What Did Purity Culture Get Wrong...AND Right?
Inside This Episode
The generation born into evangelical purity culture has grown up, and many have started families of their own. But as time goes on, it's becoming more evident that many still struggle with purity culture's complicated legacy―its idolization of virginity, its mixed messages about modesty and lust, and its promise of a healthy marriage and great sex for those who follow the rules.
In this interview, Eric chats with celebrated author Rachel Joy Welcher about purity culture's effects on her own journey with sex and marriage. Rachel also carefully examines purity culture’s teachings through the lens of Scripture and offers practical advice for the Christians attempting to navigate heated debates about LGBT+ relationships, premarital sex, and more.
Read Rachel’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Talking-Back-Purity-Culture-Rediscovering/dp/0830848169
Transcript
Eric Huffman: The generation born into evangelical purity culture has grown up, and many have started families of their own. But as time goes on, it's becoming evident that many still struggle with purity culture's complicated legacy.
Today's guest, Rachel Joy Welcher, is no exception. In her latest book, Rachel examines the purity movement and charts a path forward for Christians in the ongoing debate about sexuality.
Rachel Joy Welcher, welcome to the Maybe God podcast. I'm so glad you're here.
Rachel Joy Welcher: Oh, it's great to be here.
Eric Huffman: Great. So we've tried to do this for a few weeks now. You've been fighting off an illness. We finally made it work, and I'm pumped.
Rachel Joy Welcher: Yep, I've still got a little laryngitis. So sorry about that, audience.
Eric Huffman: That's okay. We'll make it work with your Janice Joplin voice.
Rachel Joy Welcher: Yes, that's right.
Eric Huffman: We'll power through. So, we want to eventually get around to talking about this new book that you have written, Talking Back to Purity Culture. How new is it?
Rachel Joy Welcher: You know, actually, it's been out for about three years, which feels crazy, but what's exciting is it seems like it's still got a shelf life. People are still talking about it and discovering it.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, the buzz around it is new. It feels new.
Rachel Joy Welcher: It does feel that way, yeah. I'm just thankful that God's continuing to use it. It's such a gift.
Eric Huffman: Cool, it is. We'll get to that in just a second, but first, just tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background and where you're from.
Rachel Joy Welcher: Yeah. Well, right now I live in South Dakota in a small college town. I married a pastor about six years ago, and so we serve the little town of Vermillion, South Dakota. We've got a 3-year-old daughter named Hildegard and a little boy on the way. So, God has been so kind.
My story's long. I won't share the whole thing, but I had another marriage before that that ended in unwanted divorce. And so God has really just redeemed things that I didn't think He could and has given me so much beauty and good.
I work for Lexham Press. I'm an acquisitions editor. I write books, mostly poetry, actually, but also theology. My degree is from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Actually, my degree is called Bible and the Contemporary World. It was such a fun program to do. I loved it.
This book really fit in with thinking about what the Bible says about these current topics, and so I decided to dig into purity culture for my dissertation.
Eric Huffman: Okay. I've heard and read where you talk and write about, your reasons for writing this book in particular, and it could come across as just critical of the church, like, you know, just sort of a critique of Christians and the conservative sort of ethos and what harm it does. That's not really your angle, though, is it? I sense a different kind of perspective.
Rachel Joy Welcher: That's right. I think the title is a little sassy. If people just read the title, they often think that I'm just putting down the church. But the truth is, I'm still in the church. I'm a pastor's wife, I'm a Baptist, and I love the church as imperfect as she is.
I actually wrote the book because I really wanted us to continue to talk about sexuality from a biblical perspective but without the baggage that I feel like we gained during that purity culture movement. And because I was young, I was a teenager during that movement, I really wanted to kind of go back and revisit it and say, Ask myself, which of those lessons, which of those internalized messages actually came from Scripture?
So my goal with this book is not to tear down the church but to try to build her back up in the right ways, which, of course, I can't do perfectly because I'm very imperfect. But that was my goal, was that we would be more biblical, not less, in how we talk about sexuality.
Eric Huffman: I appreciate that. I think it comes through in your writing. Whoever's listening right now, I hope they'll check out Talking Back to Purity Culture.
Let's talk more specifically about purity culture itself. You just described it as sort of, I forget the word you use, like a phase or a season in church life, but-
Rachel Joy Welcher: Kind of a movement.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. What is that movement or what was it? Is it still around today? If we could just put some parameters or boundaries around that.
Rachel Joy Welcher: Right. It's challenging because the idea of like a Victorian-era purity culture, you know, it's been around forever. But what I'm referring to is this sort of evangelical trend that happened coming out of the 70s and 80s where there was just this huge wave of fear about teen pregnancy and STDs, which I guess now we call STIs.
So parents were just scrambling to figure out how do we get our children to commit to abstinence so that they don't get hurt? I mean, really that was kind of the... it was a very fear-based response. An understandable response, but very fear-based.
