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

by Linda Kay Klein

“Again, that label seems to ignore context,” I said. “Hiding parts of yourself from a community that punishes people for showing those parts seems completely rational to me.”

The shame spike she saw in the early 2000s became a plateau. Year after year, the stories of sexual shame came pouring in. The professor began to research religious sexual shame, and eventually authored a book for helping professionals (like therapists!) to address people’s religious sexual shame. The title of the book is Sex, God, and the Conservative Church: Erasing Shame from Sexual Intimacy.III

The lack of therapeutic understanding around the damage that growing up in the purity movement can do comes up often in my interviews. Christian therapists are often too deeply embedded in their religious worldview to guide us, and secular therapists, who are generally tragically under-trained in both religion and sexuality, aren’t always much help either.

Therapists don’t shy away from exploring these complex and often contradictory familial dynamics. So why shy away from exploring complex and contradictory religious dynamics? What makes us think that religious networks, unlike every other network in our lives—our families, our work communities, our friend groups—can only be either “all good” or “all bad”?

And yet, here we both were—tormented by the same fear and anxiety.

Eli and I have discussed it and decided I should use female pronouns when referring to the period in which he presented himself as Elizabeth and male pronouns when referring to the period after his transition.I Though Eli is a man, I am including his story in this book because he was raised with the same girl-specific messages that the rest of my interviewees were. Whether or not he felt like a girl growing up, he was certainly treated like one.

“I realized, ‘This community’s ideology is more important to them than anything else. It’s more important than people. It’s more important than keeping their relationships with each other intact. The ideology is the only thing that matters here.’

‘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?’ ”

In other words, it wasn’t until Eli knew who he was that he could identify who he wanted to be with.

“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.’

Though this was Eli’s wish, as they say, “you’ve met one trans person, you’ve met one trans person.” In other words, every trans person is different and it’s best to check in with someone about how they want to be referred to at various points in their lives.

There’s a whole different version of shame that goes on with guys too.

Generally speaking, purity culture excuses male sexuality and amplifies female sexuality, and it shames consensual sexual activity and silences nonconsensual sexual activity.

“women are taught their bodies are evil; men are taught their minds are.”

And that’s how easy it is to feel like you no longer have worth, you no longer have value. Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value.”

The way in which it wrongfully classifies sexual violence, for example, can re-traumatize survivors, making the church—a place that many would hope to be a safe haven—a very dangerous place for survivors.

But the church isn’t always and certainly doesn’t have to be a dementor. It can be a healer, as the continuation of Rosemary’s story illustrates.

But that’s a snapshot of evangelicals, right?” “It is,” I said—both the students’ warm embrace, which literally saved Rosemary’s life, and the teacher’s admonishment that her life didn’t look like it was “supposed to” and that she had best go back and rewrite it. It is a tension I suspect most evangelicals and former evangelicals would identify with.

To be sure, not all sexual violence is male-on-female, and that which is not is often even more silenced than that which is. Sexual violence against males is deeply stigmatized, and violence against gender nonconforming people, which is disturbingly common, is often entirely ignored.

Research shows that when we challenge old ideas about ourselves and the world and replace them with new ones, we can break down old neural connections through what’s called synaptic pruning and strengthen new ones.

I didn’t receive the blessing I went home for. But in time, I realized I could go on and tell my story without it. And perhaps, that is what I really needed.

They say going home is the hardest part of any journey. It is there that we risk losing the gains we made elsewhere. There that we may ignore our hardest-won lessons, let down our guard, and find ourselves in the gravest danger.

Today, it’s my mom sending me daily text messages saying, “You can do it!” “Keep writing honey!” And my dad who tells me, “Don’t worry if people are mad at you for what you have to say; you are a truth-teller.”

I think often about the fears my family and community expressed the first time I tried to write this book, but these thoughts no longer immobilize me. I am careful with people’s stories. I don’t ever want to be in a position of shaming the evangelical community for having shamed me.

