When evangelical sexual purity organizations such as True Love Waits and Silver Ring Thing exhort teens to pledge themselves to sexual abstinence until marriage, they are doing more than protecting individuals from what they believe is a dangerous practice; they are trying to save American civilization from collapse. This is the argument of Sara Moslener's Virgin Nation. From the late nineteenth century to the present, American evangelical sexual purity campaigns have reflected the belief that sexual promiscuity leads to national decline—a belief that has allowed evangelicals to graft a campaign for individual purity onto a larger national security agenda.

Moslener's study offers an intriguing and nuanced historical survey of purity campaigns of the late Victorian era, the early years of the Cold War, and the last two decades. In each of these eras, Moslener argues, moral crusaders connected their concern about youthful sexual deviance to concerns about the nation. This did not mean that the purity campaigns of these three eras were identical manifestations of the same tropes. The sexual purity campaigns of the late nineteenth century were often led by women's rights advocates, such as Woman's Christian Temperance Union president Frances Willard, who viewed the campaigns as a way to control male sexual desires and empower women. By contrast, evangelical purity campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s, which received strong support from male evangelical leaders such as Carl Henry and Billy Graham, linked twentieth-century fundamentalist concerns about moral behavior with the national goal of protecting the health of American youth and instilling young people with a sense of purpose and self-discipline—goals that were closely connected with the “muscular Christianity” that Youth for Christ promoted. Evangelicals such as Graham connected these ideals with the goal of protecting the nation against Soviet communism and preventing national decline. Accordingly, Graham called young people to premarital chastity because he believed that premarital sex threatened the nation's moral fiber and security.

Similar anxieties have shaped recent sexual purity campaigns. By tapping into fears about sexually transmitted diseases and juxtaposing those concerns with warnings about societal collapse, the contemporary sexual purity movement has presented a secularized version of longstanding evangelical beliefs about the societal implications of individual decisions. Yet, as Moslener shows, the contemporary sexual purity movement is not merely a repackaged version of the Cold War evangelical sexual purity campaigns. Instead, the movement has skillfully borrowed language from the counterculture, modern psychology, popular media, and even the feminist movement to depict sexual abstinence as an individual choice and expression of sexual identity. The youth-oriented presentations produced by Silver Ring Thing combine parodies of popular movies and a pledge ritual that echoes evangelical conversion motifs to portray a sexual abstinence pledge as a radical, individualistic decision that connects a sexually abstinent teen to a countercultural community. Yet Moslener argues that the nationalistic themes of earlier sexual purity movements have not disappeared, even if they are not immediately obvious in Silver Ring Thing's public presentations. By drawing on quotations from James Dobson and other evangelical advocates of the sexual purity movement, Moslener demonstrates that the same anxieties about national decline that influenced earlier sexual purity campaigns are still manifest in the rhetoric of contemporary abstinence advocates.

Virgin Nation's intriguing analysis will probably be of interest to scholars and students who are seeking a better understanding of the historical background of the contemporary evangelical sexual purity movement. Yet the evidence that Moslener presents in her case studies of the three eras of sexual purity campaigns falls short of the claims made in the book's introduction, because in only one of those case studies (the study of sexual purity campaigns of the early Cold War era) does Moslener present clear evidence of a direct link between sexual purity campaigns and anxieties about national decline. In the case of the other two eras that Moslener examines—the late nineteenth century and the present—the evidence that she presents for a link between anxieties about civilizational collapse and sexual purity campaigns comes mainly from inference or from sources not directly associated with the sexual purity organizations that she profiles. Moslener is probably correct to argue that there is some connection between evangelical sexual purity campaigns and anxieties about national decline, but the connection is not nearly as direct as she asserts in her introduction, nor, with the exception of the early years of the Cold War, did national concerns ever provide the dominant paradigm for evangelical campaigns for sexual purity.

Moslener's study would probably benefit from the inclusion of more analysis of the familial concerns that have motivated evangelical sexual purity campaigns. Virgin Nation includes some discussion of the politics of family values that provided the context for recent incarnations of the sexual purity movement, but much of the book nevertheless portrays the decision for premarital sexual abstinence mainly as an individualistic decision about bodily autonomy, not a decision that has repercussions for the family. This might reflect the rhetoric of Silver Ring Thing, but it does not fully convey the primary concerns of the American sexual purity movement during the past century, because in the American evangelical protestant context, discussions of sexual purity were never far removed from concerns about the family. The book does not discuss how evangelical interpretations of the Bible or Christian theological traditions have shaped evangelicals' understandings of sexual purity. While this study may accurately convey some of the things that evangelicals believe about sexuality, it does not give readers a full understanding of how evangelicals think about these issues or why they have arrived at their particular beliefs.

By emphasizing themes of national security and individual identity more than family values, Moslener's study prompts us to ask new questions and look at American evangelical sexual purity campaigns in a different light. Yet in the end, Virgin Nation may not offer enough evidence to provide a substantive challenge to those who believe that evangelical sexual purity campaigns were primarily not about national security but about the protection of the home and the preservation of a set of values that long predated the Cold War or the late Victorian era.