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

by Linda Kay Klein

After all, what other sin is said to fundamentally change you forever? You can be born again and have your slate wiped clean of lying, stealing, even murder. And if you do these things again later but honestly apologize to God, your sin is again forgiven. But sex outside of marriage is the only “sin” that I have ever heard described as changing you.

The purity message is not about sex. 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.

the brain does not differentiate between overt or big trauma and covert or small, quiet trauma—it just registers the event as “a threat we can’t control.”

If the messages don’t hurt you, you are less likely to hear them (for instance, a straight person is less likely to hear a covert homophobic message than a queer person is). And if the messages benefit you, you are even less likely to hear them

(girls are a whopping 92 percent more likely to experience sexual guilt than boys)

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.

I wasn’t allowed to experience anger or sadness because that was just evidence that you’re giving in to the Devil and him wanting you to feel that way—not having joy in the Lord, and all that stuff.

I felt this. I thought my family wasn’t normal either.

Happiness was a sign that you’re on the wrong path, because if you’re happy, then things were too easy, and things are only too easy when you’re really giving in to your sinful nature. If we wanted to be holy, it was going to have to be a struggle. So, you have to be struggling and suffering constantly.

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.

My need for approval and my fear of being blamed shut me up when I should have been standing and shouting for people to pay attention.

For some reason, this information shocked me. I had been tacitly accepting that women were banned from certain roles in the church for years. But the absurdity of a woman not being allowed to say, Randy, you’ve got the fifth; Isaiah, you’re the twelfth; Oh, you’ve got a wedding out of state that day? Okay, Randy can you swap with Isaiah? Great, made all of the rules about what women were and were not allowed to be and do seem suddenly crazy to me.

“The common thread was always that I was vocal and opinionated,” she continued, holding the cup of espresso I had just made her on my stovetop. “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.’ But being sexually fulfilled in a context that would lessen me intellectually? I didn’t want that,” Piper said definitively.

“You were both reacting to the same gender-based lie: Be submissive and be loved, or be a leader and be alone forever. It’s the same story, the same lie. You just made different choices within it. Lucy chose submission for the sake of having a relationship; you chose being alone forever so you didn’t have to submit.”

Research shows that complementarianism upholds abusive dynamics among conservative, evangelical women whose religious lives are integral to their sense of identity.

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.”

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,” she answered.

I was taught smart, strong women destroy men.

“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?”

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.

If that’s what they’re thinking, isn’t that their problem? I was just wearing the clothes that I had, clothing that my parents bought me. If I was developing and they didn’t fit anymore, she could have just helped buy me clothes, rather than shame me.

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.

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.

Within religious communities that stereotype makes people think that ‘other’ people get raped, not Christian women, not people within the church. It’s prostitutes; it’s drunks; it’s party girls; it’s something else.

‘Yes, it makes sense that you’re more worried about sex outside of marriage than you are about rape.’ People think rape doesn’t happen to people in the church, but we need to protect against pre-marital sex. I just feel like I fell through a crack in the church.”

the number one sin confessed by women is pride.3 Yet I don’t think this means women are more prideful than men. Rather, I think women are more likely to notice their pride and categorize it as sinful because it contradicts the gender expectations they’ve been raised with in secular and religious society.

Despite the fact that Jesus was himself a thirty-something-year-old single man, prolonged singleness is frowned upon in evangelical purity culture.

When single evangelicals were asked by Claire Evans at London School of Theology,I “Do you think Christians view singleness as being equal or inferior to marriage?” 75 percent of the men said Christians view singleness as inferior. That seems like a big number! Until you hear that 98 percent of the women feel this way.2 Even within this pro-marriage context, men can get away with being single well into their adulthood (some even jokingly calling themselves “Bachelors to the Rapture”) in a way that women rarely feel is permitted for them.

Meanwhile, purity culture does not permit women to solve their singleness by taking matters into their own hands and going out and getting a man (and certainly not going out and getting any other kind of romantic partner). A “pure” woman must wait patiently for God to bring the right man to her. All she can do is prepare herself. Say, work through any sin that might be preventing God from bringing the gift of a relationship to her.

I would be the first to say that celibacy served me well in these seasons, and that I came away better emotionally and spiritually as a result of it. But as time passes and one season turns into two, then three, then four, and perhaps a lifetime, its sweetness can begin to sour.

Basically it comes down to the hackneyed old story that men and boys don’t like it when you know more than they do, so, just don’t.

