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January 10 - January 27, 2021
Yet, in the years I spent as an evangelical Christian, I never once heard anyone use the term the way it’s used here—in reference to the onlooker’s lustful eye. Instead, I heard it used time and time again to describe girls and women who somehow “elicit” men’s lust.III
Yet, in the years I spent as an evangelical Christian, I never once heard anyone use the term the way it’s used here—in reference to the onlooker’s lustful eye. Instead, I heard it used time and time again to describe girls and women who somehow “elicit” men’s lust.III
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).
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).
We went to war with ourselves, our own bodies, and our own sexual natures, all under the strict commandment of the church.
We went to war with ourselves, our own bodies, and our own sexual natures, all under the strict commandment of the church.
“It’s interesting,” I replied to Renee. “The emphasis on being devoured, right? This message that we should look at our sexuality as food—” “For someone else,” Renee finished my sentence.
“It’s interesting,” I replied to Renee. “The emphasis on being devoured, right? This message that we should look at our sexuality as food—” “For someone else,” Renee finished my sentence.
Oreo being spit on, gum being chewed, etc
“It’s interesting,” I replied to Renee. “The emphasis on being devoured, right? This message that we should look at our sexuality as food—” “For someone else,” Renee finished my sentence.
Oreo that’s been spit on, gum that’s been chewed, etc.
So if you want to assess who’s really a Christian and who’s not—and lots of people do—you need a proxy, some externally measurable quality that is deemed representative of the person’s internal commitment. Among single people in the church, one of the most popular proxies is sex.
In group vs out group
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. This is the language of shame.
Especially for women
Shame tends to make people feel powerless and even worthless. It creates a fear of abandonment that, ironically, makes us push others away. We want to hide those aspects of ourselves we are ashamed of, so we may emotionally withdraw from those close to us, lash out at them to keep them at bay, or isolate ourselves in self-blame. Whatever it takes to keep the world (including ourselves) away from those parts of us that we have come to believe make us bad.
Within all of this diversity, the sexual purity message is one of the most consistent elements of the evangelical 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.
When about one-sixth of an adolescent’s Bible is marketing about the importance of abstinence, how could she not reach the conclusion that her sexual thoughts, feelings, and choices determine her spiritual standing?
$50 million a year for the aforementioned Title V abstinence-only programming.
Super surprised by the role of the govt
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!
In books, movies, and just about everywhere else, girls get the message that the more selflessly and painfully a woman suffers, the more we love her. But nowhere is this message quite so clear as it is in religion.
we knew it was also our role to be what my pastor called “cheerleaders” for the “football players” in our lives—our fathers, brothers, and husbands. You never saw a group of teenage girls so . . . happy.
In 1912, Émile Durkheim identified the emotional high individuals get from being part of religious group experiences and the effects that high has upon the group itself. He called it “collective effervescence.”
In 1923, the theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto said that there is a kind of heat in religion—“vitality, passion, emotional temper, will, force, movement, excitement, energy, activity, impetus,” all coming together to create a “consuming fire.”
The first stumbling block those raised as girls in the purity movement must overcome is the message that if you are suffering, it’s your fault: It may be your sin; it may be your psychosis; but it is certainly not the shaming system you find yourself in.
And when we stop, when we complain, when we expose that whatever isn’t “supposed” to be happening in our church, our school, or our home is happening, too often the response is that whatever’s happening is our “fault.” Be it from a doctor who says your real problem is your acne or your complaining, not your pain, or from a church board who decides to let the pastor who admitted to touching you go, but then quietly moves him on to another church, implying that they don’t think he will do it again there, which means, of course, he isn’t the problem. You are.
That unconditional love that I had fallen for in my early days in the church? It was conditional.
complementarianism—the idea that there are two distinct genders that have equal worth in God’s eyes, but very different roles, responsibilities, and expectations here on earth: The man is to be undeniably masculine, even as he practices patience and understanding as a leader, whereas the woman is to be irrefutably feminine and to lovingly consent to and support the leadership of the man. They complement one another—hence
Strict gender roles, as outlined here, are the second stumbling block
“You were both reacting to the same gender-based lie: Be submissive and be loved, or be a leader and be alone forever.
