30 years later, the evangelical purity movement still influences sex education

On July 29, 1994, thousands of teenagers gathered in Washington, D.C., to tell the nation their pledge to remain sexually abstinent until marriage. They covered the National Mall lawn with an estimated 200,000 signed chastity pledge cards and participated in a rally that featured speakers and Christian rock bands.

Teenagers across the United States signed the cards, produced and collected by the Southern Baptist organization True Love Waits, last year. It was a groundbreaking moment in the evangelical purity movement – a movement that continues to influence sex education in the United States today.

Jill Dender was one of the first teenagers to sign the pledge.

She went to Washington with the youth group of her church, Tulip Grove Baptist in Nashville, Tennessee, to help plant the cards in the ground. She and her friends wore matching True Love Waits T-shirts and packed beauty essentials of the era. “We had lots of hairspray and our picks,” she said, “and our blue mascara and our blue eyeliner.”

She said she felt joy and excitement when she finished and looked at a sea of ​​cards.

“Wow, all these people want to honor Jesus. All these people love Jesus,” she recalled thinking at the time.

Thirty years ago, the country was still in the shadow of the AIDS crisis and the number of teenage pregnancies was high. News agencies such as Newsweek and ABCs 20/20 were quick to pick up on this “virginity” trend. True Love Waits received hundreds of media requests in its first year. The organization later held similar card shows at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta in 1996 and at the Golden Gate Bridge in 1999.

An early version of the commitment card, developed by True Love Waits co-founders Richard Ross and Jimmy Hester, reads: “Believing that true love waits, I commit to God, myself, my family, the people I date, my future partner, and my future children to be sexually pure from this day until the day I enter into a committed marriage.”

Claire McKeever-Burgett came across True Love Waits in 1996 at a youth service at her church in Abilene, Texas. She remembers feeling unsettled by it. “There was just something about it that confused me. But I did it because the church was my life.”

She said it felt like a one-time event at church and she hadn’t spoken to her parents about it. “So if they had a hundred kids signing this, then that would be something to celebrate,” she said.

The large number of young people participating certainly contributed to the purity movement being so well received.

Ross, co-founder of True Loves Waits, said the early 1990s were dominated by questions about how to mitigate the consequences of teenage sexual behavior. It was “a complete surprise to adults that teenagers would, of their own accord, wait until marriage to have sex without adult coercion,” he said.

Ross then heard from government politicians asking for advice. “They were just fascinated by what we had learned about young people who are, to use their words, choosing abstinence,” he said.

And he said True Love Waits is happy to help.

Shortly thereafter, federal funding was provided for abstinence-based programs such as Sex Respect and Choosing the Best, whose explicit goal was to “teach abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage as the expected standard for all school-age children.”

According to a report to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, states funded more than 700 programs in the first two years that money became available through the Welfare Reform Act.

But, says Ross, True Love Waits wasn’t among them. “We did this purely for the glory of God. So it would have been a little strange if the government had funded it.”

There has never been a national standard for sex education in the United States. States and local school boards set requirements for educating students about sex and their bodies.

Leslie Kantor, a professor of public health at Rutgers University, became involved in sex education in the 1990s. She documented hundreds of school board battles across the country.

“Conservative groups became increasingly organized and tried to replace existing health education programs with newly developed abstinence-until-marriage programs,” Kantor said.

Many temperance advocates were successful in doing so, especially in the South and more conservative states, while some states began to reject the grants and reject the criteria associated with them.

During President George W. Bush’s administration, abstinence organizations were able to apply for grants directly, without government assistance, through the Community-Based Abstinence Education program. At the same time, studies began to emerge showing that programs that focused exclusively on abstinence had no significant impact on the sexual behavior of the youth exposed to them.

In addition, a congressional report showed that 80% of funded programs contained “false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health.” Many of the abstinence-only curricula have been criticized for sexist or racist stereotypes and anti-LGBTQ+ language.

SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change is an organization that has advocated for comprehensive sex education since 1964. Their website features an interactive map that assigns grades A to F to states based on sex education requirements and content. They report that 35 states require an emphasis on abstinence and 17 states still only offer sex education that focuses on abstinence.

Most of these 17 states have teen pregnancy rates higher than the national average, and they are mostly located in the South and Midwest.

Although language in laws and programs may have shifted from “abstinence” to “avoiding sexual risks,” any sexual activity outside of marriage is still discouraged.

But even in comprehensive sex education classes, which are now standard in many countries, abstinence is still part of the curriculum, says Nawal Umar, policy analyst at SIECUS.

“It’s just equated with all the other options that are out there,” Umar said. “Because the reality is that abstinence is not going to be the choice that every young person makes.”

Jill Dender and Claire McKeever-Burgett are now married and live in Tennessee, a state that gets a C- on the SIECUS rating scale. The state requires sex education classes to focus on abstinence, and it has strict restrictions on contraceptive education. Teachers can even be sued if parents feel they are “promoting, advocating, coercing, or condoning initiatory sexual activity,” according to the Gateway Law.

Dender has seven children and homeschools them. She is still happy with her decision to wait to marry and wants her children to follow the same path when it comes to sexuality. But most of all, she wants her children to follow Jesus. “And when it’s all about Jesus, all the other things fall into place,” Dender said.

McKeever-Burgett says she is still a Christian, but goes against what she learned in the chastity movement. She said it left her without tools for her relationships and made her feel disconnected from her body. She wrote about this in her book, Blessed Are the Women.

She wants her two children to develop a better relationship with their bodies and to talk about their feelings without shame. “If you have access to that inner wisdom, I think you can live a really beautiful, free life. And that’s what I want for them in terms of sexuality and everything else.”

True Love Waits is still around 30 years later, but stopped selling pledge cards in 2017. The wording of the pledge has changed over time. The latest version of True Love Waits’ pledge does not explicitly mention sexual abstinence or even the word “purity.” Instead, children are asked to commit themselves to God “in a lifelong pursuit of personal holiness.”

And you’ll only come across it if you open one of their teen study guides to the back cover.

Copyright: NPR