Making Chastity Sexy: The Rhetoric of Evangelical Abstinence Campaigns (review)

The cover of Christine J. Gardner’s book, Making Chastity Sexy: The Rhetoric of Evangelical Abstinence Campaigns, features a close-up photograph of a young woman’s bare abdomen. Her low rise jeans and cropped shirt expose a navel piercing encircled by a cursive tattoo declaring “True Love Waits.” The photo itself is far from shocking. On the contrary, it is indicative of the sexualized images of adolescent females that drive and define popular culture in America. What is surprising, however, is that the tattoo references the earliest, and perhaps most successful, contemporary evangelical abstinence campaign. The seeming incongruity of this image and the program it evokes is at the heart of Gardner’s book, which explores the rhetorical strategies of contemporary evangelical abstinence campaigns as they shift a traditionally private message into the vernacular of the public sphere. Gardner argues that such campaigns utilize the promise of great sex later (in the context of marriage) to promote abstinence now, a message that she suggests is at once persuasive and problematic.

Gardner frames her book around two main research questions: How do evangelical abstinence campaigns persuade young people to remain abstinent, and how do young people understand and negotiate sexual abstinence in their daily lives? She focuses her analysis on three contemporary evangelical abstinence campaigns and weaves a discussion of these campaigns throughout the book’s eight chapters. Her analysis is based on examination of campaign materials, interviews with campaign organizers and participants, and her own attendance and participation in campaign events. Thus, although her analysis is rhetorical, her study methods are best characterized as ethnographic. She provides a “thick description”(6) of each of her campaign case studies, deftly capturing locations, performances, exchanges, and participants. Through this, she successfully deconstructs the various rhetorical strategies and appeals utilized by evangelical abstinence campaigns and also conveys the nuanced intricacies of adolescent sexual behavior that quantitative studies (and public discussion) often render invisible.

Gardner’s introduction contextualizes her study. She begins by tracing the current controversy over sex education, which often paints abstinence campaigns as less about public health than about moralistic threats of damnation and the reinforcement of stereotypical gender roles. She describes the three campaigns on which she focuses, including the stadium concert style of True Love Waits, the Saturday Night Live-esque performances of Silver Ring Thing, and the gender specific forums of Pure Freedom. She argues that the campaigns use sex “to sell pledges to not have sex” (12), and rely on a shift of rhetorical agency from rhetor to audience that is indicative of the public sphere emphasis on individualism. Interestingly, she also posits evangelicals as akin to feminists inasmuch as both rely rhetorically on their status as counterpublics, the construction of choice, and efforts to “liberate private concerns into the public” (14).

Chapter 1 focuses on the campaigns’ strategic shift in rhetorical emphasis from abstinence to purity. The latter, Gardner argues, represents an “active choice” (31) that subsumes other, nonsexual elements of one’s life (for instance, clothing choices and private thoughts), while simultaneously allowing for an ambiguity regarding what actually constitutes sex. Chapter 2 describes how the campaigns utilize “secular forms” (43), especially pop culture, along with peer testimonies and the promise of “good marriage” and “great sex” (49) to illustrate the benefits of living a pure life. This promise of future happiness is further expounded in chapter 3, which offers a narrative criticism of the fairy tale tropes that Gardner argues may reinforce traditional gender roles, yet nevertheless allow for the construction of rhetorical agency as they do so. The ambiguity invoked by “purity” is taken up again in chapter 4, as Gardner uses interview data to explore how different participants—all of whom have pledged abstinence—define and negotiate their pledges within the context of varied experiences and relationships. Chapter 5 returns to the implications of the fairy tale narrative, both for the young people...