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

by Linda Kay Klein

In the evangelical community, an “impure” girl or woman isn’t just seen as damaged; she’s considered dangerous. Not only to the men we were told we must protect by covering up our bodies, but to our entire community. For if our men—the heads of our households and the leaders of our churches—fell, we all fell.

evangelical Christianity’s sexual purity movement is traumatizing many girls and maturing women haunted by sexual and gender-based anxiety,

she would still weep about it. Not that the youth pastor who she had the baby with is weeping about it! But his wife still weeps about it and says how she feels ashamed, disgusting, and wrong twelve years later.

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.

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.

I take comfort in knowing that when I read the Bible today, I find more liberation in its pages than I was taught to see in it growing up.

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.

I remember how I felt. Scared and alone. Lying there trembling on the floor while looking up at the hand that once held me. I had lost so much—my community, my purpose in life, and worst of all, God, whom I missed so badly my body ached. I looked up at the hand sometimes, and wished that I was there so I could touch God again. But I didn’t feel I was allowed to.

I gathered up my broken body. There on the floor, with no one paying attention to me, I uncovered those parts of me that I had tried to hide or make small. And I watched, amazed, as these parts of me unfurled—some gorgeous, some terrifying, and others plain. From time to time, I felt something I thought I had lost—a holy presence, the feeling someone was watching out for me. In time, I came to trust, to know, that God was still with me. That God was in the hand, yes. But also here . . . and here . . . and here. That no hand can confine something so great. Today, I am a Christian, but I stand outside of the hand I grew up in. Waving to those in it and saying, “It is good in the hand. God is there. And s/he is also here. So let’s come together to end the shame that hurts all of us. For there is much work to be done.”

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.

Though the girl told the police of earlier incidents, my youth pastor was charged with only one felony.

dismissed from two other Christian staff jobs for “improper behavior” with similarly aged girls, which had somehow never come up in his reference checks.2

apparently more interested in protecting their reputations than the safety of children—I

For the first time, somebody saw me. And somebody gave me permission to see myself. Permission to admit I was suffering. Permission to ask for help.

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. When taken to heart, this message can make us miss—or, when we do see it, dismiss—our suffering, until one day, it’s too late.

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

The moral of the story, as shared in the curriculum? “Occasional suggestions and assistance may be all right, but too much of it will lessen a man’s confidence or even turn him away from his princess.”

“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. No one will want you if you’re like this.’

Like the women in this study, Piper and Lucy healed themselves and each other by developing greater spiritual autonomy, unleashing themselves from religious leaders who hurt them with their analysis of what was right and what was wrong—which they called “the truth”—and doing their own spiritual analysis, which included naming some of that “truth” as lies.

Lucy put her hand on my head, and she prayed to let me release The Lie. She prayed that God would let me realize how I was made and that I was loved. It was really powerful. It felt—I started to be able to put the pieces together. I stopped fighting with God because I thought he made me in a way that set me up to fail, and started thinking about how I could better reflect what he had made me to be, and accept it as a gift.”IV

“Even now, we laugh about it. That I have to work to remind myself that I know he loves me. It’s no shortcoming of his whatsoever. When I sit back and let myself be objective about my relationship with Michael, I know that the things about me that he loves are the same things that I fear are the nuggets of destruction. But there have been times where I have not fully allowed myself to experience everything with Michael because I just . . . it’s a pinch-yourself moment. It’s like, ‘This can’t be real.’ 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. I have fancy degrees. But the circuits still don’t fire for me on this.” “On feeling loved?” I asked. “On feeling romantically loved,”

“We’ve had several conversations in which I’ve said, ‘I think you should break up with me because I think I’m going to ruin your life.’ He is always so steady, saying I don’t get to make that choice for him. I get to make that choice for myself in terms of whether or not I wanted to be with him, but I can’t decide for him whether or not he wants to be with me.” “How do you fear you might ruin his life?” I asked. “It’s a vague notion. I was taught smart, strong women destroy men. So it’s like, ‘Someday, somewhere you’ll regret that you were with me. You’re probably not going to want me. One of these days you’re going to wake up and realize you don’t want me. So let me save you from that experience.’

