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

by Linda Kay Klein

Evangelicals are also among the least likely to expect sex to be pleasurable, and among the most likely to anticipate having sex will make them feel guilty.2 And yet evangelical young people are basically just as likely to have sex as their peers are.3 In other words, most evangelical youth are a lot like I was in the years after I left the church—sexual, and ashamed of it.

“Is someone following us? Are people from the church watching me right now? If I buy this wine, am I going to be reported the next day? If they see my car at Johnnie’s house too late, am I going to lose my job?” 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.

Studies have found that abstinence pledgers are less likely to use protection against sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy when having sex than their nonpledging peers. To be sure, the lack of accurate information young people receive in abstinence-only-until-marriage programs is likely at least partly to blame for this. After all, over 80 percent of the abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula reviewed by a 2004 House Committee on Government Reform minority staff report included “false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health.”4 But I believe there is something deeper going on as well. Prophylactics are demonized in religious purity culture. A condom, for example, isn’t just a piece of rubber in a plastic sleeve; it is an instrument of sin, which can make shopping for protection feel like plotting your immorality.

“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. * * * Listening to my interview with Rosemary again now, I am struck by how appropriate the metaphor she drew about the dementors really is. In the Harry Potter books, the dementors are like trauma-triggers. They “force their victims to relive the worst memories of their lives, and drown, powerless, in their own despair.”5