A household sister and friend of mine recently wrote a personal blog post about the problems with “Purity Culture”, specifically the “purity ring,” and I wholeheartedly agreed with every word of it. When discussing her post with another friend of mine I couldn’t help but notice the confused look on my friend’s face, even though she shared my mutual distaste for “purity culture.” When I asked her if she was confused by my position she said she was confused not with my negative opinion of purity rings but with the fact that I wear one despite my apparent distaste for them.
“What?” I said, “I don’t wear a purity ring…” but my eyes had already fallen on my left ring finger where the sterling silver ring bearing a heart and a cross that I had received for my Confirmation was positioned.
“Oh!” I exclaimed, “This isn’t a purity ring it’s just…well…actually I’m not quite sure what you would call it.”
I’d like to assure everyone reading this at this moment that I am not in fact crazy and I really don’t think I’m stupid. But believe me when I say that I never considered this ring to be a purity ring, despite the fact that in hindsight, it probably appears so to everyone I encounter.
The truth of the matter is that this ring of mine represents so much more to me than some trite pledge to remain chaste for my future spouse, but to explain all of that I am going to need to back up a bit and start from the beginning.
I’ve never really bought into the whole “purity culture” thing, even from the beginning. The first time I ever really considered the topics of sexuality and religion at the same time was in sixth grade. But unlike a lot of Christians out there my first intellectual consideration of “purity” wasn’t at some youth rally or church group that was telling me to “save myself” for marriage. I’m not going to lie, I was a pretty naïve little sixth grader so if someone had said this phrase to me I probably would have asked what exactly of myself I was supposed to be saving for my future husband (A lock of my hair? My baby teeth?). Fortunately, I had an amazing religion teacher in sixth grade who took it upon herself to write her own middle school curriculum based on the Theology of the Body that had been articulated by JPII (a revolutionary idea at the time because there weren’t really even curriculums out there for high schoolers yet).
But unlike a lot of theology teachers and youth group leaders who only dive into TOB to talk about sex (specifically how you shouldn’t be having it but should rather be “saving yourself for marriage”) I distinctly remember how my teacher chose to introduce our class to the subject. She wrote two questions on the board and had us consider the answers:
Who am I?
Why do I exist?
Good luck trying to find two other questions that are equally important and equally terrifying to a sixth grader.
After posing these questions and allowing us to share our responses, my teacher then began to gradually unfold over the next few weeks the profound truths that can be discovered in JPII’s Theology of the Body. It’s important to point out that the answers she gave to these questions focused on one important thing: Love.
We are created lovingly by Love for love. God is our Father and we are His children. The Love exchanged and shared within the Trinity is so good and life-giving that God desires to share it and let it overflow so He creates us out of love to share His Love with us. And within each human being he gives us the ability to love and to be loved.
I know, there’s a lot of love there, but the important things to take away from all of that are the answers to the questions my sixth grade teacher posed to us:
Who am I? I am “one who is loved and one who loves”
Why do I exist? I exist “to love and to be loved.”
Why am I sharing this? Quite simply, it’s to emphasize a point. In my experience I learned that the discussion about my human identity doesn’t begin with a discussion of my sexuality; it begins with a discussion about love.
The problem with most of the “purity culture” that we find in many Christian circles is that, while it may have good intentions, oftentimes it is no better than the secular world in where it places its emphasis: on sex. This ultimately comes across as a hollow and empty message because sex disconnected from our deeper identity of love is hollow and empty.
Because at their root, the virtues of purity, chastity, modesty, etc. have NEVER first-and-foremost been about sex. They have always been about the human identity which is wrapped up in love. But because part of my personhood (or identity) is embodied (i.e. I have a body), these virtues have repercussions for what I do with my body.
But Satan, along with much of the world, is really messed up because he twists my understanding of love and the body. If my identity is tied up with loving and being loved, Satan is going to do everything in his power to make me feel unlovable and incapable of giving love.
A moment of true, personal vulnerability here: I’ve always really struggled with both of these lies, but I’m going to especially focus on the first one in this blog post. Satan has done a pretty good job of convincing me my entire life that I must be unlovable because despite the fact that “on paper” I seem to have my life completely together, I’ve always had a hard time making friends. Going further and really solidifying this lie in my mind, Satan has never once failed to tell me that I’m clearly unlovable because no man has ever found me lovable enough to ask me out on a date.
Verily Magazine recently posted an article written by a man explaining why he doesn’t ask out the seemingly “perfect” girl that he knows. One of the reasons he gave in the article boiled down to attraction (perfect as she may seem, he just might not be attracted to her). It was a well-written article and the rational part of my brain appreciated the wisdom of his insights. But as soon as I read it I felt that familiar dark shadow creeping into my mind and whispering again and again, “Well there’s your answer: you’ve never been asked out by a man because no man has ever found you attractive.”
Now, I knew that this was a lie of Satan’s the moment I heard it, but that didn’t make it any easier to shake. Weeks and weeks that same lie spun around in my head, inflamed by the fact that every aunt, sibling, parent, hairdresser and optometrist I encountered over the Christmas break wanted to know if I had any romantic prospects looming on the horizon. To have to keep insisting that “No, I have nothing to report,” while deflecting comments like, “That can’t be true, a girl like you surely has admirers!” was a trial, to say the least.
But here is where we get back to my supposed “purity ring” because every time that the lie that I was unlovable popped into my head, I would glance down at the ring I wore on my left ring finger.
You know, I didn’t always wear it on my left hand. Until about a year ago I had always worn it on my right. I only changed it last spring after going to confession with a little Eastern European priest who was the spitting image of Padre Pio. He told me that at the heart of my spiritual battle was the struggle to remember and trust that Jesus loved me despite my imperfections. He told me to wear a piece of jewelry to remind me of that truth whenever I began to doubt it. I walked out of that confessional and slipped the ring from my right hand to my left and haven’t looked back since. Before that moment it had always been just a pretty piece of jewelry, but after that moment it became an important symbol of truth in my life.
You see, this ring for me is NOT a purity ring because I don’t wear it to remind myself that I’m waiting for the love of the perfect man. No, I use this ring as a constant reminder that the perfect Man already loves me.
Satan’s lie that I’m unlovable is just that, a LIE, because Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried for me. He descended into Hell for me. And on the third day he rose again from the dead for me. This isn’t some fairy tale or analogy that Christians made up to feel better about their lives. It happened, and I profess this truth every time I recite our Creed.
But because I’m not just a spiritual being it sometimes takes more than words to get this truth to sink into my thick skull. Remember, I’m an embodied creature and so sometimes it takes visible, material, embodied things to get through to me. That’s why Jesus gave us the Eucharist, as a physical reminder of His love for us. But because we can’t physically carry the Eucharist around with us all the time (darn!) we sometimes need even more material reminders of spiritual truths.
Think of scapulars, Marian consecration chains, saint medals, prayer cards, rosaries, crucifixes, and sacred art. These remind us of already existing realities. They aren’t just some visible way to show others about some resolution we hope to complete in the future. They’re not conditional like a purity ring is (if I remain chaste until marriage then I will be pure) but rather unconditional (Jesus can and has purified me despite my sins and the lives of Mary and the saints prove it). While purity rings focus on the past (what you have or have not done) and the future (what you can expect as a result) sacramentals show us all of time in one eternal moment (whatever you’ve done in the past or will do in the future, Jesus loves you then, now, and always and He gives you eternal life to live with Him in Heaven forever.) Sacramentals, like my ring in this instance, remind us of our profound dignity and worth because they remind us of the love God has for us right now.
Knowing then this profound dignity and worth that I possess, I am given confidence to demand that others treat me (which includes my body) accordingly. The virtues of purity, chastity, modesty, etc. are then the natural conclusion to the thesis of love. If I believe that I am loved freely, totally, faithfully, and fruitfully by God then I will seek to live out this perfect model of love (after all, God is love) in all my interactions with others. When I begin my self-understanding with the understanding that I am made to give and receive the perfect love that is modeled by Christ, I won’t want to settle for anything less.
Thus, purity, chastity, and modesty make sense and flow naturally from this true understanding of love. They are not some arbitrary dictum handed down by power-mongering old men in funny hats who think sex is bad and we need to “protect” people from its corruption and temptations. People who think this is the Catholic Church’s understanding of human sexuality have clearly never read a word of Pope St. John Paul II (or St. Edith Stein or St. Thomas Aquinas or St. John Chrysostom or anyone else for that matter).
We shouldn’t begin our discussions of the human person and their sexuality talking about sex or abstinence or modesty like the “Purity Culture” does. We shouldn’t do this because the Christian exhortation isn’t to go forth baptizing all people in the name of the purity ring, the pledge to “save ourselves,” or the slogan that “modest is hottest” (honestly, anyone who utters this phrase, let them be anathema!) The Christian exhortation is rather to go forth baptizing all people in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The Christian mission is Trinitarian, and what is the Blessed Trinity but a Communion of Love. Christians are not called to build up a “Purity Culture;” we are called to create a Civilization of Love.
Because ultimately people, they’ll know we are Christians by our Love, not our purity rings.
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Alyssa Snyder is a Junior studying Humanities and Catholic Culture, Theology, and Philosophy. She is a native of Texas where she lives with her family in a blue-roofed house on top of a hill. She is passionate about the Truth of the Lord's Incarnation and loves spending time discovering and discussing ways in which others have incarnated the Gospel in film, history, literature, politics, and art. Her favorite saints are St. Teresa of Avila and St. Catherine of Siena because they both personify St. John Paul II's "feminine genius" in her mind.