The point is that we must all move past shaming. But today, I know that telling my story and the stories of those who have trusted me to tell theirs is about more than answering a call to help others. It is the only way to the other side of the granite block of shame that is stil...

explained how people of color have historically had to adopt white values and affects in order to assimilate and survive within the dominant white culture.

Elizabeth Esther, author of the memoir Girl at the End of the World: My Escape from Fundamentalism in Search of Faith with a Future, in May 2016.7

As this chapter illustrates, the purity message cuts across racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, national, and even religious borders, intersecting with a range of cultures and identities. And so the tapestry must be unwoven and woven again, as the multicolored stories of individual experiences from across multiple spectrums are told. Until, one day, perhaps we will see the loose end of shame’s thread appear, and know, the spool is empty.

it being ‘emergent’ means there would have been some real intentionality around being loving and nonjudgmental toward anyone who were to break those rules, rather than going down the shaming route with them.”

“I think what fascinates me about being a gay person is that from the minute that that part of me comes out, that’s all I am, right?” Susan said. “As a heterosexual person, can you imagine that that is all the identity you get? When you walk in the room, that’s what people see? It’s who you are?”

The curriculum they used is called Our Whole Lives (OWL): Lifespan Education Curriculum.II OWL was developed by the United Church of Christ (UCC) and the Unitarian Universalist Association. A secular model with religious supplements, OWL is used in a wide range of churches, schools, nonprofits, and community centers, though Highlands is the only evangelical church the curriculum’s UCC coordinator was aware of having tried it when I spoke with her.

OWL is described as a “holistic program that moves beyond the intellect to address the attitudes, values, and feelings that youth have about themselves and the world.”2 While Susan and her co-facilitator met with the adolescents, Jeana met with their parents to discuss what the young people were learning that day, answer any questions parents might have, and recommend how they could engage with their kids about what they were learning.

But life gives kids its own sexuality education, and its lessons—learned from friends or on TV, engaged with on the Internet,III or experienced firsthand are rarely what parents want for their kids.

‘Okay, let’s think about this question through the lens of the values that we talked about,’ ” she illustrated. “Let’s start with self-worth, for example. ‘Through the lens of self-worth, how might we answer this question?’ ” Susan and her co-facilitator were shocked by how quickly the adolescents progressed from asking what they were supposed to think to thinking themselves.

“There is this dynamic tension between progressive and conservative that I see in Jesus and that I would advocate is a balance we need to carry forward if we want to be authentic Jesus followers—blending the old with the new and living in that dynamic balance. Sometimes saying, ‘We’ve got to stick with this old because it’s so wise,’ and other times saying, ‘No, the Spirit of God has shown us something new, and we have the liberty to move a step forward.’ ”

I’ll never forget seeing them receive what I had needed growing up—the promise that God loved them, and that some in God’s community would stand by them and their sisters no matter what they had been told by others.

No company, no institution, no pastor can tell us whether we’re in or out because it is us. You can choose the church or not—that’s up to you—but no one can choose for you. Because if you choose it, it already is you.

Know you are not alone. My message for readers is: You’re not alone. You’re not alone, and you’re not crazy. (Katie)

Re-membering is a process of integrating all of you and understanding that your bodies are here for you, not others. Gratitude helps us to reframe the stories we’ve been told about our bodies.

Most importantly, thank you to my interviewees. I am humbled by your courage and your trust. My healing was made possible by your healing, my strength by seeing you so strong. I will never be able to say thank you enough for that.

12. In your experience, have you found, like the interviewee Jo, that “women are taught their bodies are evil; men are taught their minds are” (page 235)? If so, why do you think it is that church and society place so much more attention on women’s bodies than on men’s, and on men’s minds than on women’s?

14. Discuss the ending of the book. Did it surprise you to learn that Klein’s faith is still strong, if different than before? How did she manage to take ownership of her faith, from your point of view? Have you ever had a similar experience, either of taking ownership of your faith or of something else that you first learned about from others?