Best Supporting Actress · Episode 5 of 10 · 21 min
Pure — The Heavy Toll of Purity Culture
Two hundred thousand pledge cards were staked into the National Mall in 1994; a generation later the movement's best-selling author unpublished his own book and left the faith. The episode traces True Love Waits, purity rings, the Bearman and Brückner data and the documented harvest, weighing sincere intentions against audited outcomes.
Who's who
- Richard RossCo-creator of True Love Waits at the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board
- Joshua HarrisAuthor of I Kissed Dating Goodbye who later left Christianity
- Elisabeth Elliot+1 more episodeMissionary author of Passion and Purity
- Peter BearmanSociologist who audited pledge outcomes
- Hannah BrücknerSociologist who audited pledge outcomes
- Janet RosenbaumResearcher whose 2009 matched-comparison study tested pledge effects
- Linda Kay KleinAuthor of Pure, built on interviews with purity-culture survivors
- Denny PattynFounder of Silver Ring Thing
Where it happens
- National Mall, Washington, D.C.+1 more episodeSite of the 1994 pledge-card stakeout
- Old Hickory, TennesseeTulip Grove Baptist, where the first pledge cards were signed
- Colorado Springs, ColoradoHeld the first father-daughter Purity Ball in 1998
Timeline
- Spring 1993True Love Waits launched; first pledge cards signed in Tennessee
- July 1994An estimated 200,000-plus pledge cards staked into the National Mall
- 1997I Kissed Dating Goodbye published
- January 2001Bearman and Brückner publish "Promising the Future"
- November 2017#ChurchToo launched
- July 2019Joshua Harris announces he is no longer a Christian
Still debated
Whether shame and dysfunction were caused by purity teaching or correlate with high-control religion generally is unsettled, since much evidence is retrospective testimony. Defenders call the excesses distortions, and an 18-month delay in sexual debut is weighed against other findings in a ledger rather than a verdict.
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