John Paul Basham remembers, when he was a teenager, participating in a sexual abstinence program called True Love Waits at his Southern Baptist church in Hoover, Ala. in the late 1990s.
In fact, at the program’s height in the 1990s and early 2000s, thousands of teens pledged to remain sexually abstinent until marriage – an ethic of many conservative Christian churches that the program termed “sexual purity.”
Click to the rest of the story at ReckonSouth.com.
This story is part of a Reckon series about purity culture, sex education and the role of family, faith and communities in addressing the lasting impacts of purity culture’s teachings.