In a world of low-rider jeans, friends with benefits, lunchtime hookups and drug-resistant STDs, you can forgive a girl like Christy Parcha for feeling besieged. "It is really hard to be pure," says the 19-year-old, her hands clasped on her lap, a knit top providing the modesty her off-the-shoulder gown cannot. But tonight in the opulent Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, Co., Parcha suffers no shortage of paternal protection. There is God("He's just awesome to me. He makes my life so exciting"). There's her father, Mike, whose bulwarks against iniquity include rigid control of the TV and an outright proscription on dating. Then there is a ballroom full of like-minded dads, scrubbed and black-tied for an evening of celebrating their roles as father-protectors and standard-bearers for virtue of all sorts. If the devil plans to stir havoc in this place, he'll have his work cut out for him.

The annual "Purity Ball" is a high point on the social calendar in Colorado Springs, the unofficial headquarters of America's evangelical movement and laboratory of sorts for church-made solutions to all manner of social scourges. For months, the girls and young women here have been trying on gowns and agonizing over footwear choices, counting the days until the big night. Now, as hotel staff rush about with dinner trays, the girls are filing into the Lake Terrace Ballroom in a gust of silk and taffeta, many of them resplendent in white gloves, and about a third of them crowned with rhinestone-studded tiaras. The event has the look of a prom, a wedding and a debutante ball rolled into one. But there's a twist that just might leave the uninitiated with a case of the creeps: on this night, the debutantes are dating their own dads.

Not that there's anything wrong with a night of dinner and dancing with your father. But the connubial overtones in this instance are more than a little unnerving. After dinner, about 50 fathers will rise, lock hands with their daughters and swear in unison to "cover" their female offspring "in the area of purity." "I will be pure in my own life as a man, husband and father," reads their oath. "I will be a man of integrity and accountability as I lead, guide and pray over my daughter and my family as the High Priest in my home."

Afterward, the crowd will gather in a separate ballroom for more pledges of love and honour, along with rituals laden with cryptic religious symbolism. One man will slip a ring on his 13-year-old daughter's finger, telling her she's a "joy and a treat," and asking for God's blessing of her. The gesture will draw a round of hearty applause from the couples around the room.

The relationship between fathers and daughters is fraught terrain in any culture -- a connection that secular psychologists say is complicated by male discomfort with a girl's journey toward sexual maturity. There have been attempts to normalize it over the centuries through ritual, and the results range from the poignant to the horrific. Coming-of-age parties called quinceañeras, at which 15-year-old girls officially enter adulthood, remain popular in Latin America, and serve as a balm to fathers grappling with their girls' increasing social autonomy. At the far end of the spectrum are female circumcision ceremonies conducted in parts of tribal Africa, a practice anthropologists believe to be rooted in fears of female potency.

But for many a North American dad, the default position when it comes to dealing with adolescent females is respectful distance. About the only formal recognition most of us make of our unique relationship with our daughters occurs on their wedding day, when we escort them down the aisle. And while Freud would no doubt view this as an all-too-convenient sop to unacknowledged anxiety -- why do we feel the need to deliver our daughters into the care of another man? -- it's hardly a moment in which most guys revel.

Randy Wilson had none of this sociological history in mind when he organized the first purity ball in 1997. But there's no doubt he sensed untapped longing in the Christian community to celebrate and better understand the father-daughter bond. Then a junior pastor at one of Colorado Springs' myriad Protestant ministries, Wilson envisioned a modest dress-up event for the daughters and dads in his congregation -- the kind of thing his own five girls might enjoy, and a chance to air out liturgical themes in a non-church environment. The idea, he says, was for fathers "to model the kind of treatment their daughters should expect from men." And among churchgoers, at least, the idea took off. Today, purity balls take place in 48 states, while the 49-year-old Wilson has grown into something of a celebrity. This year, the full gamut of U.S. network morning shows came calling for interviews.

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