Like many people, reaching the age of 40 inspired Matt to do some self-reflection. He had achieved many hallmarks of adulthood: a college degree, a career he enjoyed, and two beloved dogs. But he’d never had a relationship, or even a sexual partner.

This weighed heavy on him; he craved the experience of a deep romantic connection and wondered how it might feel to be in love.

Matt, who is using a pseudonym, grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household where sex and masturbation were considered sins. The only message he could ever remember hearing was that it would ruin his life and condemn him to hell.

Though he’d drifted from evangelicalism, sexual shame still clung to him. Around his birthday, he decided to experiment and bought a male sex toy. But after unwrapping the bulky plastic object and fumbling with it, he felt nothing.

“I felt so embarrassed and stupid,” he said. “I’m 40 and I don’t even know how to use this thing.”

Frustrated, he vented in a Facebook group for ex-evangelicals, ranting about how he’d never learned even the basics of sex. It struck a chord. With 30,000 members, the group regularly discusses sexuality and relationships. Members trade stories, comfort each other, and share resources – books, therapists, anything that might help.

One commenter recommended a private group: the Purity Culture Dropout Program, run by sex educator Erica Smith. It offers sex-ed lessons and a safe space for people to unpack fear, compare upbringings, and confront the shame they’ve internalized.

Matt enthusiastically signed up.

Purity culture – the conservative Christian belief in abstaining from sex until marriage – boomed in the 1990s and early 2000s, just as Matt was a teen.

In 1993, the Southern Baptist Convention launched its “true love waits” program, which encouraged teens to take “pledges” promising to save themselves for marriage. Books such as I Kissed Dating Goodbye (1997), gave teens strict instructions not to date for fun. Purity balls popped up, where girls attended with their fathers, who vowed to “protect” their daughters’ virginity.

By the 2000s, purity culture was mainstream. The Jonas brothers wore true love waits “purity rings.” But it wasn’t just a church thing – its leaders pushed it as a national issue.

In 1994, “true love waits” gathered thousands of teens in Washington, carpeting the National Mall with 200,000 pink, yellow, and blue pledge cards. Two years later, Bill Clinton signed a bill funding abstinence-only sex ed at $50m a year. The Bush administration expanded it, despite mounting evidence that abstinence-only education didn’t reduce teen sexual activity.

Purity culture enforced rigid gender roles: men were cast as aggressors; girls were told not to tempt them. Both ended up alienated from their bodies and desires.

But rarely do we hear about heterosexual men raised in this ideology. Purity culture “tells men they’re supposed to lead”, says former minister and religion scholar Bradley Onishi, co-host of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. “It says God made you aggressive, an uncontrollable sexual beast.”

“If men don’t heal from purity culture, they’ll keep hurting themselves and others,” he adds. “They won’t form healthy relationships – romantic, familial, professional, or political.”

Joshua Harris, author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, has since apologized for the fear he instilled and the false promise that his method would lead to a happy ending.

Too little, too late, perhaps. Today, 17 US states still offer abstinence-only sex ed – and they have higher-than-average teen pregnancy rates.

Matt was born in 1982 in Pennsylvania. His father was heavily involved with the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church, a deeply conservative denomination that believes men have divine authority over women and children. Weekends meant choir practice and pledging allegiance to the American flag near the pulpit.

As a child, Matt was quiet and empathetic. He couldn’t play sports due to a heart condition and instead enjoyed music and art – activities his community considered feminine. “I got the message early that there was something inappropriate about that,” he said. “The message was men should be strong and tough.”

Formal sex education was off-limits in his house. However, like many children, he discovered masturbation around the age of nine or 10 – even though he did not understand what it was. “Sometimes I had trouble falling asleep, and I realised that touching myself was soothing,” he said.

At 11, his father caught him in the act and dragged him to the dining room, where his mother was helping Matt’s younger brother with homework. “He was yelling at me, screaming ‘Are you sexually active?’” Matt remembered. “I felt so humiliated, I just wanted to melt into a puddle on the floor.”

Weeks later, his Sunday school teacher told the class Magic Johnson’s HIV diagnosis was God’s punishment for sexual sin.

