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

by Linda Kay Klein

As a teenager, I went to the sandbox in the empty playground beside my church when I wanted to be alone. I dug my bare feet down deep, cooling them in the damp sand. “God, I would do anything for you,” I remember saying there one afternoon. “Anything?” I imagined God’s reply. “Anything,” I promised. “Would you become a missionary in a foreign land?” God tested me. “Giving up the lavish life of an actress that you dream about?” I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured myself a poor missionary living in a small, rural village somewhere on the other side of the world. In my imagination, I wore a thin, cotton dress and my long brown hair whipped around my face in a way that could only be described as romantic.

In 1912, Émile Durkheim identified the emotional high individuals get from being part of religious group experiences and the effects that high has upon the group itself. He called it “collective effervescence.” In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life he argues that by creating positive feelings among participants, collective effervescence enables a group to overcome divisions.

However, I have never seen collective effervescence as intense as when a bunch of evangelical adolescents, fired up on hormones, get together. Here, the adolescent’s most extreme emotions are called forth time and time again. In 1923, the theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto said that there is a kind of heat in religion—“vitality, passion, emotional temper, will, force, movement, excitement, energy, activity, impetus,” all coming together to create a “consuming fire.”4 Still today, I yearn for it. There are few places in this world that we can go to feel like this.I

Crohn’s disease—which was my ultimate diagnosis—is the immune system’s failure to recognize the presence of food and stool in the intestines as normal. The disease tricks the immune system into thinking these essential entities are bad. Attempting to protect the person from the food and stool the body must process in order to survive, the immune system attacks the intestines, making itself the thing that the person really needs protection from (in the same way that those who use shame to “protect” people from natural aspects of themselves, such as their sexuality,

can inadvertently become the thing from which the person actually needs protection).

They caused themselves physical harm, one professor explained, in order to feel the pain of the God with whom they had entered into marriage.

And when we stop, when we complain, when we expose that whatever isn’t “supposed” to be happening in our church, our school, or our home is happening, too often the response is that whatever’s happening is our “fault.”

Whereas my sexuality had once hidden my goodness from their view, my suffering seemed to expose it.

And yet, I knew I was the same person now as I had been then. Just as selfish, just as selfless, just as caring, just as careless, and wearing the same little dresses and skirts I’d always worn. My sorrow made me purer in their eyes—stripping me of my sexy vitality, and allowing them to forget my body. But as for me? I was more aware of my body than ever—of how much I missed it. 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.

At my public school, cruelty was currency, but here, it didn’t matter if you sat in the back of the retreat’s rugged sanctuary with your hair hanging over your face in hopes that no one would notice you or if you were the star of the local soccer team and magically maintained a tan through the winter—everyone was welcome, worthy of time, attention, and love. I had never been somewhere where all I had to do to be accepted was walk into the room. Where my mere existence was enough. It was everything that I had thought the world should be up until this point, and nothing of what I had found it actually was. But for the first time in my life, I felt like I could change all that. Here. With these people. Sitting around the campfire with my new friends our last night there, tears came running down my cheeks just as they had when I was born again months ago, and I claimed this faith to be my faith and these people to be my people.

No matter how many warnings she received from people like our cabin mom, she wasn’t willing to give up her ambition or her desire to prove she was the smartest person in the room. So instead, she gave up guys. Piper interpreted the story that all of us girls were told about who we could and must be if we wanted to be loved in a way that allowed her to live. At a young age, she accepted that she would never be attractive, never date, never kiss, never marry, never have sex, and if any man was ever fool enough to love her, she would warn him that she would likely destroy his life. But she would—dammit—become president.

As I listened to Piper, I thought back to the experiences of others I’d spoken with. Two other women had told me almost the same story—that they didn’t want to give up their intelligence so they shut off their sexuality, wishing they were boys so they could be fully free of it. One even thought deep down she was a boy for the sole reason that she really liked books. When she got her period, she was disappointed to see she was a girl after all.

The women in one study, “The Process of Recovery and Rebuilding Among Abused Women in the Conservative Evangelical Subculture,” reported facing many challenges to their healing post-abuse, but said that the challenge that posed the greatest threat to their recovery was the church’s emphasis on traditional gender roles. And yet, this is often the last thing the church looks at when addressing intimate partner violence.

