Earlier this year, Netflix released “Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart,” which documented the story of Smart’s 2002 kidnapping and rescue nine months later. Smart, who founded the Elizabeth Smart Foundation, now works as a sexual violence victim advocate and educator, and gives talks and interviews about her experience and about sexual violence prevention.
In recent interviews surrounding the release of the documentary, Smart has spoken about the shame she felt after being repeatedly assaulted — and the way certain messages she heard from adults in her faith tradition and at home about chastity shaped her emotional responses. She drew particular attention to object lessons that compared youth who had premarital sex to chewed gum or licked cupcakes, thereby indicating that they were no longer desirable.
In a video released last month on her YouTube channel, she further explained, “I genuinely wondered if I was worth saving. I genuinely wondered if maybe I would be better off dead, because how could anyone ever love me after what happened to me? How could my parents ever want me back if they found out what happened to me?”
Difficult experiences like these are cited in critiques of what has come to be known as “purity culture” — loosely connected trends in how sexual morality was taught to Christian teens in earlier decades. Those include extreme modesty policing, morality pledges and lessons that compared virginity to objects that could not be repaired once defiled — practices that appear to have peaked between the 1990s and mid-2000s.
Often these practices were also paired with a sort of embarrassment about sexuality, where euphemisms for body parts and sexuality were used in place of accurate and frank conversations.
Critiques of purity culture should be taken seriously and should inform to some degree how we approach teaching chastity to youth going forward. But such critiques, which are becoming increasingly popular, don’t always distinguish between bad methods and the good principles and intentions that have motivated parents and teachers in the past.
What is ‘purity culture’?
Many “purity culture” practices were much more common among evangelical Christians, including “Purity Balls” (a formal dance teenage girls would attend with their fathers, culminating in fathers pledging to “protect their daughters” and the daughters pledging “to live pure lives”), and purity rings (a ring worn by teens to symbolize their commitment to abstinence before marriage).
Others, however, crept into Latter-day Saint congregations and homes, including overzealous modesty policing and harmful metaphors. I have been unable to find any official curriculum of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that encourages the kinds of object lessons Smart and others experienced. But regardless of where or how they showed up, they were likely spread through cultural transmission.
There is no doubt in my mind that these efforts were well-intentioned, and they didn’t arrive in a vacuum. Neither do I believe it’s a coincidence that peak purity culture coincided with peak “raunch” culture in the broader United States. In the mid-90s, shock jock Howard Stern dominated the radio airwaves, reaching as many as 20 million listeners with his vulgar show, which flouted FCC regulations. Sex comedy “American Pie” was one of the highest-grossing teen movies of the 90s. And television commercials advertising restaurants and consumer products regularly featured women in bikinis dancing provocatively.
In a relatively short span of time, mainstream culture had diverged sharply from traditional Christian sexual norms. Religious leaders and parents were working against everything we were exposed to in popular culture, in the days before high-quality Christian entertainment or the renaissance of Christian music, to help us feel excited about being virtuous. They were rebuilding guardrails on their own in a world that had torn such protections down. They deserve an extraordinary amount of grace and gratitude.
But there is also no doubt that well-intentioned practices and language have still caused real harm.
Well-intentioned practices, unintended consequences
I still remember attending a Christian youth camp at 15, in which the girl participants got together with the counselor before breakfast each morning and did “modesty head, shoulders, knees and toes.”
We would sing the song and do the dance while the counselor watched to ensure that our midriffs, cleavage, backs and legs above the knees were covered even when we were moving. Then we would all kneel to ensure the hemlines on our skirts or shorts touched the ground.
I was sent back to change twice. This felt humiliating, needless to say. I did not return to camp in subsequent years. This experience altered not only my perception of this particular youth activity but also my relationship with modesty more broadly.
In “A Better Way To Teach Kids About Sex,” a team of scholars in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University describe some of the harmful impacts of this older way of teaching sexual morality.
In the case of fear-based metaphors, like those Smart grew up hearing, “One of the primary consequences … is a negative portrayal of sexual intimacy, often unintentionally conveying to young minds that sex is a bad thing that harms us.”
They also point out that metaphors based on reward (“the trophy” or the “unopened gift”) may send a message that chastity is just waiting until you get past the finish line of marriage, rather than a lifelong commitment to virtue both before marriage and after.
And, while modesty in dress is important, some ways of discussing modesty can send the message that our children are responsible for the sexual thoughts of others, which can lead to feelings of shame about their bodies and discomfort around those of the opposite sex.
If these approaches had real downsides, the encouraging reality is that many of them are already fading. Smart’s own advocacy on this issue is surely a part of this shift.
But even while critiquing these methods, we should be cautious not to minimize the value of sexual morality.
Don’t dismiss purity
It is easy to flatten the distinction between a particular method of teaching sexual morality and sexual morality itself.
And many critics of purity culture reject Christian sexual ethics entirely — arguing that shame is inherent to any sort of abstinence education. That term “purity culture” is also problematic for implying that purity was the problem in the first place.
The sexual freedom sold by the popular culture of the last 50 years has brought very little but despair and cultural rot. As Washington Post reporter Christine Emba puts it in her book, “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation,” “We’re liberated, and we’re miserable.”
Teaching our children to live chaste lives is still as important and protective as it ever was.
The New Testament teaches that our bodies are temples, we are not our own and we should honor God with our bodies.
Latter-day Saint doctrine also affirms “that God approves of sexual activity only between a man and a woman who are married.” We covenant in the temple to keep the law of chastity, and are taught that living that law “brings God’s approval and personal spiritual power” and protects us and our families.
The problem was not that previous generations cared too much about sexual morality. It is that, at times, they taught it in ways that were imprecise or incomplete.
Smart’s critique is more nuanced than those of other critics. She has stated she does not take a public position on abstinence education, but believes it should be paired with more frankness and accuracy, along with more education about consent, boundaries and assault.
These principles seem to be a good and a worthy addition to our conversations about sex. But from a gospel perspective, the most important addition still remains the “why.”