Her article was prompted after Joshua Harris, author of \u201cI Kissed Dating Goodbye,\u201d renounced the basic message<\/a> of his 21-year-old book, which encouraged Christian young people to avoid a particular style of recreational romance. I can understand Harris\u2019 decision, since he has spent the last two decades fielding complaints<\/a> that his call to avoid aimless relationships ruined people\u2019s sex lives and self-image. Many of us would crack under such a ceaseless barrage of blame.<\/p>\n But one thing I\u2019ve noticed is how many of those complaints come from people who admit they never took Harris\u2019 advice in the first place. Favale is one of them. She confesses: \u201cI opted for more conventional forms of kissing and bade farewell to my virginity instead.\u201d Nevertheless, she claims, \u201cthe ideas in Harris\u2019 book influenced me\u2014if not my habits, certainly my sense of self.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not clear what she means by this, except perhaps that she felt guilty about having premarital sex. No one needs Joshua Harris to experience the prick of conscience, though. Which is why one detects in recriminations against \u201cpurity culture\u201d by those who openly engaged in impurity more than a hint of sour grapes.<\/p>\n Favale goes on to complain that purity pledges and rings, fixtures of 90s evangelical piety, taught \u201creductive and often harmful understandings of \u2018purity\u2019\u201d\u2014notice the scare quotes. I\u2019m not sure how promising to save sex for marriage harmed young people, or how this countercultural message was \u201creductive.\u201d Favale ventures an explanation, arguing that Harris and others focused on \u201cwhen to have sex, rather than the underlying purpose of sex and why it belongs in marriage.\u201d<\/p>\n Having read \u201cI Kissed Dating Goodbye\u201d as a teenager and lived by it into early adulthood, I find this suggestion puzzling. Harris\u2019 argument, in brief, was that recreational dating is a training ground for serial relationships that teaches young people to see not just each other, but romantic love and sexual attraction as pastimes\u2014sources of cheap thrills divorced from any thought of marriage. In addition, Harris argued that traditional dating affords too many temptations to sexual sin. I have always struggled to understand how such an obvious observation is harmful, reductive, legalistic, or any of the other adjectives self-proclaimed survivors of \u201cI Kissed Dating Goodbye\u201d deploy.<\/p>\n Far from promulgating rules without reasons, Harris\u2019 book and evangelical \u201cpurity culture\u201d more broadly were explicitly rooted in teleology\u2014namely the belief that not only sex, but romance itself should be ordered toward godly marriage, not recreation. In several places in his book, Harris extoled the superiority of committed sexual relationships with one\u2019s spouse, calling young people to keep God\u2019s design for their bodies and hearts at the front of their minds while navigating adolescence. His wasn\u2019t a book of rules, as Favale charges. It was a timely reminder that \u201cthe body is not made for sexual immorality<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Favale decries Harris\u2019 \u201creductive notion of \u2018purity\u2019 itself,\u201d and how \u201cpurity culture\u201d wrongly equated it with virginity. She accuses him of inverting the arc of the Christian life, portraying virginal teens in a state of original innocence, which can be \u201ccorrupted or lost through sexual activity.\u201d<\/p>\n Once again, this charge is baffling. The suggestion that young Christians make a conscious decision to fight sexual temptation implies that our in-born appetites are at war with our new lives in Christ. If we were innocent and pure by nature, what would Harris and other purveyors of \u201cpurity culture\u201d have to warn us about?<\/p>\n Secondly, the claim that an emphasis on virginity is new or aberrant in Christianity is dumbfounding, particularly coming from a Roman Catholic. Favale asserts that \u201cthe purity culture conversation is rife with fear-and-shame-based rhetoric\u2026\u201d I can only wonder if she has ever cracked open the church fathers, whose views of sex make Joshua Harris sound like a Cosmopolitan columnist.<\/p>\n John Chrysostom (349-407) and John of Damascus (676-749), for example, both taught that Adam and Eve were never intended to have sex in the Garden of Eden, that \u201cdesire for sexual intercourse\u201d was \u201calien to their soul,\u201d and that \u201cin Paradise virginity held sway.\u201d Were it not for sin, these fathers argued that reproduction would have taken place in some non-sexual fashion!<\/p>\n Jerome (347-420), likewise, could easily be accused of using \u201cfear-and-shame-based rhetoric\u201d when he suggested that the man who is \u201ctoo ardent a lover of his own wife is an adulterer.\u201d Augustine (354-430) concurred, arguing that in the husband-wife relationship, \u201cthat which goes beyond [the necessity of reproduction] no longer follows reason but lust.\u201d And Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) went still further, writing that a man who is too enthusiastic in bed with his wife \u201cmay in a sense be called an adulterer; and even more so than he that is too ardent a lover of another woman.\u201d<\/p>\n This exalted view of abstinence which dominated the first millennium-and-a-half of Christian thought inspired a backlash in Protestant paeans to married sex.<\/a> This in turn led to a more balanced view of marital intimacy, which as Leland Ryken points out in his book, \u201cWorldly Saints,\u201d<\/a> became a mainstay of Puritan piety.