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

by Linda Kay Klein

‘Other than being a person who comes to their church and believes all the right things, do I have any value to these people? And if I stop believing the right things, then do I lose all my value to them?’ ”

But in my mind, if you don’t want to get married, then the appropriate response is to not date anybody and be a hermit.

And the most respectable and acceptable alternative to serious monogamous relationships in the evangelical frame is to be totally single, and I don’t know, get ten cats. No relationships. No sex.

Talking about her fear and discomfort around her brother didn’t get Rosemary the attention she needed. But she knew she’d be seen if she confessed a sin.

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

To side with the perpetrator we must do nothing, but to side with the victim, we’re asked to stand with them, which is so much more emotionally taxing.”

My fifteen-year-old brain had trouble reconciling these two conflicting views. I remember thinking to myself ‘Somebody’s lying.’

Even though I didn’t see myself as his primary audience, I and others like me reaped the consequences of his work. The US church was afraid of sex and sin, and so we became afraid too. That didn’t serve us well.”

And then in John 16:12, Jesus says near the end of his ministry: ‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.’ That’s Jesus saying, even after he’s finished, there’s a whole lot more that the Spirit of God needs to teach us. So you can’t freeze this in time at any point. Even now, we have to remain open to the idea that God is still teaching us things we weren’t even ready to receive in Jesus’s time.”