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It is a strange thing to learn that your body is a potential stumbling block to your brothers in Christ when you are thirteen, bone-skinny, and don’t even know how to properly blend foundation into your neck. Nevertheless, it was the persistent buzz in the background of my youth. When I went to Walmart to buy a new pair of shorts, I had to try them on to make sure they were long enough. The invention of the “tankini” was a pure gift for conservative Christian girls during the high tide of purity culture, because it covered our midriffs while giving us some relief from the dreaded one-piece, which inevitably gave us wedgies in the back and the front. We didn’t fit into our own skin at that age, let alone a proper bathing suit.
I never had a problem with the idea of modesty. It made clothes shopping annoying, but it made sense to me that, as a Christian, I would consider others in the way I dressed. After all, I was called in Scripture to consider others in what I ate and drank, and apparel seemed to be at least on the same level. What was puzzling, however, was the idea that the sanctification of teenage boys and grown men depended on the length of my summer shorts. This never made sense. It just made me nervous.
“Guys think about sex all the time,” is what we were told in youth group, on television sitcoms, and in Christian books on dating and sexual purity. I never asked my peers to confirm or deny this claim. I just accepted and internalized it, nestled beside my memories of a simpler time, when I caught bullfrogs in the marsh with Chris and raced my friend Matt over and over again until we were both breathless. These same friends were now supposedly undressing me with their eyes. At least, if I wore the wrong dress.
While all this was being preached, I was dealing with my own burgeoning sexual desire, for which I had no box or category. We girls were given talks about spaghetti strap shirts and lusty boys, not about our own budding struggles with sexual fantasies and masturbation. At summer camp, the girls had to wear long t-shirts over their bathing suits while the boys could run around shirtless. I heard the message loud and clear: girls don’t struggle like boys do. So when I discovered that I had a sex-drive, I felt nothing but shame.
I have carried that shame throughout most of my life and still, to this day, have to wrestle it down sometimes and triple-punch it with the truth of the Imago Dei, the God-created goodness of sexuality, and the full forgiveness in Christ for all our sins. But I want more for my daughter.
I’ll never forget watching my childhood friend and her boyfriend stand up in front of the congregation to confess that they had sex outside of marriage and were now pregnant. She was fifteen.
I was the virgin in the corner trying to save my first kiss, resist buying that adorable bikini I saw at Target, and make sure not to talk to boys for too long on the phone. But we weren’t that different. We were just two adolescent girls in the church, trying to wade through puberty and crushes, not yet fully able to distinguish between sinful lust and innocent desire. We both needed mercy and guidance. We both needed a better understanding of what it meant to live in our bodies and honor them, honor others, and honor God.
My church threw her a baby shower, setting a positive example of love and support, but the purity craze in evangelism at large produced too many scared teenagers and not enough true converts to the gracious gospel of Christ. In my book Talking Back to Purity Culture, I wrote:
“So many of us walked right past the gospel on our way to a purity conference.”
I want more for my daughter than just freedom from shame or toxic teachings on sexual purity. I want her to see herself the way God sees her, to see others the way God sees them, and to view sex the way God designed it; as good, exclusive, and temporary. I don’t want her to view virginity as her ticket to heaven, or chastity as some path to salvation. Instead, I want her to look to Christ as the ultimate source of her purity, and see chastity as part of her lifelong call to Christian worship.
Growing up, chastity was stereotyped in the secular sphere as the girl with braces and greasy hair handing out True Love Waits pamphlets in-between classes; the one who wore a homemade dress to the prom and giggled nervously during sex ed. Teenagers were advised to save sex, but not for marriage. In the late 1990s, sex advice for teenagers could be boiled down to waiting until you “felt ready” and had a condom in your purse or wallet. Some movies and books suggested that you should wait until you were in-love. Whatever you did, you were warned never to forget that image of herpes you saw in gym class.
In evangelical so-called “purity culture,” chastity was defined by virginity. It was a temporary state, like holding in a sneeze. If you could just get through your young adult years a virgin, then you could get married and proceed to have all-the-sex. There was never an acknowledgement that some of us might end up single for the rest of our lives, or that we might never find ourselves attracted to the opposite gender, or to anyone at all. What did chastity mean for those who were sexually abused as children? For those still unmarried at twenty-three? And what did it mean for those of us divorced by twenty-nine?
To my surprise, at almost thirty years old, I found myself a non-virgin, carrying around a suitcase full of emotional baggage from an unwanted divorce. I smiled weakly at married couples with kids, shuddered at the thought of dating again, and wept quietly while singing on the worship team at church. Having grown up reading books by the Ludy’s and Joshua Harris, I felt disenchanted and let down. My commitment to sexual purity was supposed to secure me a lasting marriage, but it hadn’t.
