Purity Culture Isn’t the Problem, by Carl R. Trueman 

By Carl R. Trueman, First Things, February 6, 2025

cAnd apparently it must share blame for lack of sexual agency, rape culture, misogyny, and, of course, racism—without which no list of modern sins is ever complete.

Yet for all the scorn heaped upon it, purity culture is not the most pressing threat today. Even if it proved counterproductive, it is not nearly as dehumanizing as its successor. Kathleen Stock, in an article at UnHerd last week, recounts the stories of Nikole Mitchell, a “pastor-turned-stripper and companion,” and Lily Phillips. The two young women have anonymous sex with vast numbers of random men for free, on condition that they can video the encounters and post them online. These women also display their sexual license in even more public ways, if that were possible, the details of which I will not describe in a First Things column. Stock calls this sexual extremism the “impurity spiral.” There is certainly a sense in which the women she describes represent a new extreme, a twisted descent into new depths of degradation. But I would argue their behavior is only the logic of the old sexual revolution, albeit now playing itself out in a world of technologically-enabled performance. It’s an impurity spiral, but it’s also a culture of desecration and consequent dehumanizatio …n.

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