Silver Ring Thing - History

History

Silver Ring Thing was created in 1995 by Denny Pattyn, an evangelical Christian youth minister from Yuma, Arizona, as a way to combat what he saw as rising rates of STDs and pregnancies amongst teenagers, as well as a way to protect teens from what the founders saw as a distinctly American obsession with unhealthy (in opposition to biblical standards) sex, which, according to Pattyn, was a byproduct of the “promiscuity the sexual revolution of the ‘60s”.

In 2000, Pattyn became Executive Director of the John Guest Evangelistic Team of Sewickley, Pennsylvania, and SRT became part of the national outreach of the John Guest Team.

In 2004, SRT claimed to have won pledges of chastity of more than 16,000 young adults since its inception, and Pattyn stated that SRT planned to have rings on the fingers of 2 million youngsters by 2010.

Initially, SRT was funded entirely by private sources, but beginning in 2003, SRT began receiving money from the federal faith-based initiatives program. By 2004, SRT had received more than US $1,100,000 in U.S. government federal funding.

In 2004, SRT began expanding operations into the United Kingdom, with mixed results. While some teens in the UK embraced the message of abstinence, some critics rejected and ridiculed SRT, claiming it was anti-sex or unrealistic, and have stated that it seems unlikely that abstinence programs will attract widespread support in the UK because of the UK's different attitude about sexuality and sex education, but the group's Assistant National Director for the UK, Denise Pfeiffer, says there is a real need for such a movement in the UK to curb what she sees as the ever-increasing rates of sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancies, both of which she claims are the highest in Western Europe.