True Love Waits and Sexual Accountability

Media Clip: Washington, DC at 7am. The warm wash of morning sun brings the nation's capitol to life. But one of the most unusual sites on the National Mall marks this as no ordinary Friday. Thousands of teenagers from all over North America and from every walk of life have a job to do. Today they're staking a claim for their future and the future of this country. Today they're pledging their sexual abstinence until marriage. Gather together with your friends and family as the Inspirational Network and Youth for Christ present True Love Waits, the national celebration. Live from the National Mall in Washington, DC.

Media Clip Intro: ...country, very courageous young people who say, 'I'm willing to stick to my claim, make a pledge, and I will abstain until I'm married.' I'm not married yet. I made a claim a long time ago, but I want to recommit myself to say that I will wait until I'm married. So I'm going to do it with them. I'm very proud of y'all. They're so awesome in number, I'm looking at an ocean of young people. And not only do they represent themselves, but each teenager out here, each young person, represents pundits back home that couldn't make it. As they stake their individual claims, their individual commitment cards and drive them to the ground here in the National Mall.

Sara Moslener: Welcome to Pure White. A podcast about sexual purity and white supremacy. I'm your host, Sara Moslener. And this is episode six. Guess what we're talking about today? So now we've come to the beginning of what many of us know as Evangelical Purity Culture. The rings, the pledges, the Jonas Brothers. True Love Waits national celebration in DC was just the first step toward the cultural saturation of evangelical purity teachings in the US. In this episode, we're gonna hear again from my friend Laura, who read the True Love Waits pledge in our very first episode. She was pretty involved as a teenager with True Love Waits, so we'll hear from her about that. She never knew that True Love Waits was started by the Southern Baptist Convention. In fact, it wasn't until I told her a couple months ago. And she's not the first person I've heard that from. This episode, we'll also hear from historian, Dr. Jesse Curtis, who's going to help us understand how colorblind Christianity made sexual purity appear less problematic in the 1990s. We'll hear some archival footage from Richard Ross and Josh McDowell, two of the evangelical leaders who started True Love Waits to help us gain some insight into the origins of the organization. And finally, we'll get some analysis from Dr. Stephanie Krehbiel, the Executive Director of Into Account, a survivor advocacy organization that mostly serves people who've experienced sexual assault in their Christian communities. When I first met Dr. Krehbiel, she told me she read my book, 'Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity of American Adolescence,' while a graduate student. Her first thought after finishing it was, 'the next thing this author will study is sexual assault in churches.' And damn it you all, she was right. So before we go any further, if you're currently dealing with religious trauma or sexual trauma in your life, you may want to read the transcript first so you know what to expect. This episode is on the longer side. So take your time if you need to.

Media Clip (CBS News): Now to a shocking claim that one of the country's largest Christian denominations suppressed, ignored, and stonewalled sexual abuse allegations for nearly two decades. A scathing new report commissioned by the Southern Baptist Convention describes extensive cover ups by senior leaders who were, quote, 'singularly focused on avoiding liability.'

Sara: 30 years after the founding of True Love Waits, the SBC is facing a widespread sex abuse crisis it seems not to know how to handle. It doesn't help that many in the church are continuing to insist, there is no crisis. And by many I mean: men. In leadership. In a church that just recently voted to expel churches who have female clergy. So all men, making all the rules, claiming God's authority. But it wasn't always this way. Before the late 1970s the SBC was moderate in their theology and politics. Even passing a resolution in favor of keeping abortion legal before Roe v Wade. But I want to go back even further, because the SBC has a significant history of racism that we need to consider alongside its promotion of purity culture. The denomination was founded in the antebellum period when slave-holding members were denied the opportunity to serve as missionaries. As the debate over slavery was threatening national unity, congregations faced the same divisions. Siding with the Confederacy and the belief that one could own slaves and be a good Christian. The Southern Baptist Convention started out on the wrong side of history. The SBC has since repented of these origins, and in 1995 they voted to apologize to their Black members. But today, conversations about race have become deeply fraught with the convention rejecting any ideas that are identified as 'critical race theory.' As a result, Black members and leaders, including four entire congregations, have left. Dr. Jesse Curtis is a historian at Valparaiso University who recently published the book 'The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era'. When we met, he was very excited to share a primary source he found from the mid 20th century, back when the Southern Baptist Church still practiced segregation. It's a letter to a denominational leader from a teacher at the Winchester Tennessee Southern Baptist Adult Men's Sunday school. In it, the Sunday School teacher explains how the men in the class, all fathers of young children, had been carefully considering the practice of segregation now that the laws were beginning to change. After referring to 'the Negro' as 'God's creature, the same as we are,' the letter writer goes on to endorse segregation. Here's Jesse reading the end of the letter that explains why:

Jesse Curtis: He says, 'We are associated in work and business with the Negro sufficiently to know their lives pretty well. They are very diseased physically. And their school age children use the most obscene language and think of sex above everything else. We really shudder at the idea of our children being placed side by side with them in school and Sunday school. Shall we do this to help the colored children and pull our children down to their level and maybe make outcasts of ours. Will God hold us, as parents, responsible for this?'

Sara: So here we have a white Christian claiming to accept non-whites into the body of Christ, but also very adept at translating his own fears and prejudices into a theological claim about obedience to God and parental responsibility. In his book, Jesse calls this sacred whiteness, a theological justification of segregation and anti-miscegenation that prioritizes the good intentions of white people but ignores the racist impact on people of color. This, Curtis explains, is the origin of colorblind Christianity. Dr. Curtis further explains in his book that after the Civil Rights Movement, the SBC and other predominantly white evangelical churches do begin to change their stance on race. They began adopting the language of color-blindness, which they believed was compatible with Christian teachings. They heard Dr. King speak about being judged by the character of one's heart and not by the color of skin, and they ran with it.

Jesse: Christian color-blindness says, 'Hey, we're all united in Christ. We're all equal at the cross.' And is there anything that could have more impeccable credentials in terms of, you know, the apostle Paul said this? Like, you know, in Christ, there's neither Jew nor Greek, right? And so it's very alluring on its face. It's impeccably Orthodox and biblical and all of that. And then, of course, the question becomes, 'what are these ideas deployed for?'

Sara: Today, the SBC remains firmly committed to color blindness, asserting that racism is an issue of personal sin. They are affronted by what they understand to be critical race theory, which requires us to think about racism as racial inequality that is embedded into our legal, educational, economic and theological systems. The SBC is very much a microcosm of broader national resistance to understanding and addressing racism and white supremacy. And it gives us another lens for understanding the denomination's urgency around sexual purity. In the 1970s, male leadership in the SBC was getting nervous. The women's movement had made its way to their gates, with women beginning to organize around the idea of Christian or evangelical feminism. So a select group of male leaders calling themselves the Conservative Resurgence started planning. Their goal was to align the SBC with conservative political ideologies and instate male-only authority. By the mid-1980s, all SBC seminaries were purged of women. Abortion was fully condemned, and biblical inerrancy, the belief that the Bible must be understood as the literal word of God, became the only correct form of biblical interpretation within the church. This conservative-takeover of the SBC mirrored a larger political shift as Ronald Reagan entered the White House, with help from a newly invigorated evangelical voting block convinced that being a Christian meant voting Republican. During the Reagan years, federal funding for abstinence-only education was first introduced. It was immediately caught up in the judicial system by progressive religious leaders who understood the meaning of religious freedom. But by the time True Love Waits was launched, in the 1990s, that legal tangle was loosened and the topic of abstinence-only education frequently emerged among political leaders, especially in relationship to welfare reform. More on this next week. In 1994 Youth for Christ and True Love Waits co-sponsored an event to introduce the nation to thousands of young people via their True Love Waits pledge cards that were staked into the lawn of the National Mall. The image is quite striking. Thousands of tiny pastel colored cards standing at attention. Rising behind them, the US Capitol building. True Love Waits leaders Josh McDowell and Richard Ross believed, like many conservatives, that Bill Clinton's election was a sign of the nation's moral decline. To be fair, Clinton didn't help with that any. The nation needed moral and spiritual revival and True Love Waits kids were being called to lead it. McDowell's own abstinence campaign pre-dated True Love Waits, but he was considered to be a 'well respected authority' on the dangers of teen promiscuity and what the nation faced as a result. Listen to him describe his take on this 'problem of promiscuity.'

Media Clip (Josh McDowell): Young people, right this moment are teetering on the issue of sex. So many have tried promiscuity and it's back-fired. They're even talking about second virginity. They were just on-- Prime Time America interviewed all these kids who had been pregnant. And at the end of the interview, Diane Sawyer says, 'Every single young person we interviewed said they wished they had waited.' And she asked them, 'Wait until when?' Every one of them said, 'Till I was married, till I was married, till I was married, till I was married.' And so right now you have those who have waited and wanting to be encouraged to continue waiting like true love. And then you have those who haven't waited saying, 'Hey, there's got to be more to it than this. Help me.' And those are the people the government's given on.

