Q&A: How can I overcome the shame I experienced as a result of growing up in the purity culture?
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Full Transcript
There’s a lot of conversation today, uh, about people who grew up in what we call purity culture.
Now, let me define that for those of you who don’t know what that means. It essentially was taking the biblical teaching that God wants you to save sex for marriage and building an entire theology of sexuality around that one teaching. And I’d say in the 1990s and the 2000s, particularly in American Christianity, that was such an emphasis for Christian singles that it almost became a gospel in and of itself where some people were sexually pure and some people weren’t. And even though it wasn’t taught explicitly that way, people began to feel like there are two categories of people and that your whole relationship with God was based on whether you were sexually pure or not. And you can see the problem with that because the true gospel says that none of us are righteous, none of us are pure, that we actually achieve our righteousness and our purity, whether it’s sexually or otherwise, through surrendering to the lordship of Jesus Christ. And we take on his purity.
Now, what is true about purity culture? Did they get it all wrong and what was false? Well, as I mentioned, uh, sort of that thinking of our purity coming from our sexual behavior is a, a wrong teaching. And that’s where a lot of the shame has come from is: I can never be who I can never be right. I’ve messed up in such a way that God can never really forgive me, or I’m always on God’s plan B, because I’ve had sex with someone, or I’ve struggled with a, a horrible sexual struggle.
Again, when we look at the gospel of Jesus Christ, nothing separates us from the love of God through Jesus Christ. And so God has taken away that shame. But what is maybe a nugget of truth in what became purity culture is that God has designed sex to be experienced within the covenant of marriage. It is the physical sealing of the covenant promise between a husband and wife. And there’s some people, because they’ve experienced the shame of purity culture and seen the shortcomings, they’ve just said: Nothing about God and sex is true. We’ll just go with what the world teaches. But we have to recognize that sexuality is a powerful force in our lives. God created it for a purpose. And part of what we wanna do is realize: Hey, if I’m a follower of Jesus, that means, uh, like Jesus said, I’m gonna follow Him in every area of life, including sexuality. And so our walk then becomes how out of the purity that Jesus Christ has given me, do I begin to honor him with my sexuality, whether I’m single or married?