And so what came out of that were all these books and conferences and pledges and rings and even purity balls where parents were trying to get their children to make this lifelong commitment that they'd wait until marriage to have sex.
While there was absolutely some biblical basis for that, it became kind of its own thing. And one of the reasons it did is because when abstinence education was introduced to public schools, they had to take the message of Jesus out. So you continued to be taught about abstinence, but the gospel was just missing. I think that that did impact how the church talked about it as well.
It became very much this man-centered, human effort thing where if you do good, you get good, and if you do bad, you get bad. And there's really no gospel in that.
Eric Huffman: What part of the country did you grow up in?
Rachel Joy Welcher: California. Northern California.
Eric Huffman: In a Baptist church, is that right?
Rachel Joy Welcher: A Bible church. My dad was the pastor. So I've been a pastor kid my whole life. And now I have a pastor's wife. I can't seem to get out of it.
Eric Huffman: Nothing wrong with that. I like that. I have a similar story. I grew up in the Bible Belt, Northeast Texas in a rural area. And it's interesting. I read your book and I hear other testimonies about what it was like to grow up. When I grew up and in the culture I supposedly grew up in, but I don't remember being that hammered or having this pounded into us as youth. And maybe it was because we were Methodist and Methodists are not quite as hardcore about some things.
I do remember a little bit of it, but I don't remember the traumatic unequal justice, if you will, especially where boys and girls are concerned or some of the other things. We never have purity balls or... I barely have memories of purity rings when I grew up, which is surprising to me because I can't imagine a more Christian setting than the one I grew up in in the 80s and 90s at the height of this purity culture sort of phenomenon.
So when did you first sort of experience this as a child or as a teenager growing up and how did that look?
Rachel Joy Welcher: It wasn't really from my parents. I feel like they did a great job of talking honestly about sex and the Bible. But the thing is, is that there were these books coming out like, I Kissed Satan Goodbye and Passion and Purity and The Bride Wore White. All parents knew is that Christians were writing about biblical sexuality and what could go wrong, right?
So what happened was parents just bought these books for their kids, their teenagers, and handed them to them. And so we were all reading them. We weren't reading them as a group though. We weren't discussing them. We weren't even discussing them with our parents, frankly. We were just reading them and internalizing these messages. And so it was kind of a strange thing.
You'd occasionally go to a purity conference and get a real intense weekend of make sure that you save virginity for marriage because it's the greatest gift you could ever give someone else. And all the books emphasize that. It was a regular topic in youth group. Also, modesty was the girls would regularly get separated from the boys to be talked to about what we wore.
For me, I had it in my mind, the way to be godly was to not have sex before marriage. Of course, I had a great biblical education from church and I knew there was a lot more to Christianity than that. And thankfully, around 11 and 12, I really did become a true Christian and started talking to God on my own and reading my Bible on my own. But I was internalizing these messages.
Here's a story to illustrate this. My best friend got pregnant when she was 15. And I remember thinking that, Oh, I guess she's not really a Christian. To me, that was the only explanation because why would she have had sex before marriage? That's kind of what was communicated to me is that there are some unforgivable sins or at least sins that will ruin your life so completely that you will never be the same again and you will never be able to really fully have a good future marriage or life.
So while other sins were emphasized, I think purity was kind of the gold standard for us teenagers that if we could just make it to our wedding day's virgins, then we were Christians.
Eric Huffman: Did you experience an unequal sort of share of that as a young woman versus the young men you grew up with?
Rachel Joy Welcher: For sure. I mean, you know, silly things like at youth Bible camp, we had to wear big floppy shirts over our bathing suits and the guys could run around in shorts with no shirt, you know, that kind of thing. Whereas, of course, the teenage hormones were raging on both sides, but it was assumed that women were kind of sexless and men were these lust machines.
So I definitely believed... and again, I did get this from my parents. I got it from the books, but I definitely believed that my body could cause someone to sin. And so even though I was just kind of a skinny, awkward teenager, I felt this responsibility beyond my years that if I wore the wrong thing, I could cause a godly man in church, like I could cause his downfall. And it was a lot of pressure to put on a small, scrawny teenage body and [inaudible 00:10:22]. And yet that's what I was reading and that's what I was told.
So I did start to view my body as kind of a stumbling block rather than the fact that I was fearfully and wonderfully made. I think men were picking up their own twisted, internalized messages that we can talk about, but I don't believe that modesty was something that was emphasized to men.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, for sure. It wouldn't even have made sense, I think, for most men and young men in the culture at the time to even think about male modesty and how it could... you know, I've never once thought I could put a woman's soul in danger by wearing the wrong thing. If anything, I've had the opposite. Well, anyway, I won't get into that.
