Many people have sounded the alarm on what is sometimes deemed purity culture. The term refers to the Evangelical circles that overemphasize abstinence before marriage in a strange and hyper focused way. The phenomenon is perhaps most associated with the purity ring, a trinket that often looks as though it has been retrieved from a vending machine, which is worn to symbolize abstinence until a wedding ring takes its place. The obsession with purity leads many God-fearing teens into a legalistic turmoil.
The poster boy for “purity culture,” Joshua Harris of I Kissed Dating Goodbye fame is no longer Christian, long since having renounced all the strategies he once pedaled. Sadly, the effect of Harris “evolving” included divorcing his wife. The elating sense of schadenfreude is hard to miss when reading articles about how Harris once decried dating as “the breeding ground of divorce,” yet finds himself, once so pure and date-less, divorced.
There are countless tales of hurt and woe wrought by purity culture. It seems that such an obsessive focus has warped the view of married life for a generation of Evangelicals. Undoubtedly there are still many churches that will continue to embrace this uniquely America fetishization of abstinence, but likely gone are the days when a book like I Kissed Dating Goodbye could sell almost a million copies. The strongest evidence for the death of semi-mainstream purity culture is seeing a young man wearing a “Virginity Rocks” t-shirt in an airport terminal and being utterly incapable of discerning if this proclamation is meant seriously or comedically.
Meanwhile, there’s another form of purity culture brewing that will likely mark a generation, and generations to come, irrevocably. This is the purity culture wrought by an obsession with our climate sins. A growing number of celebrities and lay people are making another purity pledge. They are not pledging abstinence but committing themselves to never procreating.
Barrenness by choice is an option only available to people in recent decades, and it opens up a strange new world. Ross Douthat writes about this in his illuminating article “The Case for One More Child.” As he notes, the strangeness of this proposal to remain childless to “save the environment” is that a lack of people seems likely to exacerbate the problem. He writes, “This strikes me as a deeply mistaken approach to the climate crisis – above all, because any long-term solution will require exactly the kind of human ingenuity that a stagnant gerontocracy will tend to smother.”
There is a hint of despair in the pledge not to have children. Having been convinced of the severity of our sins against the climate, we might reasonably conclude that the Earth is better off without us. There’s no sense that our offspring could ever figure anything out about how to live well. Here we reach a disturbing dead end.
In additional to the existential self-annihilation at work, there’s a superficial reason people might opt never to breed. Any honest mother will admit that her visions of the mother she would be and the children she would have crumble in the quotidian reality of raising children. Suddenly, the ecologically responsible, sugar-free, dairy-free, gluten-free vegan fairy child is a loud, uncouth, selfish person eating highly processed meat and dairy products that you, her mother, purchased.
While the fact of this upsetting outcome may not consciously occur to many people, it is there. If you never step foot on the path of motherhood or fatherhood, you will never be confronted with certain inadequacies or have to face the infuriating fact that a child is just like you and you behave just like your mother or father you couldn’t stand. Leaving motherhood or fatherhood as an abstraction means it is untainted with all the complicating factors of specificity and shortcoming. This is the same temptation at the root of any perfectionism: it’s better to abstain from attempting than to venture forth and find yourself lacking.
Our culture tells us never to abstain from a certain class of actions, yet abstinence in many sad and destructive ways is at work. These choices not only traumatize us, the generation of the childless, frightened and perpetually immature. They also erase the existence of people in the next generation. How we think about these people who do not yet exist is philosophically complex, but the thrust of the implications is intriguing.
What is the right answer? Maybe we shouldn’t think about it too much. Maybe the intense sense of obligation so many people feel to personally address and command the solution to climate problems is itself an effect of dwindling families and the isolation that entails.
Matthew 18:2-5 reads, “And Jesus calling unto him a little child, set him in the midst of them, And said: Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, he is the greater in the kingdom of heaven. And he that shall receive one such little child in my name, receiveth me.”
While we may think we have overcome the evils of purity culture, human nature is such that our progress is ever a whack-a-mole game. Where one dragon is vanquished, that same vice arises in a new form. The new form of purity culture taking hold has ramifications for everyone’s future. The difficult and trying child in front of you is really the embodiment of the best of all possible worlds because this child is real and reveals us to ourselves.
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