The rose slowly made its way around the room, losing petals, thorns falling off, the stem breaking from being mishandled.
Exactly as I’d planned.
I smiled and went back to preaching.
It was my junior year of high school, and I’d been selected to preach the Valentine’s Day message at Bible Club. I’d seen this sermon preached before and thought it was effective, so I was going for it.
I had about twelve minutes to get through the sermon and an altar call. Oh, yes, that’s correct: in a high school activity meeting, I was still going to have an altar call. Fifth hour be damned, lest someone’s soul go in its place.
I began by passing a rose around the room, telling people to take a petal—or just pass it along. Do whatever they wanted to it, so long as they handed it to the next person.
I used 1 Thessalonians 4:3–8 and talked about how porneia—and no, at seventeen I didn’t know Greek, but I had a Strong’s Concordance—referred to any sex outside of marriage.
Then I used 1 Corinthians 6:12–20 to talk about fleeing sexual immorality. I spoke about how sexual sin was a travesty before God, how it soiled us not only before God but before our future spouse.
“Imagine,” I said, “that you get to your wedding and your bride is wearing rags. Imagine your groom shows up in shorts and hasn’t washed. That’s what happens when you have sex before marriage. You’re soiling the marriage bed!”
It was a hell of a sermon, if I do say so myself.
Heads were nodding. High schoolers were paying attention.
The rose made its way back toward the front of the room, and I smiled at its disheveled state. I picked it up and looked out at everyone.
“This is what happens when you go out and have sex before marriage. You show up on your wedding day offering this.”
I threw the rose to the ground, said a prayer, and the activity alarm buzzed just as I was finishing.
Perfect timing.
I was proud of myself. A bunch of my friends walked by telling me it was a great sermon.
Then a girl caught my attention.
At first, she was just a blur out of the corner of my eye, hunched over in her chair. I turned and looked at her.
She was convulsing from sobbing.
Two of her friends hovered around her, running their hands up and down her back. I went over and sat next to her, putting my hand on her without asking—because of course—and looked at her with concern.
“What’s wrong?”
She kept crying. Finally, through the sobs, she managed to speak.
“Your…your…your sermon…I…I’ve had…I’ve had sex…and…who would want me?”
Then she collapsed into grief again. I furrowed my brow, searching for the right theological response.
“Jesus can redeem us, make us clean—”
“I had a baby!”
The words pierced straight through whatever theological framework I’d been building.
She shattered my world with a force I wasn’t expecting.
I had just spent twelve minutes condemning this young woman to hell for the crime of doing what comes naturally to human beings.
Such is the way with purity culture.
Purifying the Word
Make no mistake: I want to distinguish between the traditional Christian sexual ethic and purity culture.
Most branches of Christianity have traditionally held to some sort of strict sexual ethic. Paul certainly appears to have held that sex belonged within marriage.
But Paul also appears to have expected Jesus to return within his own lifetime, which makes his sexual ethic basically this: abstain from sex if you can; if you’re too horny to manage that, fine, get married.
Funny how we don’t follow that ethic.
Some people view sex as something beautiful, enjoyable, and only to be shared with one special person. Or maybe a few special people. Some people place enormous emotional importance on sex, and that naturally affects the decisions they make about it.
There’s nothing wrong with abstaining from sex until marriage.
If someone chooses that for healthy reasons—maybe they recognize that sex carries an enormous emotional connection for them, or they simply want to reserve it for marriage—that’s a perfectly valid decision. Nobody should mock them for it.
But purity culture is something else entirely.
Purity culture teaches that sex makes you dirty.
There’s basically a six-step process:
Desire — You experience sexual desire. That alone is dangerous because desire can become lust.
Temptation — Because the desire exists, you’ve opened yourself to sexual temptation.
Sin — Eventually, you give in. Once you sin, you become impure.
Contamination — Now you’re not merely sinful; you’re filthy. You’ve joined yourself sexually to another person. You became “one flesh,” and you can never undo it.
Shame — You go home and beat yourself up. Days become weeks. Weeks become months. Some people spend years condemning themselves for a single sexual decision.
Loss of value — Eventually, the shame starts whispering something worse: you have less value now. Less value to God. Less value to your future spouse. Less value, period.
Purity culture teaches that sex is incredibly dirty and sinful—unless it happens within marriage, of course.
Which creates an incredibly fucked-up situation where, at 10:00 a.m. on the Saturday before your wedding, having sex with your future spouse would be sinful.
Filthy.
An abomination.
But at 5:00 p.m., after the ceremony?
Go nuts.
What the fuck?
