Like many people, reaching the age of 40 inspired Matt to do some self-reflection. He had achieved many hallmarks of adulthood: a college degree, a career he enjoyed, and two beloved dogs. But he’d never had a relationship, or even a sexual partner.
This weighed heavy on him; he craved the experience of a deep romantic connection and wondered how it might feel to be in love.
Matt, who is using a pseudonym, grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household where sex and masturbation were considered sins. The only message he could ever remember hearing was that it would ruin his life and condemn him to hell.
Though he’d drifted from evangelicalism, sexual shame still clung to him. Around his birthday, he decided to experiment and bought a male sex toy. But after unwrapping the bulky plastic object and fumbling with it, he felt nothing.
“I felt so embarrassed and stupid,” he said. “I’m 40 and I don’t even know how to use this thing.”
Frustrated, he vented in a Facebook group for ex-evangelicals, ranting about how he’d never learned even the basics of sex. It struck a chord. With 30,000 members, the group regularly discusses sexuality and relationships. Members trade stories, comfort each other, and share resources – books, therapists, anything that might help.
One commenter recommended a private group: the Purity Culture Dropout Program, run by sex educator Erica Smith. It offers sex-ed lessons and a safe space for people to unpack fear, compare upbringings, and confront the shame they’ve internalized.
Matt enthusiastically signed up.
Purity culture – the conservative Christian belief in abstaining from sex until marriage – boomed in the 1990s and early 2000s, just as Matt was a teen.
In 1993, the Southern Baptist Convention launched its“true love waits” program, which encouraged teens to take “pledges” promising to save themselves for marriage. Books such asI Kissed Dating Goodbye(1997), gave teens strict instructions not to date for fun.Purity ballspopped up, where girls attended with their fathers, who vowed to “protect” their daughters’ virginity.
By the 2000s, purity culture was mainstream. The Jonas brothers wore true love waits “purity rings.” But it wasn’t just a church thing – its leaders pushed it as a national issue.
In 1994, “true love waits” gathered thousands of teens in Washington, carpeting the National Mall with 200,000 pink, yellow, and blue pledge cards. Two years later, President Clinton signed a bill funding abstinence-only sex ed at $50m a year. The Bush administration expanded it, despite mounting evidence that abstinence-only education didn’t reduce teen sexual activity.
Purity culture enforced rigid gender roles: men were cast as aggressors; girls were told not to tempt them. Both ended up alienated from their bodies and desires.
But rarely do we hear about heterosexual men raised in this ideology. Purity culture “tells men they’re supposed to lead”, says former minister and religion scholar Bradley Onishi, co-host of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. “It says God made you aggressive, an uncontrollable sexual beast.”
“If men don’t heal from purity culture, they’ll keep hurting themselves and others,” he adds. “They won’t form healthy relationships – romantic, familial, professional, or political.”
Joshua Harris, author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, has since apologized for the fear he instilled and the false promise that his method would lead to a happy ending.
Too little, too late, perhaps. Today, 17 US states still offer abstinence-only sex ed – and they have higher-than-average teen pregnancy rates.
Matt was born in 1982 in Pennsylvania. His father was heavily involved with the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church, a deeply conservative denomination that believes men have divine authority over women and children. Weekends meant choir practice and pledging allegiance to the American flag near the pulpit.
As a child, Matt was quiet and empathetic. He couldn’t play sports due to a heart condition and instead enjoyed music and art – activities his community considered feminine. “I got the message early that there was something inappropriate about that,” he said. “The message was men should be strong and tough.”
Formal sex education was off-limits in his house. However, like many children, he discovered masturbation around the age of nine or 10 – even though he did not understand what it was. “Sometimes I had trouble falling asleep, and I realised that touching myself was soothing,” he said.
At 11, his father caught him in the act and dragged him to the dining room, where his mother was helping Matt’s younger brother with homework. “He was yelling at me, screaming ‘Are you sexually active?’” Matt remembered. “I felt so humiliated, I just wanted to melt into a puddle on the floor.”
Weeks later, his Sunday school teacher told the class Magic Johnson’s HIV diagnosis was God’s punishment for sexual sin.
“I immediately started panicking,” Matt said. “I figured I must have made some kind of sexual sin, and that was why my dad had been so angry. So I thought I must have made God just as angry.”
He soon found himself in a repetitive loop, promising God not to masturbate again, then breaking his promise and praying for forgiveness.
“I think I eventually figured out you can’t catch HIV from masturbating,” he recalled dryly. “But by then, I was receiving all kinds of other purity culture messages.”
As he moved through his teens, the purity industry was booming. Matt’s youth pastors read passages from I Kissed Dating Goodbye and explained that sexual contact would ruin their future marriages. They compared pre-marital sex to a piece of gum: the more times it’s chewed, the less appealing it is.
“The idea of sexual sin terrified me,” Matt remembered. Whenever he came across pornography or sex scenes in movies, they didn’t make him feel aroused: “Which made me feel smug, like I was more godly than other boys.”
According to his church’s teachings, this godly behavior would be rewarded with a perfect relationship, and Matt still craved a romantic connection. But he wasn’t sure how to turn any of his friendships with girls into something deeper.
“From what I was taught, it seemed you were friends with someone and at some point it would just happen,” he said. “But I didn’t know how to make it happen.”
The Purity Culture Dropout Program costs $50 a month. It offers two live lessons per month, a lesson archive, and a private discussion space.
The first session Matt joined, in 2024, tackled the myth of porn addiction. Most experts don’t consider it physically addictive, though it can become compulsive. Matt shared that youth leaders had told him porn would destroy his life.
