Inside the High-Control World of Purity Culture
NFP Awareness Week and the Evangelicalization of American Catholicism
In recent decades, the Catholic Church in the United States has invested significant institutional energy in promoting Natural Family Planning (NFP) as an essential component of Catholic moral and marital life. Every July, dioceses across the country participate in NFP Awareness Week, a coordinated marketing campaign spearheaded by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to “celebrate and reverence God’s vision of human sexuality” and to “support God’s gifts of love and life in marriage.”
This year’s campaign, running from July 20–26, 2025, features messaging such as “Pursue a lasting love… create hope for the future!” alongside workshops, parish events, and glossy promotional materials.
Notes: In this essay we will touch on the topic of NFP Awareness Week. This discussion is purposefully centered on the marketing campaign promoted by the US Catholic Bishops rather than the efficacy of NFP as a method. Please keep this distinction in mind as you read our critical analysis.
Content Statement: Please be sensitive with yourselves while reading this essay. This piece includes discussions of queerphobia, involuntary sterilization, and racist and xenophobic violence.
Finally, this essay is very long—if you received this by email, you may need to view it in your web browser to access the full piece.
What is striking, however, is how thoroughly this institutional emphasis has come to resemble — both in tone and in theology — the purity culture that emerged in late twentieth-century American evangelicalism. Purity culture, which sociologists identify as a set of beliefs and practices emphasizing sexual abstinence before marriage, modesty codes, and heteronormative gender roles, rose to prominence in the 1990s and 2000s through movements like True Love Waits and Silver Ring Thing.
These movements focused heavily on controlling sexual desire, stigmatizing premarital sexuality, and equating sexual purity with spiritual worthiness. While the Catholic Church historically developed its own teachings on chastity and marital ethics, the American iteration of NFP promotion exhibits notable continuities with evangelical purity culture: the sacralization of heterosexual marriage, the erasure of queer and single vocations, and the prioritization of sexual control as a marker of holiness.
This is not simply a matter of theological convergence, but of sociocultural assimilation. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Catholic immigrants in the United States — particularly from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Germany — were subject to widespread suspicion and discrimination by the Protestant, Puritan-descended majority. Catholics were often viewed as morally suspect and incapable of self-discipline, caricatured in public discourse as a threat to the orderly, “pure” character of American society.
In response, Catholic leaders and laypeople adopted strategies of respectability politics designed to demonstrate their compatibility with the dominant cultural norms of whiteness, heteronormativity, and middle-class propriety. By emphasizing marital fidelity, patriarchal family structures, and sexual restraint, Catholics sought to refute nativist stereotypes and claim their place within American civic life.
This strategy has left a lasting imprint on Catholic moral discourse in the United States. The contemporary fixation on NFP Awareness Week — particularly its portrayal as joyful, easy, and essential to a “proper” Catholic marriage — can be understood as a continuation of this assimilationist project. Rather than centering Catholic social teaching’s prophetic commitments to solidarity, economic justice, and care for the marginalized, the Church has devoted disproportionate energy to promoting an ideal of sexuality aligned with evangelical Protestant norms and American individualist values. In doing so, it has marginalized and harmed those whose lives fall outside the narrow paradigm of heterosexual, reproductive marriage: queer people, infertile couples, single adults, survivors of sexual trauma, and many women and men who experience NFP as psychologically and relationally burdensome (or even harmful) despite its promotion as liberative.
The framework underpinning this emphasis exhibits characteristics of what psychologists and religious scholars describe as a high-control religious environment. High-control religious systems are marked by rigid hierarchies, intrusive regulation of members’ private lives, and the use of shame, guilt, and fear to enforce conformity. Purity culture — both in its evangelical and Catholic variants — meets these criteria. It polices not only behaviors but desires and even thoughts, equating compliance with one’s value and moral worth. This dynamic undermines personal conscience and can lead to long-term spiritual and psychological harm, particularly for vulnerable groups.
