ABSTRACT
With the rise of the Religious Right in the late 1970s, the general public became aware of evangelical concerns regarding the nation’s religious and moral integrity. Targeting abortion, homosexuality, divorce, sex education, pornography, and sexual promiscuity as symptoms of national decay, the Moral Majority mobilized conservative evangelicals and solidified a budding alliance between conservative politics and evangelical Christianity (Freedman and Freedman 1988, 327, 333). Evangelical denominations and para-church groups, committed to restoring the moral status of the country, focused their efforts on the adolescent population. Leading the way, the Southern Baptist Convention launched True Love Waits in 1993. Developed by the Reverend Richard Ross, a Southern Baptist youth minister, True Love Waits is a Christian sexual education program with the sole purpose of promoting premarital sexual abstinence.1 A year after its founding, True Love Waits held a national rally in Washington DC, introducing the movement onto the national scene and confirming its position within the evangelical-Republican alliance. Shortly thereafter, numerous other religious groups endorsed the movement, and young people of all Christian faith traditions found themselves attending True Love Waits rallies and signing pledge cards committing themselves to sexual abstinence before marriage.2
