Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free

by Linda Kay Klein

This message that we should look at our sexuality as food—” “For someone else,” Renee finished my sentence. I nodded. “As though it’s all about how well we are able to feed others,” I continued. “Like, ‘If I let this person eat, then this other person won’t be properly fed. Or won’t want to devour me—’ ” “Or ‘I just won’t be any good anymore,’ ” Renee added, frowning.

The objectification of women as a consumable good in context to sexuality is unfortunately not uncommon.

The religious purity messages many of us received as girls were not about what we might do, but about what we would be, or be seen as.

It asked weather a woman was able to be trusted with her ow autonomy.

Shame can become like the smell of our own homes. The hum of an air conditioner. The feel of a wedding ring. It’s just . . . there. Which is when it is most dangerous. Because it is then that we are most likely to dismiss, rather than deal with, its dangerous effects.

This is so real.

As Dr. Curt Thompson writes: “When I perceive that I am receiving the shame from a community of voices, the pain can become unbearable. When the collection of the voices of an entire community shames us, it is more unwieldy due to our inability to locate it centrally in any one place. And so when I feel shame in my family or my church, addressing it feels quite overwhelming.”25

Rejection from a. Group or community you desire to be included in is such a powerful motivator...and can be a very damaging one.

Yet one’s level of religiosity (there is a 30 percentage point gap in anticipated sexual guilt between the least and the most religious youth)27 and one’s gender (girls are a whopping 92 percent more likely to experience sexual guilt than boys)28 have even greater impacts on one’s likelihood to experience sexual shame than one’s denominational affiliation.

92% of women in this study. Is this because of the patriarchal mentality of the church? Presentation of purity to women versus men? Both?

To summarize, first, the researchers are finding that purity teachings do not meaningfully delay sex. Second, they are finding that they do increase shame, especially among females. And third, they report that this increased shame is leading to higher levels of sexual anxiety, lower levels of sexual pleasure, and the feeling among those experiencing shame that they are stuck feeling this way forever. Oh, and it doesn’t get better with time . . . it gets worse! Yep. Sounds about right.

It’s not even taking care of the church’s concern. It’s just used as a means to brainwash and control people when they ‘fail.’

I don’t know about you, but within the larger context of the chapter, it seems to me that judgmentalism is the stumbling block Paul is most concerned with here, not modesty.

SAY IT LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK!

my childhood friends and I were being told that we were stumbling blocks, our accusers were, even then, placing the real stumbling blocks before us: purity-based shaming and judgmentalism that pushed many of us right out of the church.

PREACH!

But as I grew older, the hand began to squeeze me, and I became uncomfortable. I tried to make myself smaller, squishing myself down so I could fit inside of it, but all of the ways in which I was not the “right” kind of Christian woman squeezed through between the hand’s fingers and I was exposed.

Love this metaphor. It’s a great word picture for the experience.

In books, movies, and just about everywhere else, girls get the message that the more selflessly and painfully a woman suffers, the more we love her.

Is it because of empathy or relatability?

The doctor did a short scope and diagnosed me with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, but before I left his office I remember him telling me that if my symptoms were as severe as I claimed they were, I wouldn’t be smiling so much.

Dismissal of women who deal with pain well is common. Personally I have experienced this.

And so, even while we suffered, especially while we suffered, we smiled.

Fake it until you make it is a common reaction I have taken.

The first stumbling block those raised as girls in the purity movement must overcome is the message that if you are suffering, it’s your fault: It may be your sin; it may be your psychosis; but it is certainly not the shaming system you find yourself in.

God isn’t karma. We’re humans. Our bodies fail. It’s not because God is punishing us. It’s because we are mortal by genetics and disease happens.

“The common thread was always that I was vocal and opinionated,” she continued, holding the cup of espresso I had just made her on my stovetop. “I was essentially told, ‘Don’t disagree with the men around you. They don’t want you to be smarter than them. They don’t want you to have opinions. You’ll make them intellectually uncomfortable.

This is a construct caused by males being insecure.

Research shows that complementarianism upholds abusive dynamics among conservative, evangelical women whose religious lives are integral to their sense of identity.

I’m glad I know this now.

the challenge that posed the greatest threat to their recovery was the church’s emphasis on traditional gender roles.

Yes. Accept people for their strengths, not for roles assigned on assumption.

Though “adult-like” sexual experimentation among children can be a sign that a child is a victim of sexual abuse and so should be taken seriously, sexual experimentation among children and adolescents of the same gender and age can also be quite normal.7 And yet, Chloe was immediately shamed by her parents for it, and her parents were immediately shamed by the larger community.

She was quite young to be exposed to it, but I have heard this more than once.

The shame that religion puts on it, just religion’s general hostility toward sex, sexuality, the human body in its sexual form—it created the environment for me to be mistreated by my family.”

As is often the case.

The fourth stumbling block girls raised in the purity movement must overcome is the wrongful classification of rape and other forms of sexual violence. By this I mean both that the purity movement classifies sexual violence by systematically silencing and hiding it, and that if and when it is exposed, the purity movement then misclassifies sexual violence as “sex” rather than “violence.”

This is just so disappointing that we even have to debate what is and isn’t rape.

Equating survivors’ actions, such as drinking in Laura’s case, and perpetrators’ actions, such as assault, is called sin-leveling, and is often categorized as a form of spiritual abuse.

