Welcome to the podcast Think Biblically, Conversations on Faith and Culture.

I'm your host Sean McDowell, Professor of Christian Apologetics at Talbot School Theology, Biola University.

I'm your co-host, Scott Ray, Dean of Faculty, and Professor of Christian Ethics, also at

Talbot School of Theology here at Biola University.

Today we want to talk about a subject that's been really discussed pretty heavily over the last three to five years, but really in the past few weeks because of an announcement by Joshua Harris, the author of the book I Kiss Dating Goodbye

which was a radically popular book in kind of the late 90s framing what has been

called purity culture.

Turns out that Joshua Harris, who wrote this book at only 21 years old,

decided to kind of abandon his teachings in this regard,

and also to say he no longer defines himself as a

conventional Christian and that he and his wife are divorcing. Many people have

come out and said this is the death of purity culture and many people

even critics from the outside have said this is the damage of a Christian

sexual ethic. Now a lot of people have weighed on this from a number of different perspectives and this this

podcast is not really going to be focused on the story of Joshua Harris or in particular

his book but really what's been called purity culture and just

asking the question, what kind of message of sexual purity if we even want to

use that term do we want to teach from the church and from parents really focused on the next

generation?

Now this term purity culture is actually somewhat ambiguous, and I don't know that anybody really knows what it means

but essentially you go to the maybe late 90s into the 2000s.

It was a very intentional movement and you had campaigns like say the silver ring thing or why

...