The last decade witnessed a sharp turn against the so-called purity culture that emerged in the 1990s American Christian scene. Emphasizing abstinence and exalting virginity, it has since been blamed for promoting unhealthy views of sex and for damaging some of its adherents.
Indeed, mockery of purity culture has become a standard trope, even within Christian circles, where it is often decried for causing trauma, that most elastic term in the dictionary of modern victimhood. And apparently it must share blame for lack of sexual agency, rape culture, misogyny, and, of course, racism — without which no list of modern sins is ever complete.
Yet for all the scorn heaped upon it, purity culture is not the most pressing threat today. Even if it proved counterproductive, it is not nearly as dehumanizing as its successor. Kathleen Stock, in an article at UnHerd last week, recounts the stories of Nikole Mitchell, a “pastor-turned-stripper and companion,” and Lily Phillips. The two young women have anonymous sex with vast numbers of random men for free, on condition that they can video the encounters and post them online. These women also display their sexual license in even more public ways, if that were possible, the details of which I will not describe in a First Things column. Stock calls this sexual extremism the “impurity spiral.” There is certainly a sense in which the women she describes represent a new extreme, a twisted descent into new depths of degradation. But I would argue their behavior is only the logic of the old sexual revolution, albeit now playing itself out in a world of technologically-enabled performance. It’s an impurity spiral, but it’s also a culture of desecration and consequent dehumanization.
At the heart of the sexual revolution was the notion that the significance of sex is primarily recreational. Sexual acts are thereby detached from any role in any ongoing interpersonal relationship, and so, the argument goes, sexual agents are liberated from old, repressive patterns of thought and behavior. The satisfaction of immediate individual desire is all that matters.
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This is a dramatic break with earlier cultures that deemed sex to be of great sacred and social significance, and for good reason. Judaism and Christianity treated it as a serious, holy matter. In the Torah, sexual acts had implications for cleanness and uncleanness. In the New Testament, Paul regarded the sexual union of a man with a prostitute as particularly heinous, involving sin against the man’s own body and not simply that of the woman. This makes sense. Sex was the mysterious source of life, and frequently the first sexual experience was also a rite of passage into adulthood and became the seal on the unique relationship between a man and a woman, connecting both to lifelong loyalty, childbearing, and the structure of the family. Sex was one of those things that had heavenly and earthly significance and influenced our understanding of what it meant to be human. The trivialization of sex therefore results in both desecration and dehumanization.
Ironically, even our libertine culture still has an intuitive sense that sex cannot be treated as intrinsically trivial. The law treats sexual assault as something qualitatively different to other forms of non-lethal bodily violations, and society still regards the rapist and the pedophile with special disgust. Thus, the trivialization of sex that lies at the heart of the sexual revolution and the “impurity spiral” highlighted by Stock constantly crashes up against reality. We know that sexual assault is serious because it steals something deeply human from someone, something that can only really be freely given by one human to another. It too is therefore consonant with the logic of the sexual revolution, with its focus on taking rather than giving.
Defying the real significance of sex for what it means to be human, the sexual revolution promised liberation but instead offered a new form of oppression. Sexual partners were turned into instruments whose only real value lay in their ability to fulfill each other’s desires. The logic of the one-night stand is antithetical to the logic of marital sex and consistent with that of pornography. Partners become things. It matters very little whether they are present to the consumer in space and time or merely confected from pixels on a screen.
Enabled by technology and in a culture shaped by the Age of TikTok’s imperative of performance, this dehumanization is accelerating. The women Stock criticizes are still thankfully (hopefully?) extreme outliers in our world. But, consistent with sexual mores since the 1960s, they treat their partners and themselves as nothing more than instruments, whether for sexual pleasure or financial profit. And Stock’s account of responses to her criticism of their behavior indicates that they are far from being treated with popular horror as harbingers of a debased and dehumanized culture: “What is it about other people being happy that upsets you?” asked one user on X. The transvaluation of society’s broader sexual values continues apace, with yesterday’s degraded crudity becoming today’s personal liberation.
The old purity culture that has earned such scorn in trendy Christian circles over recent years certainly had its limitations and its problems. But it understood a couple of truths: Sex is important, not trivial; sex is sacred, not just one species of human act among others; and how we act sexually reflects how we value other people and how we value ourselves. The culture that has replaced it, far from being an improvement, is deeply disturbing. As Stock indicates, it involves a spiral of impurity. I would add that it also involves a deep commitment to dehumanization.
Originally published at First Things.
Carl R. Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He is an esteemed church historian and previously served as the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life at Princeton University. Trueman has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including The Rise and Triumpth of the Modern Self, The Creedal Imperative, Luther on the Christian Life, and Histories and Fallacies.
