30 years later, the evangelical purity movement still impacts sex education

On July 29, 1994, thousands of teenagers gathered in Washington, D.C., to tell the nation about their pledge to remain sexually abstinent until marriage. They covered the lawn of the National Mall with an estimated 200,000 signed purity pledge cards, and they attended a rally with speakers and Christian rock bands.

Teenagers across the U.S. had signed the cards, produced and collected by the Southern Baptist organization True Love Waits, over the previous year. It was a breakout moment in the evangelical purity movement — a movement that impacts sex education in the United States to this day.

Jill Dender was one of the first teens to sign the pledge.

She went with the youth group from her church, Tulip Grove Baptist in Nashville, Tenn., to Washington to help stake the cards into the ground. She and her friends wore matching True Love Waits T-shirts and packed beauty essentials of the era. "We had plenty of hair spray and our picks," she said, "and our blue mascara and our blue eyeliner."

She said she felt joy and excitement when she was finished and looked up at a sea of cards.

"Wow, all these people want to honor Jesus. All these people love Jesus," she recalled thinking at the time.

Thirty years ago, the nation was still in the shadow of the AIDS crisis, and teen pregnancy rates were up. News outlets like Newsweek and ABC's 20/20 were quick to pick up on this "virginity" trend. True Love Waits received hundreds of media inquiries in its first year. The organization later held similar displays of cards at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta in 1996 and at the Golden Gate Bridge in 1999.

One early version of the commitment card, developed by True Love Waits co-founders Richard Ross and Jimmy Hester, reads: "Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, those I date, my future mate and my future children to be sexually pure from today until the day I enter a covenant marriage relationship."

Claire McKeever-Burgett encountered True Love Waits during a youth group service at her church in Abilene, Texas, in 1996. She remembers feeling unsettled by it. "There was just something about it that I was confused about. But I did it 'cause, like, church was my life."

She said it felt like an isolated thing that happened at church, and she didn't talk about it with her parents. "And so if they had a hundred kids, right, who signed these, then that was something they could celebrate," she said.

The number of youth participating was certainly part of what got the purity movement so much traction.

Ross, the True Loves Waits co-founder, said the early 1990s were marked by a preoccupation with how to reduce the consequences of teen sexual behavior. It was "a complete surprise to the adults that teenagers on their own, without any coercion from adults," would choose to wait for sex until marriage, he said.

Ross then heard from government policymakers seeking counsel. "They just were intrigued with whatever we had learned about young people choosing, to use their words, abstinence," he said.

And he said True Love Waits was happy to help.

Federal funding was allocated shortly thereafter for abstinence-based programs, like Sex Respect and Choosing the Best, whose explicit purpose was to "teach abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard for all school-age children."

States funded over 700 programs in the first two years that the money became available through the Welfare Reform Act, according to a report submitted to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

But, Ross says, True Love Waits was not among them. "We were doing this entirely for the glory of God. So it would've been a little bit strange to have the government funding that."

The U.S. has never had a national standard for sex education. States and local school boards make requirements for the education that K-12 students receive about sex and their bodies.

Leslie Kantor, a public health professor at Rutgers University, worked in sex education advocacy in the '90s. She documented hundreds of school board fights across the country.

"You started to see a lot more organization by conservative groups trying to get existing health education programs shifted out in favor of some of these newly developed abstinence-only-until-marriage programs," Kantor said.

Many of the advocates for abstinence succeeded, especially in Southern and more conservative states, while some states started refusing the grant money and rejecting the criteria attached to it.

During President George W. Bush's administration, abstinence organizations could apply directly for grants, bypassing the states, via the Community-Based Abstinence Education program. At the same time, studies started to emerge that showed that abstinence-only programs had no significant effect on the sexual behavior of youth who were exposed to it.

Additionally, a congressional report showed that 80% of the grantee programs contained "false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health." Many of the abstinence-only curricula were called out for having sexist or racist stereotypes and anti-LGBTQ+ language.

SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change is an organization that has been advocating for comprehensive sex education since 1964. Its website offers an interactive map that gives grades A through F to states based on their sex education requirements and content. It reports that 35 states require abstinence to be emphasized and that 17 states still provide abstinence-only sex education.

Most of those 17 states have higher rates of teen pregnancy than the national average and are largely located in the South and Midwest.

Though the language in legislation and programming may have shifted from the term "abstinence" to "sexual risk avoidance," they still discourage all sexual activity outside marriage.

But even in comprehensive sex education, the standard in many states today, abstinence is still part of the curriculum, according to Nawal Umar, a policy analyst at SIECUS.

"It's just equated to all the other options that exist," Umar said. "Because the reality is that abstinence is not going to be the decision that every young person makes."

Jill Dender and Claire McKeever-Burgett are now both married and live in Tennessee — a state that gets a C- on SIECUS' grading scale. The state requires any sex education to center on abstinence, and it has severe limits on birth control information. Teachers can even be sued if a parent sees them as "encouraging, advocating, urging or condoning gateway sexual activities," under the Gateway Law.

Dender has seven children and homeschools them. She's still happy about her decision to wait for marriage and wants her kids to follow the same path when it comes to sexuality. But mainly what she wants for her kids is for them to follow Jesus. "And when it's all about Jesus, all this other stuff falls in line," Dender said.

McKeever-Burgett says she is still a Christian but disagrees with what she learned in the purity movement. She said it left her without tools for her dating relationships and made her feel disconnected from her body. She wrote about it in her book, Blessed Are the Women.

She wants her two kids to have better relationships with their bodies — to talk about the feelings they're having without shame. "If you can access that inner wisdom, then as far as I'm concerned, you can live a really beautiful, free life. And that's what I want for them with sexuality and with everything."

True Love Waits is still around 30 years later but stopped selling pledge cards in 2017. The language of the pledge has changed over time. The most recent version of the True Love Waits commitment doesn't explicitly mention sexual abstinence or even the word "purity." Instead, kids are invited to commit themselves to God "in the lifelong pursuit of personal holiness."

And you'll encounter it only if you flip to the back of one of their teen study guides.