The Church’s assimilation of purity culture in the American context thus reflects a deeper theological and pastoral failure: cultural conformity prioritized over the radical inclusivity of Jesus in the Gospels. While NFP itself may serve as a meaningful practice for some couples (and leaving aside conversations surrounding its efficacy), its elevation to a quasi-sacramental status — and its use as a litmus test for Catholic identity through this marketing campaign for NFP Awareness Week — exposes the extent to which the American Catholic church’s priorities have been shaped more by American evangelicalism and Protestant Puritanism than by its own rich traditions of moral discernment, solidarity, and care for the marginalized.
A renewed Catholic ethic of sexuality and family life must confront this history honestly, disentangle itself from the assimilationist anxieties that produced it, and recover a vision of chastity not as a tool of control but as a dimension of authentic, embodied love open to the diverse realities of human life. Only then can the Church begin to repair the harm purity culture has wrought and embody a moral vision that is truly Catholic, truly just, and truly good news for all.
How Purity Culture Polices Queer and Trans Bodies
To understand how purity culture operates in high-control religion, we begin not in a Catholic parish but with Fr. Shannon Kearns—a queer, transgender man raised in a Fundamentalist Protestant church. Though not Catholic, his story reveals how purity culture disciplines bodies across traditions, especially those deemed “disordered.” His experience helps us trace how anti-queer and anti-trans ideologies travel between denominations, often cloaked in language about holiness and control. By centering a trans perspective rarely included in purity narratives, we expose how this culture harms LGBTQ+ people—and how its logic has taken root in both Protestant and Catholic spaces.
For Fr. Shannon Kearns, purity culture was a curse dressed up like a blessing. “The language of purity, of the spirit and flesh divine,” he explained to Emma in an interview for the Queer and Catholic Oral History Project, “of really concentrating on your spirit actually really resonated with me as someone who didn’t want to be in their body.”
His experience with purity culture as a trans man is common among LGBTQ+ people who grew up during the Purity Culture Movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, or the rise of abstinence-only sex education and mainline programs like True Love Waits and Silver Ring Thing. It’s a classic queer experience in purity culture–believing you were somehow more holy because you didn’t have the same desires straight people struggled with.
Born into a Fundamentalist Christian family in Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania, he was so involved in Penn Valley Grace Brethren Church that the staff gave him his own key. He was an active member of youth groups, attended private Christian schools and was homeschooled, and every part of his life was steeped in the language and ethics of the Church. This also affected his physical and mental development, as True Love Waits programs, purity pledges, and “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” talks cultivated a disconnect between his mind and body.
“I didn’t have a great sense of myself as an embodied being,” Kearns remarked, and “with greater self awareness about my sexual orientation and gender identity, came shame and fear.”
It wasn’t until after college that Kearns began to untangle the spiritual knots purity culture had tied around his body and identity. His campus, like so many cloaked in Christian values, enforced strict rules on relationships and condemned queerness as sin. When he finally sought help—vulnerable, searching—a campus counselor didn’t offer support or understanding. Instead, they handed him a link to a conversion therapy website. That moment could have marked the end of his story. Instead, it became a turning point. After graduating, Kearns came out as trans in 2007 while attending seminary, reclaiming his body, his spirit, and his future. In 2008, he began his medical transition—choosing truth over shame in a system that had tried to erase him.
Today, he is an ordained queer trans priest in the Old Catholic Tradition independent from communion with Rome. His Church ordains women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and married, partnered, and divorced people. You can read more about his experiences in his acclaimed book No One Taught Me How to Be A Man: What a Trans Man’s Experience Reveals about Masculinity published this past April.
Kearns’s experience of purity culture is different from those typically presented in the media. Often, white female cisgender, heterosexual accounts in Evangelical Churches are foregrounded, with few examples of Catholic purity culture and even fewer examples of how purity culture affects LGBTQ+, disabled, and BIPOC individuals.
This lack of representation contributes to the belief that purity culture did and does not impact Catholics nor does it impact LGBTQ+ people.
In reality, purity culture is built on and into high control religion as well as strict gender roles, anti-queer mental and physical policing, and systemic shame contributing to bodily harm and dysmorphia.
