CreditCreditIllustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban; Photograph via Metropolitan Museum of Art

When I was 14, a circuit speaker came to my church’s youth group to talk about sexual purity. I don’t remember many details from the talk but vividly recall signing a True Love Waits pledge, a small notecard promising that I would remain a virgin until marriage. Twenty years later, that ritual strikes me as almost innocuous — how much power do we give to the scribbled signature of a teenager who had only the faintest idea what sex was? Yet it also carried a psychological burden that many of my peers and I are still unloading.

A majority of adults who came of age in evangelical churches in the 1990s and 2000s were exposed to “purity culture,” a term for teachings that stressed sexual abstinence before marriage. We had our own rituals, such as “purity balls,” and our own merchandise, such as “purity rings.” I had a “Wait for Me Journal”Read the Full Article