But I do think that sometimes I read books in this genre or hear people talk about purity culture strictly from a... usually, it's a female author or speaker, and I hear it just strictly from like a victimhood standpoint where young women were victimized by this culture in ways that young men weren't. And something in me just kind of wants to push back a little against that. And I don't think that's what you're saying necessarily. I think you're saying it was, there was good and bad in it for everyone.
Rachel Joy Welcher: For sure.
Eric Huffman: But I think just like you would say in that context, you were made to feel like your body was some sort of potential weapon of mass destruction. I think young men in that context were made to feel like our eyes were, and our lust, our feelings, or whatever were. I'm not saying it was equal because I still think fundamentally the reality was when a girl had sex and it was known, somehow her value was diminished.
Rachel Joy Welcher: That's right.
Eric Huffman: Versus a man, he just sort of messed up and that's what guys do, but his value wasn't diminished. I don't think that's a strictly Christian phenomenon though. I think that's cultural and the church just sort of picked up on it and went with it where we should have questioned it. What do you think about sort of what the damage done to young men in a purity culture like the one we're describing?
Rachel Joy Welcher: Well, I love that you're asking that because I think you're right that so far the conversation has been a bit one-sided. And even in my book, I focus on more on the damage to women just because I'm speaking as a woman. But my goodness, men were absolutely harmed by this movement.
We talk about the dehumanization of women when they're sexualized, but men were dehumanized in a different way. And I truly believe they internalized that. I interviewed quite a few men when I was writing this book and they said what they walked away with was that they were constantly on the verge of sexual sin, almost as though self-control, that fruit of the spirit didn't exist for them.
And so in some ways, other authors have pointed out that it was almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy where men were talked to so often about lust that it kind of became an obsession. One of the most common stories I've heard is that they were so ashamed that they went into the dark with porn.
So what you end up hearing is so many young Christian men now having families and they're older now, still dealing with these addictions to pornography because when they were a teenager, maybe they were even in junior high, they were curious about sex and that alone made them feel ashamed. And so instead of having open conversations, they went to the internet, which was pretty new then.
I think men have been sold this unbiblical message that they are somehow less than fully human, that they're these lust machines or even animals. That is just so unbiblical. It's so dishonoring to men. Scripture says that anyone who has the Holy Spirit can resist flesh. Women are not more sexually pure than men. Women are not morally superior to men. I talk about that in my book. In fact, talking about women as morally superior puts a lot of pressure on them and it's so degrading to men.
So I think you're absolutely right that... and it's not talked about enough because I think men often... they don't know how to broach the subject because they're so often the enemy in this story. But that's part of the problem is that they were told that they were the enemy from the beginning.
So we grow up scared of our sexuality. Men are scared that they're going to become an animal if they look too closely at a woman and women are scared that they're gonna awaken the dragon or the animal. And so then we don't even know how to interact with each other in healthy, pure ways because we've been told that we're gonna bring each other down. I think you see that in the modern church today, that men and women don't quite know how to be friends.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, no. It's really interesting. I do want to touch on some of those things with you, but I sort of got us off track. I want to hear more of your story and your personal experience. I know when you were very young, you fell in love and you sort of did things the right way. Just talk a little bit about that first relationship.
Rachel Joy Welcher: I mentioned that I was married before and I kind of followed the typical pattern where I went to Bible college. And after I graduated shortly after, I married a man that I met in Bible college. We were both raised in Christian homes. We both read the books, the purity books, and I saved my first kiss, not for the altar, but for him. He was my first kiss.
Eric Huffman: First kiss?
Rachel Joy Welcher: Yeah.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Rachel Joy Welcher: And so I had it in my head that if I gave away too many firsts, then I wouldn't have those firsts for my husband. I remember dating other guys and thinking, okay, I don't know if I'm gonna marry them so I can't kiss them. And I'm not saying that's right or wrong. It's just that it was kind of an interesting extra-biblical line that was drawn for me in this hand. I'm not saying I regret saving my kiss for him, but all that to say we tried to do it right.
And so we dated for a long time. We practiced the purity culture rules imperfectly, but you know, pretty well. I really thought that because I'd obeyed God, that it meant that our marriage would last, that sex would have no hitches, it would be pure and undefiled, and that we'd have children easily and all those things.
What ended up happening is, first of all, I brought a lot of my own shame. Even though I was a virgin when I got married, I still had sexual shame. I brought that into our marriage and I know that impacted our sex life, but it wasn't even that. My husband, about five years into our marriage, he just decided he wasn't a Christian anymore. I mean, I could have never predicted that. No one that knew us could have.
At some point, he said he didn't want to be married to a Christian anymore, essentially, and he left me. And so here I was like almost 30, I was about 29, and I thought I'd done everything right and I thought I'd earned these good gifts. And now I was this divorcee. Not a virgin, right? I can't marry another guy and give him that special gift that purity culture said was so irreplaceable.
