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It is a question the Otts have had to come to terms with. There is one rather large blip in the couple’s sugar-coated story — the fact that Deborah is a “born-again virgin”, having had sex with someone else at the age of 16. “We were intimate for about seven months, like most high school relationships,” she says of her first boyfriend. “He was the only one I’d gone all the way with but the relationship changed soon after we’d started sleeping together. We started fighting and I decided I wanted to get out of it. Afterwards I was really upset with myself. My parents, who’d wanted me to wait, found out and it weighed heavily on me that I’d let them down. I decided to wait until I was married before having sex again. There were a lot of opportunities to go back on that decision but I stuck with it for six years.”

If the concept of “revirginising” is difficult for streetwise and cynical young Scots to take in, there are other elements of the Silver Ring message which might make them balk.

Take the merchandising side of the movement. Visit the Silver Ring Thing website and you are quickly notified that the cost of the silver rings at UK shows will be a hefty £10 (it also recommends “that students bring additional spending money for snacks and SRT merchandise”). Another advert invites you to buy a Silver Ring Thing information package for $30 (£16.30), complete with promotional video, SRT New Testament Bible and a copy of a book called Epidemic: How Teen Sex is Killing Our Kids. All of which begs the question, do you really need to buy a ring to make the decision to stop having sex?

For converts such as Louise Thomson, though, “abstinence was something I’d always had in my heart”. A member of the Destiny Church in Shawlands, Thomson says it helps that her boyfriend shares her beliefs. “We have a strong relationship and I wouldn’t want to threaten that,” she adds. “It also helps me to trust him.”

Thomson’s boyfriend, Andrew Rennie, 18, is equally big on patience. “I’ve never really made a decision to abstain,” he says. “I’d been brought up as a Christian and it’s one of the fundamentals that you don’t have sex before marriage. You do get tempted but you can help yourself by not putting yourself into compromising situations. And a lot of prayer!”

The prayer connection is one of the big issues that British critics have with the abstinence movement. The American government may be putting millions of dollars into funding projects such as the Silver Ring Thing in the hope that chastity will be promoted as part of a secular social policy, but does the concept only work for Christians? “Of course you can make the decision on your own, but if you believe in God it’s a lot easier,” says Deborah Ott.

“Now I find that about half the teenagers who come to the shows are already Christian, and about half the remaining audience will probably decide to become Christian afterwards.”

Deborah includes the experience in her talk on “second virginity” during the Silver Ring Thing show. “In my talk I share the ‘what now?’ with the audience, showing them that they can put on their silver ring and start over that night if they want to. Most of them go for it.”

So, is the Silver Ring Thing more relaxed about purity than it looks? Not really. When I ask Jared how he has dealt with his wife’s past he replies, rather grudgingly, that “it was a little difficult but I thought if God can forgive her then I can too”.

The Silver Ring Thing takes place on June 29 at Partick South parish church in Glasgow (0141 339 8816, www.silverringthing.com). To Be Pure: A Special Night On Purity takes place on July 6 in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow, as part of Heart and Soul 2004 (0141 764 1555, www.g1.org.uk/heartnsoul)

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