For nearly two decades this site has made the case that the Christian scriptures do not teach 'Abstinence until marriage'. Instead they teach a better framework. 'Abstinence until adulthood'; an ethic rooted in the text, not in fear or institutional convenience.
An ethic that:
- Protects children and those without agency
- Encourages adolescents toward emotional maturity
- Does not burden responsible adults with demands God did not make nor do Scriptures require
If you've been hurt by purity culture, you are not alone, and you are not broken.
Pastors, teachers, and parents looking for a Biblical sexual ethic that is both realistic and honest are in the right place too.
Hurting or questioning?
What happened to you is not your fault. Purity culture caused real harm — and the theology behind it doesn't hold up. You're in the right place.
Pastor, teacher, or parent?
You don't have to choose between Scripture and honesty. A better framework exists — grounded in the text, not in fear. You're in the right place.
Why Listen to Me?
I'm not a seminary scholar or a pastor with a denomination behind me. I'm someone who spent decades inside the system — living under it, watching what it did to me and my brothers and sisters. Eventually I decided the argument needed to be made more faithfully, from the text itself; with or without institutional approval.
I've been making this case since 2008. I debated a Reformed Baptist pastor on his own radio program — he never released the episode. I wrote a white paper documenting how AI platforms interpret the relevant purity culture scriptures much differently when institutional bias is disabled. And I wrote a novel about what this theology does to real people over a lifetime.
The Debate — Pastor Gene Cook Jr., 2009 — A recorded debate from 2009, when this argument was considerably less welcome than it is today. The content includes discussion of 1 Corinthians 7:3–4 and coercion within marriage — viewer discretion advised. Pastor Cook ultimately chose not to publish the episode without disclosing why. Watch the debate →
The White Paper — The Fellowship of Thy LLMs — Published on Zenodo and distributed through SSRN's academic preprint network. A documented examination of how five major AI platforms independently resolved every ambiguity in purity culture's core proof-texts in favor of the institutional reading — silently, without acknowledging the ambiguity existed. When prompted using steelman prompting, every platform produced alternative readings that were more consistent with the original language and, by the platforms' own analysis, more compelling than the defaults they had initially offered. Read on Zenodo → · Read on SSRN →
No pulpit. No seminary. Just the text, my lived experience, and nearly two decades of not letting this go.
Start here — Pillar 1: Abstinence Until Marriage →