And yet, the study’s researchers report that when these women stopped listening to the black-and-white gender-based analysis of their religious leaders, and developed a healthier spiritual life in which they allowed themselves to reframe their understanding of how God saw abuse, their faith was transformed from a dangerous influence that maintained their abuse into “a powerful source of comfort, hope, and insight” that allowed them to heal from that same abuse.4 The researchers explain: “The women’s faith

functioned as a meaning-making framework that could either engender shame and guilt or inspire hope and empower transformative change. 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.”

“So, how has all of this affected your relationship with God?” I asked Piper, who now loosely identifies as Episcopalian. “It’s hard,” she said. “Until I could really affirm the way that God had created me, both as a physical being and an intellectual being, I was basically saying that God messed up. And theologically, what does that mean for God as a good creator?”

“So either you’re bad, or God is,” I continued. Piper was still nodding. “Or . . .” I smiled, “the ‘shoulds’ are the problem. The shame is the problem.”

“Yes,” she said with a final nod. “Exactly!” She threw her hands up in the air. “This is energizing! Putting it in a context—this is what it looks like—I feel like, I don’t know, I’m not totally fucked. It’s a the-emperor-has-no-clothes moment. Somebody has got to stand up and say, ‘actually wait a second,’ and then all of a sudden you realize that there’s a lot of people out there that were just waiting for you to say it!” Her smile widened. “That’s the idea,” I smiled back.

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.

It is worth remembering that “purity” is a proxy for “sameness.”

And so, when we try to be the same, or “pure” as defined by one person’s or group’s concept of normality, we are set up for failure.

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.

“But I couldn’t actually tell anyone about this stuff. It was too bad . . . or not bad enough. I wasn’t going through the ‘right’ kind of hard times. It wasn’t drugs or any of the other ‘right’ struggles. I couldn’t get up in front of youth group and say, ‘Hey, I had oral sex with a lot of my girlfriends. You don’t want to hear about that? You don’t want to talk about

that? I think we should talk about it!’

“It was something my mom said: ‘You bragged about your virginity.’ I don’t think that’s true. I know a lot of people assumed that I wasn’t a virgin because I dated someone much older than me in high school and because I had a certain type of body. So a lot of people suggested I was sexually evolved and I would have to defend myself—‘I really am a virgin.’ I even bought a shirt from the Virgin record store that said ‘Virgin’ on it during a mission trip. I thought it was kind of funny. It was one of those things my mom threw in my face after the rape.” “Because you were too prideful about your virginity?”

Boston Globe journalist Michael Rezendes spoke with The New Yorker about the ten thousand pages of Church documents the journalists reviewed that ultimately revealed the extent of the abuse the Church had been covering up: “What was not in the documents was any indication anywhere of concern for the children who had been harmed. Not anywhere. It was all about protecting the reputation of the Church, and then, in parens, keeping it secret. It was always about the secrecy.”

Whether we are looking at religious institutions, colleges and universities, our armed services, or any number of other places, 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.

Many survivors are told not to press charges or alert the authorities, as the institutions will deal with the perpetrator themselves—often by quietly moving the perpetrator on to a new community, as we saw happen with my own church youth pastor. And some survivors have it even worse—being actively shamed, blamed,

and disbelieved by those to whom they turn for h...

I had these overwhelming desires to go into churches and seek solace, but I had a really messed up relationship with religion after the rape. Because the church says nothing to survivors; people say nothing to survivors. It’s one of the worst forms of suffering. And there’s nothing for you. I’ve never seen a sermon crafted for people who suffered from sexual trauma. What? They don’t know this happens? They don’t know this is damaging? The only messages that come close to addressing it are the worst ever. We need healing. We need support.”

wrong with her because she was raped, like she was at fault or she was evil. He said that was a lie, a lie from the Devil to keep her down. That’s part of the message I would like to hear from the church. Because I don’t think people see rape victims as innocent. I think that most people view them as having some responsibility.

