My wife went through what a lot of churches would call a “purity weekend” growing up. The goal (theoretically) was to instill strong values early on, to set clear boundaries, and to protect her from making decisions she might regret later.
Unfortunately, it didn’t land that way.
What it actually did was make her ashamed of her body and uncomfortable with her own sexuality. It followed us into our relationship in ways neither of us were really prepared for, and even after 4 years of marriage, we still haven’t worked through everything.
With very little digging, you can easily find others with similar stories. There have been plenty of parents and communities with good intentions, who inadvertently triggered deep-rooted anxiety, shame, and trauma by leaning into purity culture. And that’s why the thesis for this article is as follows:
The central failure of purity culture is not its commitment to sexual ethics, but its method of formation: by training people to avoid situations and suppress desire, it produces compliance without integration, often leading to confusion and shame rather than wholeness.
The issue isn’t that the Church takes sexual ethics seriously – it should. The issue is how those ethics have been taught, and more specifically, what kind of people that approach actually forms.
The Problem with Purity Culture
To be fair, purity culture has gotten many things right. It’s very concerned with protecting people, relationships, and the integrity of marriage. Undoubtedly, it’s protected many Christians from slipping into certain sexual sins.
Those are all great things. They should be celebrated.
My question, though, is simple: “At what cost?”
An article published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine (April 2025), titled “Being Pure and Being Ashamed: The Role of Purity Culture in Sexual Wellbeing,” explored this question by studying college-aged women and measuring various aspects of their sexual wellbeing.
The conclusion is difficult to ignore:
“Women exposed to purity culture beliefs as children reported significantly elevated sexual shame scores; this effect held even for women who experienced penetrative CSA (child sexual abuse). That is, exposure to purity culture as a child contributed uniquely to sexual shame, above and beyond the experience of penetrative CSA alone.”
That’s…sobering, to say the least.
Purity culture is having a measurably damaging effect on people’s (particularly women’s) relationship to sex. That should make us all slam on the brakes and reconsider our approach to teaching kids about purity.
So, where exactly did the good intentions go wrong?
Avoidance Over Formation
If purity culture has a central flaw, it’s this: it confuses avoiding situations with forming people.
It’s the lazy way of teaching kids morality. If you just scare or guilt them into staying far enough away from those desires, they won’t have to deal with them in the first place…right?
Don’t be alone too late. Don’t sit too close. Don’t put yourself in a position where something might happen.
Or my personal favorite: “Leave room for Jesus!”
And to be fair, if you remove the opportunity, you do reduce the likelihood of sin. There’s a kind of wisdom in recognizing limits, but there’s a big difference between limiting opportunity and developing maturity.
Instead of helping people learn how to process desire, purity culture trained them to avoid situations where it might have a chance at surfacing. Instead of developing internal clarity and self-control, it relied on external constraints like time limits, physical distance, supervision, and unspoken rules about what was “safe” and what wasn’t.
And here’s the clincher:
A person can follow every rule and still have no idea what to do with their own desires when those rules no longer apply.
And for many of us, the rules do eventually change.
When it comes time to get married and consummate the union, the same system that spent years reinforcing distance and restraint suddenly expects closeness and freedom. The environment shifts overnight (literally), but the person doesn’t, because they were never taught how to relate to desire in the first place.
When the external constraints fall away, what remains isn’t necessarily maturity.
It’s often confusion, and a regression toward what’s safe and familiar: avoidance.
The Body as a Liability
If avoidance is the method, then the body inevitably becomes the problem. Very few people actually frame it this explicitly, but the implication is there nonetheless: your body is a problem. Desire, pleasure, and your sexual nature are liabilities that will prevent you from living a godly life. Your body isn’t yours. It has the potential to lead someone else into sin. Be aware of how you sit. Be careful about the signals you send.
This is the framework many people grow up in. And over time, it changes how you relate to yourself.
Instead of experiencing the body as something natural, it becomes something to monitor constantly. You start thinking about how you’re coming across, what your presence might do, whether something normal might be taken the wrong way. Over time, this begins to affect how you look at yourself in the mirror. I can’t count how many women I know who still struggle with self-loathing because of this, and it doesn’t magically go away once they’re married.
Obviously, modesty is a virtue. But there’s a big difference between wisdom and suspicion. There’s nothing wrong with establishing boundaries, but we go too far when we reframe the body itself as something to be ashamed of.
Dare I say, that starts to drift into something that looks uncomfortably close to Gnosticism.
When Desire Becomes Suspect
Purity culture doesn’t just stop at avoidance, though. Many (including my wife) have also been taught that desire is bad, and that feeling any sort of bodily pleasure leads to sin.
Again, the initial focus is usually good: avoid porn, flee from temptation, and don’t give in to lust. But over time, the lines start to blur. At some point, what gets communicated (directly or indirectly) is not just that certain desires are dangerous, but desire itself.
To the point where getting aroused or having a nocturnal emission feels like a moral failure.
And let me be clear:
Desire, in itself, isn’t the problem.
It’s a signal that points somewhere. It can be disordered, sure, but it can also be understood, directed, and integrated into a healthy life. Treating it as inherently suspect cuts off that process before it ever really begins.
If you’ve ever read Song of Songs, you know that the described man and woman clearly want each other. That’s not hidden in the slightest, and in fact, it’s often expressed very openly and intensely. They speak in ways that would probably make most modern church conversations uncomfortable:
“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth—for your love is more delightful than wine.” (1:2)
“I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me.” (7:10)
There’s nothing hesitant about that. And before you say, “Well, they’re married, so it’s different…”
…the text never actually tells us. The relationship isn’t defined in those terms. Many scholars point out that much of the book reads like pursuit and anticipation, not settled domestic life.