I hate this response. It happens a lot in churches especially whe teens are involved in a wrong doing.

The community’s understanding that women and girls are responsible for men’s and boys’ sexual thoughts, feelings, and actions toward them can halt a survivor’s own internal healing and, if she seeks support from within this community, can even lead to further traumatic experiences, such as having the first question your father asks after you tell him you were raped be: “What were you wearing?”

This makes me so angry.

Although 90 percent of female teenagers who are active in their faith communities say that they would like programs to help them avoid rape, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse, many of their churches will never directly discuss these issues.4

THIS IS SO OUTRAGEOUS! They want them to take the responsibility for protecting themselves but deny them resources. Typical.

As opposed to a bat mitzvah or a quinceañera, evangelicals ought to have a funeral at the beginning of girls’ adolescence. When you’re a girl you’re allowed to be who you are. But as you get older, you have to put that person to death. Because after puberty, you’re dirty. So now you have to be what’s expected of you. You always have to fit some kind of role or be whatever a woman is supposed to be instead of actually who you are. (Jo)

I feel this hard.

Both the repressed sexuality of the virgin and the fully surrendered sexuality of the wife are requirements in purity culture—one being fabled to lead to the other.

Somehow, purity culture has turned a pornographic fantasy about a virgin turned vamp into “morality,” so that now both a woman’s nonsexuality before marriage and her hypersexuality after marriage are required for her to be considered good.

But you can’t talk about it. Or you’re a hussy showing off.

But what the church forgets,” she said, standing up with the grocery bag in her hand, “and I’ll preach it from the pulpit, because there are some who will let me—is that God is above gender. He sometimes expresses himself as a mother in the Bible. And so we are the image of God most fully when we are together as one. Equal.”

AMEN!

I’ve got post-traumatic pastor disorder. I’m so afraid of being diminished, talked down to, dismissed, patronized. Or of being looked up and down. I’m afraid that he’s going to fail me in some—not in some minor way, not a slip-up—but in a fundamental way that is harmful. I just get really sick to my stomach. I feel so much shame. And I’ve always felt that. Talking to men who are pastors in the past too, or any kind of church leader. It’s like I’m expecting to get slapped or something.

Same.

In the early 2000s, the professor saw a shift among her students’ autobiographies: a sudden rise in religious sexual and gender-based shame. “The symptoms I’m seeing are exactly the same symptoms I might see in someone who was sexually abused,” she told me in an interview.10 Having grown up in a very sex-positive environment herself, she couldn’t understand why so many students whose sexual autobiographies did not include sexual abuse would be experiencing symptoms traditionally associated with this form of trauma.

This is such a real thing.

At the beginning, often all that those of us who let go of a shaming worldview know is that we are tired. Tired of hiding ourselves, tired of hating ourselves.

Sick and tired of being sick and tired.

We had been sure there was solid ground beneath us just a moment ago. But suddenly we look down and there’s nothing. No old worldview. No new worldview. Just . . . space. But unlike Wile E. Coyote, we do not fall. We float. Because we didn’t just lose our grounding; we lost our gravity—our entire way of being, of understanding ourselves and the world around us. We have no compass, no sense of direction. We don’t know what’s up, what’s down, what’s forward, or what’s back. We are confused and, all too often, we are alone. We float above an abyss and, as the Bible tells us it was before the world was created, darkness is over the surface of the deep.

A similar brain trap occurs in Japanese people who, when speaking English, can’t hear the difference between “r” and “l” because the two sounds are not differentiated in their brain maps. Each time they try to say the sounds properly, they say them incorrectly,

I always wondered about this.

As I mentioned in the opening, evangelical young people are the most likely religious grouping to expect that having sex will upset their mother and cause their partner to lose respect for them. Evangelicals are also among the least likely to expect sex to be pleasurable, and among the most likely to anticipate having sex will make them feel guilty.2 And yet evangelical young people are basically just as likely to have sex as their peers are.

Clearly we need to talk about sex more openly.

You don’t own anything, even your thoughts, and it matters more how the culture and the community thinks about your thought than what the thought itself is. Their judgment determines everything. (Jo)

Social media has made this so much more apparent in both religious and secular culture.

The part about this definition that really strikes me as critical to understanding shame is the sentence “People will do almost anything to escape this combination of condemned isolation and powerlessness.” Shame can make us feel desperate. Reactions to this desperate need to escape from isolation and fear can run the gamut from behavioral issues and acting out to depression, self-injury, eating disorders, addiction, violence, and suicide.1

This.

As my interviewee Jo said, “women are taught their bodies are evil; men are taught their minds are.”

stories. I don’t ever want to be in a position of shaming the evangelical community for having shamed me. The point is that we must all move past shaming.

Yes. Failures cannot heal if people cannot get past the shame.

Every time I tell my story—come what may—I am closer to free.

Preach.

Josh was just what the purity industry had been waiting for. IKDG quickly became required reading for white,II American evangelical adolescents, teenagers, and young adults who were serious about their faith, selling over one million copies.III Josh, meanwhile, became one of the bestselling evangelical authors of all time. He wrote many more purity culture favorites and eventually became the head pastor of a megachurch.

How an unmarried 21 year old became the freaking authority on dating is beyond me. This was a snowball effect of failures right here.