More Than Modesty Rules

It was late evening as our small group of teenagers traveled back to the boarding academy from a weekly community Bible study outreach in a neighboring town. The dark shadows outside the 15-passenger van’s windows were punctuated by occasional streetlights as the vehicle made its way out of the city.

My 14-year-old heart began to flutter as the boy in front of me slid his hand over the back of the seat to grasp mine in his. We had liked each other for several months, and the van’s darkness provided a perfect opportunity to have some minor physical contact without the staff’s watchful eyes intruding. Dating relationships weren’t allowed at our school, and both of us knew what the consequences would be if we were caught: “Social holiday”—we wouldn’t be able to communicate or interact with each other for two weeks. But even that grim prospect didn’t dampen the allure of reaching out and intertwining fingers.

A few years after that quiet night in the van, a phenomenon called I Kissed Dating Goodbye emerged on our academy campus. The book, written by Joshua Harris, a then 22-year-old evangelical Christian who has since left the faith, was the start of a rolling purity movement across our campus and a glimpse into a sliver of Adventist lifestyle at the time.

A Brief History

Purity culture in the United States was part of a pendulum swing shift in the 1980s and 1990s from those who grew up in the promiscuous cultural revolution of the sixties and seventies. People saw firsthand the dangers of not having boundaries and guidelines, so prominent movements began pushing back. The primary drivers were evangelical leaders such as Bill Gothard, James Dobson, and Jerry Falwell, who created explicit guidelines for modest dressing, dating, child rearing, and Christian lifestyle.

They promoted these standards to Christian parents as a way to get a guaranteed good outcome. If you train your child up in this way, with these specific guidelines, they will love and serve God, they will be pure and holy, and they will avoid the pitfalls of free love, teen pregnancy, etc. Giving your kids solid rules and making them look the part was enough; the end justified the means.

This countercultural movement became its own cultural revolution. Homeschooling, dressing modestly, and getting “back to the basics” became immensely popular within certain circles and across denominational lines. Adventists bought into it right along with Christians from other denominations. It was a breath of fresh air to people concerned with the “downfall of society.” Many of the lifestyle practices felt to Adventists as though they were in alignment with Spirit of Prophecy teachings, and they followed them indiscriminately.

Recognizing Error

At its core, purity culture tried to protect young people—spiritually, emotionally, and physically. And there was a lot of good in the foundational principles. Despite its good intentions, however, this way of thinking introduced several serious imbalances. The ideas were often absorbed without question, shaping expectations, roles, and even personal identity in ways that were not always helpful or biblically grounded.

Girls were taught to see themselves as guardians of their own purity and that of the boys. Modesty talks were aimed primarily at females: how we dressed, moved, or even laughed could cause others to stumble. Our bodies were depicted as powerful and dangerous tools that needed careful management.

Boys, meanwhile, were often framed as visual creatures with uncontrollable urges. Their struggle was described as almost biological inevitability—something girls needed to protect them from rather than something boys were fully responsible for themselves. This dynamic unintentionally positioned girls as gatekeepers and boys as reactors. It burdened girls with shame and hyper-vigilance while offering boys a softer moral landing for their desires.

This imbalance confused accountability. Girls learned to internalize guilt for situations over which they often had little control, while boys sometimes absorbed the message that lust was unavoidable rather than something to confront with maturity and spiritual growth. Both genders were shortchanged: girls burdened with disproportionate blame; boys underequipped with tools for true self-discipline.

Purity was almost exclusively defined as abstaining from sex before marriage. There was little to no discussion of what purity and honoring your spouse looked like within marriage, or how these principles extended into other areas of life. It became largely a culture of subtraction. At times it felt as though people cared more about what you didn’t do and what you avoided than about building a healthy, meaningful relationship or cultivating a life that would bless both you and a future spouse.

Young men were encouraged to take charge, lead, and guide relationships, while women were encouraged to submit and wait. While these ideas are not inherently wrong, the extremes they were often taken to created imbalance.