You also feel like a failure when you're divorced, no matter what the circumstances are. You feel like people... I moved back home and all these people that I'd grown up with in church, you know, had celebrated my marriage and now here I'm home five years later, divorced.
I had to really reckon with what I had believed I deserved. Like, was God punishing me? Did I fail somehow and so he was punishing me? Or is it possible that you are not promised marriage and sex and happiness forever if you follow certain rules, right? Is it possible that that is a prosperity gospel full of lies? So I really just had to dig in.
That's when I went back to grad school and that's when I started studying this topic from a theological perspective. And it was really helpful on a personal level for me because I had to deal with some of these messages I'd internalized and figure out why I felt like a failure or why I was angry with God, frankly.
But I think what you'll see too is so many people coming out of this movement are so angry with God because they were taught that if they stayed pure, they would get a husband or a wife and some of them are still single. Or they aren't even attracted to the opposite gender and they're frustrated. They're like, wait, now what do I do? Or they are divorced now, or they've been sexually abused and all this baggage where they're crying out to God saying, I thought you were gonna give me good gifts.
One of the biggest things I've learned throughout my life is that God can allow great suffering for those that He loves. All you have to do is look at Jesus. All you have to do is picture that scene on Gethsemane where... sorry, always makes me tear up. But you know, He asks God if there's any other way and God says no.
So if God can allow that kind of suffering for His beloved Son and He still loved Him, then we need to know that when we suffer, God still loves us too. And He hasn't abandoned us.
Eric Huffman: Do you think people tend to be more angry with God or are they angry with the church and the messages and messengers?
Rachel Joy Welcher: I think you just nailed it. I think they really are angry with the church and maybe it's misdirected anger because they have a view of God that isn't biblical, frankly, right? And so what some of these people are going back to Scripture and they're saying, Oh wait, this isn't what Jesus is like. But then they're still mad at the church because the church is the one who lied to them. That's how they feel.
So we understandably have this deconstruction reckoning happening, but it is so grievous because we also know that the church is God's plan for us right now here on earth, as imperfect as it is. What I want to say to so many is please return and help us be better. Come back to church. We need to apologize and we need to get back to Scripture and we need to love each other because we need each other until Christ returns.
That's what I want to say to those who are deconstructing. They can keep deconstructing and trying to figure out what's biblical and what's not, but don't abandon Christ, and don't abandon His bride.
Eric Huffman: It is interesting to me to see how many of the deconstructing stories that pop up in Christian world right now, whether it's worship-leading celebrities or former pastors or whoever, how much of it seems to be around sex and issues of sexuality. I mean, that Venn diagram isn't a perfect circle, but it's close.
Rachel Joy Welcher: No, you are absolutely right. And I think that's part of the reason we have to talk about purity culture. I mean, some people are just so sick of it. They're like, move on. But the problem is, is that there was a lot of damage done. And if we don't help people unravel truth from lies, then they may never return to the church or they may never return to Christ. And so it does matter. We do have to talk about it.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. I'd like to hear any other stories that sort of came into your purview as a result of your research for this book or stories that inspired you along the journey. What other kinds of testimonies did you come across?
Rachel Joy Welcher: I mean, I definitely interviewed people who now three years later, four years later, are no longer walking with the Lord. That's challenging.
Eric Huffman: Three years or four years later from what?
Rachel Joy Welcher: From interviewing them.
Eric Huffman: Okay.
Rachel Joy Welcher: I guess it's been about four or five years, actually, because I spent quite a few years on this book. I probably either in person or via survey, I interviewed about 100 people. And I do have to say, sadly, that quite a few of them have just completely abandoned, at least the Christian faith as I see it in scripture. So some of them still claim to be Christians, but they're preaching a different gospel, right? And some of them have just completely abandoned the faith.
Others though, I think... I've seen a great deal of healing take place as we've talked about these subjects. I go to colleges occasionally... I mean, I've got a toddler, so it's pretty rare. But I got to Biola University in Southern California a few months ago and speak at one of their conferences. That was an incredible experience because I thought, okay, these kids, they didn't grow up with this like I did. So it's probably not gonna resonate, but I'm gonna do my best.
I was so wrong. I received... I don't even know how to explain the response. It was absolutely the Holy Spirit and not me, but they were clinging on to every word. And it was like shame was being released, you know, in community. And these kids came up to me and they were sharing their stories. What I saw was that this generation really cares about holiness, which to me, I mean, I didn't know that. You read all these things about this generation that are not flattering, but honestly, that's not what I've seen.
My husband and I lead a college group here and these kids are so earnest. They want to know what is true. They want to get it right. And they are not afraid to talk about things. That's something really beautiful and hopeful I see is that my generation, we would read about sex and purity, but we didn't talk about it out loud unless it was like one youth leader preaching, right? And we'd giggle. We'd giggle.
Kids in that room were struggling with masturbation and pornography and all sorts of things, they've been sexually abused, and we didn't say any of that out loud. This generation, they don't have any problem with it.