“there’s another category called ‘Sexual Offenses.’ Even that section doesn’t start with sexual assault; it doesn’t start with sexual harassment; it actually starts with consensual sex and how God intended it to be for a man and a wife.” And there in the Sexual Offenses section, alongside consensual sex outside

of marriage, you find sexual assault.

Here, this lifelong misfit felt like a painfully average, fanny pack–toting tourist visiting a foreign land. I quickly became known as the gosh-darn-sweetest girl on campus, a real salt-of-the-earth type, sugar and spice and everything ugh. People often stopped me on campus and asked why I was smiling at them. “Do I know you?” they’d press when I told them that I was just being friendly. “No. I’m just being nice.” “Oh. Okay,” they’d say, narrowing their eyes. “I’m from the Midwest,” I’d explain. “Ohhhh,” they’d respond with understanding.

Interestingly, the greatest discrepancy the researchers found was not among the children, but among the women over the age of twenty. Women from both the conservative and the egalitarian communities described feeling more comfortable with themselves and gaining a sense of voice at this age. However, the difference lies in how they felt about that. Women from the egalitarian communities viewed it as a strength and a sign of maturity. The women from conservative communities, on the other hand, saw it as a personal weakness, a sign that they were too selfish or aggressive, which led them to “struggle to be more passive.”

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)

In her groundbreaking essay “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Valerie Saiving Goldstein argues that the Christian focus on the sinfulness of pride is rooted in the faith’s historic masculine leadership. She says pride may well be a sin for many men who hold power in our patriarchal society, making men’s choice to check their pride in service of others very virtuous indeed. Yet women, not being in this position of power, are more likely to think too little of themselves than too much, suffering from an “underdevelopment or negation of the self”4—something Blue Jones saw in me from a mile away. And so, perhaps, for such women, pride is not a sin, but a virtue.

Before I met Blue, I had no idea how much the gender expectations I’d grown up with controlled my thoughts, feelings, and choices—even down to the sound of my own voice. I had dropped from the evangelical hand that once held me, but the heartstrings that connected me to it were still there. Like a marionette, I still danced under the church’s direction. And when Blue picked at the strings, the discordant sounds they made drowned out every other song I had in me.

I never told Blue of course. I couldn’t give her the satisfaction. But I did begin to observe myself more closely—how I spoke, when, why. And for the first time, Blue and I got on the same page. When I began to speak in that high-pitched voice, Blue stopped me. “Pay attention to what you are doing now,” she would say. “Your voice just went up again. You hear that? The squeaky girl is back. Why? What are you thinking? What are we doing that brought you back there?” “I don’t know,” I might say. “I guess I wanted to know what you think of the song I just played.” Blue would laugh. “You want me to approve of you? Then stop asking me to. How does your throat feel?” “Tight.” “Tight. Right. So relax it.” I closed my eyes, dropped my tongue to create space at the back of my throat, took a deep breath, and rolled my head around on my neck. “Okay, now finish what you were saying,” Blue would prod. When I did, it came out straight, without apology, without permission, without question, and with a mounting annoyance at the professor who it would’ve killed to give a girl a break, let alone a friggin’ pat on the head every once in a while. “Good,” Blue said. “Now—sing.”

“What do you mean by dark and horrible?” I asked her. “Fantasizing about somebody that I find attractive or somebody that I’ve been in intimate situations with before, and just recalling those feelings of being with them. Or imagining somebody touching me or saying things to me that I want to hear that make me excited. It’s complicated,” Katie summed it up. “I think masturbation is a comfort thing. The pleasure, the happy endorphins. It’s a way for me—if I’m feeling super tired or super insecure—you get the good feelings and you feel better or relaxed, or whatever.” “It’s a form of self-care,” I suggested. “But then there’s the loathing that comes afterward. The fantasy helps you to get excited, and that gives you that physical reaction of happy endorphins, but then comes the self-loathing.”

“When you describe the clinical masturbation, it almost sounds like you are trying to avoid shame by stripping sexuality of pleasure.”

Then, “If we could just have the ‘Masturbation Revolution’ we could all get over it,” she announced. “Our leaders probably could never get over the fact that they masturbate. That’s why they’re all making a big deal about it.”