Purity Culture Is Purely Impure
The empirical evidence is out there as well. Abstinence-only education simply does not work the way its advocates promise, and it can leave teenagers less prepared to prevent unwanted pregnancies and STIs.
According to The Revealer:
“In 2021, a study by Sheila Wray Gregoire and colleagues of 20,000 married Christian women, of whom 77.5% were evangelical or formerly evangelical, found that 22.6% reported vaginismus or some other form of primary sexual dysfunction that makes penetration painful.”
The article goes on to explain that 43% of respondents said they believed a wife’s duty was to her husband.
That’s evangelical-speak for: “When your husband wants to fuck, you don’t have a choice.”
For those saying, “That’s not sex. That’s rape.” Yes. You are correct.
But the belief that a wife is obligated to have sex with her husband absolutely exists within evangelicalism. It may not be something you hear from the run-of-the-mill evangelical who shows up once a month and on Christmas and Easter, but spend enough time deep inside conservative evangelical culture and you’re going to encounter some version of it.
Why?
1 Corinthians 7:3–5.
The key passage is this:
“The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does—and likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.”
I heard plenty of sermons teaching this. I believed it. I taught it. The wife had a duty to the husband.
Good thing I’ve never been married.
To be fair, plenty of evangelicals turn the passage around and acknowledge that it applies equally to men. But let’s also be realistic: we know which direction the power dynamic tends to run in the communities where this theology becomes most rigid.
The Greek word here is ἐξουσιάζω (exousiazō), meaning to exercise authority or control over something. So saying the wife’s body “belongs” to the husband is already an interpretive gloss. The language itself is about authority.
And just a few sentences earlier, Paul writes:
“It is good for a man not to touch a woman.”
There’s good reason to think Paul is quoting a position held by some of the Corinthians rather than simply announcing his own rule. Some Christians in Corinth seem to have been advocating sexual asceticism—even within marriage.
So Paul is basically responding:
“Hey, guys. Maybe don’t stop fucking.”
In context, Paul isn’t primarily handing husbands a property deed to their wives. He’s telling married ascetics that unilateral celibacy is a bad idea. Or, to put it in theological terms: Suck a dick every now and again.
But this is where purity culture creates such a profound problem, especially for women.
People who grow up in purity culture can have an incredibly difficult time finding sexual satisfaction later in life. And it isn’t necessarily because they lack experience. Far from it. Plenty of former purity-culture adherents have racked up quite the body count and still find sex fundamentally shameful.
And that’s the rub. Pun not intended.
Purity culture trains people to associate sexuality with guilt and shame. So even when the sex is consensual, wanted, safe, and enjoyable, there can still be this nagging feeling that something is wrong.
We have a phrase for things that feel almost too good:
“This feels wrong.”
And sometimes we mean it as a joke.
Purity culture teaches your body to believe it. Purity culture fails because it never teaches us how to have a healthy relationship with sexuality. It only teaches us how to be afraid of it.
There’s a great scene in Mean Girls where the sex-ed lesson basically amounts to:
Have sex, get an STI, die.
Something to that effect. I don’t know. I don’t remember, and I’m too lazy to look it up.
The point is: fear sex and fear its consequences.
That’s purity culture in a nutsack nutshell.
Desires of the Heart
Purity culture also takes Jesus’s warning about lust and runs away with it.
Desire becomes action.
Thought becomes deed.
But fundamentally, they aren’t the same thing.
I might have the desire to rob a bank when rent comes due. That doesn’t mean Tom Cruise and his pre-cogs are coming to arrest me for it.
Sexual desire is perfectly natural and, for most people, unavoidable.
Telling someone not to experience sexual desire is like telling them not to experience hunger. Desire happens. The question of ethics begins with what you choose to do with it.
For me, there are simply certain women I’ll look at and have an immediate:
“Oh. Hey.”
I don’t consciously choose that reaction. Some women have that reaction toward men. Some men toward men. Some women toward women. Some people toward any and all genders.
It’s a kaleidoscope of sexuality out there, folks.
What you can choose is what happens next.
You can entertain the thought. You can let it pass. You can flirt. You can ask someone out. Maybe you end up in bed together. None of that becomes morally wrong merely because desire existed first.
It becomes wrong when desire turns into entitlement. When you harass someone. Coerce them. Ignore boundaries. Treat them as an object rather than another human being who gets an equal vote in whatever happens next.
That’s where the moral question actually begins.
A Better Way
And that’s what I’d like to do now that I’m an agnostic who fucks—instead of a Christian who still fucked but cried afterward.
I now cry for entirely different reasons.
I actually do think there’s such a thing as sexual purity.
