On social media, a testimony of Ashley Sheatz given by her husband, Trevor and gained millions of views. This follows Tom Buck white knighting for the supposed Rehabs out there. And so Trevor Sheatz, a social media consultant, chimed in with his wife’s testimony.
My wife was formerly promiscuous. I was a virgin.
She was then radically born-again. Committed to church, evangelized constantly, Puritan books in her bedroom, prayer journals, grief over past sexual sin, etc.
We got to know each other well for over a year, dated for four months, engaged for two and a half, and didn’t sin sexually with one another. Our first kiss with each other was at the altar on our wedding day (reaction pic attached!).
We’ve been married for over five years now, and she’s been the most wonderful and godly wife, mother to our three children, and homemaker you could imagine. She’s more pure than most virgins, as biblical purity has less to with past sins (though they certainly matter) and more to do with one’s current posture of the heart and daily decisions to honor the Lord (Matt. 5:8).
We’re far too quick to forget the story of the woman labeled as a known “sinner” (likely a prostitute) in Luke 7:36-50 who was washing Jesus’ feet with her tears while kissing them too. The Pharisees were shocked that Jesus let a public sinner do this.
Jesus responded with a parable about debts being forgiven and ended with this powerful conclusion: “Her many sins have been forgiven; that’s why she loved much. But the one who is forgiven little, loves little” (Luke 7:47).
Everyone seems to highlight the benefits of virginity, and it certainly is a blessing. But we forget to highlight the benefits of being forgiven much as well. My wife knows the depths of Jesus’ forgiveness more than most people, enabling her to more easily live out a life of passionate love for her Savior.
A woman or man’s past sexual sin matters. But what matters far more when it comes to deciding who to marry is if the person is truly born again, if their repentance is real, if they truly have a heart for Christ, if they truly follow Jesus and obey his commands. “God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen what is weak in the world to shame the strong.
God has chosen what is insignificant and despised in the world ​— ​what is viewed as nothing ​— ​to bring to nothing what is viewed as something, so that no one may boast in his presence. It is from him that you are in Christ Jesus, who became wisdom from God for us ​— ​our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, — in order that, as it is written: ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.'” (1 Cor. 1:27-31)
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come!” (2 Cor. 5:17)
Many saw this as a beautiful story. Others saw it as treading out the sins of one’s past for social media clout. The line “She’s more pure than most virgins” line is clearly a dig at other people as this discussion was framed in the context of the haughty virgin vs reformed whore debate. And this brings us to the topic of testimonies.
In the church, we have an obsession with dramatic conversion stories and the more salacious the sin, the more elevated a person can become in celebrity Christendom. Repenting after sleeping with your boyfriend. Boring! Claiming Christ after being one of the few wildly successful OnlyFans prostitutes. Book her at TPUSA!
And so we’ve seen a number of lofty conversion stories of complete frauds, like Kanye West, Russell Brand, and even Robert Blaire White. Sheatz is elevating his wife’s sin as making her more qualified as a believer, as though the count of our forgiven sins is a competition and something to virtue signal about. The virgin need not apply for he or she cannot grasp forgiveness nearly as much. This is prideful. Suffice to say that dramatic conversion stories are overrated, and boring conversion stories are underrated, as the glory to them goes to God’s faithfulness over generations.
Trevor Sheatz is giving his wife’s testimony of past sin, which is a slight deviation of how testimonies usually go, to weaponize it against young Christian men who would snub the “born again virgins.” But this is their right in finding a wife.
Defiant Baptist posted a clip of Evangelical Dark Web covering Josh Harris and his ex-wife.
For those that are claiming that a repentant whore is marriage material, let @RaymondFava of @EvangelicalDW introduce you to Shannon Harris.