Both the repressed sexuality of the virgin and the fully surrendered sexuality of the wife are requirements in purity culture—one being fabled to lead to the other.

“I’ve felt from the age of . . . always . . . that if you were a woman in the church you weren’t respected. I saw that the church intrinsically believed women were not as important to God as men. It was in how we were treated. Were we girls taught that God had amazing plans for us—married or not, with kids or not, that we had our own purpose? No. We were taught to support somebody else’s purpose, and given biblical reflections on ‘partner and submit.’ Were we girls taught to be warriors? To gird ourselves and be as prepared for life as possible? No. We were trained to be supportive, nice, and caring to a warrior man.

we are the image of God most fully when we are together as one.

Is this not complementarian thought?

My only choice as a woman was to work with children, even though I knew by then I didn’t want to.

I went to a therapist because I would have rather cut off my hand than go to my church and tell them I was struggling with it. I would have been taken off of every ministry that I was on; I would’ve been shamed; I might have experienced church discipline. Church is supposed to be where you feel safe and come for prayer, but no, you don’t do that there. At church you show your shiny self that Jesus redeemed. You’re together.

“Hiding parts of yourself from a community that punishes people for showing those parts seems completely rational to me.”

There is this idea that you’re accountable to everybody for your sexual behavior, for your dating behavior, for everything, especially as a woman. If you were not telling something, it was because you had sin in your life. You don’t own anything, even your thoughts, and it matters more how the culture and the community thinks about your thought than what the thought itself is. Their judgment determines everything.

Rosemary’s parents’ reactions to the two varieties of sexual “issues” Rosemary brought to them—her reading Harry Potter fan fiction, which resulted in her being sent to ongoing therapy, and her brother’s sexual propositions and threats, which resulted in brief conversations—reflect the purity movement’s values and norms.

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

“My dad said he didn’t have a video camera in my room so he’d never know exactly what happened. I hated him for saying that, though he’s since said he never said it. The church views men as animals with no agency. The whole ‘as a girl it’s your job to stop guys from doing stuff’ line of thinking. So my parents treated my brother like he’d messed up but nothing more, and I felt really blamed. They acted like it was consensual, like it was sex. Sex is so penalized in evangelicalism, it’s easier to chalk rape and abuse up to sex and be done with it. But I don’t think what happened between me and my brother was sex at all. This was abuse.”

all. For instance, boys hear girls being told that they must cover their bodies and avoid flirtation in order to protect themselves from boys’ and men’s uncontrollable sexual virility. What does that say about men?

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

sisters—I cannot help but wonder if, while some men worry that they are monsters because of this gender-based messaging, others may feel their monstrous behavior is justified because of it.3 When boys are repeatedly taught that they cannot control their sexual impulses and that it is a girl’s responsibility to protect her own purity, how logical it must seem for perpetrators attempting to justify their actions to come to the conclusion that if a woman dresses or acts a certain way she is “asking for it,” making rape at least partly (if not totally) her fault?I

Can you imagine turning around and going back into society where you’re no longer of value? Where you’re no longer as good as anybody else?

To side with the perpetrator we must do nothing, but to side with the victim, we’re asked to stand with them, which is so much more emotionally taxing.”

“Did you read the third book, with the dementors?” “Yes. Or, I saw the movie.” “Okay. Remember how the dementors bring out horrible memories? And the way to deal with the aftermath of that is to eat chocolate?” “Okay, yes, I totally remember,” I said. Rosemary picked up the Tupperware filled with fudge brownies and dropped it in her lap.

Yes!!!!!

But the church isn’t always and certainly doesn’t have to be a dementor. It can be a healer,

“Evangelicalism here is about purity culture: you don’t have sex; you have to wear these clothes; you only listen to this music; you only watch these movies. In the part of Europe I was in, they were more concerned about creating fellowship with each other and doing service. It was one of the few times that I was really in a ‘Christian fellowship.’ Not everything about it was perfect, but it was really honest. People didn’t try to fake who they were. There was a lot of love. We cared about each other a lot.

I think the more you tell your story, particularly within safe spaces, the freer you are. That’s part of the reason I’m willing to tell you my whole story . . . within reason, I’m not going to give everybody all of my dirty laundry. But if there are things that you can’t tell anyone, they have power over you.

“In Europe we all wanted to know who each other were, but back at my evangelical college in the US, it didn’t feel like that was an option. You’re just supposed to be ‘a happy Christian.’ ”