Traditional Christian teaching on sex and marriage causes real, measurable harm — shame around normal desire, purity culture's psychological damage, and the exclusion and suffering of LGBT people. A loving God would not teach this.

Why people find it persuasive

The testimony of harm is widespread and well-documented: purity-culture literature from the 1990s-2000s produced lasting shame and dysfunction in many raised on it, and LGBT people have faced real rejection, conversion-therapy abuse, and family estrangement justified by Christian teaching.

Important distinctions

• • The classical Christian sexual ethic itself (chastity outside marriage, marriage as a covenant, sex ordered toward union and often procreation) vs. culturally specific '90s-2000s purity-culture pedagogy (metaphors of being 'used goods' or 'chewed gum').
• • Teaching a demanding ethic vs. teaching it cruelly, shamefully, or coercively.
• • Disagreement about what the good life requires vs. animus toward persons who dissent from it.
• • Church practice in specific eras and subcultures vs. the New Testament's own text and tone.

Christian response

• • Much of the documented psychological harm (Joshua Harris's own public renunciation of his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye, or Linda Kay Klein's Pure) is traceable to specific late-20th-century American evangelical pedagogical methods and metaphors, not to the historic doctrine itself, which long predates and is broader than that subculture — the New Testament nowhere compares a non-virgin to 'chewed gum' or 'a used cup.'
• • The classical sexual ethic is demanding of everyone, not selectively of gay people: it calls unmarried heterosexual people, the majority, to the same chastity, and celibate same-sex-attracted Christian writers (Wesley Hill, Eve Tushnet) argue this consistency, not exemption for the majority, is part of its coherence, whatever one makes of its content.
• • The New Testament's own rhetoric toward sexual sin is notably not singling out any one group: Paul's vice lists (1 Corinthians 6:9-10, Galatians 5:19-21) place sexual immorality alongside greed, drunkenness, and slander, and Jesus reserves his sharpest recorded words for religious self-righteousness and exploitation of the vulnerable (Matthew 23, Luke 18:9-14), not for sexual sinners, whom he treats with notable gentleness (John 8:1-11, the woman caught in adultery).
• • That a teaching is experienced as costly or painful to live under is not by itself evidence it is false or unloving — many demanding ethical claims (fidelity, honesty, non-violence) are costly and painful for those who feel strong contrary desires, without that cost showing the claim untrue.
• • Documented instances of coercive 'conversion therapy' and its harms are now widely repudiated by mainstream Christian bodies (including many evangelical organizations) as a misapplication rooted in bad psychology and cruelty, not as a straightforward implication of New Testament sexual ethics, which nowhere prescribes such practices.

Christian counterresponse

Traditionalists reply that costliness is not unique to this ethic — every serious vocation, including celibacy for unmarried heterosexual Christians or vowed religious life, asks people to forgo real goods for the sake of a larger good they believe in, and that the relevant question is whether the underlying theology of sex and the body (not the suffering it may involve) is true, which suffering alone cannot settle either way.