The True Love Waits pledge states: "Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate and my future children to be sexually abstinent from this day until the day I enter a biblical marriage relationship." In addition, they promote sexual purity, which encompasses not only abstaining from intercourse before marriage, but also abstaining from sexual thoughts, sexual touching, pornography, and actions that are known to lead to sexual arousal." By the late 1990s, Christian music groups were promoting the program, and events similar to youth rallies were held at Christian music concerts, providing an opportunity for adolescents to sign pledge cards.
Impact
In the first year of the campaign, over 102,000 young people signed the pledge, which was also taken up by other church groups including the Roman Catholic Church and Assemblies of God. The campaign has continued to spread across the US, making the use of occasions such as Valentine's Day to gain attention. As of 2004, groups supporting abstinence numbered in the hundreds. During the previous decade, approximately 2.5 million American youth took the pledge of abstinence.
Criticism
The efficacy of the program has been questioned not only by studies, but also by contemporary Christian music artists who previously supported the cause. A 2003 study showing that 3 out of 5 college students who had taken the pledge had broken it, and of the 40% who identified themselves as abstaining from intercourse, 55% acknowledged having participated in oral sex. In the 2011 book Making Chastity Sexy: The Rhetoric of Evangelical Abstinence Campaigns, Christine Gardner criticizes True Love Waits for "using sex to sell abstinence" by promising more satisfying sexual activity within marriage for those who abstain from premarital sex; she argues that this rhetoric reinforces selfish desires for gratification, sets people up for divorce and dissatisfaction with marriage, and simply adapts "secular forms for religious ends". The Jonas Brothers made an abstinence pledge through True Love Waits as teens. The band and pledge are satirized in the 2009 South Park episode The Ring. In 2013, Morgan Lee, a journalist of The Christian Post, conducted an interview with Joe Jonas and wrote:
