The Bulletin and Bible teacher Jen Wilkin respond to a recent article from The New York Times linking American wedding traditions with unhealthy Christian purity culture.
This conversation is edited and condensed from a discussion that appeared in episode 217 of The Bulletin. Listen to the whole conversation here.
Queen Victoria started the tradition of wearing a white gown when she married Prince Albert in 1840. Writer Gina Ryder argues that argues that purity culture lingers in this tradition that modern women find unnecessarily binding. What is purity culture, and how does it show up in American Christian church culture?
Jen Wilkin: Purity culture goes way back, but its modern, popular conception arose in the 1990s. We started to hear that if you kept yourself pure until marriage, then your marriage was going to be perfect. We heard that a woman’s purity was like a source of value. That’s an ancient idea, but it came forward into modern times in the form of things like the purity ring that made it seem as though you’re married before you’re married. These ideas were intended to allow you to enter into marriage as pure as possible so that your marriage could be as successful as possible.
The hope was that the guys would also get on board, but there was more messaging for women. I grew up with four brothers who would not report having heard as much messaging as we girls got.
Mike Cosper: Religious conservatives want to challenge their young people to avoid sex until marriage for good reason. Scripture affirms the value of abstinence. But the messaging can be very confusing.
A decade ago, I was sitting with evangelical leaders my age, and the subject of purity culture came up. Everybody told stories about how their youth groups said that sex was filthy, dirty, and nasty—so save it for the one you love. When they got married, they struggled to figure out how to make sex into something that was intimate and satisfying. In the middle of this conversation, an older pastor stopped us at one point and said, “Yeah, but remember: Abstinence is a good thing.”
In the church, we’re in a long moment of reactivity to the purity culture that a lot of us who are in our 40s and older grew up with. However, there’s actually something valuable at the heart of purity culture, which is that sex is a sacred bond between a husband and a wife and something that should be saved for marriage.
Russell Moore: It’s kind of like dealing with the word legalism. When somebody uses the word legalism, you have to stop and make sure that you’re actually talking about the same thing, because for some people, obedience is legalism.
Sometimes when people say purity culture, what they mean is the very basic concept that in the early church in Acts 15, one of the few messages given to the new Gentile believers is abstain from sexual immorality, defined as it is in Scripture.
When we come to purity-culture language, we need to stop and figure out what we’re talking about. Purity culture can be anything from father-daughter dances, where a girl commits to allowing her dad to surveil her phone until she’s 35, all the way over to a desire to flee sexual immorality, which is what the Scripture says. We have to understand what we’re talking about before we go forward.
Wilkin: The purity culture of my youth occurred at the cusp of what became a tsunami of the sexual revolution and the rise of birth control. It was grappling with the early stages of what we would now call hookup culture and trying to come up with a solution. I don’t think the implications of what was going to happen were clear at that time.
Purity culture tried to talk about sexuality in way that was spiritual in nature and more than just “Hey, don’t get pregnant.” It was well intended, but it ended up communicating things that were unintentional as well.
Cosper: Look at teen-pregnancy rates in the 1970s and the 1980s, and consider that in light of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. This sexually transmitted disease had emerged that was new and scary. For a long time, HIV/AIDS was fatal; there was no real treatment. Purity culture also emerges from that. It carried with it a desire to protect young people from teen pregnancy and dying of AIDS.
How do the symbols of weddings in American culture relate? The bride wearing white, the veiled bride, the father giving away the bride—are these Christian ideas? Cultural ones? Are they a mix of both?
Wilkin: I think it’s a mix. My kids are the age where I’m going to a lot of weddings, and I do not find that there are endless discussions about whether the bride should wear white.
Not only that, but because of social media, brides are wearing white to the bridal shower. They’re wearing it to the rehearsal dinner. There’s even a catch phrase: “the little white dress.” I would argue that our wedding traditions, Christian and non-Christian, are being shaped more by Instagram and celebrities than they are by any throwback idea of what a white dress means.
