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

by Linda Kay Klein

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.

Equating survivors’ actions, such as drinking in Laura’s case, and perpetrators’ actions, such as assault, is called sin-leveling, and is often categorized as a form of spiritual abuse.

“I am just beginning to realize how much my upbringing has had and still has all these effects on my personality and my approach to life that I don’t even notice a lot of the time. I still have this urge to be the kind of person that I think this community would have wanted me to be, even though I don’t believe in the religion part anymore. Just trying to be this very respectable, appropriate, wholesome person who follows all the rules and does everything right.