December 22, Advent 4A (Matthew 1:18–25; Isaiah 7:10–16; Romans 1:1–7)

Many people I know who were raised in the church grew up with purity culture. I didn’t. The congregation that raised me was concerned with my spiritual formation, and all of us were involved in social justice causes. But I don’t remember much talk about when it was acceptable to have sex, or not. At home, my mother read the 1970s feminist classic Our Bodies, Ourselves with me. Instead of a set of rules tied up with shaky theology, I received “evidence-based information on girls’ and women’s reproductive health and sexuality.”

By the time I was in high school, a few of my Christian classmates were talking about abstinence. For some of my classmates in college as well, it seemed like the message that got through from adults in their lives was simply to avoid intercourse—a message that, among other things, demeaned the spiritual and emotional connection that other kinds of physical intimacy can form.

I developed a bit of an allergy toward the notion of virginity as an ideal. This continued through divinity school, especially as I read the early church fathers. It seemed to me that they extrapolated too much from the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ miraculous birth. I found them to be excessively concerned about virginity, equating purity with abstinence from sex.