If you grew up in purity culture, you probably remember the rose.
A preacher holds up a perfect red flower, full and fragrant, and passes it through the crowd. As the bloom makes its way around the room, he warns of the degrading power of sexual sin. He cautions against “giving pieces of yourself away.” By the time the rose returns to the front, it’s drooping, torn, missing petals. Like a prosecutor presenting evidence to a jury, the pastor holds up the flower and asks the question no one will answer. “Who wants this rose?” The ensuing silence is the point.
The rose illustration is emblematic of purity culture, the evangelical sexual-ethics movement that took hold in the 1990s amid soaring teen pregnancy rates. Offering father-daughter dances, spaghetti-strap prohibitions, and seminal titles like I Kissed Dating Goodbye, purity culture at its best proclaimed solid biblical teachings on sex, marriage, and modesty.
At its worst, it appealed to shame to protect the sacred. Too often, it preached self-control motivated by fear, equated virginity with virtue, and confused holiness with reputation. Its weight lay heaviest on women—how they dressed, who they tempted. Even when motivated by good intentions, purity culture left many believing they could lose God’s love with a single mistake.
Today, people who grew up signing pledges and internalizing object lessons—the rose, chewed-up bubblegum, tape that’s lost its stickiness—are naming what purity culture did to them. The guilt. The anxiety. And the church has started to listen. Writers, pastors, and therapists have worked to untangle desire from shame, to show that sex isn’t dirty and that grace isn’t fragile. Let me be clear: This reckoning is good and necessary. It’s helped many Christians rediscover a God who loves wounded people, not perfect performances.
But I fear that in the process of tearing down purity culture, we may have kissed purity itself goodbye. And that’s a problem.
You might think I sound like a boomer nostalgic for the days of modesty charts and curfews. I’m not. I’m a zoomer from the cesspool. My generation is porn addicted, drug dependent, dopamine sick, irony poisoned, attention fractured, and spiritually starved. We’ve traded repression for indulgence, and the result isn’t freedom—it’s decay.
Does Jesus still love my generation? Of course! But the youth pastors were halfway right. We really can become damaged roses.
If the 1990s and early 2000s gleamed with silver purity rings, today’s fingers slip over “for you” pages instead. Every scroll, swipe, and stream is saturated with sexual imagery—thirst traps disguised as authenticity, confessions that double as exhibition, and entire industries built on monetizing the human body. Pornography has become the air we breathe. Studies show that 73 percent of teens have consumed porn and 87 percent of young men watch porn weekly.
Porn aside, we’ve absorbed a worldview that treats the body as endlessly editable and desire as endlessly expressive. Sex before marriage is assumed. Cosmetic surgery is casual. Hookup culture is celebrated as empowerment. Even Christian spaces aren’t immune. Churchgoers hype the same music, the same aesthetics, the same algorithmic sexuality as everyone else.
The irony is that the “sexual freedom” meant to liberate us has only left us lonelier. Sociologists note that young adults are having less sex, entering fewer relationships, and marrying later than any generation before them. The more our culture obsesses over pleasure, the less capable we seem of connection. We’ve been trained to consume rather than commit, to perform rather than belong.
Recently, British influencer Lily Phillips went viral after admitting to sleeping with more than a hundred men in a single day—a story she later recounted with visible regret. “Sometimes you’d disassociate,” she said tearfully. “In my head right now, I can think of like five, six guys, ten guys I remember.” The sexual revolution promised empowerment, but it has delivered exhaustion—a generation of people who can’t tell the difference between intimacy and exposure.
Even secular thinkers are starting to admit this. In The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, journalist Louise Perry argued that newfound sexual “freedom” has made women less safe, less happy, and more disposable. She concludes her book with a piece of advice for her young readers: “Listen to Your Mother.” It turns out the Christian sexual ethic—once derided as prudish—is one of the last coherent frameworks for love, dignity, and belonging.
Purity, rightly understood, isn’t about fear. It’s about reverence. It’s not about suppressing desire but directing it. Paul writes, “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable” (1 Thess. 4:3–4). The problem isn’t that we desire too much; it’s that we’ve forgotten what desire is for.
Our desperate need for purity runs deeper than sex. It’s apparent in our humor, our language, our appetite for outrage. In many conservative circles, it’s become fashionable to use once-banned words like retard and gay as weapons. Public figures toss them around like badges of bravery against “wokeness,” and their followers applaud the “courage” to say what others won’t. Even young Christians have joined in, mistaking cruelty for conviction.
But Scripture names this plainly: sin. “On the day of judgment,” Jesus said, “people will give account for every careless word they speak” (Matt. 12:36, ESV). Paul wrote, “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up” (Eph. 4:29). James warned that the tongue is “a fire, a world of evil,” capable of blessing God and cursing his image bearers in the same breath (James 3:6–10).
We’ve confused bluntness with bravery, irreverence with realism, profanity with power. But how we speak about people—especially our enemies—reveals the kind of god we actually worship. The tongue, James says, cannot be tamed. Maybe that’s why purity still matters: not as repression but as restraint.
From shock-jock pastors to Taylor Swift’s raunchy lyrics, from poisoned memes to videos of a father gunned down in broad daylight—our culture is anything but pure. We live in an era where everything sacred has been reduced to a spectacle.
Nothing will make you long for purity quite like living without it. Spend enough time in the digital swamp, and you start to feel the brain rot, the moral vertigo. “The eye,” Jesus said, “is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light” (Matt. 6:22). We’ve trained our eyes to crave darkness.
“The mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Luke 6:45), and in the digital age, our feeds reveal our hearts. The internet has normalized voyeurism and cynicism. To refuse them is to remember that purity isn’t repression—it’s clarity. It’s the quiet discipline of guarding what you see and what you let shape you. “Above all else,” Proverbs 4:23 says, “guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”
Louise Perry’s questioning of the sexual revolution has led her somewhere she didn’t expect: faith. Recently, Perry announced that she has become a Christian—not just in a cultural sense but in a real, supernatural way. What began as a sociological interest in Christian sexual ethics has evolved into a belief in the Christ behind it.
The very purity our culture mocks is now drawing people back to God—because Christian purity, rightly understood, isn’t repression. It’s restoration. It doesn’t deny the body; it dignifies it. It doesn’t erase desire; it redeems it.
As someone who’s grown up entirely online, I’ve seen more than I ever needed to—and I know I’m not alone. So many of us feel exhausted and overexposed. We want a cleaner joy. We want guarded hearts, filtered eyes, sheltered souls. We’d rather be “prudes” than products.
We’re damaged roses who Jesus loves. We want to bloom again.
Luke Simon is the codirector of student ministries at The Crossing in Columbia, Missouri, and an MDiv student at Covenant Theological Seminary. He has written on Gen Z, technology, masculinity, and the church. You can follow him on X.
