This is an interesting commentary in the New York Times about purity culture and the potential harm it causes. A key point is that many churches still teach some form of purity culture, because nothing else has come along to fill its place. Evangelical teaching on sexuality is still largely derived from what we inherited from the Catholics, and whilst we understand fully well the distaste for the more liberal teachings that have come out of the progressive church in recent decades, the problem is that purity culture has been allowed to capture the evangelical church as a whole and remains significant, despite being a creation of the extremely conservative Southern Baptist Convention and its misogynistic complementarian theology.