If you're here, you're probably carrying something heavy or concerned about someone who is. Questions? Wounds? Perhaps a sense that your faith community wasn't being entirely honest with you? Whatever brought you here, you're not alone and you're not broken for wondering.
I started this project in 2008, after my own crisis of religious deconstruction and rebuilding. For years I had been involved in singles ministries across a variety of churches. I watched up close what happened to my brothers and sisters who sincerely, desperately tried to live out heavy-handed purity dogmas. White-knuckling their way through it, trying to shoulder a millstone that was falsely presented as the righteousness of God and devastated by shame when they failed. Many didn't make it, emotionally, spiritually, or in a couple of cases... unspeakably.
Having spent time around church leadership, I witnessed their occasional double standards. Behind closed doors, I was stunned to discover how little regard they had for those who followed through on their public messages regarding purity. In a couple of cases certain leaders were publicly caught in affairs: scandals quietly swept out the back door by their peers. Declared healed by prayer and counseling and never mentioned again. These were the same voices who would brand our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters as abominations, and harshly condemn anyone who had premarital sex.
Over the years I've managed to forgive these people. As infuriating as it was to witness, I know it wasn't their intent to cause harm and I came to realize their personal indiscretions weren't any of my business. They were genuinely generous, faithful Christians in almost all other ways, and I don't have the bandwidth or energy to hold a cloud over them. This is why it's often uncomfortable for us to directly question the underlying theology of purity culture. It is usually presented by those who are sincere and carry real moral authority on other subjects.
If you've struggled with or been wounded by these teachings, you are not alone. What happened to you is not your fault, and you deserve to be at peace. I try to help anyone willing to listen and open to honest conversations, even if they're convinced I'm dead wrong. Some will say I'm promoting sin. I'm not. I'm trying to prevent the kind of real harm that religious institutions are very reluctant to discuss.
I'd love to see a genuine reformation inside Christian institutions: a denomination, or even a single church brave enough to break the mold. But I'm not holding my breath, and neither should you. They are allergic to looking in the mirror, and their thought leaders often seem to value scholarly opinion about the text over the text itself.
Credentialed scholars prefer talking among themselves. Christian media wants predictable, cookie-cutter narratives. Affirming churches tend to dress the theology in kid-gloves packaging that doesn't hold up for anyone seeking the backbone of God's righteousness. If you're waiting for your denomination or your local church to change course on any of this, they are perfectly content to let you keep waiting. And waiting.
Institutions and the people behind them consider much of what I'm challenging here "settled," meaning they will not reconsider past conclusions, and likely dismiss my approach as amateurish and presumptuous, or worse. While I've tried to stay aligned with modern biblical scholarship and to be respectful that tradition has its place in exegesis, I will happily break with all of that when I see it headed toward harm.
"Settled" doesn't always mean proven. Sometimes it just means someone stopped listening.
And a good deal of what gets called settled was never settled by evidence at all. It was settled by repetition and selective listening, and anyone who tries to reopen it gets marginalized as an apostate or a crank.
Two different things wearing one word — Sometimes settled means proven. The longer ending of Mark, the woman caught in adultery, the Comma Johanneum: those questions closed because the manuscript evidence is overwhelming and points one direction. Nobody decided to stop discussing them. The field also reopens things — Pentateuchal source criticism was about as settled as anything got by mid-century before it was pried back open, and Markan priority still has a serious minority challenge nobody treats as illegitimate. That is what a working discipline looks like.
The other kind of settled is procedural. A judgment enters a lexicon, the next translation follows the lexicon, and a century later nobody is examining the choice anymore — they are examining each other. Nothing was demonstrated. The question was closed, and the closing got mistaken for an answer.
1946 — the word homosexual — It first entered an English Bible in 1946, in the RSV. Later the committee that put it there admitted the choice was wrong and voted it out. By then other translations had already copied it; one adopted it the same year the correction was published. Scholars reopened the question decades ago, but the institutions never followed. Three generations on, that mistake is still boldly preached, and leveraged for political causes. It has caused tremendous harm to people who had otherwise done nothing wrong. The correction has long been available. Few are looking for one.
1991 — a paper that became a requirement — Sometimes the correction does come. It just tends to arrive decades late. The Church of England's House of Bishops published Issues in Human Sexuality, commended by General Synod for discussion but never procedurally adopted as doctrine. It drifted into the ordination process anyway and became something every candidate for ministry had to affirm. Anglican commentators describe that transition as having happened without much due process. The bishop who chaired the working group that produced it gave a lecture publicly dissenting from its conclusions five years later. It stayed in force another twenty-nine years.
The bishops' own assessment — By 2017, the balance of view within the College and House of Bishops was that what Issues laid down about the questioning of clergy and ordinands was not working well. The same report defended holding clergy to an exemplary standard where the laity are not bound in the same way — a professional requirement rather than a universal ethic, and one a straight candidate could satisfy by marrying.
Removal — 15 July 2025 — General Synod passed a Private Member's Motion asking the House of Bishops to remove any requirement relating to Issues from the vocations process. It passed on a near-unanimous show of hands, supported across a breadth of theological standpoints, with a note that the tone, language, and some of the assumptions in the document now appear prejudicial and offensive to many people. Thirty-four years from publication to removal.
I lament that it may already be too late for large segments of Christianity to recover. There's a lot of confusing news about whether young people are coming back, and I don't put much stock in any of it. What I see is generation after generation, mine included, watching the people running these organizations choose their public reputation over their own children. Each generation more disillusioned than the last. And now a generation largely deciding not to inherit it at all. Frankly, given what's left to inherit, who can blame them? Certainly not me.
Jesus asked whether the Son of Man would find faith on the earth when he came. I've come to realize that question was about those in power, like the unjust judge in his parable, who forsook justice. Not the marginalized who have no reason to trust in the judge or his court.
I still believe the message of abstinence until adulthood is correct, and that accompanied by proper ethics and education it could help revive what's left of Christianity and its better institutions. But I'm not counting on that, and I don't run this site for any institution's benefit, or in the hope of an administrative blessing I'll never receive.
Modern scribes and Pharisees can dismiss, insult, and laugh.
Neither this site nor my life runs on their approval — and neither should yours. I hold this message for individuals trying to make hard decisions about their relationships, including their relationship with their faith community.
For example:
- The young man or woman at the end of their rope after "failing" at conversion therapy.
- The friend or family member caught between their faith tradition and someone they love.
- The parent weighing whether to pull a child from sex education, or whether it's alright to let their teenager be prescribed hormonal birth control.
- The person deciding whether to walk away from a controlling faith tradition before it takes anything else from them.
- The person who has been told that marrying someone outside their faith tradition is a sin against God.
- The pastor or counselor who realizes the guidance preached from the pulpit is incomplete — or simply wrong for the unmarried Christian sitting across from them — and needs to quietly offer something better.
- Or just the person trying to understand these things more honestly.
These are the kinds of stories that sometimes reach me, and they are why this site exists: why I keep going, and why I believe this message matters. I want you to know that you matter. Your eternal soul matters more than any institution, and dare I say, more than any form of liturgy. If things aren't working for you, try something else. I have faith that God will ultimately hold these institutions and their functionaries accountable. But that is not your burden to carry today. You don't have to be crushed under their millstones to be a good and faithful servant.
"For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." — Matthew 11:30