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# Purity Culture and the Shame of a Generation
- URL: https://matthew-d-burkholder.ghost.io/purity-culture-and-the-shame-of-a-generation/
- Published: 2022-03-23T21:23:32.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-28T19:42:35.000Z
- Author: Matthew D. Burkholder
- Tags: Life, purity culture, #Migrated-1787946130805, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-08-28 15:42

I was staring in the bathroom mirror with a sick feeling of shame. What had I done to feel this horrible feeling? Said an angry word to my child? Fought with my wife? What sin had I committed?

The answer: I had made love to my wife. But I love sex. I love the intimacy and closeness. It's an incredible privilege to share a bed with someone I love. I've only ever wanted to be with one woman in my entire life. That doesn't make me better than someone who doesn't or hasn't. But I remember the exact moment when I decided I only wanted to be with one woman. It was at a sleepover. We talked as teenagers often do about our wild sexual fantasies. And of course, I was a typical teenager: crush-crazy and writing melodramatic love poems. But for me, in my mind, the dream of romance, of falling in love, getting married, growing old, and making love to one woman thousands of times instead of thousands of women once, was what I sincerely wanted.

Those things happened. So why did I feel a profound sense of shame around sex? Was it perhaps because the order or those things did not follow the linear pattern I was required to follow? I was not a virgin when I got married. I had done something human and had a sexual relationship with a woman I loved before marrying her. At the time, the shame I felt surrounding those decisions was constantly conflicted with the joy and pleasure I felt physically connecting with someone I love. It felt natural and pleasurable. Everything felt right. It felt like I was doing something I was created to do.

But my Christian culture didn't nuance that for me growing and help me understand that was how sex was supposed to feel, at least, not without the looming shadow of judgment. Some tried. Some did a better job than others. But the overarching message I took away was that sex was *only* supposed to feel that way with my wife. I have almost no memories of being taught the centrality of erotic love in the human experience. Those feelings and desires? I internalized them as sinful, disgusting, destructive, and damnable. Only after my wedding vows could those feelings shift into the blessed, beautiful, creational, and euphoric. The ever-beautiful horizon of God's gift of sexuality became a harsh law.

Growing up, the only message I heard was that sex outside of marriage is wrong. Liking sex was frowned upon. All the adverse reactions, comments, and prohibitive scripture verses stuck to me. It was clear: being a very sexual person is a uniquely dangerous condition. But perhaps the worst part was that a deafening silence enveloped everything else. Silence is a breeding ground for shame. I filled that silence with toxic messages, especially at night. Cleaning up after a wet dream, I felt the silent wrath of God burning into my soul. I begged God to change me and take away these feelings. I hated God for giving me dreams and desires. Please make me saintly. And, of course, I didn't change. My feelings didn't go away. And all under the crushing weight of silence.

The result was a deep self-hatred that I struggled to even put into words. I snapped in college. I can't even fully remember that time in my life. A lot of the information comes to me through second-hand accounts from my wife. Depression fueled by sexual shame is a hideous monster. Some tried to help, but the only help that felt safe was the haven of repression. I pushed all of it down into the shadows. So much silence. Those hidden feelings surfaced in my browsing history—heap on more shame. Make sure to change the channel during steamy love scenes but use Braveheart to talk about Jesus? Message received loud and clear: the excitement I felt from sex is worse than the queasiness I felt from violence. Have you lost your virginity? Dirty rag. Harmlessly notice an attractive person? Lust is bound to follow. Feel anything sexual? Be hyper-vigilant towards that toxic part of humanity.

For those who aren't aware of what purity culture was, it was a singularly focused group of religious movements and books in the 90s where virginity was emphasized to an extreme extent. It was not uncommon to hear truly painful analogies: talking about men and women as if they were objects (used cars, sandwiches, etc.) whose use would spoil them for their future partner. For those of us who took it seriously, our worth might as well have been determined by our virginity or lack thereof. Little to no attention was given to sexual assault victims. Grace was difficult to see and it was a quick and easy path from "sex before marriage is sin" to "sexuality before marriage is sin." Dating was discouraged. Strict gender roles were enforced.

The "true love" test was to "wait," and I had failed the test.

And then I got married. I can now "flip the switch" and enjoy sex. Except my marriage did not solve my "condition." Sex immediately after marriage was *more* difficult. Our bodies did not always work the way they did before our wedding. My wife now felt pain. I still felt shame. I still liked steamy love scenes in movies. I still felt that awful curse of biology that marriage was supposed to resolve. And so I did again what I thought was my second-best and most familiar option: repress my thoughts and feelings. That is what I was taught, after all. And if God's wrath was turned against me because of my feelings, I would beat him to the punch. I can judge myself as much as you judge me, Lord! I will show you how much I love you. I will decrease so that you may increase. I will take my sin, tie it in knots, put it in a box, and bury it deep down in my soul. But why stop there? Why not turn my self-hatred towards my *entire* emotional makeup? For "the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure."

