Kris Vallotton addresses old sermon claiming he's seen restored virginity in young people
Senior associate leader of Bethel Church and co-founder of Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry in Redding, California, Kris Vallotton has clarified clips from a 2014 sermon on sexual purity in which he claimed to have "seen thousands of people's virginity restored" after they recently went viral on TikTok.
A TikTok user named Rachel Spears created a 57-second compilation of Vallotton's sermon framing his teaching as misogynistic after posting it on YouTube on Sept. 11. In the clip, which has since been removed from YouTube, Vallotton makes comments about human sexuality before making the claim he's heard reports of girls' virginity being restored.
"I wrote a book called Moral Revolutions, I've seen thousands of people's virginity restored," Vallotton claims in the sermon to students at the School of Worship in 2014. "I've got hundreds of emails about girls' hymens being restored. Hundreds. It's not typically something you tell your pastor."
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He recalled one girl telling him: "'By the way, I had a creative miracle. ... God restored my hymen."
@youknowthatonegirlrachel some of y’all always wanna ask why i’m so angry. why aren’t you?? #fyp#recoveringevangelical#christiantiktok#churchtrauma
? original sound - Rachel
Days after the clips from his sermon went viral, Vallotton explained in a statement that his team had removed the edited lesson from YouTube for review.
"This past weekend, we uploaded an old teaching that I shared with School of Worship students from 2014 to my YouTube channel," Vallotton stated. "Someone who I do not know created a short, 57-second video using select soundbites from that teaching, and posted the clip on social media. Understandably, anyone who saw that short video would be confused as the full context was completely missing."
He pointed his followers to watch another video on YouTube in which he discusses sexual purity with his wife, Kathy, along with Cole and Caitlin Zick, directors of purity advocacy organization Moral Revolution.
"We felt led to further address the topic of sexual purity and bring clarity to this teaching, as well as address some of the concerns and feedback we received. There are certain topics and conversations that the Church has often pushed under the rug or whispered about in a corner," he said.
"Sexuality is one of these topics that has been disregarded and avoided in the Church for years. Yet, I feel it is vitally important that as a Church we bring clarity and truth to a subject that the world has perverted and religion has shamed."
Vallotton said the clips were taken from a half-hour video he posted to YouTube and that it was edited down from the two-hour teaching session.
He said that many years ago, he and his wife led a youth group class in a local gym started with the county probation department. As a stipulation for the course, Vallotton said that he was told he couldn't "bang them with the Bible."
"It started with a six-week class, and what they were doing is they had all these kids that had violated their probation as juveniles," he said. "They basically made a rule that said, 'Your parents have to come to parent training' because they traced back their kids' behavior to their families."
The program started with 36 kids on probation. During the program, Vallotton said they would spend about an hour letting kids play basketball and volleyball. In the last half hour, they presented a 30-minute teaching.
During that time, he had to talk to a co-ed group of young people after witnessing young males touching the breasts of a young female while they played basketball. The young girl, he said, didn't stop the males from touching her inappropriately, so he intervened.
"That very first night, the Lord gave me this whole teaching. It's in the book Moral Revolution if you ever want to read it. [It's] about this ring and really it's a story about nobility and purity and the restoration of virginity," Vallotton said.
He said he used a fictitious story to talk about sex with the group because he couldn't use the Bible.
"I'm telling this story and about how God has created us to have sex inside of marriage. And it came out of this fiction story that I made up and about the restoration of that. When we get [to] the climax of the night, where this guy fights for and works for this ring, in the end, it turns out to be a parable. We call it 'Parable of the Ring,' the restoration of virginity," he said.
"The girl who I told the story of getting grabbed, a point of that story was she was raised in a drug home, she didn't have a dad. This was all normal. That was the way they behaved. She wasn't trying to stop them from doing that. This was a big joke and funny."
He added that he used that story to let the group know this isn't how women should be treated.
"When we got to the end of that half-an-hour story, and the climax of that story is that God actually created you to live your sexuality out in covenant because the world perverts sex, the religion shames it, but the Kingdom celebrates it. God is the one who created sex," he continued. "It was His idea. To not celebrate sex in the right circumstance is crazy."
He said that the specific girl that he mentioned told him that night in tears that 'No one ... ever told me about this."
"That was one of the motivations of us staying with those kids for five years," Vallotton said. "We didn't get paid for it. We won two community awards. We saw so many kids come to Christ."
He added that they had 36 kids "weeping" in the gym that night not because they were being shamed but because they were "actually for the first time being envisioned [and saying], 'This is why I have a sex drive years before I am supposed to have sex inside of marriage.'"
"It wasn't the old '90s religion, like, 'Let's shame people,'" he contends. "It was the opposite of that. It was like, 'This is a vision for why God said no because God is the one who created sex.'"
With the rise of the #MeToo movement, Vallotton said he understands how some might be concerned over the comments, and some will question a man who is talking about women. He added that he has been "very excited" about the #MeToo movement because he thinks it's "time for women to stand up."
"We are seeing morality now, even in Hollywood and the business world," he stressed. "It's been pretty exciting, but it also has the side effect that [people are asking], 'are you shaming women' and 'are you bringing that old religious shame into the whole world of sexuality?'"
