ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Thirty years ago this week, thousands of teenagers came to Washington, D.C. to pledge to abstain from sex until marriage. It was a breakout moment for an evangelical purity movement that continues to affect sex education in schools. Magnolia McKay reports from Nashville.
MAGNOLIA MCKAY, BYLINE: In 1994, the True Love Waits campaign was still in its infancy, and this event in D.C. took the movement mainstream. It garnered national media attention, including an ABC report by John Stossel.
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JOHN STOSSEL: Teenagers signed cards pledging their virginity and planted 200,000 of the cards, creating a field of abstinence.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Woo. True love waits. Wait till you get married. Woo.
MCKAY: Jill Dender had signed the pledge and was on the Mall that day.
JILL DENDER: We had matching T-shirts (laughter).
MCKAY: She helped stake the pledge cards into the ground, and when she saw that sea of cards...
DENDER: I just felt like, wow, all these people want to honor Jesus.
MCKAY: Thirty years ago, when the True Love Waits campaign started in Nashville, the nation was still dealing with the AIDS crisis, and teen pregnancy rates were up. Claire McKeever-Burgett encountered the True Love Waits pledge at her church in Abilene, Texas.
CLAIRE MCKEEVER-BURGETT: There was just something about it that I was confused about. But I did it 'cause, like, church was my life.
MCKAY: She doesn't remember her parents being involved. It was just something she did with her youth group.
MCKEEVER-BURGETT: If they had a hundred kids - right? - who signed to these, that was something they could celebrate with the rest of the church.
MCKAY: And True Love Waits founder, Richard Ross, says people were surprised that so many kids signed it.
RICHARD ROSS: That there were young people, who in a very joyful and a very positive way, said we think sex is wonderful, and we think it belongs in marriage.
MCKAY: Soon, Ross heard from people in politics.
ROSS: Government policymakers did seek counsel. They just were intrigued with whatever we had learned about young people choosing, to use their words, abstinence.
MCKAY: The U.S. has never had a national standard for sex education. Instead, state and local school boards decide what kids learn about sex and their bodies. Leslie Kantor worked in sex education advocacy in the '90s. She's now chair of public health at Rutgers University. She remembers school board fights across the country.
LESLIE KANTOR: You started to see a lot more organization by conservative groups trying to get existing health education programs shifted out in favor of some of these newly developed abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.
MCKAY: And many of these groups were successful, especially in Southern and more conservative states. To this day in Tennessee, any sex education, if it's even taught, must center around abstinence and has severe limits on birth control information. A group called Sex Ed for Social Change estimates that 17 states still include strict requirements like these. Abstinence as one way to avoid pregnancy and STIs is part of comprehensive sex education, but there is no strong body of evidence to support that abstinence-only programs work.
Jill Dender and Claire McKeever-Burgett are now both married and live in Tennessee. Dender homeschools her seven kids. She's still happy about her decision to wait for marriage and wants them to follow in the same path.
DENDER: I mean, it's all about Jesus. All this other stuff falls in line.
MCKAY: McKeever-Burgett says she's still a Christian, but what she learned in the purity movement didn't prepare her for sex and dating. She wants her two kids to have better relationships with their bodies.
MCKEEVER-BURGETT: If you can access that inner wisdom, then as far as I'm concerned, you can live a really beautiful, free life, and that's what I want for them with sexuality and with everything.
MCKAY: True Love Waits is still around 30 years later, but you won't see a pledge card unless you flip to the back of their Bible study guides. For NPR News, I'm Magnolia McKay, in Nashville.
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