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

by Linda Kay Klein

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. In the evangelical community, an “impure” girl or woman isn’t just seen as damaged; she’s considered dangerous.

Wow. This is well put. Women are the stumbling block, not the lustful eye is what is taught.

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.

I believe this stems from not valuing the body and the message that your flesh is sinful. This book has later chapters of the physical and mental barriers set up from being so rigid for so long.

But the truth was, I couldn’t always tell the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian. I saw both lie, both steal, both love, and both unselfishly give to others. But one tangible thing we could point to as evangelicals was that we didn’t have sex before marriage. There was that. There was always that. Which is why, I believe, the threat of losing that so-called sexual purity seemed so grave. Were we to have sex outside of marriage, could we even call ourselves Christians anymore?

The binary view of life. Can't see a person's heart to know if they believe but i can judge based on abstinence. It became *the* identifier.

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.

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! Yep. Sounds about right.

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.

Next page "Christianity has a long history of glorifying gore and gorifying God."

My friends and I were told in one breath we were loved unconditionally, accepted just as we were, and headed for Heaven, and in the next we were warned of the evils of feminists, homosexuals, women who had sex outside of marriage, and other Hell-bound individuals. It didn’t even occur to me then that some people in youth group might already see themselves as fitting into some of these categories that I wouldn’t see myself in for years, and how that must have felt to them then, 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.

I was a class A conditional lover.

second stumbling block is its strict gender role expectations. At a time when many in our society are rejecting the importance of gender distinctions altogether, the religious purity movement is doubling down on them, teaching what is called 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 third stumbling block those raised as girls in the purity movement must overcome is the destruction of what author and cofounder of the popular online community Feministing, Jessica Valenti, refers to as “the purity myth.” In her book, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women, Valenti defines this term as the myth that girls’ “only real worth is their virginity and ability to remain ‘pure.’ ”

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.

And it makes no sense!

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.”

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)

Dang, ain't that the truth.

By the age of twenty-eight, I wanted to be a woman, and experience that side of life. I was feeling left behind. I wanted a house and a family and I wanted a man. But the longer I stayed out of it, the harder it got for me to even imagine entering in.

I relate to this woman's testimony.

I see this logic among many of my interviewees when they first begin to question the church’s teachings. They hold on to the good/bad binary they were taught growing up; they just swap everything around on it. In their new reverse binary, evangelicalism goes from good to bad; the secular world goes from bad to good; sex outside of marriage goes from bad to good; abstinence goes from good to bad. But, most of my interviewees eventually have come to the conclusion that the binary itself is the problem. From here, they become uniquely sensitized to fundamentalism in all forms, distrusting any community that claims they have all the answers, that assumes they are all right and that those they oppose are all wrong, be that community conservative or progressive, religious or secular.

I think this is key. Life is not binary. Not in racism or church.

I believe that the merger of sex and shame that I experienced is just such a brain trap. Even if we eventually come to understand that our sexual nature is natural, normal, and healthy, we may find that our upbringing in purity culture, which has dedifferentiated shame and sex over years of messaging, observation, and experience, ensures that our brains fire those shame neurons when the subject of our sexuality arises, with or without our permission, trapping us in a shame spiral.

Basically the thesis of the book.