Side Hug

Heard in the wild

The longer version

What it means

A side hug is exactly what it sounds like: you stand next to someone, put one arm around their shoulders, and lean in briefly — no frontal contact. In evangelical youth culture of the 1990s and 2000s it was taught, sometimes explicitly, as the safe way for boys and girls to hug, to avoid any hint of anything. "A-frame hug" is the related form, where you lean in from the shoulders with the rest of you well back. The intent was modesty and appropriate boundaries; the result was a generation of Christians who hug like they're being photographed for a church directory.

Why people say it

Christians who mention the side hug now are almost always joking about their own upbringing. The rule came from real concern — youth pastors trying to keep hormonal teenagers out of trouble — and from purity culture's broader anxiety about bodies. The joke came when everyone realized how it looked. Both the concern and the joke are inside the church; it's one of the most self-aware bits of Christianese there is.

How to respond

If someone side-hugs you, they went to youth group, and you can hug them however you like. If a Christian friend jokes about side hugs, laugh — they're inviting you to. If you're a parent and a youth group actually has a side-hug rule, that's a little dated but not harmful; the real questions to ask are about safety policies and adult supervision, not hugging geometry. If you've never heard of it, congratulations, you've been spared a very specific kind of awkwardness.

If you hear it in different churches

Evangelical, Baptist, and non-denominational youth groups and Christian schools, 1990s–2000s especially. Catholics, Orthodox, and mainline Protestants had no such rule and find the whole thing baffling. Pentecostals have their own version of physical-contact caution. The side hug is a cultural artifact of a specific place and time, and everyone who was there recognizes it.

Where does “Side Hug” come from?

Paul told the churches to "greet one another with a holy kiss" — which is a full-contact greeting — and told Timothy to treat younger women "as sisters, with absolute purity." The side hug has no scriptural basis; it's a youth-ministry practice of the purity culture era, spread through camps, Christian schools, and youth groups from the 1990s. It became a national joke with "Christian Side Hug," a parody rap performed at a 2009 youth conference that went viral and was widely mistaken for sincere; the meme has outlived the rule.

Good to know

You might also hear

Common questions