The wave of present-day anti-trans and queer laws—pushed in part by far-right Catholics—is a direct extension of purity culture: a ruthless system policing queer and trans bodies under the guise of morality. Unpacking the legacies of purity culture is critical to understand how a Church with a long history of using sexual discourse to explore spiritual ecstasy feeds into a growing sexual conservatism built on the erasure of queer and trans people to “protect” women. This isn’t new. It’s a centuries-old playbook rooted in 19th and 20th century social purity movements that weaponized legislation to police and control white women’s bodies and virginity—and today, that legacy still haunts us.
The Origins of Purity Culture in Early America
Purity culture has existed in religious institutions for centuries, policing the bodies of queer people and women and their relationships, but to understand its legacy, we have to go back to the beginning. In the United States, Puritanical beliefs surrounding sexuality crystalized in a budding country. From the very beginning, ideas about American sexual morality and purity were deeply tied to race, as Sara Molsener discusses on her podcast Pure White. Before the Civil War, this was enforced through laws surrounding miscegenation when African and African American individuals were enslaved in the United States.
After the Civil War, as African American individuals travelled North in search of opportunities and Eastern and Southern European immigrants entered the United States, the Social Purity Movement took hold. Led by activists who sometimes overlapped with the earlier social reform movements of abolitionism, temperance, and women’s rights, social purists campaigned against behaviors deemed immoral by largely Protestant reformers. These social purists lobbied for legislation against abortion, alcohol consumption, the distribution of contraceptives and “obscene” materials, and sex work, alongside raising the age of consent.
Anthony Comstock, an infantryman during the Civil War, was a key figure in this movement, who tipped police about sex trade merchants and got his anti-contraceptive bill passed on March 3, 1873. Comstock was instrumental in the passing of a federal law with his namesake in 1873 criminalizing the distribution of pornography, contraceptives and information about them, and any materials that could be used to produce an abortion.
Today, anti-abortion activists are debating the resurrection of the Comstock Act of 1873, which is still in effect but has largely become dormant in the last 150 years. The law is still technically enforceable and could be used to stop the distribution of contraceptives and abortion medications and supplies through the mail and local carriers.
Modern anti-trans legislation uses some of the same language that Comstock did over 150 years ago and abstinence-only educators did over 20 years ago that access to information about sexual intercourse, contraceptives and abortion will cause people to seek them out. It’s the same argument used within late 20th and early 21st purity culture to mandate the erasure of queer and trans people from libraries, classrooms, and public spaces, which conservative Christian leaders argue that they can stop children from “becoming” gay by “protecting” them from all discussions of LGBTQ+ identity and expression.
The Eugenics Movement and Natalism
At the same time that social purists were pushing for legislation promoting Christan morality, Moslener argues in Pure White, campaigns to alleviate poverty, overcrowding, and sex work often served xenophobic ends, and soon meshed with the burgeoning Eugenics Movement. The Eugenics Movement was built on a dangerous and discredited belief that “planned breeding” could engineer a “perfect” race—wiping out so-called social “vices” just as earlier social purity crusaders tried to police bodies and behaviors before the 20th century.
Eugenics advocates pushed a chilling agenda of selective breeding, targeting the bodies of white women—controlling who was deemed “pure” enough to reproduce. At its core was Natalism: the ruthless belief that producing children wasn’t just a choice but a moral duty to preserve and “perfect” the race.
The term Natalism itself is relatively young, dating to 1971, but the philosophy was integral to extremist nationalist movements like Nazism in 1940s Germany which used eugenics to justify genocide in order to breed an ideal Aryan race. Lebensborn was a Nazi Germany association, established by Heinrich Himmler, with the goal of increasing the birth rate of Aryans. German mothers who bear a large number of Aryan children were awarded the Cross of Honour of the German Mother.
