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

by Linda Kay Klein

I am still a Christian, but I don’t go to church much anymore. Maybe if I lived in Denver or Indianapolis, I would. But I can’t bring myself to attend a church that teaches purity culture and other things that I know hurt people as deeply as they do, and when I attend progressive churches I sometimes find myself thinking I may as well be at home watching a TED Talk. It’s just not my kind of church. When I go to church, I want to throw my hands up in the air! I want to sing at the top of my lungs! I suppose in some ways I am still an evangelical after all. And so, these days I mostly do “church” at home: Praying, meditating, journaling, reading, and sometimes throwing my hands up and singing praises or laments to God at the top of my lungs in the privacy of my apartment where only my neighbors—who can undoubtedly hear me through my thin New York City walls—are invited to join in. I know my teenage self, rulebook in hand, would have certainly been wary of my salvation. My faith looks very