And I did that for a while. I repressed what, in effect, was a large part of my humanity. As a consequence, I became judgmental towards other people's sexual choices. One day, a friend and co-worker called me out, and I finally asked myself what was going on here? Why am I so *angry*? Why do I feel a tightness in my chest when people even *talk* about sex? Why is it so difficult for me to open up about sex? I sometimes tried to talk about it, but it always felt painful and filled me with a small pit in my stomach. Why do I feel like something is wrong when the topic of sex-the thing we all owe our existence to-comes up?

Because I stopped feeling human. But that's the goal.

My sexual relationship with my wife recovered and has produced dividends of pleasure beyond words for many years. But the *feelings* still felt familiar. They felt a lot like the ones I buried in my box. I finally broke down again. I can't continue like this. Something has to change. But my hands are too raw from digging the hole to bury my shame. I can't untie the knots. I'm broken, and I can't put myself back together again.

I ask this in sincere honesty: how did anyone not see this was a recipe for a complete and total disaster? Why am I almost 40 years old and *still* trying to work through the fracturing of my humanity? I can contextualize purity culture as a reaction against the sexual revolution. But that hurts all the more when it seems like the sex-positive group is healthier in many ways than my chastity-ring generation. If ours was also a social experiment, we failed just as hard. We signed abstinence pledges, not realizing we were signing ourselves over to a controlling voice that would shout at us for years after our wedding nights. *We surrendered our ability to choose freely because we sacrificed our agency out of fear.* We surrendered to the church and said our humanity is in your hands. And what did the church do with our trust?

Like all movements and experiences in life, there are nuances. I am likely viewing my history through the skewed lens of my pain. But the world they painted for us made it difficult to see any shade of gray. I was not taught to view the world in sympathetic terms; I was taught to view the world as my enemy. I have spent my entire adult life struggling against this thought distortion. And now, as I evaluate my hurt, I am resisting the temptation to paint the church as my enemy, that natural way of seeing the world that feels bequeathed by my previous version of faith. But purity culture stole something precious from us - our curiosity. This unfortunate theft extends far beyond human sexuality, but nothing feels quite as damning as shaming the sexual component of the human person. The required first response to my sexual feelings felt programmed into my religious DNA: fear. Not excitement. Not awe and wonder. Not anticipation. Not joy. In healthy sexual development, our first sexual encounter is with ourselves. But there was no warm welcome planned for my arrival. I felt hopelessly scared of my own skin. How could I possibly think the gift of myself was of any value?

The "evil" world we so sanctimoniously thought we stood above understands that critical component of development. Yes - sexuality can be dangerous. But equally dangerous is a religion that uses the powertrip of sin to keep an individual in check. I have spent many hours wondering how my life would have been different if I had never gone through puberty in a Christian environment. Would I be writing a blog post filled with stories of feeling shame?

How can we reconcile with a faith that made us feel shame about something as human as sex? How can we ever forgive traditions that often treated us like robots? Why would anyone want anything to do with a faith that has damaged our sexuality just as much or more than most one-night stands ever could? And not to mention that I'm a man. My experiences pale in comparison to the experiences of many women. Women who had their sexuality categorically rejected: "Women don't struggle with sexual issues!" Who (literally) were called methadone to cure in their husbands what was supposedly a disease akin to drug addiction. And what about members of the LGBTQ2+ community who have their feelings labelled an abomination? Or divorced people? Or single people? I recognize that my experiences are only one small part of how the church has hurt people.

So what do we do?

I'm scared to work through the hurt. Despite the purity culture that chewed up a child like me and spat me out as a fractured adult, I still love the church. But at this moment, I want to say: "Don't talk to me about sexuality anymore. You don't get to speak shame into my human life. I am not sure I can turn to you for my healing. I don't trust you. You told me marriage was between two people, *so why are you in my bedroom with me?* Leave. You've done nothing but hurt me over and over again. You've made so many of us feel less than human. How can I raise children in such a place? Are you going to be better? You should have trusted us."

But they didn't. And so many of us don't trust ourselves either. I don't know how to move forward, but I'm finally choosing to reclaim the agency that was robbed from me with fear, an agency that sacredly belonged to me in the first place. And do you know what? I finally feel *free* to make choices that I believe will honour God. Not because I'm crippled with paranoia that my sexuality will poison me, but because I'm finally saying no to this legacy of the church and saying yes to my God-given humanity.

The church doesn't own sexuality; it belongs to every living thing in creation. Nothing creational exists without the stamp of sexuality. The church must learn from the failure of purity culture that it should fear the wielding of fear above anything else. The church must own shaming the gift of sexuality and for its adulterous presence in the mirrors of so many broken people.

Maybe then, we can finally start to feel pure.