More importantly, we get a refrain that shows up three times:
Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires. (2:7; 3:5; 8:4)
Ironically, this phrase always shows up right after moments of heightened passion. That means the text is doing two things at once: it’s not downplaying one’s longing for their lover, but it’s also not letting it set the pace. The couple isn’t doing anything to avoid desire or attraction (in fact, they usually lean into it), but they are choosing not to rush it.
That’s a very different framework than what many people were given.
Instead of “flee temptation” or “don’t give the devil a foothold,” the emphasis here is more measured. It assumes desire is going to be there. It doesn’t treat that as failure, but as something that needs to be handled with care.
Purity culture teaches you to distance yourself from passion altogether; Scripture teaches you to recognize it, respect it, and exercise restraint without pretending it isn’t there.
So, let’s stop mishandling: “Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.” When it makes an appearance in Song of Songs 3:5, it comes immediately after the woman describes bringing her lover into her mother’s house. The passion and ache for intimacy couldn’t be more obvious, but so is the restraint. The trajectory of the relationship is building to when they can freely enjoy each other after the relationship reaches a point that can sustain what “desire” is moving toward.
Even though the text doesn’t say it explicitly, we would call that point marriage.
It’s when the culmination of passion is allowed to be expressed freely and bodily. And yet, for those who grew up in purity culture, that’s often the opposite of what happens.
The Marriage Collision
I’ve already touched on it briefly, but here’s the unavoidable truth: the purity framework that expects you to create distance, avoid situations, and be careful with your body suddenly expects you to turn all of that off on your wedding night. What was once treated as dangerous is now something you’re supposed to embrace freely and without hesitation.
That transition isn’t as clean as people assume.
You don’t spend years learning to associate desire with risk, or your body with liability, and then suddenly experience both as good and unproblematic the moment you’re married. The external rules may change, but the internal framework is still there.
For some, this presents itself as guilt that doesn’t go away, even in marriage. For others, it’s difficulty relaxing, or feeling fully present. Sometimes it’s a sense of obligation rather than enjoyment, or a lingering feeling that something about the whole thing is still… off.
It doesn’t take much online searching to find a substantial pool of people sharing these stories. They were never taught how to relate to their own desire in the first place, so when the distance is no longer required, there’s nothing in its place. The issue isn’t about behavior, but about whether someone has been formed into the kind of person who can actually experience intimacy as something natural, mutual, and good.
1 Corinthians 7 makes it clear that marital intimacy isn’t optional. Paul doesn’t frame sex as a bonus feature of marriage, but as a normal, expected expression of it. Spouses are not to deprive one another, except for a time and by mutual agreement.
In other words, this is a core part of what marriage is.
Purity culture doesn’t prepare people for this reality. It trains distance, caution, and suppression, and then expects those same people to step into something that requires presence, comfort, and mutual enjoyment. When that formation isn’t there, the strain isn’t surprising.
What Formation Should Have Been
If the problem with purity culture is that it relies on avoidance instead of formation, then the obvious question is what formation should have looked like in the first place. We know it’s not the absence of boundaries – that’s where people go wrong when they hear critiques like this. Boundaries matter, and Scripture is not casual about sexual ethics.
The issue isn’t that purity culture took things too seriously, either. It’s that it focused almost entirely on what to avoid, and very little on what to become.
Healthy formation would have started by treating the body as something good, not something to be managed. Not something neutral, and definitely not something to be suspicious of, but something that’s part of the person and meant to be lived in without constant second-guessing.
Notice that I’m referring to the “body” in a literal sense, not the “flesh,” as Paul often calls our sinful nature. If you’re a Christian, your body is a temple. It “houses” God. Do you think it’s proper to loathe and reject the very dwelling of the Holy Spirit?
Likewise, healthy formation would have treated desire differently.
As I’ve already mentioned, desire points somewhere. Sometimes it points in the wrong direction, and when it does, it needs to be corrected. But that’s very different from assuming its very presence is problematic.
But really, formation should have helped people ask better questions. Using desire as an example, we shouldn’t be asking “How do I avoid this?” but “What is this, and what do I do with it?”
That shift in questioning produces someone who can recognize desire without panicking, exercise restraint without shutting down, and move toward intimacy without carrying a sense that something about it is inherently off. These are superior traits, because eventually the goal is integration, not avoidance.
This is what prepares someone for what marriage is supposed to be. Not the fear and shame inducing framework that purity culture tries to pass off as “godly.”
Reframing Purity
At this point, maybe you’ve read all of this and think I’m rejecting “purity” altogether. But that would be a non-sequitur – the issue for me (and many others) has never been the goal of purity, but rather, the framework for how we accomplish it.
Purity, in the way Scripture talks about it, is about wholeness, integrity, and being the kind of person whose desires, actions, and relationships are aligned (rather than at odds) with each other. Instead of asking, “How far is too far?” or “How do I avoid messing up?”, the better question is, “What kind of person am I becoming?”
Purity isn’t something you preserve by staying far enough away from everything.
It’s something that shows up in how you relate to your body, how you handle desire, and how you move toward or away from intimacy. Boundaries matter, but not when they’re based around fear and shame. The goal should be to operate from a place of wisdom, so that you can learn how to live rightly in your own body. Purity is a command, and it’s also a gift for your spouse, which means it’s not enough to arrive at marriage having avoided certain things.
It’s to arrive as someone who can actually step into that intimacy without fear, hesitation, or confusion.