In his manifesto Mein Kampf, Hitler attacked any interracial families, arguing that “all great cultures of the past perished only because the original race died out because of blood poisoning.” Thus, many individuals drew historical parallels when former president Trump said at a December 2023 rally in New Hampshire that immigrants entering the United States are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
The Long War on Bodily Autonomy: From Maternity Homes to the Moral Majority
Out of the eugenics-fueled obsession with white birthrates in the 1930s and 1940s emerged one of the most disturbing chapters in American reproductive history: the Baby Scoop Era. From the end of World War II until the legalization of abortion in 1973, thousands of unmarried women—especially white women—were hidden away in maternity homes, isolated from their families, and subjected to coercive tactics that forced them to give up their babies for adoption. These were not places of care—they were institutions of shame, secrecy, and psychological abuse.
As the 1960s and 70s brought new legal protections for abortion, they also ignited a backlash. Evangelical leader Jerry Falwell and Catholic activist Phyllis Schlafly helped rally a growing movement of white conservative Christians who saw these advances as a threat to their power. Schlafly, in particular, weaponized the fears of housewives worried about losing their traditional roles, using them to launch a far-right Christian nationalist crusade that targeted reproductive, social, and economic freedoms. What started in the maternity home never ended—it simply moved into the courts, the legislature, and the classroom.
As the HIV/AIDS pandemic devastated communities in the 1980s, the response from conservative leaders was not compassion—it was calculated neglect. Under President Ronald Reagan, the federal government turned its back on the crisis, refusing to fund lifesaving research while thousands died in silence. Some religious figures, like evangelical leader Jerry Falwell, went even further—declaring HIV/AIDS a divine punishment for queer existence. This weaponization of moral panic paved the way for a new era of state-sanctioned shame: the rise of abstinence-only sex education. Rather than equip young people with knowledge and autonomy, lawmakers funneled millions into programs that taught silence, fear, and bodily ignorance—ensuring an entire generation grew up cut off from the truth about sex, health, and themselves.
In 1981, abstinence-only sex education was codified into law and received federal funding. In 1981, Congress passed the Adolescent Family Life Act, or “the chastity law,” during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Receiving over $125 million dollars to date, the program supported education encouraging young people to adhere to chastity and self-discipline. Two more abstinence-only programs would follow--Title V of the Welfare Reform Act providing grants to states offering only abstinence-only education and Title XI of the Social Security Act funded through the Special Projects of Regional and National Significance Programs. With this funding, abstinence-only sex education and faith-based programming exploded, especially in the private sector with companies like Silver Ring Thing and True Love Waits.
These same companies launched massive campaigns to mobilize young people into pledging lifelong sexual abstinence, reviving tactics straight out of 19th-century Christian purity crusades tied to temperance—a social movement advocating for the moderation or complete abstinence from alcohol and other “immoral” behaviors—as well as moral reform. Backed by conservative Christian institutions, these programs weren’t just church teachings—they were policy, pushed into public schools under the banner of “protecting children.” But the real goal was control. Built on the myth that silence equals safety, abstinence-only sex education preached that simply denying teens information about sex would stop them from having it. The results? A generation left in the dark. Study after study has proven that these programs don’t delay sex, don’t reduce risk, and don’t protect against pregnancy or STDs—they only ensure young people grow up confused, ashamed, and unprepared.
And so we arrive at today—after Roe v. Wade has been overturned and maternity homes are once again on the rise—while far-right Christian leaders push the same old arguments that, like comprehensive sex education, teaching about LGBTQ+ people will “turn” children gay. Just this past Pride Month, the Supreme Court sided with religious parents seeking the right to opt their children out of public school lessons that include LGBTQ+ stories. This marks the emergence of a new Moral Majority, a new Social Purity Movement mobilizing to legislate strict, high-control definitions of gender and sexuality into law.
Anti-Queer legislation is New Purity Culture
Today’s anti-queer laws are the latest weapon in a centuries-old campaign of purity and control. While far-right leaders like JD Vance (who is a Catholic convert) loudly push for white women to “reclaim” their role as reproducers, this obsession with increasing birthrates is just one side of a darker agenda. Beneath the surface, these laws echo the brutal logic of eugenics: restricting who gets to have children, who gets to exist openly, and who is erased from public life. This is purity culture reborn—now targeting queer bodies and identities with ruthless precision.