<\/p>\n But Joshua Harris didn\u2019t invent the link between purity and virginity. It\u2019s been around since the beginning of the faith. Publicly pledging to remain chaste in anticipation of marriage parallels biblical practices like the Nazarite vow, and echoes later Christian monasticism. It becomes a symbol of moral purity in the mother of Jesus, who insisted she had been with no man, including her future husband, Joseph. Virginity pledges also prefigure marriage vows. There is a reason many Christian young people who followed through on their promises to remain sexually abstinent exchanged purity rings for wedding bands at the altar.<\/p>\n Favale charges ahead, accusing Harris of introducing a happily-ever-after theology for those who save physical intimacy for their wedding night. In her telling, \u201cpurity culture\u201d offered a kind of carnal bargain with God\u2014i.e., \u201ckeep yourself for marriage and you will be rewarded with hot sex.\u201d Conversely, she cites an infamous allegory in the opening pages of \u201cI Kissed Dating Goodbye,\u201d in which a man is confronted on his wedding day by all of his previous girlfriends, who each own a piece of his heart. This is probably the most common criticism of the book. But it says more about modern readers\u2019 inability to grasp arguments from prudence than it does about \u201cpurity culture.\u201d<\/p>\n Consider the book of Proverbs, which offers divinely-inspired wisdom contained in pithy generalizations, for example: \u201cA gentle answer turns away wrath.\u201d (Prov. 15:1) This is true, as a rule. A certain type of reply will tend to provoke anger, while a soft and conciliatory response will likely defuse it. But we do not accuse Solomon of making false promises when people hate us despite our gentleness. The same is true of non-inspired wisdom. \u201cLock your car door if you don\u2019t want thieves to steal your things\u201d is no less a prudent saying because burglars sometimes break windows! Critics of Joshua Harris don\u2019t seem to understand that when he pointed to better marriages as a reason to avoid unwedded sex, he was offering a proverb, not a promise.<\/p>\n And he was empirically right. A new study from the University of Utah<\/a> found that Americans who have only slept with their spouses are the most likely to report having \u201cvery happy\u201d marriages. They\u2019re nearly divorce-proof, too. Just six percent of marriages involving a bride who was a virgin end within five years, compared with 20 percent for brides who had engaged in sex before marriage. Similar studies from Western Washington University<\/a> and the University of Virginia<\/a> bolster these findings.<\/p>\n But Favale doesn\u2019t stop at charring Harris with false promises. She attributes all kinds of claims to him which he never made, accusing him of tying a woman\u2019s moral and spiritual worth to her sexual history, of denying redemption, and of describing repentant sexual sinners as \u201cdamaged goods.\u201d Like all distortions, these are based on a truth. Harris and other \u201cpurity culture\u201d writers did <\/em>teach that sexual sin has lasting consequences which do not vanish in a puff of smoke when we repent and seek God\u2019s forgiveness. And once again, they were right.<\/p>\n Sexually-transmitted diseases are now at an all-time high in the United States<\/a>, and in addition, those who have had multiple sexual partners are at an increased risk of cancer and depression<\/a>. Dissatisfaction with the hookup culture (the opposite of \u201cpurity culture\u201d if there is one) is a common sentiment in mainstream,<\/a> progressive publications<\/a>. And a generation of children from divorced and broken homes are suffering historic rates of mental health issues and suicidal tendencies<\/a>.<\/p>\n Sex outside of marriage is a recipe for personal misery and social destruction. It eats at the core of what makes us civilized, it promotes exploitation and murder (in the form of abortion), and trains young people to see one another as conquests, rather than as potential lifelong lovers and family members. And casual dating\u2014that ubiquitous institution of teen-age in the 90s\u2014was its training ground. I marvel at the temerity it takes for someone to survey this radioactive sexual landscape and conclude that our real problem is the teaching of a book on chastity we read in middle school.<\/p>\n Likewise, the charge that \u201cI Kissed Dating Goodbye\u201d persuaded a generation of young believers to idolize virginity is comically out-of-touch with reality. Research over the last decade has found that between 60 and 80 percent of self-identified \u201cborn-again\u201d Christians have sex before marriage<\/a>, taking Harris\u2019 call about as seriously as Favale did. And among the general population, just five percent of new brides in recent years have been virgins<\/a>. To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, chastity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.<\/p>\n Favale and fellow critics of \u201cpurity culture\u201d call for a \u201crevitalized articulation of Christian sexuality\u201d an expression of \u201cthe compelling why<\/em>\u201d behind biblical morality, and a \u201cworldview\u201d centered on God\u2019s creation and incarnation in Christ. I agree! But that worldview involves prudence, wisdom, and taking responsibility for one\u2019s own life<\/a>. It\u2019s precisely this moral sobriety that recommends evangelical \u201cpurity culture,\u201d with all its flaws, over the too-clever-by-half critics of Joshua Harris, running about with their fire extinguishers in the middle of the flood he tried to warn us about.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/703\/2018\/12\/purity-rings-300x158.jpg\")
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