The cornerstone of the purity myth is the expectation that girls and women, in particular, will be utterly and absolutely nonsexual until the day they marry a man, at which point they will naturally and easily become his sexual satisfier, ensuring the couple will have children and never divorce: one man, one woman, in marriage, forever.
Third stumbling block is the purity myth
Of course, the reality is there is no such thing as purity, as we are all different! And so, when we try to be the same, or “pure” as defined by one person’s or group’s concept of normality, we are set up for failure.
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.”
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.
A 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.
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.
98% of single, evangelical women viewed being single as inferior
when my friends were dating Jesus, they were awesome: strong, confident, and doing right by themselves in ways that I’d never seen them do before.
In some ways, the modern-day evangelical trend of dating Jesus can be compared to the historic Catholic trend in which women joined convents to avoid gender expectations.
The books written for females were different. Masturbation was more strictly forbidden, and an emphasized reason given for why girls and women shouldn’t masturbate that I didn’t see much about in the books targeted at boys and men was protecting their future marriage, in part by protecting their future husband’s feelings.
The purity movement teaches us that a “pure” woman comes to her husband an untouched virgin who has hardly (if ever) thought about sex before. And then, naturally and beautifully, the woman’s new husband introduces his wife to sexuality for the first time and years of pent-up sexual energy which she was not even aware of come pouring out of her, allowing her to meet her new husband’s every sexual want, which is also her every want, and together they live happily ever after. Both the repressed sexuality of the virgin and the fully surrendered sexuality of the wife are requirements in purity
...more
I hate this so much
Human beings don’t have a switch.”
They pray for bad things to happen to people, so they might see their need for God. That will only happen if they hit rock bottom. If they are broken.”
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.
In fact, many evangelical women leaders I’ve spoken with appear even more bound by complementarian gender expectations and other purity culture stumbling blocks than their peers. As a face of the church, they are expected to model the perfect woman—supportive of their husbands’ leadership and of the leadership of men in general, gentle in spirit, and of course, undeniably feminine and pure.
He’s never done anything to me, but it’s like I’ve got post-traumatic pastor disorder. I’m so afraid of being diminished, talked down to, dismissed, patronized. Or of being looked up and down. I’m afraid that he’s going to fail me in some—not in some minor way, not a slip-up—but in a fundamental way that is harmful. I just get really sick to my stomach. I feel so much shame. And I’ve always felt that. Talking to men who are pastors in the past too, or any kind of church leader. It’s like I’m expecting to get slapped or something.
Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS), defined as “the condition experienced by people who are struggling with leaving an authoritarian, dogmatic religion and coping with the damage of indoctrination,”8 was coined by Dr. Marlene Winell,
In other words, if two neural circuits—such as those for sexuality and shame—are fired simultaneously often enough, eventually firing the neural circuit for one will automatically activate the neural circuit for the other.
My church put on this face of, ‘We love everybody and we’re all about grace.’ That was always the message. But when I started confessing to people in church, ‘I’m dealing with this right now, it’s really hard for me, I don’t know what to do,’ the only thing that they could seem to think about was how to convert me back to their way of thinking: ‘Well, you’re wrong, because we already know the answer.’ Nobody was like, ‘Okay, let’s just talk through this. It’s your life, and whatever you decide we’ll still care about you.’
The facade of “progressive” churches
Generally speaking, purity culture excuses male sexuality and amplifies female sexuality, and it shames consensual sexual activity and silences nonconsensual sexual activity.
“women are taught their bodies are evil; men are taught their minds are.”
But when I listen to stories like Rosemary’s or that of the Duggar family—whose reality show 19 Kids and Counting regularly reiterated the family’s commitment to ensuring their kids’ “purity” only for it to come out that one of the sons was accused of sexually assaulting several girls, including some of his sisters—I cannot help but wonder if, while some men worry that they are monsters because of this gender-based messaging, others may feel their monstrous behavior is justified because of it.
When boys are repeatedly taught that they cannot control their sexual impulses and that it is a girl’s responsibility to protect her own purity, how logical it must seem for perpetrators attempting to justify their actions to come to the conclusion that if a woman dresses or acts a certain way s...
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What if people turn away from God because of what you say the church did? Those people will go to Hell. Which is a lot worse than whatever is happening to you and your friends.
Fuck this lady
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.
