Last week on the blog, we looked at some things that the purity movement got right. There were some good things about the movement, things that we need to remember and embrace.
However, there were many ways that the purity movement, though it had a good goal, went a little wonky. I’ve come up with eight ways that the purity movement went bad. This week we’ll look at the first four and next week we’ll cover the rest.
1. Inadvertent Gnosticism/Platonism (aka saying your body is bad)
Gnosticism and Platonism, without boring you to death about the details, are both systems of thought that see the body and the physical realm as of less importance than the spiritual one. Sometimes people who believe in these systems of thought even go so far as to say the body is bad or opposed to the spirit.
God made our bodies and he declared them to be be good, without reservation, in Genesis. Those good bodies have been corrupted by sin, but at the core, they are still good. One day, he will give us new bodies, physical bodies, that will be void of sin. Bodies are not inherently bad. Bodily functions are not inherently bad or dirty.
Now, to my knowledge, no one in the purity movement ever came out and said “bodies are bad.” However, this message was implicit in the way that the movement talked about the body and sexual desires. They were seen as something that needed to be defeated by being more spiritual. There wasn’t really space to appreciate the goodness of the body and the goodness of sexual desire, which God created to be a good thing.
One of the most sad outcomes of the purity movement were Christian couples who “stayed pure” until marriage, but then found they couldn’t enjoy married sex because they had been told sex was bad for so long. They had associated physical pleasure with sin and inadvertently become Gnostics or Platonists.
2. Making Marriage an Idol
In many ways, the purity movement made an idol out of marriage. The implicit message of the movement was that these rules and restrictions would help you have an amazing marriage. Now, marriage is a big deal. It’s important and most people will get married at some point.
However, the purity movement made it seem that everyone should be married as soon as possible because marriage is the best thing ever. According to the movement’s messaging, it’s the greatest thing that you can receive from God and the ultimate goal of the Christian life next to salvation.
That’s simply not true. Now, don’t get me wrong, God is a fan of marriage. He created it after all. However, he never decreed that everyone is going to get married or that everyone should get married.
Not everyone gets married. Jesus was God’s son and he never got married. Marriage has often been overemphasized by the church. The purity movement is just one more example of this overemphasis on marriage.
3. Seeing Sex as a Reward
The logic of the purity movement is this: if you can be good and keep yourself from sexual sin until you get married, after you get married your sex life will be ultra satisfying and amazing. Marriage, and therefore sex, are the rewards that you get for being “good.”
There are several problems with this logic. First of all, sex isn’t always great in marriage. Sex is especially not great in marriage when you don’t know what the heck you’re doing. Young couples coming out of the purity movement often had super high expectations for married sex and then found themselves disappointed when it wasn’t all they had dreamed of, at least not a first.
Secondly, even if a couple goes on to have a great sex life, seeing sex as a reward is problematic. Neither sex or marriage are a reward. They are simply gifts of God’s grace (more on that next week)
Lastly, seeing sex as a reward puts an unhealthy emphasis on sex. Sex is a part of marriage, but it’s far from the most important part. Putting too big an emphasis on married sex is just as damaging as the world’s overemphasis on sex in general. In all cases, sex becomes the focus wrongfully and throws things out of wack. Sex is a piece of something bigger, marriage, not the be all and end all that we often make it out to be.
4. Thinking Everything Depends on You
The subtle teaching of the purity movement is if you do the right things, you will have a great marriage and please God. The truth is that whether you do the “right” things or not, it doesn’t matter. You still can’t ever please God. It’s only by God’s grace and Jesus’ sacrifice that we can please God. There’s nothing you can do to make God love you more. There’s nothing you can do to make him love you less. God’s goodness and his gifts are not dependent on our actions.
Additionally, just because you do the right things, that doesn’t mean that you will get good results. While there are some places in the Bible where that is the case, there are other places where it’s clearly not. The books of Job and Ecclesiastes confirm the fact that sometime things bad things happen to the best of us. Other times, those who do evil prosper, at least on this side of heaven. We don’t earn a single good thing that we get. They are all gifts of God’s grace, given and taken at his leisure and good will.
Behaving well does not guarantee that God will give us good things. Behaving badly does not disqualify us from God’s good gifts. God is gracious and he often gives us things that we don’t deserve. When we try to behave a certain way in order to “earn” a gift of God’s grace, we’re doomed to fail.
What’s the Point?
Those are just a couple of things the purity movement got wrong. There are four more things that we’ll look at next week. Remember, we’re not looking at this in order to hate on the movement. It had some value too. However, we have to know what went wrong and what went right so we can learn from the past and create a better future.
[…] Last week’s blog post listed four of the 8 major flaws that the purity movement had. While these weren’t things the purity movement set out to do, they were unintended consequences of its main messages about purity, sexuality, etc. We left off with problem number four last week, so we’ll pick up with number five this week. […]