After I spoke, one young man came up to me and said, "Oh, thank you so much. I really struggle with masturbation and I'm gonna think about what you said." I mean, he just said it in front of everyone. To me, that was just incredible because I've never been able to talk about my sins. Well, Luther said to sin boldly because Christ forgives. And so what I felt like was this kid was like, "Yeah, this is what I'm dealing with and God knows, and I'm gonna try to fight it." It was really beautiful and really, really different than what I grew up with. So I have a lot of hope that these conversations are going to produce good fruit.
Eric Huffman: Well, I think it's obvious to me that purity culture didn't emerge randomly. It didn't emerge out of some vacuum of the church not talking about sexual sin before and it just suddenly started. The church has always lifted up certain ideals. I mean, I'm sure there are exceptions. But Christianity has always been about faithfulness, including our sexuality. Sex has always been held as sort of ideally for marriage and in that sacred bond. I guess I want to ask you, as much as you are a critic of purity culture, what was right about it?
Rachel Joy Welcher: I love that question because I think there was a lot right about it, at least the foundation, before it became this snowball going downhill, gathering sticks and mud. The teaching that sex was created to be a very exclusive thing by God to be experienced in a covenant, I believe that that is absolutely biblical and you'll see it all throughout scripture. And people can absolutely find ways around it, but that doesn't mean it's right. You know, we read about it from the beginning. That's how God created sex.
Sex is not something that continues in heaven. It's a very temporal expression that's supposed to reflect intimacy and unity and the way God loves us. And so sex is not meant to be this right that we all are guaranteed that you have the right to sex whenever you want, with whoever, however. That's not in scripture. That's in our culture, but it's not in scripture.
I still believe that God got sex right and that ideally, biblically, sex is supposed to be experienced in the safety and beauty of covenant. Now, we know that in this fallen world, sexual abuse happens, even in marriage. So we know that even in that context that's supposed to be beautiful, it isn't always beautiful.
But I do fully believe that even though we have corrupted sexuality, that it can still be beautiful, that God said that it was good. It wasn't the fall of mankind, right? When Eve ate the apple, it wasn't... you know, she didn't seduce Adam. That wasn't the fall of mankind. Sex was God's idea.
So I do believe that He gets to set the parameters and that even if the culture says those parameters are outdated, I don't really care because we have to follow the God of the Bible. So I do believe that God's ideas surrounding sex are right and good.
I think it's very hard to live in this world and in these bodies, because the truth is, you have godly Christians out there who long to be married and to have sex, and that's a good thing, but they haven't found anyone. And so, you know, they're hearing that sex is this good, but they don't get to experience it. And so they feel frustration or maybe go outside of God's plan and have sex outside marriage.
I don't want to make it sound like God's biblical sexual ethic is easy. I think it's probably one of the hardest things to follow as embodied beings, this side of heaven. And I think we have to cry out to Him often in loneliness.
After my divorce, I just felt very broken sexually. It was like, what is my sexuality for? I tried to turn that into lament and just to cry out to God and say, "Hey, this is difficult, help me. And what I should have done is talk to other Christians and been more honest.
Eric Huffman: Well, there's also the other side of it that you've mentioned in your book and you've alluded to it in this conversation of the disappointment that happens in marriage when someone does follow the rules and sex ain't great or sex is non-existent or sex is painful or sex is even abusive or whatever. And then I see a recipe for disaster there because there was this sense of entitlement that was built up about what we deserve. And then marriages fall apart.
Rachel Joy Welcher: We've got to keep talking about that because in terms of the feedback I've received since the book came out, that's probably the biggest.
Eric Huffman: Really?
Rachel Joy Welcher: Is married people saying my husband and I, my wife and I, we read the book and we had this discussion that we have needed to have for years. I think you're right. The word "entitled" is the right word. I truly felt entitled when I got married. I thought that if I stayed pure, then I have the right to express my sexuality whenever I wanted.
The idea that sex was actually supposed to be this selfless thing where you're honoring your spouse, it's self-giving. That was not what was in my mind. I think that whether you're a male or female, purity culture set us up to be demanding of sex and marriage. There is nothing further from the truth that God wanted... Sex was supposed to be unifying, not demanding, and selfish.
In Christian marriages, I think there was a lot of disappointment and maybe conflict when people had different views of what sex was supposed to be or how often and all those things. Even beyond that, when it came to having children, I've lost four babies. So many of my peers have struggled with fertility and miscarriage. And that too has been this big, why God? I thought you said that if I didn't get any STDs and I didn't have a teen pregnancy that I would be able to have children easily. I mean, there was one book that said that if you followed God's laws, you would have children with ease. I mean, that's a direct quote.
Eric Huffman: Is that even a thing? I've never delivered a child, but it doesn't look easy.