— Defiant Baptist (@DefiantBaptist) March 25, 2026
Ex-wife of Josh Harris (“I Kissed Dating Goodbye”), Shannon’s premarital sexual degeneracy was discussed openly in his follow-up book:… pic.twitter.com/ccR3qYUEvN
Shannon Harris was someone who was far from a virgin on her wedding night. Yet even on the honeymoon, she lusted after other men. She was a textbook “Alpha Widow.” Conventional wisdom says you can’t turn a hoe into a housewife, yet Josh Harris who wrote the book on Christian dating, thought himself wiser, to disastrous results. More recently, Nala Ray’s husband revealed, unprompted, that he struggles with the images of her wife having sex with other men, something that clearly bothered him. This is to say that wisdom and prudence should not go out the window, in light of a dramatic conversion story.
Theoretically, people with more dramatic conversions might be a better match, but oftentimes opposites attract. However, men should not be shamed by pastors on the internet for wanting the debt free virgin without tattoos. And that’s what this whole discourse is about: shaming men for having standards.
As Ben Zeisloft points out, “this post is striking a nerve because it comes in the context of a deeply broken social contract, including and especially in the church, where young men are expected to tolerate infinite bad behavior from young women even as older men and older women refuse to hold them accountable.”
William Wolfe of the Center For Baptist Leadership states, “If I were a young, unmarried, American Christian man on here…(without having the context I personally have about debates, etc, I’d probably reasonably assume that *many* (not all) so-called conservative commentators/pastors who post on here hate me and want the worst for me.”
Thus, this discourse is about shaming obedience rather than vice, shaming scruples rather than inanity, and shaming the modest rather than the immodest.Â
2 Responses
The most notable thing is that this issue still only affects a fraction of the female population: Most women are still just regular naughty and don’t end up on OF or as the wife of Joshua Harris. However nowadays these regular women never show up in church. No “conversion”, just plain old secular woman in secular cohabitation with a secular man and secular 1-2 children with regular church-free Sundays.
Now it is the female outlier demographics who ends up in evangelicalism: usually after a “crazy” conversion story. And they then meet virgin men there: the male outlier demographics. Enter a random psychiatric ward and you get almost the same demographics, minus Christianity.
The actual issue is: Evangelical pastors are stuck with those human outliers now, who have a large overlap with psychiatry inmates, while regular society just dropped out of church completely. Regular people no longer mixing and matching in church is the primary reason why pastors want to force prostitutes on virgin men. As these are they only guys they have left.
Thanks for the article! When it comes to Christian dating, the issue of prior chastity hangs in the air like an ugly, blood-crusted sword over the heads of believers. We’ve been told so many lies by the public schools, our parents, our friends, and even our church leadership on what is healthy sexuality, that most of us have some serious baggage to heal from. Truly chaste men or women, who were that way from a young age, are about as common as unicorns and dodo birds.
As a young man, I would definitely prefer someone who not only believes the Faith but also is a virgin, physically and spiritually. But spiritual virginity is far less common then physical virginity. As our Lord Himself says:
“But I say to you, that whosoever shall look on a woman to
lust after her, hath already committed adultery with her in
his heart” (Mt. 5:28)”.
Physically, I’m still a virgin: but that counts for nothing to God. It was ultimately my powerlessness over lust (pornography and masturbation) that brought me back to Jesus Christ: who can not only forgive, but also heal man of his sinfulness.
We need to repent of our past generations’ failures to protect our sexuality: by teaching that sex is neither bad nor “merely natural”, but is holy and worth protecting for our spouse-to-be. We ought to make that a cornerstone of Christian education in our homes, schools, and Churches: to reverse this awful trend. That said, given our current crisis: this is how the Lord God, through the ages, has sanctified those converts with deviant sexual history:
BRIDES OF CHRIST:
Speaking historically, the Church has offered her reformed harlots a different path to holiness. As Cardinal Gibbon writes:
“…Who is stranger to [The Church’s] consecrated virgins, those sisters
of various Orders who in every large city of Christendom are
daily reclaiming degraded women from a life of shame, and
bringing them back to the sweet influences of religion; who
snatch the abandoned offspring of sin from temporal and spiritual
death, and make them pious and useful members of society,
becoming more than mothers to them; who rescue children from
ignorance, and instill into their minds the knowledge and love
of God” (The Faith of our Fathers, Pg. 19) (Link: https://dn790002.ca.