I had to sort out what chastity was and was not. What did it mean for me now? I knew it wasn’t what the world said, about just being ready or in-love, because I had fallen half in-love with a dozen boys by the time I was fifteen. I knew it was also more than just being on birth control and practicing “safe sex.” But the purity culture messages didn’t feel right either. The constant tugging down of my shorts to make sure I wasn’t showing too much thigh didn’t feel like a robust understanding of purity or the body, and the worry that any sexual failure would make me less whole lacked the grace I saw in the gospel. The outcome of my first marriage made it clear that sexual obedience wasn’t like earning tickets at an arcade.
It turns out that chastity isn’t a sprint of self-control; it’s a marathon of spiritual endurance. And the commitment we make is not to our future selves as some kind of insurance guaranteeing relational health, wealth, and happiness, but a lifelong vow to God himself; that we will love him with “all our heart, soul, mind, and strength,” (Mark 12:30) including our sexuality.
Unlike purity, which is an impossible state to achieve outside of Christ’s work on our behalf, chastity is the human pursuit of love and self-denial. According to Thomas Aquinas, it is the act of “curbing” ungodly desires and practicing “moderation,” and it is not something we ever fully achieve on this side of heaven. Therefore it is something the Christian must pursue until their dying breath. I love Lauren Winner’s idea that chastity is a form of “holding vigil.” Contrary to what many assume, the Christian call to chastity doesn’t expire at the wedding altar.
When I was dating my husband, Evan, we decided to go camping with his family at Backbone State Park in Iowa. We weren’t married yet, so I slept in a cabin with his family while he slept in a tent in the back of his truck. It wasn’t that we thought we would lose all self-control and have sex if we got too close, but we wanted to love one another well. Chastity in dating meant respecting one another’s commitment to celibacy outside of marriage. When we got married months later, chastity looked different in that it now included married sex, but we continued to pursue worship of God through fidelity to one another, self-giving and unity in our sexual union, and love for our neighbors.
Purity culture rhetoric taught many of us to dehumanize one another. Christian bestsellers like Every Man’s Battle emphasized to men that every woman was a potential sexual stumbling block. If you were married, other women should be viewed as a threat, and your partner as your personal sexual outlet, there to help you fight lust and satisfy your desires. Women were, therefore, either a temptation or an outlet, rather than beloved sisters in Christ.
Women weren’t taught much better in regard to neighbor love. Christian books on sexual purity for us centered around rules of conduct and dress in order to receive the promised reward of marriage, sex, and children. When we didn’t receive these rewards, we were left frustrated with God, men, and ourselves.
In contrast to these selfish purity culture messages, the pursuit of chastity is about dignity and worship. We honor our neighbors by committing to view every person we meet with dignity and value, outside of their impact on our sexuality. In her book The Genesis of Gender, Abigail Favale writes that “We are all asked to curb our sexual desires out of deference for human life…” and in his book, Making All Things New, David Powlison says: “You can increasingly view each human being as a sister or brother, a mother or father, a daughter or son—as someone to care for, not a sexual object.” This practice takes work, and it is the work of worship.
A right view of chastity also means that we view ourselves with dignity, regardless of what other people say about us or do to us. Just because that man yelled a sexual remark at me from his car window does not mean that I am a sexual object. And just because someone abused you sexually does not reduce you to someone’s sexual outlet or make you “damaged goods.” You are cherished and beloved of Christ. Others will sin against us sexually, but it doesn’t change our worth.
Our personal failures don’t change our worth, either. As sinners, we will lust in our hearts, objectify with our words, and act foolishly and selfishly with our bodies. But in Psalm 139, we learn that we are each “fearfully and wonderfully made” by God. Our desires, so often twisted and broken by sin, can make this hard to believe. But our sexuality was God’s idea. The desire for intimacy and companionship can be traced all the way back to the Garden of Eden, when God saw that it was not good for Adam to be alone.
No matter what we do, have done, or have had done to us, in Christ we have been washed, we have been sanctified, and we have been justified. (1 Cor. 6:11) We are made pure, forever, by the blood of Christ. Which brings me back to my daughter, Hildegaard, who is just two years old and enjoys laughing at farts, waving at cars, and talking to God and the moon. She doesn’t yet know the full weight of shame or the feeling of long-term regret that clings to so many of us as adults.
I so badly want to get this all right for her; to teach her God’s plan for sexuality without heaping shame on her sweet frame, or making her feel like her body is some kind of stumbling block. I want her to understand God’s heart for our bodies, relationships, and sexuality in a way that reinforces the truth that she and everyone around her are wonderfully made.
Before I ever talk to her about sex, clothes, or dating, I will start there: that she is a remarkable image-bearer of the Almighty God. And I will proceed to teach her a version of chastity that is not about the sin of sexuality or having a female body, but the beauty and challenge of lifelong spiritual practice; a joyful offering of worship to the God who made her body, her sexuality, and defined what purity means. Our chastity will only ever be imperfect, but Jesus runs to meet us, embrace us, and clothe us in his righteousness each new day.