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The evangelical purity culture is firmly situated at the intersection of evangelical political activism, nationalism, and millennialist theology. This convergence occurs at points in US history when evangelical Christians have sought to restore or maintain their political influence and have been able to map theological frameworks onto widespread cultural crises. In response to the threat of moral and national decline, the movement provides ethical regulations derived from religious values and nationalist ideologies. At this intersection of nation and religion, purity reformers, now and then, employ theories of rise and decline in order to position sexual purity, and the adolescents who embody it, as the greatest hope for restoring America’s lost innocence.

Over several decades evangelical and fundamentalist leaders such as Billy Graham, Carl F.H. Henry, Francis Schaeffer, and James Dobson wove together theories of civilizations’ rise and decline with a rhetoric of sexual fear that asserted a divinely designed connection between sexual immorality, national decline, and apocalyptic anticipation. As a foundational rhetoric that underscored much of popular evangelicalism, sexual fear provided the ideal opening for a sexual-purity movement to emerge and mark adolescent sexuality as a venue rife with opportunity for personal transformation, national revitalization, and, quite possibly, the salvation of civilization. Issues of concern, however, included the place of parents and the family in sexual decision-making, as well as the perception of homosexuality as a national threat.

For evangelical adolescents living in the United States, the material world of commerce and sexuality is fraught with danger. Contemporary movements urge young people to embrace sexual purity and abstinence before marriage and eschew the secular pressures of modern life. And yet, the sacred text that is used to authorize these teachings betrays evangelicals’ long-standing ability to embrace the material world for spiritual purposes. Bibles marketed to teenage girls, including those produced by and for sexual purity campaigns, make use of prevailing trends in bible marketing. By packaging the message of sexual purity and traditional gender roles into a sleek modern day apparatus, American evangelicals present female sexual restraint as the avant-garde of contemporary, evangelical orthodoxy.

This chapter describes a belief contending that one's honor depends on the behavior of others. In a more general sense, wives and female kin had to maintain their sexual purity and even their reputation for sexual purity, or else disgrace the husbands, fathers, and brothers who were meant to control and protect “their” women. A stain on sexual honor can only be resolved via bloody revenge. During the Golden Age, there existed a powerful relationship between male honor and female sexuality. An excerpt from Calderon's The Painter of His Dishonor, with which the chapter begins, shows a potent enactment of this relationship. Judging from the honor plays, in Golden Age Castile the sexual purity of women was the only important component of male honor, and the only way to avenge dishonor related to this purity was with violence.

This chapter discusses the conventional understanding of the honor code in the Golden Age of Spain and presents its three aspects: a man's honor rests wholly on the sexual purity of his wife; he must commit violence in order to avenge dishonor, even unwillingly against people he loves; and honor rests on reputation so much that rumor is just as capable of disgracing someone as fact. This understanding led to a difficulty for students of Spanish literature in addressing the question of just how closely the honor plays, especially the wife-murder plays, mirrored reality. The current thinking is that the killing of wives suspected of adultery became a salient plot device in the seventeenth century not because such plots presented a mirror image of social reality but because of internal trends in the development of Spanish drama. It was a way to incorporate well-established themes into one plot.

This chapter examines the role of the family in the decision of Kashmiri Muslim refugees to join Islamic militant organizations. It suggests that Kashmiri mujāhids depend on the family for the social recognition of “discernment” (which one gains through sacrificing for others) and for the evaluation of “good intention” (which one gains through moral training in familiar and public domains). It shows how discernment and good intention established jihād as an extension of an internal moral transformation linked to an awareness of mujāhids' obligations to society. It also explains how mujāhids' close association with those who inspire strong personal attachments of love and physical desire, especially children and wives, produced a tension around issues of sexuality and sexual purity. For Kashmiri refugees, the challenge of being a mujāhid is living—not dying—like a martyr.