Media Clip (Interviewer, interviewing Josh McDowell): Is there something that we could do to... almost bottle their curiosity? I mean, kids could-- you know, their curiosity is so high, it's like if we could just curb that somehow?

Media Clip (Josh McDowell): Probably the best thing that we can do right now, as a church: produce families. Produce marriages that are models where kids say, 'I want what my mom and dad has. I want what my pastor has. I want what my president has.' And if we do not produce models, it doesn't matter what you preach or teach is going to fall on closed ears.

Sara: Note the animosity toward the federal government, its inability to inspire young people to live pure lives, the not-so-subtle barb at Clinton's personal life. Even as they lobbied for federal support True Love Waits leaders articulated a deep distrust of Washington. It was up to them then to produce families, marriages, and leaders that promote sexual purity. Kids won't be safe unless.... marriages must be 'this,' families must look like 'that,' our president should be 'this.' Or was it the other way around? Christian kids must be sexually pure so our Christian families are strong, so our Christian nation is strong. The last two elections certainly raised questions about white evangelicals' requirement for a morally upright president.

I asked my friend Laura, who you've heard in our first episode, if she recalled the national and governmental focus of the True Love Waits campaign, and what she thought about it.

Laura Kirkpatrick: I do remember that, and I remember it more because I knew my cousin was going. And I remember that in the meetings preparing for the rally, it was like, 'Oh, we want to see how many, how many cards we can send. Wouldn't it just be amazing to have all these cards there and for the government to see!' What does the government care if we decide to be abstinent or not?

Sara: But there was this sense that, like you're sending a message to Washington.

Laura: Yes, yes, and maybe it wasn't just to Washington, but to the country as a whole. With their, 'There are young people so convicted that are willing to sign this pledge!' And I'm like, look at this pledge, and I'm like, Dear God...just all the people I pledged to, per se, that...yeah...

Sara: Sexual purity as a national-level concern was hardly invented by True Love Waits. Do even a shallow dive in the Cold War, and you'll see it. But here, youth pastors were insisting that it was young people who needed protection from government sponsored sex education, Hollywood films and the liberalizing influence of a Democratic administration. And there was one other significant factor in all of this, the HIV crisis had raised awareness of the presence of gay people in the United States. Gay people who were getting increased sympathy and attention, eventually, because, well, they were dying. And for a long time, no one understood why, and no one cared. But by the 1990s even more people were coming out in response to the silence and ignorance.

Media Clip: Thanks everybody. Thank you for being here. There is a plague on our house. Perhaps a million Americans or more are infected with a deadly virus. Absent a medical miracle, that million and many more will die as surely as night follows day. In what one of our guests today, Paul Minette, calls: the First Decade of the AIDS Calamity. Men, women, children and tiny babies have all fallen to the dread disease. But despite the efforts of reporters, like me, to sanitize or to sympathize with the face of the epidemic, the harsh reality is that the AIDS anvil has fallen hardest on gay men. So fear of contamination now fuels the older flames of bigotry and intolerance. What must it be like to be gay in the midst of the AIDS catastrophe? Answering that question...

Sara: Ellen DeGeneres was the first lesbian to come out to a national audience on her sitcom. In response, the Southern Baptist Convention threatened to boycott ABC and its parent company Disney. But Richard Ross saw the momentum behind the gay rights movement of the 1990s and used it in the worst possible way.

Media Clip (Richard Ross): The context is this was the day where AIDS was just mushrooming. Everybody was scared out of their minds. The government was responding with the whole condom thing. In schools, all the science teachers were doing banana demonstrations. I mean, everybody was saturated with that. And so I said to the young people, 'How does everything you're hearing feel to you right now?' And the teenagers said, 'It's depressing.' They said, 'All the adults think we can't control ourselves. All the adults think we're just wild animals, crazy, and we're going to do despicable things, and somehow they've got to protect our health'. And I said, 'Okay, let me just ask you a question. If everybody else is coming out of the closet right now, maybe, maybe you guys need to come out of the closet. Maybe you just need to say, hey, we have found a way of living that we love. It's positive, it's wonderful. Makes human beings wonderful people, and we would be interested in being identified with this way of living.' And the teenagers said, 'Oh, that would be amazing. So it's like, we're not embarrassed about how we live. We can talk about it out loud. It's something we could even link arms and do together.'

