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

by Linda Kay Klein

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!

And when my friends and I got home from a long day of smiling goodness, our smiles got even bigger, because we knew it was also our role to be what my pastor called “cheerleaders” for the “football players” in our lives—our fathers, brothers, and husbands. You never saw a group of teenage girls so . . . happy.

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

At first glance, the modesty doctrine may appear harmless—perhaps even healthy—but the logic of victim-blaming that we too often see in rape cases begins here. When we demand that an individual dress in just the right way so as not to inspire sexual feelings in others, we set a precedent of blaming individuals for the thoughts, feelings, and actions of other people that can play out in dangerous ways in rape and abuse cases.

Many purity advocates teach that women aren’t very sexual, and so don’t need a way to vent their repressed sexual energy in their single years.

No matter how hard she tried, Katie couldn’t stop her sexual feelings, her sexual thoughts, and, most upsetting of all, her sexual expression through masturbation. She set her fork down and looked at me seriously. “I began to feel like, ‘This is probably something terrible in me and I’m just—’ ” She struggled for words. “ ‘I must be the only terrible, black-hearted, black-minded person. I must be weird; I’m a freak of nature; I must be a man.’ ” 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.

The purity movement teaches us that a “pure” woman comes to her husband an untouched virgin who has hardly (if ever) thought about sex before. And then, naturally and beautifully, the woman’s new husband introduces his wife to sexuality for the first time and years of pent-up sexual energy which she was not even aware of come pouring out of her, allowing her to meet her new husband’s every sexual want, which is also her every want, and together they live happily ever after.

There is no mention of the possibility that the woman may not enjoy sex with her husband because he had not respected her sexual boundaries before marriage, forcing her to fight him off (in her words) for years. And no mention that perhaps the woman might have felt guilty about having sex because the church had embedded the notion that sex was shameful so deeply into her brain that she couldn’t shake it now that she was married and it was suddenly supposed to be okay. No. It was the woman’s premarital sexual activity (not even the couple’s premarital sexual activity, though the activity took place between the two of them) that was blamed for the couple’s sexual problems.

Until they became adults, Solange’s daughters didn’t want to hear her counter the teachings of the evangelical church. They had been taught that anyone who disagreed with its tenets was simply not a good Christian and so shouldn’t be trusted when it came to those things. (Even if that person was your mom.)

“The church talked a good talk of ‘we’re going to support the family; this is all about the family.’ You heard ‘the family, the family, the family.’ You kept hearing that,” Solange said, topping our glasses off. “But the reality is they taught kids not to trust their parents.

It seems to me that 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.

A common adage in neurobiology, Hebb’s axiom, states: “neurons that fire together wire together.” In other words, if two neural circuits—such as those for sexuality and shame—are fired simultaneously often enough, eventually firing the neural circuit for one will automatically activate the neural circuit for the other.

‘I’m dealing with this right now, it’s really hard for me, I don’t know what to do,’ the only thing that they could seem to think about was how to convert me back to their way of thinking: ‘Well, you’re wrong, because we already know the answer.’ Nobody was like, ‘Okay, let’s just talk through this. It’s your life, and whatever you decide we’ll still care about you.’ The only thing they cared about in the conversation was giving me ‘the answer’ and making sure that they got me back on ‘the right path.’ Treating the whole thing like a debate instead of a conversation.

“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.’

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

Though purity culture messaging about girls and boys is very different, the gender-based messages are absorbed by 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? some of these boys may find themselves wondering. Or, more specifically, What does that say about me?

Finally, he admitted his secret to his pastor. His pastor advised him to go to Sex Addicts Anonymous. When David, a twenty-two-year-old virgin, told his story to the group of gathered sex addicts there was, as one might expect, “an awkward silence.”

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

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?

The discord Laura saw among the values she learned in US churches, the values she saw in Ghanaian churches, and the values held in other parts of Ghanaian culture made Laura question the claim that religious purity teachings were noncultural—that

“The Christian church is rendered as a trans-national movement—beyond your race, ethnicity, gender. You’re suddenly ‘in-Christ,’ which supposedly subsumes your ethnic/racial/gendered experience. Even in the United States, instead of being a black Christian, you become a Christian—which is defined with white, male, straight assumptions, including those about sexuality and the body. And internationally, whatever the indigenous, often majority, experience is, it’s overridden, including the indigenous approach to the body.

research continuously shows that external rewards and punishments (like “I do this because my parents will be proud of me” or “I don’t do this because my peers will judge me”) are less likely to support lasting healthy decision-making than internalized motivations (like “I do this because it’s important to me” or “I don’t do this because it makes me feel bad”).

Supporting people’s internal motivations requires supporting their autonomy, walking alongside them and helping them identify their own values (which may, for some, be religiously inspired) and how they can choose to act on them, rather than dictating to them what’s right and what’s wrong in every instance.

people who receive comprehensive sexuality education, which focuses on giving people a broader range on information (including information on abstinence, condoms, and contraception) in hopes that they will use this education to make their own internally motivated decisions, report delayed or reduced sexual activity (not to mention an increased use of contraceptives when they do have sex).

Rather than receiving a metaphorical ruler by which to assess whether or not they have gone “too far,” their kids were getting a kind of Swiss Army Knife, with tools like self-worth, sexual health, responsibility, justice, and inclusivity all at the ready.