Purity Culture Definition:
Purity culture has an obsessive focus on virginity before marriage and on maintaining emotional purity that pervades fundamentalism and evangelicalism, made visible in purity balls, purity rings, purity pledges, and modesty teachings.
It ties your worth as a person to your virginity, not who you are in Christ.
NOTE: Remember, there is nothing wrong with being a virgin, but there is something wrong about making virginity an idol, and that's what purity culture does.
As a millennial, the church was obsessed with purity culture during my childhood, you might remember books like
I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris, who now himself admits it was a mistake.
In a recent article by Ruth Graham:
I just picked up a new book titled Damaged Goods by Dianna Anderson... looking forward to reading it.
Purity Culture had a negative impact on my life, on my marriage, and I'm a male. I can't even image the imagine the negative impact on women.
Purity balls, rings and the like, in my opinion are super weird and sometimes gross.
I am interested in responses from women on this one, and how purity culture impacted them?