I just define it around three things:
Consent
Responsibility
Care
When looking at any sexual encounter, ask whether it’s truly consensual. Ask whether you and the other person—or people—are actually capable of informed consent in that moment.
Make consent king.
Hell, make it sexy.
Because in a way, consent is the sexiest thing in the world. Someone is looking at you and saying:
“Yes, I want to fuck you, no matter how gross you think you are.”
That’s hot.
Then ask the other questions.
Was anyone pressured?
Are you emotionally prepared?
Are you protecting yourself and your partner?
Are you honest about expectations?
Are you respecting boundaries?
Are you taking pregnancy and STI risks seriously?
All of those questions determine whether you’re acting consensually, responsibly, and with care.
Purity culture can spend fifteen or twenty years conditioning someone to associate arousal with guilt, then expect a ceremony to make that conditioning disappear. But vows can only change the theological category of the act. They cannot instantly change the body’s learned response to it. That creates fertile ground for sexual dysfunction within marriage.
Imagine the honeymoon night of a twenty-year-old man and an eighteen-year-old woman. Why are they getting married so young? In the purity-culture version of the story, because Paul said that if you can’t keep it in your pants, get married and then fuck. So they make a life-altering decision because they’re horny.
Meanwhile, the adults who should perhaps be asking whether this is wise are couching the decision in spiritual language. After all, they got married young, and they’re still married.
“Happily” is subject to debate.
“God has brought them together.”
“God has called them to one another.”
“They’ve recognized God’s plan at such a young age.”
Six years later, the husband is sitting in the pastor’s office asking why his wife won’t have sex with him. His wife is talking to the pastor’s wife, asking why her husband keeps forcing himself on her. And instead of receiving the help they actually need, they’re forced deeper into the cycle.
“Your body belongs to your husband.”
“Her body belongs to you. You’re not doing anything wrong, son.”
As a man who has somehow managed to remain single into his forties, I find this entire concept baffling.
I am voluntarily single, but there is still a part of me that seeks companionship. And during the times I’ve had it, I’ve tried to respect and honor the woman I was with.
Not because I’m some chivalrous gentleman who opens doors. I don’t. Not because I’m a hopeless romantic. I’m an asshole.
It’s because I recognize that the woman in front of me is an independent human being with hopes, dreams, fears, desires, and feelings that do not exist in relation to me. I get to be part of her life. I’m lucky for it.
Hypothetically. There is no “her” at the moment.
At its worst, purity culture robs couples of that perspective. The spouse—and, more specifically, the wife—stops being another human being, an equal partner in this absurd battle we call life.
Instead, she becomes property.
An object for the husband to use when he gets bored and horny. Someone who exists to satisfy his sexual fantasies—but God help her if she develops fantasies of her own that make him insecure.
You Can’t Redeem a Broken Rose
Christianity ostensibly centers forgiveness, redemption, restoration, and the claim that human worth does not depend upon moral perfection.
Yet purity culture creates one of the few sins where teenagers and adults are routinely taught that something permanent has been taken from them.
You can repent of lying.
You can repent of stealing.
You can repent of hatred.
But have sex? Suddenly you’re the rose with missing petals. You can be “forgiven,” sure. But you’ll never be the original rose again. How common is it in our culture to believe that if a woman has sex with multiple men, she’ll somehow become “loose”?
Science be damned. I’m afraid I’ll marry a roast beef sandwich!
Purity culture takes that idea and fucking sprints with it.
At seventeen, I wasn’t clever enough to invent that sermon myself. I had heard it somewhere else. And the fact that so many evangelicals around my age immediately recognize some version of the rose illustration tells you just how widespread it became throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
Then, in the late 2000s, pastor Matt Chandler gave a sermon that supposedly turned the rose illustration on its head.
He described the same basic illustration—the rose passed around, damaged, discarded—and then passionately cried:
“Jesus wants the rose!”
I remember hearing that and thinking:
Wow. That’s incredible.
Now?
Oh, do fuck off.
It’s purity culture with extra steps. You’re still dirty. You’re still filthy. You’re still the damaged rose.
But hey!
Jesus will take you anyway!
Jesus can make you whole again. Jesus can magically make you unfucked. Well, no. He can’t do that.
But now you’re “pure.”
Sure, your future spouse might feel a certain way about you not waiting. It might create problems in your marriage. People might still hold your sexual history over your head for the rest of your life.
But hey!
You’re forgiven!
If you teach people that an act is dirty outside a particular context, that committing it makes them impure, that they have become something lesser because they did it, there is no avoiding the shame built into that system.
Samuel James at First Things has argued that Christianity should adopt a new purity culture—one that learns from the mistakes of the past.