Eugenicists didn’t just promote “selective breeding” as an abstract theory—they enforced it with brutal, coercive policies that targeted the most vulnerable. Poor and disabled women, especially disabled women of color, were forcibly sterilized en masse, stripped of their fundamental right to reproduce. Alongside them, queer women and other marginalized groups were institutionalized on a horrifying scale, their bodies and autonomy controlled under the guise of public “purity.” This campaign extended beyond reproduction, infiltrating everyday life through laws designed to erase disabled Americans from public view—so-called “unsightly beggar ordinances” that criminalized their very presence. It was a calculated system of bodily policing and racial control, enforcing a violent definition of who was allowed to exist—and who was to be hidden away or eliminated.
It’s not so different from the indecent exposure bill, HB 446.
Introduced in March 2025, the bill criminalizes trans people from existing in any public space. To be criminalized for simply existing is to live under constant threat that your basic presence in everyday spaces—bathrooms, locker rooms, swimming pools, or even just walking down the street—could lead to arrest, humiliation, or worse. It means that ordinary acts like changing clothes, going to the gym, or using public facilities become acts of defiance punishable by law. Your identity becomes a crime, and every step you take in public is shadowed by fear and suspicion. It strips away the fundamental dignity of living openly and freely, forcing you into invisibility or risking criminal charges just for being yourself.
The bill passed in May of this year.
Modern laws like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” claim to protect parental rights, but in reality, they serve as blunt instruments of censorship—silencing education that challenges rigid, conservative Christian views on sex and gender. Across the country, nearly 600 anti-LGBTQ bills are advancing, each chipping away at the basic rights of queer and trans people: blocking access to affirming healthcare for trans youth, stripping away the ability to update gender markers on IDs and birth certificates, denying access to public bathrooms and locker rooms, and barring participation in sports. These laws aren’t just policies—they are a coordinated effort to erase LGBTQ+ people from public life, to deny them the dignity of seeing themselves reflected in books, classrooms, and communities, and to systematically strip away the safety and freedom essential to living full, healthy lives.
These anti-queer laws are a modern expression of purity culture—where religious and political powers weaponize legislation to deny LGBTQ+ people access to public spaces, places of worship, and control over their own bodies. They perpetuate the same systems of harm that Kearns and Emma endured, using funding and resources as leverage to enforce compliance with these discriminatory laws across schools, institutions, and organizations.
Recognizing this legislation as part of a broader purity culture—a set of beliefs increasingly challenged and deconstructed today—is crucial. It reveals how conservative Christian institutions and their political allies continue to inflict systemic harm on LGBTQ+ communities. More importantly, it empowers concerned citizens to dismantle these oppressive frameworks by applying the very strategies that have historically resisted religious and political purity campaigns.
Purity Culture’s New Face: Gen Z, Far-Right Natalism, and the Policing of Bodies
While anti-queer legislation represents a more overt form of purity culture, a quieter but growing chastity movement is emerging among young people across the United States. Reproductive justice journalist Carter Sherman, drawing from over 100 interviews with young adults, activists, and experts, reveals that many Gen Z individuals are embracing sexual abstinence as a way to resist and rethink traditional ideas about sex and gender. Unlike the shame-driven abstinence campaigns of the late 1990s and early 2000s, this new wave of chastity is often a deliberate response to living in a post-Roe America—where access to abortion and contraception is increasingly limited and under threat.
But part of this movement aligns closely with a far-right religious pipeline. Sherman notes that as Gen Z embraces chastity, many are being drawn in by trad wife imagery—idealized visions of “traditional” womanhood that serve as entry points into far-right, high control versions of Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. As Emma has written, influencers like Girl Defined amplify these purity ethics on social media, transforming teachings once shared in church basements and school pledge sheets into isolated echo chambers that reel youth deeper into strict religious frameworks that tightly police gender and sexuality.
