#120 – Evangelical Purity Culture

A scholar’s perspective after decades of research: “we’re talking about a whole network of politicized ideals that has used the bodies of adolescents to gain political power … Purity Culture has become rape culture.”

This movement seems to be anything but what it appears to be. Evangelical leaders compelling adolescents to be sexually pure (Purity Pledge cards and rings; Joshua McDowell’s True Love Waits, and Josh Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye), while they themselves were embroiled in sex scandals and cover-ups (the Southern Baptist Convention; Falwell Jr; Swaggart; Haggard; Ravi Zaccharias). The rise of a Purity Movement based on so-called “Biblical” principles which are not found in the pages of the Bible. A movement with laudable goals (purity; integrity) and naive promises/hopes which ended up causing an immense amount of pain and suffering through shame, guilt, and condemnation.

We talked to Dr. Sara Moslener, who has spent decades researching this movement, interviewing people and scholars, and writing a book about her findings. Some of the things we talked about include:

• the rise of this movement was driven in part by religious pressures (the Moral Majority, the Religious Right; True Love Waits [SBC]; purity pledge cards and purity rings), but also political pressures (Federal Welfare Reform bill; Abstinence-Only education) and federal funding
• boycotts against Disney (Ellen Degeneres “coming out”)
• the Free Love generation and the Sexual Revolution
• Evangelicals borrowed much of their sexual ethics from Roman Catholicism, but didn’t take the corresponding theology because “that’s Catholic theology” …. Evangelicals don’t have a theology of the Feminine Divine, or of celibacy, but do have confused and naive ideas about “a Biblical marriage” and other “Biblical principles”
• “we’re talking about a whole network of politicized ideals that has used the bodies of adolescents to gain political power”
• the backlash against the Purity Culture movement, both within Christianity and from the public/secular sector
• Purity Culture tells young girls that “if you have sex before marriage, you’re a chewed up piece of gum”
• female authors like Rachel Held Evans, Sarah Bessy and Elizabeth Esther push back on Purity Culture; Emily Joy Allison starts #ChurchToo
• Josh Butler writes Beautiful Union — a deeply male-centered perspective in which sexual pleasure (for men) is emblematic of God’s love for the Church — which receives immediate criticism and is quickly withdrawn, and Butler resigns from his ministry
• “purity culture is rape culture”; the former teaches that male sexuality is innately aggressive, and feminine sexuality is innately passive and nurturing: put these two together and you naturalize rape … an anthropological truth: it’s women’s job to make sure that men’s sexuality is contained (James Dobson and others)
• numerous sex scandals involving the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and many individuals (Swaggart; Haggard; Lentz; Falwell Jr; Hybels; Ravi Zaccharias, … )
• this normalization of a rape culture is in part behind white Evangelicals voting for Trump despite his morality, life-style and what he says (the infamous Access Hollywood tape)
• the myth that the white Evangelical family, as the foundation of the nation state, is a safe place, and that church is also a safe place. But both turned out to NOT be safe places!
• the linkage between Purity Culture and Christian Nationalism
• creating home school coalitions
• Trump’s attempts at religious piety (e.g., holding up a Bible in front of a church which had been cleared of protesters using tear gas; references to Bible verses)
• the more impactful sexual revolution happened in the 1920s, when it became acceptable to separate sex from procreation
• the sexual revolution(s) eventually hit Evangelicalism (in the 70s?)
• what we didn’t have in the 70s was the concept of consent …. and Purity Culture did not help: Purity Culture became rape culture
• gender identity, and the corresponding politics
• the After Purity Project: interviewed 65 people who grew up in and out of Purity Culture, and now talking to scholars about the data; a book is in the works.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more about Dr. Moslener at her personal website, and at Central Michigan University’s article which highlights the After Purity Project.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like you may also like Episode #48, where we talk to Kristen Kobes Du Mez about Christian Nationalism and toxic masculinity, or Episode #114 with Frank Schaeffer about the birth of the Christian Right and the rise of the Moral Majority.

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