For many people, wedding planning is “choose your own adventure.” Their officiant is a friend who gets licensed online to do the wedding. The wedding party chooses whatever dress they want. These days we’ve lost any sense of liturgy, I would argue, other than a cultural liturgy in the wedding space. The true officiants are the wedding planner, the photographer, and the DJ.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t women in more conservative circles who are giving this thought, but it’s been a long time since I’ve talked to a bride who was agonizing over the color of her dress.
Moore: Literally the most controversial thing I ever say—and there’s a lot of things I’ve said that are controversial—is to tell couples that they can’t write their own vows.
I say this because the wedding vows aren’t all about the couple. The entire community is pledging to help you to keep these vows. This isn’t just an expression of your love for each other. If you don’t have that kind of intentionality from the church, then a wedding planner runs the service. Incidentally, the same thing happens at the end of life: Often a funeral director runs the service.
Many women bring complex stories to their weddings—abuse, abandonment, sexual pain. These symbols or traditions can really complicate that. How could a Christian view of marriage dismantle some of these complications?
Wilkin: I feel a particular tenderness toward the woman who has suffered abuse. Many women don’t even realize that their “sexual status” when they’re coming into marriage really wasn’t determined by them but some guy who was overly aggressive. They think it’s a transgression of their own.
Contemporary church life sometimes complicates this, because it’s one thing if you’re in a relatively small church where everybody knows you and you don’t have to explain these things. People love you. They care about you.
So often, though, that’s not the case in our churches today. We move around from church to church. A lot of people aren’t at the same church for a long period of time. Their list of wedding guests is curated from people they’ve only known for a few years. The nature of the gathering itself is not one of people saying, “We know you. We love you, and we’re here to support you.” It’s more a party where you invite people who are significant now.
We need to be okay with less Instagram perfect and more real community. If you have the people there who know you and love you, that has to be enough for you. This is important from a theological standpoint. Your identity is not just one day but many days. The people who know and love you the most are the ones who can help you move forward in your engagement, on your wedding day, and thereafter.
Cosper: When I would officiate weddings, I would encourage engaged couples to make a list of the people they could call when marriage got really hard. Those are the people who help you keep your vows.
The modern wedding has become a performative ritual. What can we capture on camera? What can we post on social media? What can we frame and stick up around the house? Instead, a Christian wedding emphasizes, before God and man, a promise to one another. You want the people around you who are going to be able to help you keep that promise through thick and thin.
Moore: In the traditional English wedding ceremony, it says, If anyone has objection to why this man and this woman should not be married, let him speak now or forever hold his peace. No one actually ever expects anyone to say anything, unless it’s in a cheesy romantic comedy where the old boyfriend stands up and says, “I still love you. Come off with me.”
That phrase is there because the wedding is about the entire community pledging to support—hold accountable—the couple and help them keep their vows. If you have this sense that this ought to be your perfect day and anything that goes wrong is devastating, that’s a really culturally malformed way to begin a marriage.
Wilkin: So much of this has to do with the way that we think about family in general and the way we think about what it is to be a successful adult. We have told our children that the more successful you are, the farther you will live from us and the less contact you’ll have with us after you leave the home. That rolls down into weddings. A wedding becomes a sending off instead of joining in to something that’s bigger than you, that’s been around before you and will be around after you. Realistically, your actual family and your church family are the ones who are going to be there for you for the long haul. The wedding isn’t a moment in time; it’s a piece of something bigger.
Scripture tells us that Christian marriage is meant to image the marriage of Christ and church. For the bride or the groom who has apprehensions about symbolically wearing white, about bringing baggage into a new marriage, what does this picture offer as a promise?
Moore: Revelation 20 depicts the new Jerusalem coming down as a bride out of heaven. In Scripture, Christ clothes that bride in fine linen, but not as a way of marking the significance of the purity of the bride. It is the marriage itself making that reality. So if you want to wear white, wear white. The important thing is that you are committing to make your marriage reflect in a little, broken kind of way that one-flesh union of Christ in his church and the gospel.