Sara: The use of the language of Gay Liberation should raise a lot of questions for you. Evangelicals are really good at co-opting progressive language to imbue individuals with the energy for transformation. As conservatives, they believe first in individual transformation-- and that only individual transformation will lead to collective change. And to a degree, they did it. Ross and 120 youth from his church met with President Clinton and members of Congress that day. Two years later, Clinton, a twice re-elected Democrat, agreed to include $50 million in funding for abstinence only education in his hallmark welfare reform bill. The stipulations for those funds that required the promotion of Christian beliefs about human sexuality came directly from the Southern Baptist Convention.

Ross would go on to write a small pamphlet entitled 'When True Love Doesn't Wait.' This is the only place where the organization addresses the issue of sexual assault. Its content reveals a lot about True Love Waits leaders and what the Southern Baptist Church thinks about sexual assault and the experiences of survivors. And it gives us insight into how institutions create a culture in which abuse can thrive. [Clears Throat] A reading from 'When True Love Doesn't Wait,' "You probably know that sex before marriage breaks God's law and is a serious sin. You may honestly wonder what the future holds for someone who could do such a thing. Once a person has been through a tornado, a fire, a shooting, or sexual experience, a memory is created." So here we have Ross claiming that sex outside of marriage is a catastrophic event on par with violent acts. So even if you've already had good sexual experiences, you are expected to reframe it as harmful. For those who've already had their sexual debut, purity can only be restored if that memory becomes tied to trauma. Sex goes from being a curiosity to a natural disaster. So here's the question we need to consider: If sex before marriage is always a disaster, how do young people learn to recognize when they are experiencing real harm?

Ross goes on to ascribe destructive behaviors such as drug and alcohol use to adolescent sexual guilt. He writes, "Guilty teenagers give up completely, exercise some method of escape: drugs, sex, alcohol or withdraw from life." What he fails to see is that these 'dangerous behaviors' that he is describing are also efforts to cope with various forms of trauma. Instead of addressing the trauma, they are participating in victim-blaming, saying that these habits are the result of guilt accrued from disobeying God's command not to have sex outside of marriage. This authoritarian logic of True Love Waits adheres to the patterns of institutional abuse studied by scholars and survivor advocates. Dr. Stephanie Krehbiel is executive director of Into Account, an advocacy organization for survivors of sexual assault and religious communities. In our interview, we talked a lot about a lot of things survivors of sexual assault have to navigate in their churches. Among the most prominent: silence.

Stephanie Krehbiel: But silence is not... it's not a response that is emotionally or psychologically healthy. But it is the most common response to abuse. And I don't mean silence like never say anything ever, ever, ever, but having an attitude of, well, I don't want to rock the boat, I don't want to disrupt my family, I don't want to disrupt my church. My disruption could be a spiritual violation of my community, and therefore I can take on the mantle of suffering as Jesus suffered in order to make my own silence bearable to myself. That is a phenomenon that I think across the Christian spectrum, you're going to see.

Sara: As we know from the reports on the SBC clergy sex abuse crisis, survivors who do report experiences of abuse to their church leaders are often treated with contempt. Sexual Assault remains an underreported crime because many survivors experience intense hardship after doing so. Within a church, this takes on even more weight as survivors have to navigate the fallout in their spiritual community. Here's Dr. Krehbiel again:

Stephanie: When survivors step out of that and, you know, call BS on that system, they are basically accused. I mean, churches excel at...you know what the psychological and abuse recovery committee calls DARVO, which is deny, accuse, reverse victim and offender. That is terminology that comes from Dr. Jennifer Freyd, who was a renowned trauma informed psychologist. Anyway, like, DARVO with theological weight is part of part of what comes at survivors when they name their abuse and when the naming of the abuse creates significant social disruption, which it almost always does. I mean it almost always does. But if we're talking about abuse that happens in a church context, and the abuser is somebody who has a degree of social power over this survivor, which is usually the case, because it's much harder to abuse and assault people that you don't have social power over. Then the survivor is going to be recast by the community as a perpetrator, because they are, you know, taking down-- taking down a 'good man,' taking down a 'godly man,' tearing apart the church. I'm trying to think of some other goodies that I've heard-- just acting out of 'acting out of hatred.' I've heard survivors often categorized as 'hateful' when they ask for accountability, 'not embodying the Christian virtues of forgiveness and reconciliation.' These are all things that are leveled at survivors when they step outside of the, 'Okay, I will suffer silently in solidarity with Jesus,' and instead, say, take on a more justice oriented framework, which is, 'What happened to me is not okay. I'm going to ask for accountability for my community.' It really upsets the theological order of a lot of Christian settings.

