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

by Linda Kay Klein

Yet, in the years I spent as an evangelical Christian, I never once heard anyone use the term the way it’s used here—in reference to the onlooker’s lustful eye. Instead, I heard it used time and time again to describe girls and women who somehow “elicit” men’s lust.

It began to feel like it didn’t matter what I did or wore; it was me that was bad.

evangelical Christianity’s sexual purity movement is traumatizing many girls and maturing women haunted by sexual and gender-based anxiety, fear, and physical experiences that sometimes mimic the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Based on our nightmares, panic attacks, and paranoia, one might think that my childhood friends and I had been to war. And in fact, we had. We went to war with ourselves, our own bodies, and our own sexual natures, all under the strict commandment of the church.

The purity message is not about sex. Rather, it is about us: who we are, who we are expected to be, and who it is said we will become if we fail to meet those expectations. This is the language of shame.

Shame tends to make people feel powerless and even worthless. It creates a fear of abandonment that, ironically, makes us push others away. We want to hide those aspects of ourselves we are ashamed of, so we may emotionally withdraw from those close to us, lash out at them to keep them at bay, or isolate ourselves in self-blame. Whatever it takes to keep the world (including ourselves) away from those parts of us that we have come to believe make us bad.

over $2 billion in federal funding has been allocated for abstinence-only programs in the United States since 1981.

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.

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. Reading these verses as an adult I cannot help but shake my head—the whole time 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.

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. But nowhere is this message quite so clear as it is in religion.

remember him telling me that if my symptoms were as severe as I claimed they were, I wouldn’t be smiling so much. Clearly, he had no experience with good Christian girls and our truly outstanding capacity for smiling.

One of the most common themes that arose in my interviews was the pain that those I spoke with felt at not being allowed to express their true feelings.

That unconditional love that I had fallen for in my early days in the church? It was conditional.

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

The church functioned as an extended family system that could minimize, deny, and enable abuse or provide much-needed social support, spiritual encouragement, and practical assistance.”

The cornerstone of the purity myth is the expectation that girls and women, in particular, will be utterly and absolutely nonsexual until the day they marry a man, at which point they will naturally and easily become his sexual satisfier, ensuring the couple will have children and never divorce: one man, one woman, in marriage, forever.

“Even though my faith is nothing like it used to be, I can’t not believe these things. But I don’t really believe them anymore either. I mean, my beliefs make me crazy because they don’t all make sense, but I can’t not believe them,”

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.

A report in the Vatican newspaper based on a study of the confessions heard by a ninety-five-year-old Jesuit scholar, which was backed up by the Pope’s personal theologian, found that the number one sin confessed by women is pride.3 Yet I don’t think this means women are more prideful than men. Rather, I think women are more likely to notice their pride and categorize it as sinful because it contradicts the gender expectations they’ve been raised with in secular and religious society.

When I read the Bible I see God’s powerful love for women. I do not see in the Bible God treating women as second-class citizens, as little girls who aren’t quite grown-up and will never be.

the family the purity movement seeks to protect is conceptual, not actual. So-called family values are about preserving the idea of what a family should look like, not preserving actual familial relationships.

I saw that the church intrinsically believed women were not as important to God as men. It was in how we were treated. Were we girls taught that God had amazing plans for us—married or not, with kids or not, that we had our own purpose? No. We were taught to support somebody else’s purpose, and given biblical reflections on ‘partner and submit.’ Were we girls taught to be warriors? To gird ourselves and be as prepared for life as possible? No. We were trained to be supportive, nice, and caring to a warrior man.

Even if we eventually come to understand that our sexual nature is natural, normal, and healthy, we may find that our upbringing in purity culture, which has dedifferentiated shame and sex over years of messaging, observation, and experience, ensures that our brains fire those shame neurons when the subject of our sexuality arises, with or without our permission, trapping us in a shame spiral.

Generally speaking, purity culture excuses male sexuality and amplifies female sexuality, and it shames consensual sexual activity and silences nonconsensual sexual activity.

“women are taught their bodies are evil; men are taught their minds are.”

I cannot help but wonder if, while some men worry that they are monsters because of this gender-based messaging, others may feel their monstrous behavior is justified because of it.3 When boys are repeatedly taught that they cannot control their sexual impulses and that it is a girl’s responsibility to protect her own purity, how logical it must seem for perpetrators attempting to justify their actions to come to the conclusion that if a woman dresses or acts a certain way she is “asking for it,” making rape at least partly (if not totally) her fault?

To side with the perpetrator we must do nothing, but to side with the victim, we’re asked to stand with them, which is so much more emotionally taxing.”

In the Harry Potter books, the dementors are like trauma-triggers. They “force their victims to relive the worst memories of their lives, and drown, powerless, in their own despair.”5

“Evangelicalism here is about purity culture: you don’t have sex; you have to wear these clothes; you only listen to this music; you only watch these movies. In the part of Europe I was in, they were more concerned about creating fellowship with each other and doing service. It was one of the few times that I was really in a ‘Christian fellowship.’

Surviving gives you a very unique set of skills. It costs a lot. But it also makes you powerful.”

people who receive abstinence-only education, which tends to use external motivations, start to have sex around the same time as their peers and have around the same number of sexual partners overall.5 Meanwhile, people who receive comprehensive sexuality education, which focuses on giving people a broader range on information (including information on abstinence, condoms, and contraception) in hopes that they will use this education to make their own internally motivated decisions, report delayed or reduced sexual activity (not to mention an increased use of contraceptives when they do have sex).VI6

a member of the church was talking with the kids about how sex is powerful, like dynamite, and one of the kids—he’s a first year in high school—he raised his hand and said, ‘No, I don’t agree with that. Because that’s like saying sex is dangerous and bad.’ “And I said, ‘Well, what would you say then? What’s the metaphor you would use?’ “And he said: ‘I would use the sun.’ “I said, ‘Say more about that.’ “And he goes: ‘Well, if you spend too much time in the sun, you’re going to get burned. And if you get too close to it, you’re going to die. But yeah, if you don’t get any sun, you die too. It’s like, you have to have a healthy sun exposure.’

these days I mostly do “church” at home: Praying, meditating, journaling, reading, and sometimes throwing my hands up and singing praises or laments to God at the top of my lungs in the privacy of my apartment