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October 6 - October 7, 2023
It began to feel like it didn’t matter what I did or wore; it was me that was bad.
Now twenty-one, I had left my religious community, having determined that I was incapable of being the woman they made it clear I needed to be in order to belong.
Though shaming language is embedded into sexuality messaging for both boys and girls, it is especially intense and embodied when delivered to girls.
The purity message nestles neatly into the larger “us” versus “them” messaging I was raised with in the church.
The celibacy represented by a purity ringV—real or metaphorical—identifies evangelicals as one of “us.” This may never be spoken, but as a girl in the subculture, I can assure you, it is felt.
It almost seemed like if you weren’t being physically impure, you were being spiritually and emotionally impure.
We jump through hoops to make it about our shamefulness.
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.
many of our early shame experiences, especially with our parents and caregivers, were stored in our brains as traumas. This is why we often have such painful bodily reactions when we feel criticized, ridiculed, rejected, and shamed.
It is light-years easier for me to talk about being sexually abused as a child—I could give a public lecture about that—than it is for me to talk about what that religious community did to me. Sexual abuse is something that happened to me, but this was at the core of my identity. I participated in the community’s messaging about who I was, and allowed it to define me for years.
Shame can become like the smell of our own homes.
The evangelical subculture is diverse, decentralized, and constantly changing.
over $2 billion in federal funding has been allocated for abstinence-only programs in the United States since 1981.
Evangelical adolescents are also among the least likely to expect sex to be pleasurable, and among the most likely to expect that having sex will make them feel guilty.
(girls are a whopping 92 percent more likely to experience sexual guilt than boys)
Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat; for God has welcomed them. Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?
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.
And as I lay in bed I would have traded in the church’s newfound perception of me as good to be able to run and jump and play in a minute.
That unconditional love that I had fallen for in my early days in the church? It was conditional.
He would say, ‘I love you,’ and I would say, ‘I know.’ And then I would try to make myself know. It’s ridiculous to even hear myself say it. I’m a smart girl.
Suicide makes sense in a Christian framework, because isn’t Heaven better than earth?”
When we demand that an individual dress in just the right way so as not to inspire sexual feelings in others, we set a precedent of blaming individuals for the thoughts, feelings, and actions of other people that can play out in dangerous ways in rape and abuse cases.
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,
we are consistently faced with the painful reality that sexual violence survivors who choose to speak up are likely to be silenced by the institutions and communities to whom they go for support if the violence could be in any way associated with that institution or community.
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.
I hadn’t even had my first kiss, and already I felt myself on a tightrope strung between two opposing sexual expectations.
both a woman’s nonsexuality before marriage and her hypersexuality after marriage are required for her to be considered good.
“I was not one of those 99 percent faith, a little bit of question, people,” she insisted. “I was 100 percent: I will be pure; I will believe; I won’t crack.” But when the purity and community equations proved to be bad math, everything “just crumbled.”
What do you do when there’s no more absolutes? What do you fill that up with? How can you know anything? I’m left with this world and I don’t know anything.
“I realized I had fought tooth and nail against feminism all these years because, secretly, I was a feminist,”
“How do you fix things when you can’t even find a voice to discuss them?”
the family the purity movement seeks to protect is conceptual, not actual.
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,
I thought being a woman was a handicap that I had to overcome, that to be feminine was to be weak and unthinking. I was ashamed of being a woman and wanted no part of 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.”
So the only way, ultimately, that I could please God would be to kill myself. Because nothing I could ever do as a living human being, because of being a woman, could ever please God.7
the boulder was holding me in place; it was anchoring me in one place. So it made me feel safe, in some way, even though it was terrible pressure. Without it, it was hard to know how to interact. I only knew how to speak Christianese. I only knew how to approach people who came from the same viewpoint as me. I was taught that anyone who didn’t was unsafe.
I was using every other person’s trauma to tell myself I had no business feeling anything.”
Though I no longer attended an evangelical church, I still found myself analyzing my thoughts, obsessing over my mistakes, and seeking out even the tiniest sins in hopes that confessing them could free me from the feeling of impurity that was always there.
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,
Who could I fight? Whose values could I differentiate myself from? When the only person left was me.
‘Other than being a person who comes to their church and believes all the right things, do I have any value to these people? And if I stop believing the right things, then do I lose all my value to them?’ ”
‘Wow! There’s this whole world of people who don’t care if I’m gay, or if I’m bi, or if I’m whatever. They’re just going to let me do my thing. And I’d rather be around people who aren’t going to always be trying to influence me over to their way of thinking.’
I still have this urge to be the kind of person that I think this community would have wanted me to be, even though I don’t believe in the religion part anymore. Just trying to be this very respectable, appropriate, wholesome person who follows all the rules and does everything right.
I hadn’t been able to fit in. I hadn’t been able to just do what I was supposed to and believe the right things and remain part of this community. I wasn’t good enough. That’s something that the church did to me.
Generally speaking, purity culture excuses male sexuality and amplifies female sexuality, and it shames consensual sexual activity and silences nonconsensual sexual activity.
Sex is so penalized in evangelicalism, it’s easier to chalk rape and abuse up to sex and be done with it.
Sexual assault is so degrading. You treat a person like they’re not a person. It was just hard to fight my way back to feeling like a person.
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.”
Surviving gives you a very unique set of skills. It costs a lot. But it also makes you powerful.”