Rachel Joy Welcher: It is not. Honestly, I think the word "disenchantment" is what I would use, that there's just been a lot of disenchantment. What's so sad is that those marriages could have just been joyous, you know? And instead these messages, these expectations that weren't realistic crept in and have been very destructive. And yes, I've seen marriages end in divorce because of it, for sure.
Eric Huffman: Along those same lines, I think to a lesser extent, there's a problem. You illustrate it in your book a little, I think, where you talk about difference in expectation about sexual fulfillment being more about the male satisfaction than the female satisfaction. Is that something people experienced having been raised in purity cultures? Is that something you experienced? Did you either directly or indirectly get that message that sex is primarily for him to enjoy and not for her?
Rachel Joy Welcher: So there've been some authors since my book came out who are writing specifically about that. And I think that's a really important subject. But yeah, absolutely. I think one of the reasons why women have often gone into marriage thinking that sex is for men is because we were taught that if men don't get sex often enough in marriage, that they will stray and that it will be our fault. That's kind of a whole nother subject, but it's absolutely entwined in purity culture and in conservative churches where if a husband cheats, the wife is asked, what did or didn't you do to keep him happy?
Eric Huffman: Well, again, and I'll say, I think... not to interrupt you, but I would say, I think that's a cultural thing. I think I hear that in the world. I see that argument on TikTok. It's like, you gotta keep your man happy or he'll step out. And it's just the church co-opting, a tired worldly commentary rather than creating one of our own.
Rachel Joy Welcher: I like that you just used the word worldly. So much of purity culture is worldly. You put purity in front of something and it sounds biblical, but no, it was just worldly messages that crept in.
Eric Huffman: Yeah.
Rachel Joy Welcher: I think it was maybe Dobson who said that if married men didn't have sex every three days or they didn't experience that release, that... it was just this idea that like men would explode or something. I've talked to men and women who said that... like the guy is like, why does my wife think... like my wife wants sex every three days? And then she's like, no, I thought you needed it. Like, no, like I'm okay with resting a little bit.
So here's another topic is that men and women were often taught these things in segregation. So men have no idea some of the weird stuff that we were taught about them and vice versa. And so women have these weird ideas about male sexuality, totally neglecting the fact that every man is different, just like every woman is different, right? So you enter marriage and you think, okay, I have to do this, this, and this, or he's not gonna be happy, or I'm not being a good wife.
Eric Huffman: It's like changing the oil in the car almost. It's like an obligatory.
Rachel Joy Welcher: And not romantic and not... and again... so then the woman, maybe it's not that she thought her pleasure didn't matter, but you can't focus on your pleasure when you're just trying to keep your husband from cheating.
Eric Huffman: Right.
Rachel Joy Welcher: Right?
Eric Huffman: Yeah, sure.
Rachel Joy Welcher: Also, again, how dehumanizing to men to assume that if your husband doesn't get enough sex, he's gonna cheat. That's not dignifying of men to assume that. And so, oh, just so many messages to unpack.
Eric Huffman: Right. And I can honestly say throughout all my years in ministry and working with couples and marriages that fall apart, far more marriages have fallen apart because if the defining sort of issue was sex, it's usually the woman who's not getting enough and she leaves. And so it's just this sort of mind blower, like, you know, it's supposed to be the guy that's supposed to be the sex craze machine and women are human too and women have certain needs that can go unmet. And so, yeah, I think the messaging around it is limiting for sure, if not dehumanizing to everyone involved.
Rachel Joy Welcher: Absolutely, yeah. Purity culture absolutely made it seem as though women were not as sexual as men. That message alone has wreaked havoc in marriages.
Eric Huffman: Wow. Man.
Rachel Joy Welcher: So much.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, it's so good. I feel like I could talk to you about this stuff all day, honestly, because it's so important. We haven't even gotten to what might be the most important part of this conversation, which is just like, where do we go from here, what are you proposing for churches, and what we're teaching new generations about sex and sexual fulfillment? Clearly, you're not saying, let's throw it all out and just to each their own.
I mean, I will tell you, coming out of a mainline denomination recently, I was Methodist forever until two years ago, I saw that's where it's going, is that in mainline denominations, the new sexual ethic is essentially... now this isn't everyone, but it seems to be trending toward two consenting adults, hopefully in love. And that's as much as you need to rightfully have sex with each other.
Rachel Joy Welcher: Well, and frankly, not just two.
Eric Huffman: Right.
Rachel Joy Welcher: More and more about polyamory.
Eric Huffman: Sure, yeah. Ethical non-monogamy, they call it. Anyway, I don't want to be like the sky is falling about that stuff, but I do think that is on the way and it's happening. So what's your proposal about sexual Christian education?