“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.

we had to follow a slew of rules. Unfortunately, none of us knew what they were. Sex was such a shameful topic that we never got real talk on what we were and were not allowed to do. It was assumed that if no one ever talked to us about sex, it would just sort of go away until we needed it. So our “sex talks” were all generic metaphors and warnings about what would happen to us if we crossed a line, which was defined differently by so many people that we were left guessing all the same. Meanwhile, we knew we would be shamed if we asked sexual questions; shamed if we discussed sexual decisions; shamed if we shared our confusing sexual feelings and thoughts; and shamed worst of all if we admitted we had already done anything sexual. So each of us guessed at what the rules might be, hoped we were right, and didn’t tell anyone about our sexual lives just in case we weren’t.

“You can’t win. That’s why I want to try to talk about the religious stuff and the family stuff that still haunts me. I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what anyone does with that. 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.”

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?”

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.”2

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 help and healing.

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.

Katie was tripping over the purity culture stumbling block that tells girls they are to blame for their inability to meet a set of nearly unattainable standards, not the standards themselves.

Guilt is a familiar friend to me. I beat myself up about everything, so that’s just standard. I feel more comfortable with guilt than with pleasure or happiness. It seems like a natural state of being to me.”

so that now both a woman’s nonsexuality before marriage and her hypersexuality after marriage are required for her to be considered good.

“Inability to be sexual is a big problem for both men and women coming out of the church. They’ve practiced turning themselves off so much that when they have a sexual occasion, they can’t turn themselves back on again. Human beings don’t have a switch.”

For some, the issue extends beyond emotional blocks to physical ones. Some females experience what is called vaginismus—an involuntary physical tightening of the vagina that makes sex painful and sometimes even impossible. According to a sex therapist and an obstetrician/gynecologist interviewed by The Sydney Morning Herald, vaginismus is “more common among women who are saving themselves for marriage” and “women, who due to religious or cultural reasons, have developed an overriding fear of penetrative sex,” though it is also experienced by sexual abuse survivors and those with a fear of childbirth.5 Vaginismus can last days, or decades.

Muriel had calculated all of her life decisions around the equation that if she was pure, God would bless her. She would be gifted with a loving, romantic, sexual marriage. She would be kept safe in a strong, supportive, always-there-for-her religious community. “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.” How could she believe anything evangelicalism taught her if the one thing they said was most important—remain pure before marriage and you will have a blissful sexual life after marriage and be supported by the larger community—wasn’t true?

But over the past ten years, she had shared many a bottle of Chardonnay with her daughters as well, and listened to them tell her about their religious shame, fear, and anxiety. So when Solange’s daughters left the evangelical church in their early adulthood, she understood why, and soon afterward, she and her husband left too.

I thought youth group would be an extension of my teachings,” she said. “But it wasn’t.”

You know nonverbally when someone’s dismissing you. You’ve been dismissed by men. You’ve been dismissed plenty of times, Linda. It’s in the lack of eye contact; it’s in the tone of voice; it’s in the words they choose and the utter lack of concern. The utter lack of concern.

The relationship was between the youth leaders and the children. It was almost like a secret relationship, a private, secret relationship, and you realize, now, that’s how you control people. With really young ones, with teenagers—oh my God they’re so vulnerable.”

“I can’t tell you what my daughters were taught in youth group,” Solange continued, picking her glass back up off the table. “But I can tell you some of the results I saw: I saw them embarrassed about their feminine selves; I saw them more self-conscious about how they dressed and how they looked. They were just—I don’t know. There was an underpinning of shame.

How could I differentiate between what was normal growing-up stuff and what was abnormal? What was teenage angst and what was true anxiety?”

‘If you don’t agree 100 percent, it’s hit the highway. There are other churches. Either be a part of this and get on board, or leave.’ ”

We’re just a church! We’re not equipped to handle this!’ I was disgusted, because the church put itself in a position of authority when it came to sexuality, and we had no business doing that. That’s why I didn’t want to teach the purity message anymore. I made up all these excuses not to do it, but I got hounded to. Finally I admitted, ‘I just don’t believe in it: the material, the delivery, everything about it.’

“But the reality is they taught kids not to trust their parents. They told the kids, ‘Your parents didn’t go to Bible college. They don’t know what they’re talking about. We do. We’ve studied the Word of God in Latin and Greek.’ ” She’s right. As adolescents, we were taught that, if ever they came into conflict, the perspectives of the church—which we were taught was God’s representative—should be trusted over the perspectives of our parents.

Meanwhile, parents were similarly taught to prioritize the perspectives of the church over those of their children. I have seen tremendous devastation result from this thinking.

It took this woman years to create a new—and still deeply damaged—relationship with her parents. Many children are never so lucky.

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. In fact, I have seen family adherence to purity culture’s black-and-white family values disintegrate families again and again.

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