archive.org/0/items/TheFaithOfOurFathers/TheFaithOfOurFathers.pdf)
In the East, there are multiple accounts of former prostitutes removing themselves from the world altogether to become hermitesses. St. Mary of Egypt is the most famous of them. Her story, too glorious to adequately summarize here, is accounted by St. Saphronius in the 4th century. It can be read online here: https://www.stmaryofegypt.com/maryofegypt
With the support of the Church, these pathways ought to be followed by those women who wish to abandon themselves to Christ fully: whether they be older widows (see 1 Tim: 5:3-7), former prostitutes, or women otherwise incapable of marriage. Practically speaking, this is more edifying for these women’s faith than the current “conservative” solution: which is to merely set them aside as unclean and unmarriable. If they aren’t given a greater purpose in their lives, besides “being a good Christian woman” but without the benefits of Christian marriage, you are setting them up for waywardness, relapse, and even apostacy from the Faith.
BRIDES FOR CHRIST:
All that said, St. Paul discusses the dangers of the “younger widows” with St. Timothy. Read carefully what he says:
“But the younger widows avoid. For when they have grown wanton
in Christ, they will marry: Having damnation, because they have made
void their first faith. And withal being idle they learn to go about from
house to house: and are not only idle, but tattlers also, and busybodies,
speaking things which they ought not. I will therefore that the younger
should marry, bear children, be mistresses of families, give no occasion
to the adversary to speak evil. For some are already turned aside after Satan.
If any of the faithful have widows, let him minister to them, and let not
the church be charged: that there may be sufficient for them that are
widows indeed”. (1 Tim. 5:11-16).
What St. Paul says of these younger widows can, to some extent, be applied to former harlots as well. There is a case to be made that some reformed whores, if younger and not irreparably unfit, can still marry. They would be less of a spiritual danger to the congregation, being kept in holy obscurity and modesty through following the marriage covenant. That said, that past sexual history will be a particularly difficult cross for her and her husband to bear, so it should not be the norm.
…AS CHRIST LOVES THE CHURCH
In Scripture, consider the prophet Hosea, who was commanded by God Himself to marry a harlot, as a physical manifestation of Israel’s fornification (Hos 1:2). Not only that, but he had to name his children by her phrases like “Without Mercy” (Lo-Ruhamah) and “Not my people” (Lo-Ammi): to drive the point home to the hearers of the prophecy (Hos 1:6, 9).
For the prophets, their life was a type of the Christ to come: because they not only spoke of the Lord’s will with their lips, they had to also embody the words He spoke. One of the greatest indignities the prophet of prophets, Our Lord Jesus Christ, bore was this: like Delilah to Samson (Jdg. 16), His bride Israel was the person that betrayed Him for silver…
-She insulted and berated Him ceaselessly beforehand to make Him stumble. Yet He stayed faithful.
-She sent Him to a pillar: to beat Him mercilessly by Pagan hands. Yet he stood faithful.
-She would put Him in so great an agony that He was at the point of death. Yet he took that death, that perfectly unjust death, and offered it to His Father as a sacrifice of atonement for His evil bride.
If the new Israel, The Church, has become a generation of fornications, maybe it is the Cross we ought to look to for our example in marriage. Perhaps more Hoseas among us are necessary: to prophetically heal the wounds we’ve inflicted on ourselves. For assuredly, we Christians are not here because we are well: but because we are ill, deeply ill! If Jesus wed Himself to such an unclean and unfaithful bride as us, the Church, yet still gives us abiding love and mercy: how much more should WE Christian men offer ourselves selflessly to our brides and brides-to-be. As St. Paul exhorts the Ephesians:
“Let women be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord: Because
the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the
church. He is the saviour of his body. Therefore as the church is
subject to Christ, so also let the wives be to their husbands in all
things. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the church,
and delivered himself up for it. That he might sanctify it, cleansing
it by the laver of water in the word of life: That he might present it
to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such
thing; but that it should be holy, and without blemish” (Eph. 5: 22-27).
Glory and praise be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen
– Andy Soileau, fellow-pilgrim