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

by Linda Kay Klein

evangelical Christianity’s sexual purity movement is traumatizing many girls and maturing women haunted by sexual and gender-based anxiety, fear, and physical experiences that sometimes mimic the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Based on our nightmares, panic attacks, and paranoia, one might think that my childhood friends and I had been to war. And in fact, we had. We went to war with ourselves, our own bodies, and our own sexual natures, all under the strict commandment of the church.

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.

After the sexual revolution, Americans were scared. AIDS was killing people by the thousands, there were growing concerns about other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and many conservatives believed a return to traditional values, including chastity, was the only solution. Spurred by this perspective, federal money for abstinence-only-until-marriage education began to flow—first under Reagan,XIV then more under Clinton,XV then still more under Bush.XVI11 This influx of government money catalyzed the purity industry.

According to the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), over $2 billion in federal funding has been allocated for abstinence-only programs in the United States since 1981.12 Much of this funding came through the Title V abstinence-only-until-marriage program, which is still in place today. This program requires states to match every four federal dollars they receive with three state-raised dollars, presumably increasing the state-level contributions made toward abstinence-only programming in the process as well. The money is then redistributed to community-based organizations, faith-based organizations, local and/or state health departments, and schools. Every state but one (California) has at one time accepted Title V federal funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage programming.

Evangelical adolescents are also among the least likely to expect sex to be pleasurable, and among the most likely to expect that having sex will make them feel guilty.26 Yet one’s level of religiosity (there is a 30 percentage point gap in anticipated sexual guilt between the least and the most religious youth)27 and one’s gender (girls are a whopping 92 percent more likely to experience sexual guilt than boys)28 have even greater impacts on one’s likelihood to experience sexual shame than one’s denominational affiliation.

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!

‘Mom, I need to tell you something.’ I said, ‘I’ve been raped.’ The minute I said it, my mom gasped then walked out of the house. There’s a sliding door there, and she just left. Then I have just flashes of memories. At some point, she was back and my father was there. Again, I don’t really have linear memories of this. But the first thing my father said to me was, ‘What were you wearing?’ I just screamed, ‘Does it matter?!’

The fourth stumbling block girls raised in the purity movement must overcome is the wrongful classification of rape and other forms of sexual violence. By this I mean both that the purity movement classifies sexual violence by systematically silencing and hiding it, and that if and when it is exposed, the purity movement then misclassifies sexual violence as “sex” rather than “violence.” Long-indoctrinated in this illegitimate logic, Laura’s parents did not consider her solely a survivor, but also a sinner, and were more focused on their daughter’s sins and how they led to the loss of her “purity” than on the violence that was perpetrated against her. And they followed through on that logic when she told them she was raped—by controlling Laura to protect her from her own sinfulness rather than comforting and defending Laura to protect her from the sins of others.

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.

One 25-year-old woman, J., expresses the more comfortable she is in a relationship, the easier it is for her to express herself and to disagree with the other person. She views this as bad because a mature Christian should not disagree or be angry: “It’s wrong, it’s a sin. It’s very much a sin to be angry no matter, I mean no matter what the result or why or whatever.”2

report in the Vatican newspaper based on a study of the confessions heard by a ninety-five-year-old Jesuit scholar, which was backed up by the Pope’s personal theologian, found that 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.

In her groundbreaking essay “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Valerie Saiving Goldstein argues that the Christian focus on the sinfulness of pride is rooted in the faith’s historic masculine leadership. She says pride may well be a sin for many men who hold power in our patriarchal society, making men’s choice to check their pride in service of others very virtuous indeed. Yet women, not being in this position of power, are more likely to think too little of themselves than too much, suffering from an “underdevelopment or negation of the self”4—something Blue Jones saw in me from a mile away. And so, perhaps, for such women, pride is not a sin, but a virtue.

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.

When researcher Dr. Kristin Aune asked, “What are the main issues facing single Christian women today?” the most common answer single evangelical women in the United Kingdom gave was “the church’s attitude towards single women.”3 The second most common answer was “men, sex, and dating.” Many women supplemented their answers by saying they felt that the church pressured them to get married. Several said they felt that they were viewed as a threat to married people in the subculture. One even said it was difficult to know how to “function” in the subculture “without the leadership and ‘covering’ of a husband.”4

But to what extent is true joy and pleasure robbed of me because I’m calling it sin when maybe . . . it’s not?”

“Senior year of Bible college I decided to go to this woman who was a counselor,” Alma said. “Everybody loved her, but I should’ve known not to go to her, of course. She was the same woman who said in class, ‘If your husband beats you, you should thank Jesus for the opportunity to show your husband Christ’s love by staying with him.’

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.)

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

“On warm days I would walk across campus feeling like a monster, because I believed that noticing a girl’s body was the spiritual equivalent of something like sexual assault.” Every accidental glimpse of cleavage or a little extra leg was terrible.

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

Laura began to see religious purity teachings as distinctly cultural, and to recognize how the white American evangelical church had exported these teachings across the country and the world. The history of US-based purity purveyor True Love Waits alone offers an illustration: In 1995, they displayed 220,000 purity pledges from thirteen countries in Argentina; in 2004, they displayed over 460,000 pledges from twenty countries in Athens, Greece; in 2007, they hosted an international summit in South Africa and announced a $950,000 expansion of its abstinence-only-until-marriage programs in South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Tanzania, and Zambia. . . .1

“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.