Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence by Sara Moslener (review)

From the 1990s through the early 2000s, Christian abstinence organizations motivated socially conservative Christian churches in the United States to get into the business of sexual education, and they made profound incursions into federal policy and public education. Under pressure from abstinence advocates, federal welfare reform legislation was introduced in 1996 and earmarked federal funding for abstinence-only sex education. These programs invited public school students to sign abstinence pledges, a practice that transplanted a creedal approach to sexuality (shed of overt religious references) from Christian churches into public schools. Although this trend in Christian thought about abstinence and the political debates over "abstinence only" or "comprehensive" sex education have been extensively studied, Sara Moslener's Virgin Nation is the first focused exploration by a historian. The book's greatest strength is its documentation and critical analysis of recent abstinence movements; it also raises important questions about how to situate this trend historically.

Much of the contemporaneous coverage of abstinence organizations emphasized their reactionary nature, situating abstinence education as a fearful response to HIV/AIDS and as arising out of conservative political reactions against perceived trends of secularism and sexual liberalism. More recent scholarship on Christian Right organizing complicates this reactionary framing with attention to the modernity and innovation operating in conservative religion and politics. Moslener draws on the insights of this recent literature with a deeper historical trajectory. She points to the newness of abstinence culture as a born-again appropriation of therapeutic self-help and politicized identity pride, and she highlights evangelical Christianity's long-standing relationship to American nationalism. Late twentieth-century abstinence movements are not an innovation, Moslener writes, but a recent iteration within a long history that connected "sexual immorality with national insecurity and impending apocalypse" (4).

The first three chapters establish this longer history, covering turn-of-the-century Protestant reform movements, postwar Evangelical revivalism, and the 1970s coalescence of a "family values" politics. These chapters certainly substantiate the claim that contemporary purity movements rehearse a storied rhetoric that links the sexuality of white adolescents to an imperiled nation. At the same time, the material in these chapters largely builds on published sources rather than archival material, and much of it—particularly in the first chapter—has been well studied by historians of sexuality.¹ Moslener synthesizes this familiar material into an insightful genealogy of contemporary abstinence movements.

The final two chapters trace the emergence and spread of True Love Waits and Silver Ring Thing, the two most influential Christian abstinence organizations. Here, the links between adolescent purity and threats of national decline appear remarkably concrete: the federal funding of abstinence programs, Moslener shows, "helped to mobilize a faith-based abstinence movement on the premise of racialized, class anxieties" (116). While securing government funding might seem like a clear success for abstinence advocates, Moslener describes fascinating internal debates among movement leaders, who were by no means of one mind about the value of receiving a government paycheck for doing the Lord's work. It is in these last two chapters that Moslener is at her strongest, tracing out the remarkable tensions in abstinence organizers' efforts to redeem the nation through adolescent purity.