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

by Linda Kay Klein

“I’m thirty and I’m just now reaching a point in my life where I’m realizing how negatively the church affected me,” Eli told me near the end of our conversation. “For the longest time I was like, ‘No, I’m fine.’ Because I didn’t go to some big, scary, hellfire church where I was overtly traumatized and left. I’m not having panic attacks and nightmares about going to Hell and whatever. Because I didn’t have those experiences, I thought ‘I’m fine. My church was harmless. They were kind of homophobic, but whatever. Other than that, they were totally harmless.’ I’ve looked back on this community with all this fondness. I would talk about my old church, about how great it was, not realizing that they had raised me with this message that made me feel I had failed to be what I was supposed to be. I had failed to be a good Christian and be part of this community. And that the reason that I had to leave was because of that failure. 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. But for a long time I didn’t think of it that way. I was just like, ‘I’m fine. I’m not traumatized. I’m not scarred for life by this.’