“We are the legacy of the Purity Movement, the people who grew up in it, who struggle with its effects every day.” As a Christian teen growing up in the Midwest in the 1990s, Linda Kay Klein was drawn into the emerging purity movement, which advocated strict abstinence until marriage. “In fact, it started around the time I joined my youth group as a seventh-grade student. This movement saturated evangelical lives, but this was only the beginning. I entered public schools and entered grassroots organizations.” “Sex is a great thing in marriage.” Our country is starting to change the way we talk about sexuality. The Purity Movement provided a purity industry, with rings of purity, pledges of purity and balls of purity. ”“ New rituals aimed at encouraging girls and young women to abstain from sex until marriage. ”“ I live my life the way I think we should live it, and that, um, stay pure. “They are actually rings of purity, and they are promises to ourselves and to God that we will remain pure until marriage.” But before purity made its way into pop culture, Evangelical Christian teens like Joshua Harris often found themselves at odds with the world they were. They live in it. ”You had a culture that pushes the circumstance in different ways when it comes to sex. Like, my generation is getting bigger. Like, MTV to Christians was like, oh my God, you know, all these horrible things going on in these music videos etc. So there is a reaction in Christian culture to that. ”“ The campaign is called “True Love Awaits” and is sponsored by the Baptist Sunday School Board. “Thousands of teens pledge to be something most teens are not: virgins until they marry.” “I commit to God.” The people I’m dating. ”At the time, fear of the spread of AIDS reinforced the argument for abstaining from sex above all.“ Stace and I don’t have to worry about an STD, HIV, or an unwanted pregnancy. ”“ You have a type. ” From this feeling, I will choose the most difficult path and do the right thing, and God is much happier with me because of it. It’s a bit like the Christian form of vegetarianism or whatever. you know? It’s like, I’m special. I’m doing something different than everyone else. ”By the time he was a teenager, Harris was a leader among his peers.“ I remember going to Washington, DC and there was a huge Christian concert / festival that was taking place. And they put all these promise cards in the mall. ”“ Teens signed cards pledging virginity and planted 200,000 cards, creating a field of abstinence. ”[shouting] Woo! Waiting for true love. Wait until you get married. Woo! “Purity rallies have been organized all over the United States, and Klein, who was fascinated by evangelism as she grew up, still remembers one enthusiasm she attended.” We were all, like, this is the biggest and best party we’ve ever attended. Then there was a motivational speaker who talked about purity and how important purity is. And in the midst of it, with tears streaming down the faces of the people, they handed over these contracts: I promise that I will provide my purity to my partner. I will not have sex before marriage. Ah, I’m making that commitment today, and I’ll stick with it, you know, for the rest of my life. As a young man, I was confused and desperately wanted to be good and desperately wanted to please God and be accepted in my community. Because my commanders look over my shoulder and moreover, my colleagues are sitting right next to me signing their contracts, and I signed the pledge. ”[shouting] I want to know, how many virgins do we have there? “Woo!” “When I embraced my faith, I wanted to discover, what it means to be a Christian and communicate with the opposite sex, to think about sexuality.” Harris, who had approached sex at the age of 17, redoubled his determination afterwards. I ended up becoming, really, a spokesperson for these more radical ideas by saying, not only should we, you know, save the sex for marriage, but we should date differently. We should reject dating because it leads us towards a compromise. ”“ Do you see a problem with a lot of dating relationships today? Instead of protecting the sanctity of sexual intimacy, we steal from it. ”“ If you’re addicted to alcohol, don’t go to the bar. you know? It was like, ‘If you don’t want sex then don’t get into this, kind of short-term romantic relationship where there is an expectation of becoming intimate.’ Harris’s book “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” went on to sell over a million copies. And while he and others were Paying for purity, another, more insidious message has taken root. “Well, ladies, I think you also have a unique opportunity to protect the purity of your brothers in the Lord. What I think you probably don’t realize is how hard it is for a guy to look at a girl with purity in his heart when she’s dressed immodestly. You have no idea how difficult it is. You have no idea. ”“ I remember feeling like I was a threat. And I remember feeling like a bad person. My sex life was dangerous. It was something to be feared. The narrative we have taken in is that pure girls and women protect us all. They ensure that through proper cover-up, by not taking up much space, no matter what, neither of us will have sexual thoughts and feelings. ” Klein had quit Evangelism by the time she was 21, but continued to struggle for years afterwards. Whenever I had any sexual experience with my boyfriend, I would find myself crying and crying at a ball in the corner of the bed. Eczema comes out, which is what happens when I’m tense, I scratch myself until I bleed, and I have a deep shame reaction. I could actually be this close to doing something, if they were right, if the purity movement was right then that would render me worthless. ” Klein began communicating with friends from home, and then, over the next fifteen years, to people Others across the country, gathering their stories about their upbringing in the Purity Movement. She published a book on this topic in 2018 and keeps hearing new stories all the time from the people she meets in the events of her book. “This all sounds really new to me. Like, it wasn’t until a few months ago that my therapist brought up the concept of a culture of purity to me, and I didn’t even know what that was. But I realized I grew up in it, and that prompted me to find your book. And when I read it, I kind of cried through it all because now it makes sense for me to have this trauma that I’m carrying and why it doesn’t go away. ”“ They learned word for word the same things we learned and experience in their bodies in the same ways that we were experiencing. Once it happened not three times, not four times, but 30 times, 40 times, I started to think, well, this is clearly much bigger than me, and this is clearly much larger than my youth group, and this is much bigger than my case group. During Clyne’s conversations, one name continued to appear: Joshua Harris. Harris went on to become a pastor, but in recent years, he began to question his leadership role, and resigned in 2015 to enroll in the Graduate School of Theology. Soon, he also began to re-examine the letters of his book. “It was something that gave me a sense of success and personal identity. Um, and so, to the question that I felt like I was disassembling myself, honestly. I remember an important moment, kind of, pushing this into the public sphere, it was, uh, I wrote a woman on Twitter, your book was used against me. As a weapon, I replied, “I’m very sorry.” “Stop. That changed everything, right?” Suddenly, people were, like, What did you say? Did you say you were sorry for something? Now, we had this huge number of people who were tweeting, I was hurt by this, I was hurt by this You were hurt by this. You had all these different conversations going on, and it really relates to people coming together and recovering in a collective experience. ” Meanwhile, Harris decided to engage with his critics personally, and made a movie about the process. “I looked in the eyes of people who said, ‘He created this fear in me. This created intense shame and guilt for me. And your book was, kind of, in my head and shaped, you know, the way I saw myself.'” Harris, who has withdrawn his book from publication, faced some criticism that the film was not enough. He has since issued more apologies. Last summer, he announced his separation from his wife and that he no longer considered himself a Christian. “The act of not publishing my books is a great expression of regret for me. It does not compensate for, or fix, past mischief but I, I want to try to take responsibility for it.” Klein continued her encounters with women in towns and cities across the country. “I like to hold a boy’s hand when I was fourteen years old and I cried, you know, like I felt really unclean.” “Unintended consequences are what we really deal with today.” “I didn’t know why I was shaking physically, why burst into crying, why shudder in the corner, and why all these things were happening to me.” “Some of the things that we put in there don’t work, but they don’t cause harm either. This is something that didn’t work and it caused an enormous amount of damage.” “It’s not about taking big steps. It’s about taking those small steps. Teach your mind to work differently by admiring, and trying to do enough where it doesn’t trigger a massive shameful response that repeats this old nervous pathway. Is this helpful?” Change will happen when we have people on the ground, and they speak with one voice to the other, and they tell each other their truths. We will all continue to learn. And that is the real work. “
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