“I immediately started panicking,” Matt said. “I figured I must have made some kind of sexual sin, and that was why my dad had been so angry. So I thought I must have made God just as angry.”

He soon found himself in a repetitive loop, promising God not to masturbate again, then breaking his promise and praying for forgiveness.

“I think I eventually figured out you can’t catch HIV from masturbating,” he recalled dryly. “But by then, I was receiving all kinds of other purity culture messages.”

As he moved through his teens, the purity industry was booming. Matt’s youth pastors read passages from I Kissed Dating Goodbye and explained that sexual contact would ruin their future marriages. They compared pre-marital sex to a piece of gum: the more times it’s chewed, the less appealing it is.

“The idea of sexual sin terrified me,” Matt remembered. Whenever he came across pornography or sex scenes in movies, they didn’t make him feel aroused: “Which made me feel smug, like I was more godly than other boys.”

According to his church’s teachings, this godly behavior would be rewarded with a perfect relationship, and Matt still craved a romantic connection. But he wasn’t sure how to turn any of his friendships with girls into something deeper.

“From what I was taught, it seemed you were friends with someone and at some point it would just happen,” he said. “But I didn’t know how to make it happen.”

The Purity Culture Dropout Program costs $50 a month. It offers two live lessons per month, a lesson archive, and a private discussion space.

The first session Matt joined, in 2024, tackled the myth of porn addiction. Most experts don’t consider it physically addictive, though it can become compulsive. Matt shared that youth leaders had told him porn would destroy his life.

“The responses were so open and accepting – it felt safe,” he said.

Smith, the course founder, wasn’t raised in purity culture but has seen its wreckage firsthand. She has an MA in Education from Widener University’s Center for Human Sexuality Studies and previously taught sex ed to young women and LGBTQ youth in Philadelphia’s juvenile justice system.

She’s watched the post-2016 wave of religious “deconstruction” accelerate during Covid. “People were leaving churches and saying, ‘I need sex ed. I need someone to talk to,’” she said.

When she launched the program in 2019, most clients were women. Now, more men are signing up – often nudged by partners or female friends.

She sees two main groups: men who rushed into marriage to have sex, only to end up in dysfunctional relationships; and men like Matt, who arrive at adulthood with no sexual experience at all.

“So many struggle with sexual thoughts, body image, and basic confidence,” Smith said. “And when it comes to dating, they don’t know where to begin.”

Sex therapist Jeremiah Gibson often quips that “you don’t need to have grown up in the church to be fucked over by the church”. Along with his partner Julia Postema, he specialises in working with couples who’ve left high-control religions. The pair also host a podcast, Sexvangelicals, with the tagline: “The sex education the church didn’t want you to have.”

Both were raised in fundamentalist traditions and married – then subsequently divorced – while young. They partly blame purity culture for those relationship breakdowns; none of them had the emotional tools to discuss the crucial components of a life lived together.

“Communicating your sexual needs and desires is one of the most vulnerable things you can do,” Gibson said. “One of the theories in sex therapy is that if couples can solve problems around sexuality, then they can solve problems around anything.”

“Purity culture can really dehumanize both men and women,” added Postema. She says the men she works with are often stuck in a “double-bind” of being told God made them insatiable sexual creatures, but that they must also constantly fight this God-given nature.

Gibson believes that comprehensive sex education would not just help couples have healthier sex lives, but would go some way to reducing wider divisions in society.

“If it were a part of our curriculum, I think that we would have better ways of resolving differences,” Gibson said. “We wouldn’t be excoriating people who have different values to us. We’d see an increase in both men’s and women’s ability to communicate clearly and concisely.”

Nathanial, or “Nate”, now 37, grew up attending a non-denominational evangelical megachurch in upstate New York. Religion trickled down to every aspect of family life.

In his early teens he joined a church-based men’s “accountability group”. These sprung up around the country during the 1990s, with the most famous being Focus on the Family’s Promise Keepers. Youth leaders encouraged the boys to confess every time they “stumbled” by looking at porn or masturbating. Nate and his peers shared tactics on how to resist sin, such as snapping an elastic band around their wrist when they had “impure thoughts”.

