In this episode, Trent Horn explains the “damaged goods” heresy, the “sexual prosperity gospel,” and why true chastity is rooted in God’s mercy—not virginity, resentment, or guarantees of a perfect marriage.
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Transcript:
WHEN PURITY CULTURE BECOMES HERESY
If you grew up in the ’90s and 2000s, you probably sat through a school assembly or a church talk about abstinence or chastity. In more recent years, many people have been critical of this movement that they call “purity culture.”
In today’s episode, we’ll talk about where purity culture went wrong and how it turned into a heresy that made people less likely to practice sexual virtue. But to understand that, we need to go back in history.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF PURITY CULTURE
The sexual revolution of the 1960s told people that traditional sexual morality was stifling and repressive, and that people would be truly happy if they just ignored it. Though, if you see my previous episode on the decade that ruined the Church, linked in the description below, you’ll see the sexual revolution really began in the 1940s.
But at least by the 1960s, it was a full-blown revolution telling people that if you engage in fornication or sodomy, or do whatever you and a consenting partner—or partners—want to do, you’ll be happy. And it’s the traditional people who are just the repressed weirdos.
But the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and the rise of teen pregnancies in the 1990s opened the door for widespread adoption of abstinence education in public schools. The counter to the sexual revolution was basically: “Don’t have sex because you will get pregnant and die.”
During this period, you also saw the rise of abstinence and chastity programs for churches, things like True Love Waits, which was founded in 1993. It was good for these programs to point out the harmful consequences of embracing the ethic of the sexual revolution, but they just weren’t as appealing. So abstinence and chastity education rhetoric began to shift.
The message wasn’t, “Here’s why not waiting is bad,” but turned into, “Here’s why waiting until marriage is good,” or even, “You think sex outside of marriage is good? Well, wait until you see how awesome sex is in marriage, provided that you wait for it.”
This is covered in Christine Gardner’s 2011 book Making Chastity Sexy: The Rhetoric of Evangelical Abstinence Campaigns. One study found that 76% of respondents who had been part of one of these campaigns had heard, “Waiting to have sex until marriage will make the wedding night and future sex life that much better,” and 43% were told, “If you remain a virgin until marriage, God will bless you and your spouse with a great sex life.”
Gardner also describes a common skit from the Silver Ring Thing that shows a young man whose heart gets torn apart with each girl he sleeps with, thus showing how he will bring that damaged heart into marriage.
Joshua Harris’s 1997 book I Kissed Dating Goodbye used a similar image when it talked about people getting pieces of their heart emotionally torn apart, even if they didn’t have sex, which encouraged many young people to not date at all and engage in a complicated courtship before marriage instead.
Millions of young people followed this 21-year-old unmarried guy’s advice to save all physical and even emotional intimacy until marriage. Now, decades later, there is a whole documentary about the damage this caused their future marriages. And now, 30 years later, Harris not only rejects what he said in that book, he has rejected Christianity entirely.
THE DAMAGED GOODS HERESY
This is what I’m worried about: if purity culture goes too far, it can become one of two heresies. I call the first one the “damaged goods heresy,” which says that sexual sins leave a permanent mark on a person from which they can never heal.
This is similar to the third-century heresy of Novatianism, which said that sins like apostasy, or even adultery, were so serious that a person could not be readmitted to the Church even if he repented. This was opposed by people like St. Cyprian and Pope Cornelius, who rightfully taught that God’s mercy forgives any sin.
But when it comes to purity culture, I’ve heard more than one abstinence speaker ask students to take out a piece of gum and chew it, and then pass the chewed-up gum to the person next to them. They said that if you were a virgin at marriage, then you were like the gum in the wrapper that everybody wants. But if you’re not a virgin, then you were like the chewed-up piece of gum that nobody will ever want.
Kidnapping victim Elizabeth Smart said that when she was told this, it made her feel like the sex she was forced to have permanently ruined her purity:
But for me, I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’m that chewed-up piece of gum.” Nobody re-chews a piece of gum. You throw it away. And that’s how easy it is to feel like you no longer have worth. You no longer have value. Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference? If you are rescued, your life still has no value.
