Lauren D. Sawyer, "Growing Up Pure: White Girls, Queer Teens, and the Racial Foundations of Purity Culture" (NYU Press, 2025)

Jan 22, 2026

Dr. Lauren D. Sawyer, a Professor of theology and culture and author of Growing Up Pure, discusses the complexities of purity culture, highlighting its ties to white supremacy. She challenges the notion of white youth as mere victims, arguing they benefit from privileges that perpetuate harmful behaviors. Lauren explores the historical roots of purity movements, the racial dynamics at play, and how teens navigate and subvert these norms. Her work prompts a reexamination of adolescent agency, accountability, and the lingering impacts of these cultural constructs.

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INSIGHT

Purity Culture As White Supremacy

Purity culture functions as a white supremacist political project that ties sexual purity to racial purity.
Lauren D. Sawyer argues purity culture centers white youth as needing protection while othering racialized bodies.

INSIGHT

1990s Movement Rooted In Older Purity Threads

The 1990s True Love Waits movement mainstreamed abstinence-only messages among millions of U.S. teens.
Sawyer traces these messages back to earlier social purity, eugenics, and racialized protection of the nation.

INSIGHT

Performance Of Purity Grants Power

White youth often gained social power by performing purity, accessing social and romantic opportunities denied to non-white peers.
Sawyer emphasizes agency and complicity: youth both resisted and benefited from purity norms.

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Gaining mass popularity in the mid-1990s with the True Love Waits rally on the Washington Mall, purity culture began as an urge from evangelical conservatives for Christian adolescents to publicly commit to practicing abstinence until marriage. Throughout this decade and the next, millions of evangelical teenagers performed their commitment to sexual purity by signing pledges and wearing purity rings.

Growing Up Pure: White Girls, Queer Teens, and the Racial Foundations of Purity Culture (NYU Press, 2025) by Dr. Lauren D. Sawyer examines the shaping of purity culture in the United States, looking specifically at the experiences of white youth. It shows that white girls and white queer youth were vulnerable to the purity movement, but that they were also complicit in its white supremacist oppressive structure. It makes the case that purity culture follows in the footsteps of other purity movements in the United States, and is very much tied to centuries of anti-Black racism and xenophobia in US social history, seeing white youth as in need of protection, usually from a racialized, sexualized other.
While other works have focused on the ways in which purity culture has victimized young people, Dr. Sawyer argues that their perceived status as victims lets them too easily off the hook. White youth have been afforded the privilege of participating in purity culture’s harmful behaviors without being called to account. Closely reading adolescents’ stories of growing up in purity culture, she uncovers youth as agents, participants, and beneficiaries of its white supremacist framing, even as they were still vulnerable to its harmful teachings.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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