“Teenage Dream” by Katy Perry, Sunday, February 7, 2021

 

For today’s blog post, I am going to assign a lot of homework. By the end of the lesson, you will know all about purity culture and how it affected a generation or two of evangelicals. The Cliff’s Notes version: purity culture is the belief that teenagers should wait until they are married in a heterosexual marriage. That is the only way to be blessed by God. Purity culture was steeped in evangelical and even crossed over to pop culture until the late 2000s. There were rallies called True Love Waits, and there were songs like Rebecca St. James' "Wait for Me." Some may even recall The Jonas Brothers wore purity rings, which were quite common among evangelical teenagers, and parishioners of the 20th-century doctrine. The idea was you wore the purity ring until you replaced it with a wedding ring. The Jonas Brothers have since taken them off.

YOU THINK I'M PRETTY WITHOUT ANY MAKEUP ON. One of my favorite podcasts, Good Christian Fun, talks about Christian pop culture. The first episode was about Katie Perry’s Christian album, the self-titled Katy Hudson. Hudson is the singer's actual surname. Later episodes have talked about Katy Perry from multiple angles and how she influenced other artists around that time. The daughter of a Pentecostal pastor, Katy Perry was obviously aware of purity culture. There are rumors that the song on the same album “The One That Got Away” is about her ex-boyfriend Matt Thiessen, the frontman of the youth-group favorite Christian punk band Relient K. Katy Perry is somewhat of a legend of the CCM scene. From songwriting sessions with Jennifer Knapp to featuring on P.O.D.’s "Goodbye for Now," Perry was set for quite a career in Christian music. Speaking of goodbyes, Joshua Harris wrote a book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which was very popular among my classmates. He argues in the book that teens should not date casually, but rather focus on finding the right one through courting. Harris and Evangelical thought leaders inculcated a single interpretation of sexual purity for a generation. Juxtaposed to that book, Katy Perry’s first hit "I Kissed a Girl," showed the star popularizing bi-curiosity. How far the evangelical darling had fallen. Youth pastors doubled down on the message, yet it seemed everyone was having sex. And if they weren’t having regular sex, they were doing oral or anal. Christian teens either hid it, denied to themselves that it happened, or just took the hit of shame and were ostracized. I used to think, “It’s just my youth group, right? Somehow we let in secular influence that others hadn’t." 

LET’S GO ALL THE WAY TONIGHT. I’m very hesitant to share personal stories because I’m a teacher employed by a Christian school. However, I’ve been in a state of self-censorship for years. I hope that the wrong person doesn’t read my blog. But if you can't talk about your views as a teacher, what's the point of teaching? I think that as I keep writing the personal stories will come, but I’d rather spend the end of this post giving a collection of resources on how I would advise others dealing with the traumas of purity culture and what to teach teenagers today. Two podcast episodes of You Have Permission about Purity Culture and Shame, the latter with therapist Matthias Roberts who wrote a book called Beyond Shame: Creating a Healthy Sex Life on Your Own Terms, which is on my Kindle waiting to be read. The people who teach us that the Bible is very clear haven’t read it without their own cultural biases. Repression has caused sex to get weird. It has messed up generations of people. It's time to stop scaring and start healing. Sexually healing.

Read the lyrics on Genius.