Rachel Joy Welcher: Well, after the book came out, quite a few more liberal Christians read it because of the title and got really upset with me because within the book is a reassertion of what God says about sex, that it is supposed to be in covenant between a man and a woman for life. And of course, a million caveats because I'm divorced and I'm married again. But I try to reassert what scripture says about sexuality with the compassion that we live in a fallen world.
Where do we go from here? It's a huge question. Now that I have a daughter, I've been thinking about it a lot and I'm going to have a son. So I'm going to be thinking about it from a totally different angle. What do I teach them about their bodies? What do I teach them about sex? What do I teach them about what they're hearing from their peers about sexuality and gender confusion? I mean, there are so many... I shouldn't say they're new struggles, but the extent to which they are prevalent now is different than when I was a kid.
One of the things I say in my book is that it starts with just reminding your children that their bodies and their sexuality, which will come, right? Like people experience sexuality in different ways, but everyone is a sexual being, however that manifests itself. And God made us that way.
And so to teach your children to expect that they're going to be sexual beings and to not feel immediate shame just for being human and having curiosity and desires. I think that's a huge part. And that starts with just when they ask questions as innocent children about their bodies, that we answer them honestly. We try not to giggle and we try not to make it seem like they shouldn't be asking.
One of the biggest things that happened in my generation, and then when I was a high school teacher, my students shared that they weren't getting answers to their questions because it made the adults in their lives embarrassed. And so they went to the internet. And of course, what they found there led them to lifelong addictions.
That's just one thing we can do moving forward is talk to our kids really honestly about sexuality. Don't make them feel ashamed for wondering. Don't make them feel ashamed for their questions because if you don't answer them, they will find the answer somewhere else. I think that alone could be transformative.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, and the answers they find somewhere else just could run the gamut.
Rachel Joy Welcher: Oh, just devastating.
Eric Huffman: Oh, man.
Rachel Joy Welcher: One of my high school students, when I was a teacher, she said that she got addicted to porn through Pinterest because there were pictures on Pinterest of romantic settings. And those led to other pictures, and it just led down to this black hole. And I just couldn't believe it. Pinterest is like where you pin recipes and wedding dresses.
Eric Huffman: Maybe the least pornographic corner of the internet.
Rachel Joy Welcher: I thought so, yeah.
Eric Huffman: That's not my porn story. To each their own, I guess. But it's scary what happens to that God-ordained sexual desire He creates in us if we're not honest about it, if we're not having conversations that are healthy and good, conversations about it, and if we're just driving ourselves and each other further into the shadows, bad things happen in the shadows.
Rachel Joy Welcher: If we can get our children out of the shadows with this topic, that could be huge.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Because the world's different now. One of the major challenges is the teachings of the church in the past fit the culture where people were getting married at 20 and 21, or earlier sometimes. Now if people get married at all, it's usually upwards of 30, 30 plus. So we're asking single Christians to remain celibate, or at least seem to remain celibate, publicly remain celibate, as far as the church knows, through their sexual peak, especially at least for men, I think the sexual peak used to be known as 18 to 25. But the 20s are a really tough time in your life to be celibate.
Rachel Joy Welcher: They are. We have so many single people in that age range in the church right now. And we do need to listen to them. We need to hear their frustration. We need to come alongside them in the ways that they want us to. If they want us to set them up, set them up. If they want us to not try to fix singleness like it's a problem, then don't talk about it. Just invite them over for dinner. But we need to care for the singles in our churches because they are struggling.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, for sure. I had an interesting conversation the other day after church. It kind of blew my mind. I haven't talked about it yet. I've been hesitant too. I don't want this person to feel like I'm airing their dirty laundry. But I've talked to her about it and as long as I don't mention her name and things, I think it's cool for me to share.
Just the particulars of this story just stuck out to me because she just moved to Houston. She was looking for what she called like an orthodox church, theologically orthodox. She's mid-30s, great career, single, but looking for a church that is faithful, biblically about marriage and one man, one woman kind of stuff and sexuality and gender stuff. She wants sort of a straight-line, conservative church.
So we were checking off all those boxes, seemed like everything was going great. And then she said, "But I saw on your website that you believe that sex should be preserved just for marriage." As a 30-something-year-old woman, that's just a problem for her. And she said, "It's not because I so desperately seek sex. It's because if I'm ever going to find a husband, and that's what I believe God wants for me is a husband and a family in this climate, if I tell men from day one, I'm waiting until marriage to have sex, I'm off of their radar. They won't give me the time of day."
And so strategically, she's thinking about this. I know she's an analytical person, so she's thinking about it strategically. I can't close that door without closing another really important door. I can't close the door on premarital sex without closing the door on finding a husband. And that's a real-life ethical sort of theological dilemma that pastorally I'm not sure I was ready for.
Rachel Joy Welcher: No.
Eric Huffman: I know what I believe, and I told her what I believe, and I haven't seen her since at church. So those are the sorts of rubber-meets-the-road, real-life issues where theoretical ideas go out the window, and you just have to meet people where they're at, I guess.