“The responses were so open and accepting – it felt safe,” he said.
Smith, the course founder, wasn’t raised in purity culture but has seen its wreckage firsthand. She has an MA in Education from Widener University’s Center for HumanSexualityStudies and previously taught sex ed to young women and LGBTQ youth in Philadelphia’s juvenile justice system.
She’s watched the post-2016 wave of religious “deconstruction” accelerate during Covid. “People were leaving churches and saying, ‘I need sex ed. I need someone to talk to,’” she said.
When she launched the program in 2019, most clients were women. Now, more men are signing up – often nudged by partners or female friends.
She sees two main groups: men who rushed into marriage to have sex, only to end up in dysfunctional relationships; and men like Matt, who arrive at adulthood with no sexual experience at all.
“So many struggle with sexual thoughts, body image, and basic confidence,” Smith said. “And when it comes to dating, they don’t know where to begin.”
Sex therapist Jeremiah Gibson often quips that “you don’t need to have grown up in the church to be fucked over by the church”. Along with his partner Julia Postema, he specialises in working with couples who’ve left high-control religions. The pair also host a podcast,Sexvangelicals, with the tagline: “The sex education the church didn’t want you to have.”
Both were raised in fundamentalist traditions and married – then subsequently divorced – while young. They partly blame purity culture for those relationship breakdowns; none of them had the emotional tools to discuss the crucial components of a life lived together.
“Communicating your sexual needs and desires is one of the most vulnerable things you can do,” Gibson said. “One of the theories in sex therapy is that if couples can solve problems around sexuality, then they can solve problems around anything.”
“Purity culture can really dehumanize both men and women,” added Postema. She says the men she works with are often stuck in a “double-bind” of being told God made them insatiable sexual creatures, but that they must also constantly fight this God-given nature.
Gibson believes that comprehensive sex education would not just help couples have healthier sex lives, but would go some way to reducing wider divisions in society.
“If it were a part of our curriculum, I think that we would have better ways of resolving differences,” Gibson said. “We wouldn’t be excoriating people who have different values to us. We’d see an increase in both men’s and women’s ability to communicate clearly and concisely.”
Nathanial, or “Nate”, now 37, grew up attending a non-denominational evangelical megachurch in upstate New York. Religion trickled down to every aspect of family life.
In his early teens he joined a church-based men’s “accountability group”. These sprung up around the country during the 1990s, with the most famous being Focus on the Family’sPromise Keepers. Youth leaders encouraged the boys to confess every time they “stumbled” by looking at porn or masturbating. Nate and his peers shared tactics on how to resist sin, such as snapping an elastic band around their wrist when they had “impure thoughts”.
“What that does – or at least, what it did in my mind – is that all women are viewed as potential wives,” he said. “It frames women as not people, but as plot devices in your life.”
Nate met his first girlfriend at church when he was 16 and asked her out by telling her he could see them getting married one day. The pair were determined to keep their relationship as Godly as possible. The one time the couple went slightly further than kissing, “she was so upset she didn’t speak to me for a whole week.”
He met his now-wife, Katy, on a study abroad program in France and got married at 23. Though they were beginning to question evangelical teachings, they still waited until their wedding to have sex – partly because Katy, who’d never received sex education, was terrified of getting pregnant.
But their combined lack of experience placed a strain on the relationship. Katy had been taught in church to submit to her husband, that she should never refuse him sex, and that men needed to have sex daily. When Nate would sometimes rather – in his words – “eat ice cream and watch TV,” she’d feel upset and rejected.
“There were times where it was uncomfortable, because we had certain expectations of what the opposite sex wanted,” said Katy. “And when that wasn’t the case, it felt very confusing.”
Therapists working with couples in similar situations often witness relationships break down entirely. But over time, Nate and Kate learned to discuss what they were experiencing. These conversations led them to completely pick apart purity culture, and they eventually left evangelical Christianity in favour of the liberalELCA church.
“In a weird way, [purity culture] helped us communicate – we didn’t have previous partners to figure things out with, so we had to figure them out together,” Katy said.
Hearing about women’s experiences in evangelical culture has played a big role in helping Nate question the ideas around gender he grew up with. “For us boys, the teachings were always very internal, policing our thoughts and feelings,” he said. Katy, on the other hand, was taught from an early age to not tempt men to stray, to always dress modestly and never do anything that could be misconstrued as flirting: “It sounds like so much pressure, having to monitor your surroundings.”
The experience has shaped how the couple are raising their six-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son. “I want my daughter to have full information about her body – I don’t want her to go through what I did,” said Katy. As for their son, “I just want him to understand that women are people,” said Nate.
Today, most of the purity balls and rings are gone, only to be replaced by Christian influencers. “I see this new generation of TikTok and Instagram influencers talking about how wonderful it is to follow God and wait until marriage for sex,” says Smith. She also sees purity messaging being absorbed into new-age spirituality, with ideas about the “divine masculine or feminine” mirroring the same rigid gender roles.
As he made his way through the Purity Culture Dropout Program, Matt began sifting through childhood memories. “I see so much that triggered shame, and that probably made me the way that I am,” he said.
As someone who doesn’t feel much arousal from typical erotic material, the course has helped him realise he may fall somewhere on the asexuality spectrum. “But the question I still have is: Was I always that way? Or is it because of purity culture?” he said. “I think it really installed a fear of anything sexual in me.”
Matt still longs for a romantic connection, but the idea of embarking on one remains daunting. “Not having any of that practice that most people have had, and having this trauma, it all makes me a bit nervous at the idea of going into relationships,” he said. “I don’t know if that will ever change.”