Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence

Sara Moslener's Virgin Nation is a scholarly history tracing the rise of American evangelical purity culture, the movement promoting sexual abstinence before marriage through youth ministry and public policy, situating it within longer American anxieties connecting sexual purity to national and religious identity going back to nineteenth century social purity movements. Moslener's method is historical and critical rather than devotional, drawing on movement literature, denominational archives and public policy debate to trace how purity rhetoric shifted over a century. As an academic study written with a critical analytical lens on a still-active religious movement, it presents one scholarly interpretation of purity culture's origins and function, a reading some within the movement itself would frame differently, and it should be read as critical history rather than as the movement's own self-account.