I was shocked to discover in my 20s, as my friends and I got married and began comparing notes, that many men do not, in fact, have uncontrollable sexual urges. Contrary to what I had been taught, they are not all constantly thinking about sex or lusting after women. Healthy men who aren’t in addiction see women as people first, not as sexual objects. Do many men struggle in that area? Absolutely. But it is an addiction like any other, not a gender norm.

One of the most significant mistakes of this movement was prescribing in detail what “good” and “healthy” should look like beyond what Scripture itself clearly outlines.

One of the most significant mistakes of this movement was attempting to define exactly what an entire generation should believe about one issue—and prescribing in detail what “good” and “healthy” should look like beyond what Scripture itself clearly outlines.

God gives a few clear, guiding principles and invites each person into a personal relationship with Him to discern how best to understand and live them out. Some of those principles relating to marriage and sexuality are:

• Sex is a gift from God created to be good and delightful within the covenant of the marriage relationship (Gen. 1:27, 28).

• Sexual immorality is consistently warned against, including adultery, fornication, and lust. Lust is presented as a heart issue, not just a behavioral one (Ex. 20:14; Matt. 5:27, 28; 1 Thess. 4:3-5).

• The marriage bed is to be kept pure and undefiled (Heb. 13:4).

• Partners should not be unequally yoked (2 Cor. 6:14). The Old Testament also gives numerous warnings to the Israelites against marrying someone who did not share their faith and beliefs.

• Character matters over appearance (Prov. 31). The fruit of a person’s life is the most reliable indicator of character (Matt. 7:16-20).

• Marriage is a partnership with distinct, complementary roles but mutual sacrifice, respect, and love (Eph. 5:22-33).

• Proverbs warns against a quarrelsome or contentious spouse (Prov. 21:9, 19).

• Seeking counsel from wise people before making major decisions is recommended (Prov. 15:22).

The overarching biblical theme is that marriage between a man and a woman is meant to be a representation of the covenant love between God and His people. Our process of choosing a partner and building a home should reflect God’s loyalty, stability, self-sacrifice, and respectfulness. God’s love is safe, stable, and well thought out. Ours should be too.

How we believe and why we believe is as influential as what we believe. If we are looking for black and white, neatly tied do’s and don’ts, it would be valuable to stop and question why we want those pat answers. Are we looking for a rubric we can check off for approval? Are we trying to get acceptance? a spiritual pat on the back? Those things are not wrong, but God has not called us servants but friends (John 15:15). He is inviting us to a deeper relationship in which, instead of wondering whether we are accepted, we can relax in the peace of knowing we are loved unconditionally. 

People who grew up in purity culture are mostly in their 30s and 40s now. The question may be asked, Why does it matter? Why should I worry about this topic if I’m already married and past the dating stage of life? It matters that we come to a place where our beliefs are congruent with our theology, because our view of relationships impacts our understanding of the covenant relationship between God and ourselves. But particularly for those of us who may now be trying to guide our own children through the process of dating and starting homes, it is valuable to unpack our internalized beliefs and sort through what we want to keep and pass on to them and what we want to let go.

Impact on Faith

For many people the aftermath of purity culture has been a crisis of faith, or, at the very least, has generated questions and doubts regarding faith.

Purity culture was a prosperity gospel of sorts. If you do x, you will have an amazing marriage. But when the fairy-tale ending that was promised if you “did it right” doesn’t come true, it either makes you question yourself or question God. Did I mess up, or did He? One very conscientious young woman I know, embroiled in an ugly divorce following an abusive marriage, said, “I really thought God was leading me into that marriage. We did everything right! Why did we end up here?” The unspoken question is Did God break His promise?

When we dig deeper, we find that God doesn’t promise a perfect life here on earth, and while He loves to give His children good things, He doesn’t offer a transactional relationship in which we cash in good works and withdraw happiness. Marrying a living breathing human means accepting a risk that they may not continue to walk the path they are currently in. They will grow and change, just as you will. You may both walk toward Jesus, humbly submitting to the process of learning to truly love one another and building a strong and loving relationship, or they may choose selfishness and allow the relationship to crumble. No one can guarantee any marriage will have a fairy-tale outcome. 