Sara: Christian theological teachings can and do promote cultures of abuse. It requires understanding that sexual abuse is both deeply personal and embedded in institutional norms. Christian theologies that valorize suffering, service, and obedience create a culture in which the value and worth of individuals is based on their ability to comply with these signifiers of Christian piety. These same theologies become a sinister force in the life of abuse survivors who struggle to regain safety and self-worth. True Love Waits does assure its young readers that being forced to have sex does not mean loss of virginity and one's pure status. But then they go on to say this: "Reporting this immediately will increase your believability. Unfortunately, some persons use this excuse once they've been caught, find out someone is pregnant, or discover an STD. Your reason for reporting is not to get the other person in trouble." Alright, so here's where I get a little shrill, folks. And acknowledge that my nervous system is quite dysregulated, right now. I just can't imagine a church leader saying this to Emily whose adult youth minister groomed her for a relationship when she was just sixteen. Or Hannah-Kate who reported her father, and SBC pastor, for sexual assault. Church leaders called her an enemy of God. Or to Christa who was raped and spiritually tormented by her youth minister when she was sixteen. When it came to light, all the adults around convinced her it was an affair she had consented to. It took decades for her to realize they were wrong. So she became a lawyer and started a list of abusers within the SBC when the denomination refused to do so. Tell this to the seven hundred people whom the Houston Chronicle discovered have been abused by 380 clergy over the last 20 years. A hundred of those clergy were youth ministers teaching teenagers to wait for true love. Okay, nervous system: regulated. Sometimes, you just gotta rage, folks. These last few sentences in this tiny pamphlet, written by Richard Ross, tells us so much about how True Love Waits and SBC thinks about sexual assault survivors. It serves as a check-list for 'good survivors' who want to be believed and taken seriously. The assumption being, if you do not follow these directives your experiences can be dismissed and we will conclude you are committing libel against your brother in Christ. To be more straight-forward, Ross is promoting rape culture, the belief that survivors use rape accusations as a cover for their own guilt. The solution they offer is not to hold perpetrators accountable, but to follow a set of institutional protocols so that the powers that be can determine if a survivor's allegations are true or a cover for their own sinful behavior. When Christa Brown first approached the SBC leadership about being groomed and sexually assaulted by her youth minister, the men in the room turned their back on her. Not just figuratively. They laughed at her. To her face. The cruelty is astonishing unless you understand that they believe all accusations are an attempt to cover one's own guilt. Brown is hardly the only survivor to receive this treatment from church leadership. Others have been called 'divisive' and even 'demonic,' 'diabolical.' Again, this only makes sense if you don't believe the abuse actually happened. It was a youthful dalliance she now feels guilty about because she wasn't ready for it. She got caught in her sin and instead of going under the authority of the church, evil forces are encouraging her to attack. These men in leadership in the SBC, they were right about one thing. It is diabolical.

Thanks for sticking with this one. It was a lot, I know. Special thanks to my friend Laura. A reminder from her, 'don't get too hung up on protecting your twat.' Thanks to Dr. Jesse Curtis, author of 'The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era,' for being so generous with his expertise and for showing up to a podcast interview with a fascinating and relevant primary document, like a badass historian. Always a big thanks to Dr. Stephanie Krehbiel and her colleagues at Into Account. This episode is dedicated to survivor advocates and the survivors they work with every day. If you're looking for a place to throw some money, Into Account is the best I can offer. Next time we're sticking around the 1990s, the halls of Congress, and the Clinton administration. We'll look deeper into the ties between purity culture and the federal government and how True Love Waits help change the way we think about sex education, work, and welfare by worming their way into a major piece of welfare legislation. Pure White is a podcast about sexual purity and white supremacy, and made possible by Funding from the Louisville Institute and the Luce Foundation Project on Religion and Sexual Abuse. We are a co-production of Axis Mundi Media and the After Pure Project. Pure White was created by me, Sara Moslener. Executive produced by Brad Onishi. Editing, audio, and music by Scott Okamoto. And production assistance from Kari Onishi. See you next time.