THE SEXUAL PROSPERITY GOSPEL
The second heresy related to purity culture is the mirror image of this error, which says that if you follow all the rules, God will reward you with an awesome spouse and amazing sex. I call this the “sexual prosperity gospel.”
The traditional prosperity gospel says that if you follow the rules of tithing to God’s favorite preacher, then God will reward you with health and wealth. And if you don’t, then that explains why God lets you remain sick and poor. For a debunking of that nonsense, see my previous episode linked in the description below.
Now, I do want to be clear on a few things before I continue. First, it is always good to affirm the evil of fornication and the goodness of chastity. But that doesn’t mean that every way of communicating that truth is equally effective.
Second, I don’t think most people who taught what has now been called “purity culture” were deceptive or evil. I think they had good intentions and much of what they said was true. It just shouldn’t be universalized and used as the primary motivation to be chaste.
For example, Alex Cooper is the host of the Call Her Daddy podcast, and she promotes promiscuity and hookup culture:
Kiss them the first date. Sleep with them the first night. Like, I don’t care. You have to go based on what feels good to your body and what feels right to you.
A lot of men mock women with this attitude and say they’re definitely going to get their comeuppance when good men refuse to marry them and they end up dying alone, unmarried, surrounded by a bunch of cats.
But Cooper did get married in 2024, and similar women who promote promiscuity are able to find at least somewhat decent men to marry. In my debate with Farha on the Whatever podcast, she spent most of her opening statement railing against traditional marriage values:
I don’t believe that sex grounded in love or marriage is inherently more respectful or self-actualized for women than sex grounded in lust or transaction.
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Your husband is the man in your life most likely to rape you.
But I couldn’t help myself when she took her gloves off, revealing her engagement ring. And so I had to say this:
I think that is a very beautiful engagement ring that you have on, by the way. So congrats to that. I want to show it to the camera.
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It’s super. That is a nice—that’s very good.
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Opening statement: “It’s like, you’re a hypocrite.”
I’ve met Farha’s fiancé, and he is an accomplished academic that many women would want to marry. So it isn’t true that women who sell or give their bodies away are always doomed to be unmarried cat ladies, or that bad people always end up with bad spouses or no spouses.
WHEN BAD PEOPLE PROSPER
It’s understandable when Christians become angry at seeing someone who celebrates sin not get their just deserts in this life. It reminds me of this attitude in Psalm 73:
For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For they have no pangs; their bodies are sound and sleek. They are not in trouble as other men are. They are not stricken like other men.
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Behold, these are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches.
The problem with any prosperity gospel, whether it’s traditional or the sexual prosperity gospel, is that it ignores God’s sovereign plan for creation. Our Lord said that the Father makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
A lot of times we think of the problem of evil as the problem of bad things happening to good people, like the title of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book on the subject. But it’s also a problem when good things happen to bad people.
Instead of envy or anger, we should mourn when we see evildoers prosper, because they haven’t been blessed with a trial that could shake them out of their complacency. We should pray for them, because Jesus said to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. And St. Paul reminds us that God desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
WHEN CHASTITY DOESN’T GUARANTEE MARRIAGE
But what about people who did everything right and still can’t find a spouse to marry? In the study I referenced earlier, over half the respondents were told, “If you’re patient and sexually pure, God will bring you the perfect spouse.”
In St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, Paul says that God consoled him during trials he wanted to be rescued from by saying, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul then writes:
I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
That’s why I love the many examples in the Catholic faith of holy men and women who fully gave their unmarried lives to serving God and their neighbor and finding joy in that.
So what has often been called “purity culture” becomes a heresy when it makes promises on God’s behalf that he never made to us.
SHAME, CONVERSION, AND THE PRODIGAL SON
Some people went too far in the other direction and said that this culture was manipulative, and so it’s not sinful to fornicate and Christians should stop shaming people. But we should be ashamed of our past sins so that we can be ever more grateful for God saving us from them.
In Romans 6:21, Paul asks:
What return did you get from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death.
However, this attitude can go too far in yet another direction and swing back to the damaged goods heresy, saying that women, for example, who created pornography or engaged in fornication have not suffered enough and so they shouldn’t engage in public speaking about their conversions.
