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May 18 - May 27, 2019
By the time I was in high school and had my first boyfriend, I had been “talked to” about how I dressed and acted so many times that my annoyance was beginning to turn into anxiety. It began to feel like it didn’t matter what I did or wore; it was me that was bad.
You can be born again and have your slate wiped clean of lying, stealing, even murder. And if you do these things again later but honestly apologize to God, your sin is again forgiven. But sex outside of marriage is the only “sin” that I have ever heard described as changing you.
Shame is the feeling “I am—or somebody else will think I am—bad” (as opposed to guilt, for example, which is associated with the feeling “I did something bad”).
However one is born again, afterward, he or she is expected to spread the Good News to others—that is, to evangelize. Evangelicals are often further distinguished by their theological and moral conservatism, biblical literalism, emphasis on personal piety, conservative political positions, and engagement with technology, popular culture, and capitalism.
Her references are a bit dated, but her point is right on: evangelicalism is best thought of as a subculture.
Though the evangelical students I interviewed broke almost every liberal preconception about them, proving to be diverse in their politics, nuanced in their expressions and beliefs about Christianity, and perfectly willing to swim in a sea of doubt and life’s gray areas, their pursuit of purity is the one area where almost all of them could see only black and white.
If the messages don’t hurt you, you are less likely to hear them (for instance, a straight person is less likely to hear a covert homophobic message than a queer person is). And if the messages benefit you, you are even less likely to hear them (for instance, a husband whose pastor turns to him and asks if he can hug the man’s wife may not “hear” the pastor subtly referring to his wife as his property . . . but she might).
But I would’ve given anything to be the kind of good girl that the pastor’s son never would have said those things about in the first place.
I was taught I should always be in a state of suffering and don’t deserve to be happy.
the more attached they are to traditional ideas about Jesus, the more likely they are to think of their abuse as “good” for them, as a trial designed for a reason, as pain that makes them like Jesus.
A scar? I thought. Who cares about that? What? I’m going to die because of vanity? Please. I am a woman of the spirit, not of the flesh alone.
After all, according to most evangelicals, even Jesus, who lived a perfect life, did less good with his life than he did with his death. It was Christ’s torment, not his joy, that set us free. It was his death, not his life, that allowed us to enter Heaven.
implying that they don’t think he will do it again there, which means, of course, he isn’t the problem. You are.
but what did occur to me was this: That unconditional love that I had fallen for in my early days in the church? It was conditional.
At a young age, she accepted that she would never be attractive, never date, never kiss, never marry, never have sex, and if any man was ever fool enough to love her, she would warn him that she would likely destroy his life. But she would—dammit—become president.
“You were both reacting to the same gender-based lie: Be submissive and be loved, or be a leader and be alone forever. It’s the same story, the same lie. You just made different choices within it. Lucy chose submission for the sake of having a relationship; you chose being alone forever so you didn’t have to submit.”
the church denied or minimized the severity of the family violence problem. When counseling was provided, the church often suggested the problem would be alleviated if the abused woman followed what the church believed was the Divine pattern of loving obedient submission to her husband.”
I stopped fighting with God because I thought he made me in a way that set me up to fail, and started thinking about how I could better reflect what he had made me to be, and accept it as a gift.”
“I don’t think they realized how much of a struggle it was for me, so I don’t think they knew how much I needed it to be actively counteracted.
God is not cool if he has instilled in you deep parts of your personality that feel unchangeable—such as your strong opinions and your sense of competition—things that the church says aren’t in a good woman . . . but are in you.”
the message is the same: A woman’s worth lies in her ability—or her refusal—to be sexual. And we’re teaching American girls that, one way or another, their bodies and their sexuality are what make them valuable.1
It was assumed that if no one ever talked to us about sex, it would just sort of go away until we needed it.
So each of us guessed at what the rules might be, hoped we were right, and didn’t tell anyone about our sexual lives just in case we weren’t.
I always thought that if people just got Christianity, then they would believe. But my coworkers did get it, and they didn’t believe. It made me think . . . what do I believe?
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.
“You will never be able to write a song that matters if you don’t believe that you matter. First things first. Go home.”
As opposed to a bat mitzvah or a quinceañera, evangelicals ought to have a funeral at the beginning of girls’ adolescence. When you’re a girl you’re allowed to be who you are. But as you get older, you have to put that person to death. Because after puberty, you’re dirty. So now you have to be what’s expected of you. You always have to fit some kind of role or be whatever a woman is supposed to be instead of actually who you are. (Jo)
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.
purity culture does not permit women to solve their singleness by taking matters into their own hands and going out and getting a man (and certainly not going out and getting any other kind of romantic partner). A “pure” woman must wait patiently for God to bring the right man to her.
But to what extent is true joy and pleasure robbed of me because I’m calling it sin when maybe . . . it’s not?”
I mean, who knows? Maybe I’m gay. Maybe I’m a scientist. How would I know anything? I’ve spent my whole life pretending I am who they want me to be.
“I just felt no guidance from God, and I started taking it personally after a while. I didn’t feel like God kept his end of the bargain in terms of leading me and guiding me.
So you see? Although those first stages all seem to be safe, when a couple indulges in them, they find themselves just three stages away from having sex,
It never felt sexy. Sex was never sexy.
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.
They pray for bad things to happen to people, so they might see their need for God.
“To me, it meant there was no God,” Muriel said, before going on to explain that, as an absolutist, she felt that if anything the church taught wasn’t true, then nothing the church taught was true.
And had my husband been there by my side, I know I would’ve been treated differently. But I really felt as an adult, as a mother, as a parent, I should be able to talk to these people myself.
The relationship was between the youth leaders and the children. It was almost like a secret relationship, a private, secret relationship, and you realize, now, that’s how you control people. With really young ones, with teenagers—oh my God they’re so vulnerable.”
How could I differentiate between what was normal growing-up stuff and what was abnormal? What was teenage angst and what was true anxiety?”
they are concerned about the damage they see purity culture doing to adolescents’ lives. Many silence their concerns, however, knowing they are not welcome within the community, and those who do voice them are often given the same message Solange was: The religious purity movement isn’t going anywhere, so you can either get behind it, or you can go.
I was starting to be more open. I was thinking ‘maybe this narrow rail of evangelicalism is not the only answer; maybe there are more answers.’ That was the soul of my decision to leave the church.”
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.
You think the church is going to come along and be your friend and your helper, and it turns out to be just the opposite. I have them on this path and here comes youth group, and it totally changes the trajectory of what I was trying to do for them.
He says, ‘I agree with you, Jo, but this is not my battle to fight. I’m not going to back you up here.’ He could create a lot of change, do a lot of good if he would.
God is above gender. He sometimes expresses himself as a mother in the Bible. And so we are the image of God most fully when we are together as one. Equal.”
He also made it impossible for me to please Him. . . . I can’t please Him in the institution that represents Him. So the only way, ultimately, that I could please God would be to kill myself. Because nothing I could ever do as a living human being, because of being a woman, could ever please God.7
“Then I thought, ‘If I can’t accept that for her . . . why do I accept it for me?’ I realized, ‘I’m beating my head against a brick wall trying to change the church and they don’t want to be changed!
Without it, it was hard to know how to interact. I only knew how to speak Christianese. I only knew how to approach people who came from the same viewpoint as me. I was taught that anyone who didn’t was unsafe.