While LGBTQ+ youth are being targeted and harmed, far-right Catholic figures like JD Vance are calling for more American babies. In his first major speech, Vance promoted natalism—a cause also championed by Elon Musk, who warns that “collapsing birth rates” are the greatest threat to civilization. Musk, now a father of 14, has disowned his own daughter for being trans. Trump, too, has joined the natalist push, signing an executive order in support of IVF and proposing a “big beautiful” bill to double the Child Tax Credit. But behind the rhetoric of procreation lies a dangerous contradiction: these leaders celebrate reproduction while supporting policies that endanger queer and trans children. As journalist Carter Sherman has noted, their vision increasingly resembles eugenics, with genetic testing and control replacing real care.
Conclusion
These movements claim to protect children, but their actions tell a different story. They frame LGBTQ+ people as dangers, weaponizing fear to justify exclusion—while failing to protect the children in their own communities from abuse. They cut healthcare and food assistance through so-called “pro-family” laws, leaving poor and unhoused children without the basics to survive. This is the logical outcome of a politics built on control, not care.
The abstinence pledges and purity rings of the 1990s may feel outdated, but their ideology lives on. Trad-wife aesthetics and “authentic femininity” now draw youth into high-control Catholic and Christian spaces, where they’re groomed for rigid roles. Today’s chastity campaigns are recycled strategies—old purity rhetoric dressed in new social media language and hashtags, still enforcing obedience through shame and fear.
Natural Family Planning Awareness Week reveals just how much institutional energy is poured into controlling sexuality while neglecting real needs. Catholic institutions dedicate entire campaigns, websites, and diocesan budgets to promote one vision of “holy” sexuality: heterosexual, married, procreative, and obedient to Church teaching. This is not a critique of the NFP method itself—but rather how it's elevated as the only moral option while critical resources for LGBTQ+ people, survivors of abuse, or families in crisis go unfunded or ignored. The message is clear: controlling sex matters more than caring for people.
This is what purity culture does. It doesn’t just shape personal beliefs—it justifies systems of oppression. Its history is tied to racism, queerphobia, Christian nationalism, and the myth of moral superiority. High-control religion thrives by policing the bodies and choices of women, youth, and LGBTQ+ people. But when we name these patterns, we start to break their power.
That is why education—real, honest, inclusive education—is so threatening to high-control religious movements. Knowledge is power, and they know it. They ban books, restrict sex education, erase queer and trans history, and suppress the stories of survivors. They rely on silence to survive. But every time we speak the truth, every time we connect the dots between purity culture, political control, and systemic harm, we break that silence. Sharing this history is not just important; it is an act of resistance. And it is one we are committed to, because everyone deserves to understand the systems shaping their lives and to imagine something better.
As a straight woman who has been deconstructing Catholicism but still loves the Eucharist, I think the NFP issue has (weirdly) aligned me more with gay/trans/queer rights. I feel like I have to live in secrecy about my desire to have any agency over family planning, and the fact that NFP is the ONLY choice infuriates me. My ideal would be to chart and use condoms (don't want to use hormonal or invasive methods) and I WANT kids but even that relatively conservative ideal excludes me from communion. It's torturous. We don't have the tech (and didn't for so long, we're relatively better off now- but it makes it even more absurd that this was handed down in the time of Humanae Vitae) to track female ovulation accurately (which is totally insane, but that's another rant for another time), and so there is so much guesswork and abstinence that I feel shamed for not wanting to deal with in a marriage. Additionally, NFP requires abstinence during the time of month when a woman often feels most sexual desire- on that basis alone, I don't want to do it - and that is simply dismissed as an invalid reason for dissenting! It feels so dehumanizing and misogynistic. I currently am weighing whether to tell my close family and friends that I disagree with church teaching on these matters, just set a hard boundary without explanation or continue on as I have been (though this route is growing more unsustainable). It is not an understatement to say that I am potentially facing the loss or great damage to my relationship with my parents and close friends because of this (relatively) minor point of disagreement and have felt like I had to end a relationship with my loving (non-Catholic, disapproved of by fam) bf because I have so much baggage around all of this that I feel he will be hurt by if I don't figure out my own values and boundaries. I can't even imagine what it must be like for someone who is trans or gay. Regardless, please KEEP WRITING about this and please say a prayer I can find a religious trauma therapist as I figure out this decision.
Terrific! What a wealth of information! Deserves a second, third and fourth reading!