“I still have lesbian thoughts. And today, I have to at least give lesbianism a passing glance. I mean, who knows? Maybe I’m gay. Maybe I’m a scientist. How would I know anything? I’ve spent my whole life pretending I am who they want me to be. My husband comes home from work and says, ‘What did you do today, honey?’ And I say, ‘Oh nothing, just searched the web for hardcore lesbian porn. By the way, we’ve got these pop-up ads now that I can’t seem to get rid of.’ ” Alma laughed. I looked over at her husband and he nodded.

I remember thinking about this message when reading evangelical Christian Dr. James Dobson’s book Life on the Edge: The Next Generation’s Guide to a Meaningful Future as a teenager. Dobson cites zoologist Dr. Desmond Morris’s twelve stages of intimacy as described in his book Intimate Behaviour. The first stage of intimacy, Dobson summarizes Morris’s findings, is eye to body. The couple sees one another from afar. The second stage is eye to eye. Then voice to voice, hand to hand, hand to shoulder, hand to waist, face to face, hand to head, hand to body. However, the tenth stage suddenly becomes decidedly more intense, at least to the ear of a teenager like me: Mouth to breast. Now there are just two stages left: touching below the waist and sexual intercourse.1 So you see? Although those first stages all seem to be safe, when a couple indulges in them, they find themselves just three stages away from having sex, and as it is often said among purity movement authors, speakers, youth pastors, and small group leaders, those last three stages fly by:

“So I take a nap. We take a nap. Then we wake up and we start trying it again. And I have no idea what hole or where anything is. We try that and Dmitri tries touching and he doesn’t know. At this point I’ve read about the clitoris in The Act of Marriage. I know it exists, but I have no idea where it is, neither does Dmitri, and so he’s, ‘Does this feel good?’ I have no idea. I’ve never let anything down there try to feel good before. So he keeps trying and I’m like, ‘Is that an orgasm? I don’t know.’ So then he starts trying to stick it in. Again, I have no idea where. He’s trying to direct. We don’t get it in and then he’s like, ‘Well I’m kind of moved all the way here. Can you help me out?’ So I start to do that, and then I’m just, like, left there. Not having done ‘the sex.’ “We don’t figure out sex for four months. We don’t actually get it in. We keep trying. I mean, we’re discouraged, but he does keep trying. Sometimes it hurts. We didn’t get the idea about wetness or lubrication or any of that. I eventually figured out I had to stretch out beforehand, manually. I figured out where the hole was and I would stretch it out manually and then he would go in. It never felt sexy.

I was about fifteen years old when I first heard a pastor say from the pulpit: “Every man wants a woman who is a lamb in the day, and a tiger at night.” The congregation laughed. A few people clapped. My face turned red. I hadn’t even had my first kiss, and already I felt myself on a tightrope strung between two opposing sexual expectations. I have heard the tiger/lamb language many times since. Interviewees share about it being said from pulpits, in Bible studies, and in Christian counseling sessions. 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.

“To me, it meant there was no God,” Muriel said, before going on to explain that, as an absolutist, she felt that if anything the church taught wasn’t true, then nothing the church taught was true. I see this logic among many of my interviewees when they first begin to question the church’s teachings. They hold on to the good/bad binary they were taught growing up; they just swap everything around on it. In their new reverse binary, evangelicalism goes from good to bad; the secular world goes from bad to good; sex outside of marriage goes from bad to good; abstinence goes from good to bad.

“How do you fix things when you can’t even find a voice to discuss them?” she said, looking away from me. “When you’re not even comfortable talking about these things yourself? I would be very embarrassed and ashamed to talk about sexual relationships. That’s not something I can do. But it’s a conversation that needs to be had.

Over the course of my research, I have been surprised by how many of the conservative Christians closest to adolescents—parents, youth pastors, and other youth group leaders in particular—have told me they are concerned about the damage they see purity culture doing to adolescents’

lives. Many silence their concerns, however, knowing they are not welcome within the community, and those who do voice them are often given the same message Solange was: The religious purity movement isn’t going anywhere, so you can either get behind it, or you can go.