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The thing I don’t get about evangelical Christianity is how damn creepy it is. If these people aren’t watching Jesus torture!porn or subscribing to “told you so!” e-mail services for after they’re Raptured, they’re celebrating the celibacy bond between…father and daughter?

The idea of a purity ring is silly in the first place – when two horny teenagers are going at it, the purity ring has about as much significance as John Edwards’ wedding ring. (Zing!) But to involve your dad in the whole mess? That’s just…ew.

From Time.com:

When Kylie was 13, her parents took her on a hike in Lake Tahoe, Calif. “We discussed what it means to be a teenager in today’s world,” she says. They gave her a charm for her bracelet–a lock in the shape of a heart. Her father has the key. “On my wedding day, he’ll give it to my husband,” she explains. “It’s a symbol of my father giving up the covering of my heart, protecting me, since it means my husband is now the protector. He becomes like the shield to my heart, to love me as I’m supposed to be loved.”

Actually, Kylie, that key’s not to your “heart” – it’s to your vagina. Your dad. Has a key. To your vagina.

Randy and his wife Lisa Wilson believe in celebrating God’s design and life’s little growth spurts. But the origin of the purity-ball movement was not so much about their five daughters; it was about the fathers Randy saw who, he says, didn’t know what their place was in the lives of their daughters. “The idea was to model what the relationship can be as a daughter grows from a child to an adult,” Randy says. “You come in closer, become available to answer whatever questions she has.”

So he and Lisa came up with a ceremony; they wrote a vow for fathers to recite, a promise “before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the areas of purity,” to practice fidelity, shun pornography and walk with honor through a “culture of chaos” and by so doing guide their daughters as well.

No. A million times no. I don’t buy it. “Authority and protection in the areas of purity”? For one thing, if a girl has questions about sex, I’m PRETTY SURE it’s not her dad she should be talking to. I’m also pretty sure that we’ve moved beyond the period in human evolution when daughters were pieces of property for fathers to control with locks and keys.

One man is dancing with his younger daughter, wishing his older girl had come as well. She used to wear a purity ring, he says, until a boy she knew assaulted her; she took it off–felt too dirty. Her parents gave her a new one, a bigger one; it took many months and much therapy, her father goes on, before she was able to put a ring on again. “That was part of a healing process,” he says, “with the message that you’re valuable no matter what someone did to you.”

And you know what’s a better message? That you are valuable, regardless of the choices you make regarding sex. There’s no explanation of the nature of assault that this girl suffered, but isn’t it reasonable to assume that if her parents hadn’t foisted a purity ring (and the guilt-trips that come along with it) onto her, she might not even have needed months of therapy?

Out on the terrace under an almost moon, the black swans have vanished into the lake. David Diefenderfer has slipped outside for a cigarette; he’s a leathery South Dakotan in a big black cowboy hat, and he hands over his card. HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL: BREEDER SERVICE, it says, with a picture of a syringe. He’s in the cattle-reproduction business. He’s also the father of nine children by seven women.

Three of his daughters are with him tonight, including 10-year-old Taylor. I asked what purity means to her. “I don’t really know,” she says, and she’s shy about talking about all this. “But it means you make a promise to your dad to be a virgin until you are married and not have a lot of boyfriends.”

Hoo, boy. I’m not even sure where to start with this one. There’s the do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do hypocrisy: a man with children from seven different women feels justified in telling his own daughters that they owe him their virginity? And then there’s the incestuous pedophilia factor: no boyfriends, honey, and make sure you stay pure, alright, or else you’re no longer Daddy’s Little Girl.

There are so many disturbing elements to the father-daughter purity promise (and to purity promises in general) that it would be overambitious and pointless for me to address them all. So instead I’ll keep it simple: it’s really fucking weird to promise your dad that you won’t have sex. The end.

“The culture is everywhere,” says Randy’s daughter Khrystian, 20.

I’m only quoting this to point out that the guy who came up with all of this named his daughter Khrystian. If that’s not begging to be bastardized into a “good girl gone bad” stripper name, I don’t know what is.