"Be fruitful and multiply."
Genesis 1:28 — God's first command regarding human sexualityShortly after creating Adam and Eve in His image but prior to anyone formalizing marriage as an institution, God issued the very first command regarding sexual morality. This command involved no marriage ceremony or legal contract. There was no extended period of abstinence. To the contrary: it was an affirmation of humans as sexual beings, and a commission to act on it — immediately!
Purity culture never quite explains that.
Abstinence until marriage is presented as a simple, necessary, easy-to-live, undebatable biblical truth. It isn't. Institutions never debate the subject because the theology is remarkably flimsy when honestly challenged.
⚠ Content Warning: This debate contains discussion of marital sexual coercion. The pastor being debated argues from 1 Corinthians 7:3 that a spouse has a binding sexual duty to their partner — a position that has been used to justify spousal rape. If this is a sensitive topic for you, please exercise caution before watching.
Nemeth, Scott M. vs. Pastor Gene Cook Jr. — The Narrow Mind apologetics podcast, 2009. A live debate on fornication, premarital sex, and the key proof-texts of purity culture including 1 Corinthians 6–7, Song of Solomon, and 2 Corinthians. Recorded but never published by the host.
The Text Doesn't Cooperate
Independent voices have been making this case for years. In Sexuality and Scripture, Rev. Dr. Debra W. Haffner argues that the lovers in the Song of Solomon — Scripture's most vivid celebration of human sexuality — are:
...unmarried.
Rev. Dr. Debra W. Haffner — Sexuality and Scripture, regarding the Song of SolomonHaffner, Debra W. Sexuality and Scripture. Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing, 2003. Available at: huumanists.org (PDF, freely available).
"The Song of Songs is a delightfully erotic, sensual dance between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman. It is almost by definition, a statement of a sexually healthy relationship: the lovers' desire for each other is mutual; their passion is mutual; their fulfillment is mutual. The emphasis is on passion and intimacy; there is no discussion of marriage or fertility."
Schellenberg, Annette. "The Description of Solomon's Wedding: Song 3:6-11 as a Key to the Overall Understanding of the Song of Songs." Vetus Testamentum, vol. 70, no. 1, Brill, 2020, pp. 177–200. Peer-reviewed. Schellenberg argues that the wedding in chapter 3 belongs to Solomon — a separate character used as a foil — not to the lovers themselves. The lovers are distinguished from Solomon explicitly in 8:11-12, where the woman contrasts her beloved directly with the king. This means the two lovers remain unmarried throughout the entire Song, before and after the royal wedding procession. Vetus Testamentum is one of the oldest peer-reviewed journals in Hebrew Bible scholarship.
Princeton Theological Seminary — OMSC. Commentary on Song of Solomon, 2023. Princeton's own theological commentary describes the Song as centering "on romantic love between two apparently unmarried young people" — noting that the church has long been uneasy with exactly that reading.
Scripture quotations in Haffner's paper are from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).
That single observation is a crack in the institutional dam. The Song of Solomon is not a solitary exception — not even close.
- The Book of Ruth — The threshing floor scene in Ruth 3 is striking. Rather than advocating the purity culture narrative of "waiting on God," Naomi instructs Ruth to lie with Boaz in the night. Biblical scholar D.R.G. Beattie of Queen's University Belfast argued that what transpired that night went well beyond a simple conversation.
- Tamar and Hagar — Both narratives quietly resist the tidy framework purity culture depends on, presenting intimate situations outside of marriage without the condemnation the institution insists the text demands.
- The New Testament proof-texts — A white paper applying AI analysis to one of purity culture's key New Testament proof-texts reveals how ambiguities are being interpreted in a biased manner — favoring institutional narratives over more textually compelling readings. The same analysis exposes how the primary word translated as fornication or sexual immorality is being stretched far beyond what the text and historical context actually support.
Nemeth, Scott M. The Fellowship of Thy LLMs. Zenodo, February 27, 2026. Preprint. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18808385
This study administered identical prompts to six major AI platforms — Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, Llama, DeepSeek, and one uncensored control — analyzing the contested biblical text of 1 Corinthians 6–7. Every platform's default output silently resolved every ambiguous term in favor of a single interpretive tradition (conservative evangelical). Every platform's steelman output produced a more textually rigorous alternative from evidence already in its training data.
63% of recommended commentaries across all platforms came from a single theological tradition, with zero social-historical scholars represented. In at least one case, the study exposed that AI content filters are used to promote a specific theological interpretation. The machine wasn't just translating. It was taking sides.
The paper is freely available at Zenodo under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
Abstinence until marriage is not a biblical mandate and never has been. It is an institutional cattle prod to keep the sheep inside their assigned pens. A control mechanism that has caused real harm to real people, and one that doesn't survive honest engagement with the text.
But how has the institution maintained it so confidently for so long?
The answer lies in how the language surrounding sexuality has been weaponized — words stretched well beyond their original meanings to elicit fear and compliance.