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The Science of Purity Culture: How Childhood Religious Scripts Become Adult Shame

Starting in the 1990s, millions of young people in evangelical communities were taught that their bodies were moral dangers and their worth depended on sexual purity. Clinical research now documents the downstream costs: higher sexual shame in adulthood, body-shame scripts that persist into marriage, difficulty separating identity from sexual history, and a characteristic 'secret shame' when the public purity performance breaks down in private. This page traces the science — from the True Love Waits movement through two decades of clinical evidence — and explains the psychological mechanisms behind the scripts RealityWipe's programs address.