“What that does – or at least, what it did in my mind – is that all women are viewed as potential wives,” he said. “It frames women as not people, but as plot devices in your life.”

Nate met his first girlfriend at church when he was 16 and asked her out by telling her he could see them getting married one day. The pair were determined to keep their relationship as Godly as possible. The one time the couple went slightly further than kissing, “she was so upset she didn’t speak to me for a whole week”.

He met his now-wife, Katy, on a study abroad program in France and got married at 23. Though they were beginning to question evangelical teachings, they still waited until their wedding to have sex – partly because Katy, who’d never received sex education, was terrified of getting pregnant.

But their combined lack of experience placed a strain on the relationship. Katy had been taught in church to submit to her husband, that she should never refuse him sex, and that men needed to have sex daily. When Nate would sometimes rather – in his words – “eat ice cream and watch TV”, she’d feel upset and rejected.

“There were times where it was uncomfortable, because we had certain expectations of what the opposite sex wanted,” said Katy. “And when that wasn’t the case, it felt very confusing.”

Therapists working with couples in similar situations often witness relationships break down entirely. But over time, Nate and Katy learned to discuss what they were experiencing. These conversations led them to completely pick apart purity culture, and they eventually left evangelical Christianity in favour of the liberal ELCA church.

“In a weird way, [purity culture] helped us communicate – we didn’t have previous partners to figure things out with, so we had to figure them out together,” Katy said.

Hearing about women’s experiences in evangelical culture has played a big role in helping Nate question the ideas around gender he grew up with. “For us boys, the teachings were always very internal, policing our thoughts and feelings,” he said. Katy, on the other hand, was taught from an early age to not tempt men to stray, to always dress modestly and never do anything that could be misconstrued as flirting: “It sounds like so much pressure, having to monitor your surroundings.”

The experience has shaped how the couple are raising their six-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son. “I want my daughter to have full information about her body – I don’t want her to go through what I did,” said Katy. As for their son, “I just want him to understand that women are people,” said Nate.

Today, most of the purity balls and rings are gone, only to be replaced by Christian influencers. “I see this new generation of TikTok and Instagram influencers talking about how wonderful it is to follow God and wait until marriage for sex,” says Smith. She also sees purity messaging being absorbed into new-age spirituality, with ideas about the “divine masculine or feminine” mirroring the same rigid gender roles.

As he made his way through the Purity Culture Dropout Program, Matt began sifting through childhood memories. “I see so much that triggered shame, and that probably made me the way that I am,” he said.

As someone who doesn’t feel much arousal from typical erotic material, the course has helped him realise he may fall somewhere on the asexuality spectrum. “But the question I still have is: Was I always that way? Or is it because of purity culture?” he said. “I think it really installed a fear of anything sexual in me.”

Matt still longs for a romantic connection, but the idea of embarking on one remains daunting. “Not having any of that practice that most people have had, and having this trauma, it all makes me a bit nervous at the idea of going into relationships,” he said. “I don’t know if that will ever change.”

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and Verite News, a nonprofit news organization with a mission to produce in-depth journalism in underserved communities in the New Orleans area.

On a summer night in 2023, an explosion at one of Louisiana’s biggest petrochemical complexes sent a plume of fire into the sky. More explosions followed as poison gas spewed from damaged tanks at the Dow chemical plant, triggering a shelter-in-place order for anyone within a half mile of the facility, which sprawls across more than 830 acres near Baton Rouge.

For more than a year, a little-known government agency has been investigating the incident. But the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board will likely shut down before completing its probes of the Dow explosion and other such incidents across the country. President Donald Trump’s administration has quietly proposed shutting down the board, an independent federal agency charged with uncovering the causes of large-scale chemical accidents.

Near the end of a 1,224-page budget document released with little fanfare on May 30, White House officials said shutting down the agency, commonly called the CSB, will help “move the nation toward fiscal responsibility” as the Trump administration works to “redefine the proper role of the federal government.” The CSB’s $14 million annual budget would be zeroed out for the 2026 fiscal year and its emergency fund of $844,000 would be earmarked for closure-related costs. The process of shutting the agency down is set to begin this year, according to CSB documents. 