But I think the problem runs deeper. The problem is the Christian concept of sexual purity itself. By filtering sexuality through such a rigid framework, you risk condemning countless people to psychological baggage surrounding one of the most basic parts of human existence.
The average American will have somewhere around six to eight sexual partners in their lifetime. Some will have fewer. Some will knock out the average in a weekend. Maybe one particularly ambitious bedroom foray.
And so long as the people involved are consenting, responsible, honest, and actually care about the people they’re sleeping with, there is no inherent reason they should carry shame over it.
Theologically, if Christianity’s central claim is that Christ redeems you, then any Christian sexual ethic built around this concept of “purity” creates an immediate contradiction.
The rose still applies even if Jesus wants it.
If sex outside marriage makes you impure, then the problem remains. If the rose represents your value before God, Christianity supposedly says your value was never diminished. If the rose represents sin, Christianity says sin can be forgiven. If the rose represents suitability for marriage, then you’ve created an entire category of human worth that apparently even Jesus cannot restore.
So what exactly do those missing petals represent?
And what kind of “new purity culture” can you create while operating from the same broken understanding of human sexuality?
To Each Their Own
Far be it from me to prescribe a sexual ethic to anyone beyond:
Make sure it’s consensual, and don’t violate obligations you’ve already made.
For example, maybe don’t fuck someone else when you’re in a monogamous relationship. Seems reasonable.
I basically live according to a no-harm principle: so long as what you’re doing doesn’t harm another person, you should generally have the right to do it. That does not mean everything permissible is necessarily healthy. But what constitutes a healthy sexual life is going to vary from person to person.
For most people, monogamous relationships are probably going to remain the baseline. That isn’t disappearing anytime soon. Humans have organized much of our romantic lives around pair-bonding for a very long time.
That’s generally the ethic I choose for myself.
If someone decides that waiting until marriage is right for them, that can be a perfectly healthy choice. It becomes unhealthy when they decide everyone else needs to live according to their choice because everyone else supposedly owes allegiance to the same sexual framework.
Human sexuality is too complicated for that.
Back to the Rose
I think about seventeen-year-old me walking toward that girl, convinced her problem was that she had committed sexual immorality. But she was a teenage mother sitting in a high-school classroom, crying because a dumbass fuck—me—had just publicly illustrated her as a flower nobody would ever want.
I spent years remembering that sermon as the moment I learned purity culture could hurt people.
But what’s worse is that I can’t look back now and say:
“Well, I worded it badly. I was young.”
No. I hurt her. I devastated her. And I didn’t accidentally hurt her while preaching something true.
The hurt was the mechanism by which the sermon worked.
The rose illustration only functions if the audience is terrified of becoming the rose. That’s why everyone paid attention. That’s why the heads nodded. That’s why the illustration was “effective.” The shame wasn’t collateral damage.
Five months later, shortly after my eighteenth birthday, I lost my virginity.
Once the rush of guilt, light-headedness, and apocalyptic dread about the state of my immortal soul subsided, that sermon was one of the first things I thought about.
I thought about her tears. Her shaking. The way she had asked:
“Who would want me?”
I thought about everything I had done to make her feel that way. And there I was. I had gone and had sex. I got home and rushed into the bathroom, wanting to throw myself into the shower.
I looked in the mirror. I didn’t even see myself. I saw the hypocrisy. Shame is not an unfortunate side effect of purity culture.
Shame is the point.
But sex isn’t dirty. You can believe sex belongs in marriage. You can believe it belongs in committed relationships. You can have casual sex. You can be celibate. You can discover that sex means an enormous amount to you. You can discover that it means very little. You can discover all of that with one person or with several different people.
What matters psychologically is that your sexual ethic is something you understand and choose—not something constructed from the terror that touching another human being will permanently reduce your worth.
Who would want this rose?
A forgiving man?
Jesus?
The church?
No.
It’s a stupid fucking question.
A human being isn’t a flower whose value decreases every time someone touches her.
Our value isn’t tied to our sexuality. Hell, it isn’t even tied to our adherence to a particular sexual ethic. When you strip away all the theological systems, purity metaphors, gender roles, Greek words, youth-pastor illustrations, and flower abuse, the moral question becomes much simpler:
How do you treat other people?
Whether that’s in a sexual context or any other context. Seek consent. Act responsibly. Give a shit about the person in front of you.
Do those things, and you’re probably heading in the right direction.
If you want to hold to a traditional Christian sexual ethic, more power to you. If you believe that ethic is healthy and beneficial for your life, I support you in it.
But if you’re trying to force everyone else into that ethic?
I politely ask you to take your rose and shove it.