Evangelical purity culture and its discontents

This issue brings together the work of the Purity Culture Research Collective, an independent and unaffiliated organization of scholars, mental health professionals, artists, and advocates dedicated to studying the origins and impact of evangelical purity culture. Started in the summer of 2020 by Liv Schultz and Tessi Muskrat, both student scholars at the time, the PCRC has been meeting monthly for three years providing opportunities for researchers to share their work.¹ The explosion of interest in purity culture is evident in the research happening at all levels of academia and beyond. Like the essays in this issue, the study of purity culture is an interdisciplinary project, using a variety of theories and methods including those from psychology, religious studies, sociology, ethics, biblical/theological studies, queer studies, feminist studies, historical studies, and critical race studies.

Though the ideology of sexual purity has a long and fraught history within North America, purity culture is a concept that refers specifically to a movement begun in the early 1990s by White evangelical organizations and leaders who developed entire youth ministries around the goal of encouraging adolescents to pledge themselves to sexual abstinence until entering what they called a ‘biblical marriage relationship’.² A term first introduced by scholar Donna Freitas in her book Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses, purity culture describes a set of norms, practices, and beliefs that became imbued with gospel-like significance for young evangelicals.³ Sexual purity, we learned, was an instruction book for how to achieve relational and personal salvation.

Organizations such as True Love Waits and Silver Ring Thing, and Christian teachers and authors such as Pam Stenzel, Leslie and Eric Ludy, Stephen Arterburn, Joshua Harris, and Danna Gresh, went all in on a project that asserted evangelical, Christian morality held a singular promise for adolescent, spiritual formation and sexual development.⁴ At the same time, evangelical leaders claimed that young people who make a commitment to sexual abstinence before marriage must also claim a commitment to the Christian faith. For a particular generation of teenagers between 1994 and 2010 (and beyond), spiritual formation and lessons in sexual restraint and shame went hand in hand.

The term evangelical purity culture gained prominence among those who grew up and out of purity culture when Linda Kay Klein published her book Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Learned to Break Free.⁵ Klein’s publication, along with works like D. Anderson’s Damaged Goods: New Perspectives on Christian Purity gave voice to the growing resistance toward purity culture teachings.⁶ Both addressed the significant harm of teachings that equated disembodiment with religious piety and sanctified heterosexism, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny. Meanwhile, online, hundreds of bloggers, social media users, podcasters, and authors had already been detailing their adverse experiences with purity teachings, giving testimony to harms including gender-based exclusionary practices (female submission), the justification of sexual grooming and assault by religious leaders, and the White supremacist and heteronormative frameworks upon which purity culture depends. In the bibliography included in this issue, we point to 85 online sources from 2011 to 2023 alone, some of which are only a sample of more prolific authors, to illustrate the breadth of public writing on purity culture and to acknowledge the expansive historical record of online post-purity testimonials. Our research projects – Sara’s books Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence and After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America (forthcoming with Beacon Press) and Kathryn’s dissertation project The Afterlife of White Evangelical Purity Culture: Wounds, Legacies, and Impacts, were forged amid this growing conversation.⁷

Given the public backlash to evangelical purity culture and the growing recognition that public-facing scholarship is as valuable as peer-reviewed work, we have approached this journal issue with multiple goals. First, we have sought to expand assumptions about what counts as authoritative, encouraging our authors to combine traditional scholarship and ethnographic self-reflexivity. Second, we have allowed our shared topic of study to guide us toward the research and writing practices that are best suited to communicate our conclusions to audiences both inside and outside the academy. Finally, we have allowed our broader commitments to feminist inquiry and embodied knowledge to challenge our own assumptions about how we support the conclusions of our work.

While some authors elected to frame their work in traditional academic prose, others make use of self-reflexive analysis to acknowledge their own experiences as informing their arguments and conclusions. As co-editors, we encouraged submissions employing various methods of inquiry because we wanted this issue to stand as an exemplar of how traditional academic analysis can be released from the confines of disembodied scholarship and is enriched by a diversity of approaches to our shared topic of interest. This collection of essays reflects emerging scholarship both within and beyond the academy. We are especially grateful for colleagues who work as mental health professionals whose impact on traditional academic analysis has allowed us to think in new ways about the benefits and goals of academic work. The energy and focus of emerging scholars equip us to think deeply about being researchers who critique patriarchy and White supremacy and advocate for healthy sexuality and gender formation.