Rachel Joy Welcher: That's right. Well, it's not surprising to hear that because the dating world right now, it sounds like that's kind of what Christians are up against. That they're having trouble finding someone if they're not willing to adjust their theology.
Eric Huffman: Or sacrifice it altogether. Even Christian, I hate to be this simplistic about it, but even Christian guys on the dating scene seem to want to test-drive the car before they buy it. That's the mentality, which is such an awful analogy for sexual intimacy. But it seems to be so common, I'd be remiss not to bring it up. It's just that sort of, why would I hitch myself to this wagon forever if I don't know that we're compatible sexually? That's the language I hear.
Rachel Joy Welcher: That's one of the biggest beefs coming out of purity culture is people saying, well, I didn't get to know if my spouse and I were compatible, and we weren't. What I would say to that is, I mean, it's not a simple answer, but I would say that's not the problem. The problem isn't that you didn't have enough sex before marriage. That's not why this isn't working.
Eric Huffman: Sure. But they would say if we had tried, had sex before marriage, we would have known we weren't compatible. We wouldn't have gotten married, right?
Rachel Joy Welcher: Yeah, yeah. I think they would have said that, yeah. I mean, it is complicated. Like you said, we have to actually listen to people's real stories. It takes a lot of discernment, and I think it takes a lot of empathy to just say, Okay, we know what is true, but let's also just sit with this person in their disappointment for a minute. Of course, we're not gonna say what God doesn't say, but we can grieve these losses and these disappointments with someone for a moment before we remind them what is true.
And I think we have to, because so many of them are coming to our churches, and they're, like you said, they're not gonna come back. Maybe they haven't entered a church in years. And it's not our fault if they don't come back. But if we don't show compassion, they may never darken the door again.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. So we have to start with compassion.
Rachel Joy Welcher: And yet, having said that, I try to be a compassionate person, but because of my views, people... I can't even begin to tell you the names I've been called on Twitter because of this book. If you adhere to a traditional biblical sexual ethic, you will be called unloving, you will be called bigoted, you will be called uncompassionate. I've even been called a murderer.
Standing up for what scripture says is not going to earn you popularity points. Since my book has come out, some people have labeled it Purity Culture 2.0 because I haven't thrown out what God says. And that's okay. At some point, my husband was like, Eh, own it.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Rachel Joy Welcher: So, you know, my book can point people who want to do whatever they want.
Eric Huffman: Right. I mean, we're not here to make people happy, I guess. To borrow another phrase from our youth, we serve an audience of one, right?
Rachel Joy Welcher: That's right. Oh, man, I have [inaudible 00:45:53] years. That's good.
Eric Huffman: It's a little cliché, but it's true. So we've already overstayed our time here, and I'm grateful, but one more question, if that's okay. I'd like to ask you to use your imagination and fast forward through life a decade or so, and you're sitting in a room one-on-one with your sweet Hildegard, and she's asking you questions about these sorts of things and about herself. What do you imagine? I know it's hard to put yourself in that place now. What do you imagine you'll say to her at that tender age when she's asking about herself and her sexuality.
Rachel Joy Welcher: Gosh, I hope that I will be really honest. I think it's hard as parents to stay committed to that. As your kids get older, you think that you need to be on a pedestal. But I hope that I'll say, "Hey, honey, I struggled with that too, and I didn't know how to wrestle it down for years.
I hope that I won't try to pretend to be holy, holier than I am, but that I could meet her in just the very real struggle of being embodied. But I also hope that I won't cave into the pressure to please her. If for some reason she's been told things or wants to believe things that aren't true, aren't biblical, I hope that I will be that stick-in-the-mud parent and love her by speaking truth.
I also hope that she'll be the kind of kid who she's speaking that truth to others. You know, that's my prayer. But it makes me emotional to just think about it because being a teenager is so hard, and I carried so much shame and my parents didn't even know because I didn't talk to them about it. And so I just hope that she'll talk to me about it.
Eric Huffman: Well, I can tell you just from this hour we've spent together, Hildegard's lucky to have a mother like you, and congrats on your pregnancy as well.
Rachel Joy Welcher: Thank you.
Eric Huffman: You're having a son, is that right?
Rachel Joy Welcher: That's right.
Eric Huffman: Wow, how exciting. So this book is a must-read, Talking Back to Purity Culture by Rachel Joy Welcher. Who'd you write it for? Who do you think this book is most intended for?
Rachel Joy Welcher: Well, at first I wrote it for myself, but I think it's for anyone who just needs the reminder that Jesus is the source of their purity, of their holiness, their wholeness, that He's the source. And we're gonna fail, but He is our portion forever.
Eric Huffman: Amen. Rachel Joy Welcher, thanks for joining us on the Maybe God podcast.
Rachel Joy Welcher: It was an honor.
Eric Huffman: God bless you.