Pledges, Rings and a Publishing Industry

What distinguished purity culture from ordinary Christian teaching about sex before marriage was its machinery. Abstinence had been taught in American churches for a long time without pledge cards, jewellery, stadium events or a dedicated youth literature. From the early 1990s it acquired all of them.

The pledge campaign was the centre. True Love Waits, launched through Southern Baptist channels in 1993, asked young people to sign a commitment to abstinence until marriage, and the signed cards were gathered and displayed in very large numbers as a public demonstration. Purity rings made the commitment visible day to day. Father daughter purity balls, formal events at which a daughter pledged her chastity and a father pledged to protect it, spread through a smaller but well publicised set of communities. Alongside all of it ran a substantial popular literature addressed to teenagers, which became a commercial category of its own.

Sara Moslener's history of sexual purity and American adolescence traces this apparatus and situates it in a longer American religious history of linking sexual conduct to the fate of the nation. Her argument is that the movement was never only about individual behaviour: purity rhetoric carried anxieties about cultural decline and national destiny, and that is what gave a message about teenage dating its urgency.