“Do you know what I’m looking forward to most about being married?”

The question seemed sweet and endearing as I sat there listening to a 20-year-old in the coffeeshop. He had shown me pictures of his fiancee on his phone, given me every detail of the wedding, and told me with excitement about their premarital counseling at his family’s Evangelical church (where he and his bride-to-be met in the college ministry). Before I could respond, he answered his own question: “THE SEX! Seriously, I can’t wait. We’re going to have it three times a day in every room of the house.” His face flushed, and he began to perspire as he detailed his various fantasies for different rooms. More than a little creeped out to be hearing the fantasies of someone I had only just met, I found an excuse to leave.

As I reflected on the conversation later, I realized this young man hadn’t told me a thing about his fiancee’s personality or career goals or even her religious views (other than pre-marital sexual abstinence). He was focused on one thing, the thing he had been abstaining from for his whole life to that point: sex. I never had the opportunity to talk with him again, so I’m not sure how the story ends, but the first chapter was grim.

Before judging this young man, let’s consider the purity-obsessed culture that raised him. I know this culture well since I grew up around it too. I attended a “True Love Waits” weekend in my church’s youth group, Sunday School teachers discussed Josh Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye, and I had to sit through abstinence-only sex ed assemblies at my middle school. You can find more thorough breakdowns of these programs by other authors —and I strongly encourage you to pay special attention to female perspectives—, but for the next few weeks, I’d like to dive into the things I was taught as a teenage boy in the so-called “Purity Culture” of American Evangelicalism.

At its core, Purity Culture teaches rigid gender roles and strict abstinence from sex until marriage, two doctrines whose biblical origins are shaky at best. To justify these doctrines, Purity Culture imports a lot of faulty statistics and pseudo-scientific ideas about sex, combines them with pop culture stereotypes, and then sprinkles in a handful of bible verses cherrypicked from their original contexts. Evangelical churches promise incredible married sex as a reward for adherence to Purity Culture, and any deviation from these norms is met with heavy shame.

Now, if you didn’t grow up with Purity Culture, congratulations! You’ve dodged a little slice of shame and trauma! Still, our larger cultural conversations about sex are also pretty rampant with shame and double standards, so I hope you’ll consider these posts as well. The tenets of Purity Culture were prevalent in my upbringing, and Evangelicals still try to push these ideas onto the larger society to our detriment, so let’s explore some of these ideas together and peel back some layers. My goal with this series isn’t to be mean or dismissive, but I feel like it’s important to spend some time in one of modern Evangelicalism’s most harmful doctrines if we’re going to create safe havens for the people leaving this branch of Christianity. In each post, I’ll start with a misconception and suggest a healthier perspective to finish things on a positive note. See you next time!