Abstinence
Until Marriage

Shortly after creating Adam and Eve in His image — and prior to formalizing marriage as an institution — God issued the very first command regarding sexual morality. No marriage ceremony or contract. No preliminary period of abstinence. To the contrary: 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 — and the institution doesn't debate it because the theology is remarkably flimsy when honestly challenged.

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:

That single observation throws a wrench in the gearbox of institutional interpretations of morality. And the Song of Solomon is not an isolated case.

• 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. It also uncovers an unexpected government influence forcefully requiring how these verses must be interpreted.
  ▶ Prove It

  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. The study also presents evidence that Chinese state-level content filtering selectively shaped the interpretation of this biblical text — demonstrating that output-layer filtering can alter conclusions in non-obvious domains, not just politically sensitive ones.

  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 narrative of control — one 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?