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

by Linda Kay Klein

It is worth remembering that “purity” is a proxy for “sameness.” Whether we are talking about sexual purity, gender purity, racial purity, ethnic purity, or religious purity, we use the term purity to refer to “keeping out” or even “cleansing” humanity of diversity. To be “pure” in someone else’s eyes is to be like them—absent of the elements that make you difficult for them to understand or accept.

Masturbation was more strictly forbidden, and an emphasized reason given for why girls and women shouldn’t masturbate that I didn’t see much about in the books targeted at boys and men was protecting their future marriage, in part by protecting their future husband’s feelings.

Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS), defined as “the condition experienced by people who are struggling with leaving an authoritarian, dogmatic religion and coping with the damage of indoctrination,”8 was coined by Dr. Marlene Winell, the human development specialist

When shame appears, especially in malignant forms, we are often driven to a felt sense of stasis. Our mind feels incapable of thinking. We may feel literally physically frozen in place when experiencing extreme humiliation, and if we are able to move, we feel like going somewhere we can hide and remain hidden without returning to engage others. We don’t necessarily experience this with minor insults, but there is no question that our ability to move creatively in our mind is slowed.2 “So I wonder,” I continued to Eli, “if you are freezing in these moments because you’re approaching doing something that you’ve internalized so much shame around.”

David understood. He did notice women’s bodies, and the shame was tantamount. He recalled, “On warm days I would walk across campus feeling like a monster, because I believed that noticing a girl’s body was the spiritual equivalent of something like sexual assault.” Every accidental glimpse of cleavage or a little extra leg was terrible. And at the same time, wonderful. Eventually, he found himself walking around campus, the library, the supermarket, perpetually “hoping to see another accidental glimpse of . . . something.”

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