Hello and thank you for downloading the Witness Podcast from the BBC World Service, history told

by the people who were there.

I'm Lucy Burns and we're looking back at stories of love and marriage from around the world.

Today we're going back to

1995 and the birth of a movement for American teenagers who promised not to have

sex before marriage. It was known as the Silver Ring Thing.

This is the sound of the silver ring thing.

Hundreds of excited teenagers in a hall for something like a pet rally, encouraging them not to have

premarital sex.

It all started in 1995 with an evangelical Christian youth minister called Denny Patton.

My wife and I were working in Pittsburgh and we lost our job and I lost my house in a landslide so we had no

home no job three little children. So my wife and I prayed for nine months and our

prayer was Lord help us find out what you want us to do, close every door

but one so we know which door to go through. The door that opened was that he got

a job with a church in Arizona, reaching out to teenagers about different big issues in their lives.

Well the idea of Silver Ringthing came from a meeting that I went to in a county that I was working in, where we were told we had the highest teen pregnancy

rate of any county in America, and so I got the idea that maybe we should be teaching abstinence.

Abstinence, not having sex before marriage, was just one of the issues they were talking about,

but they set out on an outreach program.

They started looking for ideas to make their message more concrete and they came up with a powerful symbol.

I asked my wife to cross the Mexican border. We lived on a border town in America and purchase some silver rings because we realized that the

gold ring represents marriage so we thought it'd be a good idea to have a silver

...