In 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. She said she felt joy and excitement when she was finished and looked up at a sea of cards.
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.”
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. 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.” 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. 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.
SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change is an organization that has been advocating for comprehensive sex education since 1964. Most of the 17 states that still provide abstinence-only sex education have higher rates of teen pregnancy than the national average. 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.
Jill Dender and Claire McKeever-Burgett are now both married and live in Tennessee — a state that gets a C- on SIECUS’ grading scale. 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. McKeever-Burgett says she is still a Christian but disagrees with what she learned in the purity movement. She wants her two kids to have better relationships with their bodies — to talk about the feelings they’re having without shame.
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.”
