Sometimes you come across a book that completely reorders how you think about the world, Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free, was one of those books for me. Yes, I had told a roomful of strangers about my awkward wedding night when I performed for The Moth, but I had little data about purity culture beyond my own experience. Even after the #exvangelical movement solidified in 2016 and 2017 and I was able to connect online with others who grew up in Evangelicalism, our discussions about the church’s sexual teachings rarely progressed beyond venting our frustrations.
Enter Linda Kay Klein. Her book swept through Exvangelicals like a tidal wave. Finally, here was hard evidence of purity culture’s wide-ranging harms—it wasn’t just us; it was a whole generation. Klein completed hundreds of qualitative, in-depth interviews with survivors of purity culture. This multiplicity of voices is one of the book’s biggest strengths: across a wide range of experiences, Klein’s subjects detail the deleterious effects purity culture has had and continues to have on their lives.
Since the book’s publication, there has been such a huge shift in the way purity culture is discussed that it’s hard to remember a time before that term existed. But Pure was only published in 2018. And when Klein started researching the effects of white, Evangelical purity culture nearly twenty years ago, there was very little research to go on.
“When I was in grad school, I tried to research what was going on, and the only things that were out there weren’t directly about evangelicalism or about ‘purity culture’ as we know it. They were about other things that were adjacent. So I had to come at the topic in this very creative way,” Klein said in a recent interview. She kept an ear to the ground, trying to connect with anyone studying anything Evangelical-related, including fundamentalist amusement parks.
In fact, the term “purity culture” didn’t even appear in Pure until the final draft. “I didn’t use the words ‘purity culture.’ I don’t actually like the term. It was so brand-new, it wasn’t established, and so few people were using that language. And it operates on the norms of the system I was challenging. It was not a culture of ‘purity',’ it was a culture of shame. If anything, we should be calling it ‘shame culture.’”
But purity culture is what stuck. When I asked Klein about the term’s origins, and whether it derived from its secular cousin, “rape culture,” she wasn’t sure, but thinks it may have come from Donna Freitas’ book, Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses. In that book, Freitas interviewed college students from evangelical and non-evangelical colleges about their attitudes towards sex.
“When most people talk about ‘purity culture’ what they’re referring to is The Purity Movement, that came out of the white, American, Evangelical Christian church in the early 1990s to the mid-2000s,” Klein clarified. “[The Purity Movement] took these purity concepts, that had already been within that church and in many other places and built an industry and an intentional global movement around it.”
That movement was largely successful. It’s estimated that 2.5 million teens signed abstinence pledge cards in the 90s. One of the movement's most influential books, I Kissed Dating Goodbye sold 1.2 million copies, a huge number for any book, let alone one aimed at the Christian young adult market.
If you surveyed the general populace, they would probably define “purity culture” as not having sex outside of marriage. And while that is a defining marker, PC’s rules and expectations actually run much deeper, encompassing not only sexual mores, and clothing, but stiflingly narrow gender expectations, and rigid thought policing.
“It all comes down to a culture that defines people, in their totality, and determines their worth, based on other people’s perceptions and judgments around their sexuality and their gender,” Klein explained.
When group membership is defined by what others think of you, it can feel natural, or even necessary to fixate on doing everything “perfectly.” This can lead some people to dissociate—becoming one person at church and another when they’re alone. In Pure, Klein interviews a woman who describes having a “shiny self” at church, while, at home, she was abusing alcohol and prescription narcotics. Klein believes this behavior is not atypical among Christians:
“White Evangelicalism today (though there are some Evangelicals who are trying to do something different)—it’s a culture that would not tell you to create a division between your church-self and your outside-of-church-self. It’s a culture that tells you every moment of your life must be utterly consumed by your own purity. So that means you’re in a constant state of assessment of your thoughts, assessment of your feelings, assessment of your choices (even when you’re alone); choices that impact no one.”
“I think what ends up happening is some real religious trauma where people actually do dissociate, I mean that clinically. I also think there are people who just end up being human and thinking that [being human] is so different than how they’re supposed to be in the church that it almost feels dissociative.”
Klein has focused heavily on recovery since her book came out in 2018. “It was so brand-new even to talk about the fact that this thing was actually hurting people, that I wasn’t in a place where I could really get into ‘how do we heal’?” Klein mentioned. At first, there was very few resources—two websites that she mentions in the book. And most traditional therapists were ill-equipped to deal with the harms of purity culture.
“Sometimes [therapists] were doing the best they could, and sometimes they were outright retraumatizing people because they didn’t understand it,” Klein explained.
Luckily, things are changing. In the past few years, purity culture recovery has exploded. Conferences and coaches abound for those looking to recover from purity culture.
“Once you can name something, you can go a lot further. Now that the word ‘purity culture’ is out there, people are moving fast, and we have this counter movement: a movement of recovery.”
“Purity culture” may not have been Klein’s term of choice, but it has been a lifesaver for many. It sums up a range of experiences, labels them as part of a larger system, and tells us we’re not alone. And that is a gift.
If you’re stalled in your purity culture recovery, Klein offers group and one-on-one coaching through her website.
*Quotes were lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Discussion/Journal Questions (feel free to leave a comment below!):
What “rules” (spoken or unspoken) did your family and community have about how people expressed gender?
Are there things you can do now (or would like to do) to make your outside appearance align with how you feel inside? If so, what?
What’s the most ridiculous dress code you’ve heard of?