4 Things the Purity Movement Got Right

Last week, my blog post looked at basics of the purity movement of the 1990’s and early 2000’s. You can go back to read the full post here, but here’s the Reader’s Digest version: It was a movement within the church to encourage Christian young people to stay sexually pure until marriage.

The purity movement still matters today because we need to be aware of our past so we can understand our present. Where we’ve been will have a huge effect on where we are going and what ways we may try to overcompensate for past mistakes. Next week, we’ll look at some of those mistakes we need to be aware.

This week, let’s start with the good. There are very few movements or ideas that are completely bad. Most, especially those in the church, have some merit. Before we go out to bash something, we should acknowledge its strengths and what it got right. Here are four things the purity movement got right:

1. God Wants Us to Be Pure

The main goal of the purity movement was a biblical and godly one. God calls us to be sexually pure. The Bible is very clear that sex is reserved for marriage. Both pre-marital and extra-marital sex are labeled as sins in the Bible.

While the world around us might think that having sex or fooling around with someone before marriage is totally fine, the Bible says otherwise. God designed sex as a part of marriage. He asks us to submit our lives to his original plans. The purity movement came about to help teach young people about God’s designs for sex and how they could live up to them.

2. Sex Is Serious

The culture at large sees sex as no big deal. On any drama show that you watch these days, everybody is sleeping with everybody else and it’s seen as normal. Pornography is rampant and even socially acceptable to some extent. It’s assumed that high school and college students are having sex and it’s not seen as a negative thing, generally.

The problem is that sex does have consequences. I’m not just talking about STD’s and pregnancy either. The purity movement acknowledged that having sex is not just a physical thing. Your emotions, thoughts, and even your spirituality are involved in the sexual act. Sex shouldn’t be casual because God meant it to be meaningful.

3. Christians Should Be Different

The purity movement called Christian young people to be different. They shouldn’t date like those around them that weren’t Christians. They shouldn’t follow the cultural norms in sleeping around. The movement called Christian young people to hold to God’s standards, not those of the world around them, even if that meant they were perceived as weird.

Can you take this whole being weird thing too far? Yes, you most definitely can. The idea is not to create our own Christian bubble world and not interact with the rest of humanity (which some in the church are always liable to do). The idea is that we should be in the world, but not of it. We should never compromise God’s standards in order to fit in with the world around us. The purity movement was not wrong when it said Christians should hold themselves to a different standard. That’s kind of what God has always called his people to do.

4. God should be Lord in every area of your life

Surrender was one of the themes that popped up in many purity movement books. The writers would call their reads to surrender their love lives, their sexual desires, and their relational goals to God. That is godly counsel. God doesn’t just want to be the person we turn to when we need saving (though he is that). He also wants us to let him be the Lord of every area in our lives. That includes our jobs, our families, our money, our sexuality, and our relationships.

Now, there are different ways to define surrendering your love life to God. I don’t actually think there’s one “right” way of surrendering (i.e. if you this or give up that, then you’ve completely surrendered your life to God). I think that looks very different depending on where you are in your life. How we surrender doesn’t really matter, as long as we’re doing it.

Let’s Acknowledge the Good and Have Grace

While there may be other things that the purity movement got “right”, there are the top things in my opinion. These are the things we shouldn’t throw out as we look critically at a movement that left a bad taste in so many people’s mouths.

The purity movement wasn’t perfect. We’ll talk about many of its flaws next week, but we should remember, it wasn’t all bad. The people who led the movement were just trying to help young people navigate a changing world. Their goal was the same as ours should be: to live their lives, and to help others live theirs, in a way that pleases God and gives glory to him. We should be as gracious to them as we want future generations to be to us.

Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash