Brio Magazine, Christy Miller, and I Kissed Dating Goodbye

The Prosperity Gospel of Purity Culture

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Friends: Today, I welcome my friend and fellow author, Anna Rollins, for my very first Substack guest post! Her fabulous book, Famished, released this week.

The Prosperity Gospel of Purity Culture

As an evangelical millennial girl, I devoured Focus on the Family’s Brio magazine. Brio was marketed as a Christian alternative to teen magazines like Seventeen or Cosmo. Rather than running headlines about how to attract a boyfriend, Brio’s relationship beat covered topics such as how to dress, act, and speak to keep guys pure. Underneath this rhetoric was the idea that my demure behavior would lead to eventual reward – both romantic and spiritual.

Even though I checked out Sweet Valley from our local library (despite my mom’s disapproval), I did not aspire to the lifestyles of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield. Instead, I longed for a life like Christy Miller’s, the main character in Robin Jones Gunn’s iconic evangelical chapter books, also distributed through Focus on the Family. Set in a beachside town in California, Christy is chastely pursued by the dreamboat surfer, Todd Spencer. When she decides to save her kisses for marriage, this slow burn of desire only makes him want her more.

My Christian media, in other words, was preaching the purity culture prosperity gospel – the idea that through controlled behavior and personal restriction, I would receive future blessings. It’s a false promise I’m still unpacking in adulthood today.

In research for Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl, I asked women how their experiences in purity culture impacted their relationships with their own bodies. Nearly every woman I spoke to described feeling disassociated or fragmented from their own desires. And when I asked where they received these messages about suppressing their bodies’ longings, nearly all of them cited bestselling evangelical books from the 90s and 2000s.

One can’t speak about evangelical purity culture without referencing the most famous text of the time: I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Published in 1997, it went on to sell over a million copies. The author, Joshua Harris, wrote the book when he was only 21 years old. The book provided a roadmap to purity for singles hoping to marry. Harris disavows any physical display of intimacy prior to marriage, including kissing and handholding. Our culture’s view of dating, he quips early in the book, is “practice for divorce.” Harris proposed courtship as an alternative to dating. Courting was similar to dating, but the end goal was always marriage.

There was always an end goal – no playing around, no having fun. Courting involved chaperones and accountability. Male-female involvement was to occur in public, with witnesses. Courting, supposedly, was a less risky alternative to dating. No going too far in a moment of passion. Fewer hurt feelings.

I read other purity culture staples, too: Boy Meets Girl_, Joshua Harris’s follow-up about his early marriage, Captivating by John and Stasi Eldredge, Let Me Be a Woman by Elisabeth Elliot, and Every Young Woman’s Battle by Shannon Ethridge, to name a few. I was drawn to these books on my own, sneaking to my parents’ bookshelves to steal the books away, reading them privately from cover to cover. No one forced me to consume them. I was hungry for the rules, the step-by-step plan that told me how to be a perfect woman who would eventually obtain a perfect life.

I wanted the Christian dream: a virginal engagement that led to a happy marriage. In many ways, Christianity seemed like little more to me than a bunch of rules about sex broken into two chapters: life before marriage and life after. Before marriage, I was to keep my body untouched and safe. After marriage, my reward would be fulfilling sex that would produce good children who I would train to go on and follow the exact same script as myself.

Of course, purity culture’s white picket fence fantasy breaks down in the wear and tear of life. Eventually, I would learn that a husband – no matter how upstanding – could never serve as my savior. Restriction would not yield abundance. Passivity would not lead to peace. And wanting things and going after them was not a moral failing – rather, it was a sign that I was fully alive.

Today, I can flip through my old Christy Miller books and recognize the fantasy and harm of the underlying messages. If my daughter decides to read them, we’ll tease out the rhetoric together. Because, despite the marketing, these cultural artifacts were not just safe and pure.

It took me years to undo the thought patterns I absorbed in purity culture. And, as I write about in Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl, I’m in good company: many women are unpacking these scripts of suppression to find a more capacious, embodied faith.

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