Purity teachings spread through celebrity-led consumer products like books and VHS tapes

Evidence

McDowell, an evangelical pseudo-intellectual who first made a name for himself writing popular books on Christian apologetics, helped launch the purity movement. In 1987 he published Why Wait? What You Need to Know about the Teen Sexuality Crisis, and he followed this purity primer with a VHS video series. In the early 1990s he joined with Christian rock band Petra to promote his purity message. It was an odd pairing, the middle-aged father figure who appeared onstage at rock concerts mixing in dad jokes with frank talk of sex and venereal disease. But it all made sense within the larger evangelical culture. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 391

Categorization

• XREF: Instantiation of Du Mez’s method — the commercial artifact (VHS, rock music tie-in) as the vehicle of religious identity, which builds toward the book’s central continuity thesis. — connects to: Purity culture reasserted patriarchal headship through rituals and consumer goods — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White…, 393
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Purity culture reasserted patriarchal headship through rituals and consumer goods — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White…, 393

Broader Connections

• Purity culture reasserted patriarchal headship through rituals and consumer goods #expands (0.92) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 393