Eliminating the CSB will come at a cost to the safety of plant workers and neighboring communities, especially along the Gulf Coast, where the bulk of the U.S. petrochemical industry is concentrated, said former CSB officials and environmental groups. 

“Closing the CSB will mean more accidents at chemical plants, more explosions and more deaths,” said Beth Rosenberg, a public health expert who served on the CSB board from 2013 to 2014. 

“This shows that the Trump administration does not care about frontline communities already burdened with this industry,” said Roishetta Ozane, founder of the Vessel Project, an environmental justice group in Lake Charles. “We’re the ones who have to shelter in place or evacuate whenever there’s an explosion or [chemical] release, and now there will be less oversight when these things happen.”

The CSB did not respond to a request for comment. 

The proposed closure of the CSB follows several other moves by the Trump administration to slash staffing levels at the Environmental Protection Agency and ease federal health and safety regulations. 

Founded in 1998, the CSB investigates the causes of petrochemical accidents and issues recommendations to plants, regulators and business groups. The CSB doesn’t impose fines or penalties, instead relying on voluntary compliance or on enforcement by other agencies, such as the EPA, to mandate safety improvements.

Of the more than 100 investigations the CSB has conducted, Texas leads the country with 22 cases, followed by Louisiana with eight. 

“Those numbers tell us that Louisiana and Texas really need the Chemical Safety Board, and there will certainly be negative impacts here if it closes down,” said Wilma Subra, an environmental scientist with the Louisiana Environmental Action Network.

Along with the Dow chemical explosion, the agency has four other active investigations of incidents in Texas, Kentucky, Georgia, and Virginia. CSB investigations often take several months to complete. 

In an update of the Dow explosion investigation last year, the CSB hinted at “several events of concern” at the chemical complex between Baton Rouge and the town of Plaquemine — an area that forms part of the industrial corridor known as “Cancer Alley.” Among the targets of the investigation were at least two mechanical problems, multiple smaller explosions after the initial blow-up, and the release of more than 30,000 pounds of ethylene oxide, a colorless gas the agency noted is a cancer-causing substance.

The CSB’s last completed investigation was a fatal 2024 explosion at a steel hardening facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The CSB identified several safety failures and at least three other dangerous incidents involving similar hazards at other facilities owned by the same company, HEF Groupe of France. 

HEF “failed to ensure that information about those incidents and lessons learned from them were shared and implemented organization-wide,” the CSB investigation, released early this month, found. 

A chain reaction of mishaps at the Chattanooga facility resulted in an eruption of “hot molten salt” that killed a worker, according to the investigation. 

On average, hazardous chemical accidents happen once every other day in the U.S., according to Coming Clean, an environmental health nonprofit. Coming Clean documented 825 fires, leaks and other chemical-related incidents between January 2021 and October 2023. The incidents killed at least 43 people and triggered evacuation orders and advisories in nearly 200 communities.

Trump called for the CSB’s closure during his first term but settled for leaving many investigator and agency leadership positions unfilled. Slowing the agency’s work resulted in a backlog of 14 unfinished investigations by the time former president Joe Biden took office in 2021. 

Under the first Trump administration, investigations were hampered by staffing shortages and monthslong conflicts between the board and the agency’s Trump-appointed director, according to a federal inspector’s report. 

In the new budget proposal, the Trump administration indicated the CSB’s duties could be handled by other agencies.

“The CSB duplicates substantial capabilities in the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to investigate chemical-related mishaps,” a CSB budget proposal said. “This function should reside within agencies that have authorities to issue regulations …”

This justification is “a lie,” said Jordan Barab, a former deputy assistant secretary of OSHA and a former CSB recommendations manager. 

While OSHA and the EPA are limited to assessing specific violations of their existing standards and regulations, the CSB can look far more broadly and at the “deeper causes” of accidents, including worker fatigue, corporate budget cuts, and lax oversight, Barab said. 

Even when other federal agencies appeared to ignore CSB recommendations, community groups and local governments could cite them when pushing for improved safety standards, Ozane said. 

“It was scientific evidence we could all use to pressure the state or the federal regulators to do something about pollution and safety in the places we live,” she said. “This is just another tool and another resource that’s been taken away from us.”