It’s interesting to note that in Ellen White’s counsel on the topic, the fairy tale is absent. There are no statements promising a radiant happily-ever-after if you save sex for marriage. Instead she presents the genuine complexity of blending two lives together:

“However carefully and wisely marriage may have been entered into, few couples are completely united when the marriage ceremony is performed. The real union of the two in wedlock is the work of the afteryears. As life with its burden of perplexity and care meets the newly wedded pair, the romance with which imagination so often invests marriage disappears. Husband and wife learn each other’s character as it was impossible to learn it in their previous association. . . . Often they discern in each other unsuspected weaknesses and defects; but the hearts that love has united will discern excellencies also heretofore unknown. Let all seek to discover the excellencies rather than the defects.”[*]

Healing and Unlearning

For women, one of the most prevalent wounds in purity culture was autonomy. Some girls had more autonomy and choice within the movement than others, but the ideology subtly eroded the sense of self-government for all women. Women in purity culture endured a tremendous amount of critiquing. Their bodies and clothing were scrutinized and equated with their spirituality and characters.

I constantly evaluated myself when we were in communities that heavily promoted purity culture. I stressed about what I wore, how I walked, how I stood, whom I talked to. I felt eyes on me all the time, sizing up my outfits and determining if they met the standards or not. Whenever I wore things that didn’t fall in line, I would see disapproval, and often had someone pull me aside to encourage me to wear something different. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to bring up in conversation how some girl was dressed and what it said about her spiritual condition.

When my husband and I moved out of that environment, one of the most striking things for me was that the people in our new circle simply didn’t think about what I was wearing. They didn’t notice. They just wanted to get to know me as a person. There was no gossip about people’s spiritual condition based on their outward appearance. This new group still dressed modestly. They certainly weren’t flashy or using their clothes to try to draw undue attention to themselves. They dressed to be comfortable and practical. I remember thinking, Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart. These people aren’t trying so hard to be like Jesus as our previous community was, but they sure are a lot more like Him.

How we believe and why we believe is as influential as what we believe.

Men are far less likely to think of themselves as needing to “heal” from purity culture, but many report that they had unlearning and relearning to do when they entered relationships and got married. Learning to see women as persons instead of objects and to truly respect them, seeking out the female point of view on issues, is an important step of healing for men. Those who choose not to embrace this refining process generally end up acting out harmful cycles in their families.

In purity culture we were handed what to believe in a neat little package. There were clear, black-and-white details about exactly what you were to think, believe, and do. Some of these were things not explicitly stated in Scripture. There are areas of Christian life in which the Bible is intentionally vague, and we wander onto very dangerous ground when we try to create specificity where God did not. The Bible’s principles are designed to guide people from a vastly diverse range of cultures, backgrounds, and experiences. What is best for one couple and family will not look exactly like the next. 

As we grow in emotional and mental maturity, we develop the ability to be more nuanced. It is important that we embrace the process of questioning which of our beliefs on purity (and any other topic) align with biblical principles and which are the “doctrines of men” (cf. Col. 2:22). God invites dialogue: “Come now, and let us reason together” (Isa. 1:18). There is much healing in this process.

Learning that biblical modesty is a character quality, not a list of rules, allowed me to shift the focus to my own heart. I discovered that much of what people had labeled “prideful” in my character was actually insecurity. I chose to stop listening to the outside voices and to seek only God’s voice. He helped me see that I was worthy and loved, and that I wasn’t maliciously trying to harm men by what I wore as I had believed. Those labels were put on me by other people, not Him.

Allowing myself to be loved by God just as I was took away the stress of choosing what to wear. Unlike the people in purity culture, He saw me as a person, someone beautiful and worthy. My clothing choices simply followed the inward changes—once the insecurity was gone, the need to dress for other people went with it. When I look in the mirror now, I see Him saying He likes me for who I am, and there is so much security and peace in that.

This is the framework I plan to pass on to my children. Rather than giving them a list of things to adhere to, I want to encourage them to first choose who they will serve, and let that be the guiding principle for their lives. I hope that they will find that seeking God’s love and His will will lead them to stable, healthy, balanced relationships in which they can serve Him with joy.

[*] Ellen G. White, The Adventist Home (Nashville: Southern Pub. Assn., 1952), p. 105.