Now, I covered some of these issues in my previous episode on OnlyFans converts. And I agree: new converts of any kind shouldn’t rush into ministry. St. Paul even warns Timothy to not make new converts bishops, so they are not puffed up with pride. And these converts should express proper sorrow and shame for their past without losing joy in what Christ has done for them.
But it’s wrong to demand that these converts never share their testimony, or worse, that they be perpetually miserable. You can see this in posts like this, which say, “Sorry, chud, the porn star/prostitute gets the happy ending.”
Saying that promiscuous women who convert “got away” with bad behavior is like the older brother’s criticism of his father celebrating the return of his prodigal brother. In Luke 15:7, Jesus says:
I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.
HOLINESS VS. SECULAR PURITY
This is why we should be focused on the Christian concept of holiness rather than the secular concept of purity.
We should be chaste not primarily because it makes us happier in this life. On average, it does. But even if our life is a trial because we practice chastity, doing so saves us from sins that move our hearts away from God, including non-sexual sins.
The late Protestant pastor Timothy Keller often told an anecdote about a young man telling his pastor why he was no longer Christian, which perfectly illustrates this concept:
“Well, I don’t know. I’m having doubts. I’m having doubts.”
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“Well, why?”
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“Well, I took a course on religion, and they said this and that about the Bible, and I’m just—I don’t know.”
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“Are you going to church there?”
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“No.”
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“Are you going to a campus minister?”
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“No, I’m just having a lot of doubts. I’m not sure. I mean, it doesn’t feel real to me.”
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“So who are you sleeping with?”
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And what’s intriguing about that question, by the way, the minister said, is that almost always a person’s face falls. He says, “Look, if you’re hurting your conscience, of course God is going to get less and less real to you.”
St. Jerome also said in his commentary on the Book of Hosea that “it is difficult to find a heretic who loves chastity.”
Saying chastity is good based primarily on the effects of being chaste in this life is like saying that abortion is bad because of the effects abortion can have on women, like post-abortion syndrome. I mean, that’s true, but not every woman grieves her abortion. Some even celebrate it.
Likewise, not every person grieves their sexual sin, and some even celebrate it. But at the end of our lives, we’ll have to give an account for all of our sins.
That’s why when purity gets reduced to virginity, we turn the virtue of chastity into something that’s indistinguishable from a pagan meat market. In the study I mentioned earlier, 60% of students heard that purity is primarily about virginity.
When this attitude creeps into chastity education, people can end up looking pure because they don’t engage in a certain behavior, but their hearts are very impure. They’re far from God because they’re filled with impure thoughts and motives, hiding behind so-called good behavior.
Sins of the flesh can lead to spiritual poverty, but true spiritual nourishment doesn’t come just from avoiding the sins of the flesh, which is something purity culture often misses.
DATING, SEXUAL HISTORY, AND MERCY
Finally, for those of you who are discerning marriage with someone, be patient with them because we live in a fallen world.
On the one hand, it’s understandable if a man doesn’t want to marry a woman who has to deal with all of the issues that come from being a former pornographer, including having to explain to their children about the pictures of their mother on the internet. And it’s understandable why a woman may not choose to marry a man who had a severe porn addiction and consumed thousands of hours of hardcore material that rewired his brain.
So I’m saying you don’t have to marry anybody who wants to marry you. You’re allowed to have standards, but just be careful if those standards become impossibly high.
Men, if you refuse to marry a woman because she isn’t a virgin or has looked at pornography, which is a problem women struggle with, as I showed in a previous episode, then you’ll miss out on holy, solid women because God can turn any sinner into a saint.
Likewise, women, if you refuse to marry a guy because he isn’t a virgin or he has viewed some pornography in his life, then you’ll miss out on holy men for the same reason.
Besides, even if you hold out for the perfect Christian who says that he or she played by all the rules, you might still worry because he or she could have been lying to you about their sexual history, a fact made clear in some recent scandals.
Instead, we should follow the advice that St. Paul gave to the Galatians when he said:
If a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Look to yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.
CLOSING
Thank you so much for watching. If you’d like more information on chastity or sexual ethics, check out our materials at Catholic Answers. And if you enjoy these episodes, please support us at TrentHornPodcast.com.
Thank you so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.