm of purity culture?  Enter chastity.

When I use the word “chastity” with young people today, they’re conditioned to think of it as “abstaining from sex.”  But chastity is so much more—it is learning to rightly order our sexual desires.  Chastity recognizes that sexuality is really complicated, and that all of us are trying to rightly order our sexual desire.  Yes, the teenager who wants to be married and isn’t is learning chastity, and growing in chastity, through celibacy.  They are learning to rightly order their desire by firmly and gently saying “no” to a world that invites them to experience sexual intimacy without the security that marriage provides.  Single people of all ages should be learning and growing in chastity, developing a sense of how to live as a single person in a sex- and romance-obsessed world.

But married people also should be learning and growing in chastity.  Most marriages experience conflict about sex—in every marriage, there is a time when one spouse wants to have sex and the other doesn’t.  This is an extremely vulnerable moment for both spouses.  In most marriages, this is not an isolated incident.  Often one spouse regularly wants sex more often than the other, or one spouse wants to try sexual behaviors that the other does not.  And of course, this conflict can change over time due to hormonal changes, family situations, personal traumas and tragedies, or conflicts in other areas that spill over into the bedroom.

Conflicts like this are opportunities to change and grow.  Both spouses are invited to ask really hard questions, questions that are essential for growth:

• “Why is it so important to me to have sex anyway?” 

• “Why don’t I feel sexual desire as often as I’d like?”

• “What is shaping my understanding of what sex is?  Am I treating sex like an idol, assigning it god-like qualities for spiritual and emotional healing?”

• “Am I ambivalent that sex can be good and beautiful, and if so, where did that come from?” 

Chastity helps us to answer those questions.  As we become more chaste, we become more realistic and honest about what sex really is.  As we learn to rightly order our sexual desire, we stop giving it god-like qualities.  Sex cannot save us, nor can it destroy us (though, of course, sin of any sort can destroy us without God’s grace).  We can look honestly at sex as a gift from God and start trying to appreciate what that gift means to us without letting the primal nature of the gift dominate us.

The most important distinguishing feature between chastity and purity is that chastity is a virtue, and purity is a state of being.  You’re “pure” to start, but you can become impure by having sex.  Chastity, though, is different—it’s a virtue.  Like all virtues, it’s not something that we inhabit, but something that we grow in.  We start at all different places on the journey to chastity, but we all can grow.  Through my work at Houghton, I know many students who are “pure”—they’ve not had sex.  But they definitely can become more chaste.  They believe that once they’re married, they will have sex, and this will meet all their emotional needs.  If they grow in chastity, they learn to acknowledge that this is not the case, grieve the consequent sadness, and begin to realize they will need to address their emotional needs in other ways.  I also know many married couples who are sexually “pure”—they’ve only had sex with each other—and yet they don’t really understand how out of balance their sexuality really is.  For instance, I’ve read awful comments from church leaders, and even published books, that advise wives to have sex with their husbands even if they don’t really want to—because this is the only way to preserve their husbands’ sexual purity.  Such a husband is not really chaste—the desire for sex dominates him so much that he would willingly have sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with him.  It may also be (though not necessarily) that a wife in this situation can also grow in chastity—she can learn about her own attitudes toward sex and what lies underneath them.  A chaste couple is learning to rightly order their sexual desire, and will find a different way to work through this really common problem. 

And I also know many people who are not “pure”—they’ve taken part in sexual behavior that isn’t part of God’s design for us.  But God’s not done with them—they’re growing in chastity.  They are learning to rightly order their sexual desire.  They’re learning to say “I’m sorry” to God and to others.  They’re not worried about being pure because they recognize that purity is somewhat of an illusion.  For many of them, it is when they were “pure,” before they had sex, that they believed lies about sex that made their choices logical.  When we are only consumed with being “pure,” we are less likely to go beneath our behavior to our heart posture, and to ask ourselves the hard questions that make chastity possible.  We are less likely to be curious about our sexual desires, we are less likely to be realistic about what lies we have inherited about sex, we are less likely to be honest about our temptations, or even aware of them because we are afraid to be honest with ourselves.  When we just want to be pure, we don’t even care about being realistic—about what sex really is or about who we really are. Often, when we are consumed with being pure, we inwardly believe that getting married (and specifically, having sex) will cure our profound loneliness and our deepest longings.

But of course it won’t. Sex is not God. It’s hard to see that when you’re consumed with purity, though.

In the end, none of us is really pure—we all live in a pornified culture, and Christians inhabit churches that harbor strange ideas about sex too.  The church and world shape our ideas about sexuality, often in really destructive ways.  Once we let go of the need to be pure, though, we can start the project of being chaste: the project of understanding our sexual desires in the light of Jesus, appreciating the gift of our sexuality, and ordering and managing those desires rightly, in a way that honors God, so that we can flourish.