This issue represents evangelical purity culture as a distinctly White Protestant phenomenon, rooted in historical constructions of White womanhood. Many of the essays in this special issue are authored by individuals who were socialized into purity culture as White girls and women where colorblind ideologies circumvented our understanding of how these teachings shaped our racial identity. Some essays foreground how colorblind ideologies harmed them as women of color within White Evangelicalism. Previous research by Monique Moultrie, Kera Street, Madison N., Brittney Cooper, and Tamura Lomax describe the contours and complexities of purity culture in non-White Protestant traditions.⁸ They illuminate the ways purity culture has created lasting, harmful stereotypes about Black and Brown women who have been historically excluded from the privileges of sexual purity. Informed by this work, we seek to understand sexual purity as a form of racial power that exploits illusions of racial and sexual innocence ascribed to White womanhood on behalf of larger religious and national projects.

When we approach sexual purity as a project in racial formation, we do not see uniform patterns of experience between racial groups. Instead, we observe how the impact of purity on White, Black, Asian, and Indigenous identities reveal how historical and contemporary purity practices can be deployed both as racial power and empowerment. Even as discontent with White Evangelical purity teachings grows, critiques based solely on gender and sexuality are insufficient for understanding how these lessons created sexual and racial others. Within White evangelicalism and other right-wing conservative spaces, White women’s presumed innocence is easily weaponized toward any real or perceived threat (non-white men, drag queens, immigrants, non-Christians). The pervasive impact of sexual purity ideologies has imbued White womanhood writ large with racial power, a sobering reality that keeps us attuned to the perpetuation of White supremacist thinking in our own work.

We are also attuned to the climate of sexual and gender-based abuse that infects much of White evangelicalism, many of us having crafted our self-understandings within these contexts. Many of us were raised in White evangelical communities where our intellectual gifts were often not acknowledged as valuable. Re-assessing, critiquing, and leaving one’s religious community and family of origin requires profound, life-long relational work. But holding these frameworks of our formation accountable provides many of us a lifeline as we engage questions we were never able to articulate.

Rebecca Wolfe is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California San Francisco where she is finishing a dissertation on evangelical purity culture and the development of eating disorders. Rebekah Vickery holds an MA in Counseling Psychology from the Seattle School of Theology and is a Licenses Mental Health Counselor. Together, they have co-authored an essay entitled ‘Graham Crackers and Good Girls: Manifestations of Purity Culture in the Female Body’ that begins with an original poem written by Rebekah, an intentional choice by the authors to complicate academic conventions that elevate knowledge of the mind over knowledge of the body. The poem frames their historical and sociological analysis which allows them to describe how purity culture is mapped onto female bodies.

Their essay begins with the well-established claim that evangelical purity culture demand bodily control. However, they argue that this control is not limited to sexual appetites, but also makes claims on the shapes and size of bodies. For people assigned female at birth within patriarchal religious communities, this means contending with bodily ideals informed by deep suspicion of female desires and appetites. Using Foucault’s concept of biopower, the authors examine how purity culture dictates expectations about food and sexuality. Within Christian theology, abstention from both is associated with holiness, as the containment and control of bodies, especially non-male bodies, controls sinful behavior.

Situating purity culture within a broader history of Christianity and food restriction, this essay expands our understanding of how White evangelicalism is invested in controlling bodies that do not confirm to White supremacist, patriarchal norms. The denial of bodily needs has long been associated with Christian piety, practices that today are recognized as disembodiment that encourages young evangelicals to distrust their bodies, even viewing them as sinful. These Christian teachings easily map onto female-bodies ideals of thinness, ideals that are gendered and raced by the demands of holiness and purity.

Tessi Muskrat is a doctoral student in the Department of Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology at the University of Missouri, Columbia. She is also a co-founder of the Purity Culture Research Collective. In her essay ‘The Space Between: Liminal Time Within Purity Culture’ she examines the rituals of purity culture that she practiced as an adolescent. Tessi identifies as a bi-racial Indigenous women who was raised female within White evangelicalism. At an early age she learned that her Indigenous heritage was an obstacle to her Christian faith development.

As a scholar seeking to connect with non-western forms of analysis, Tessi compares the rites of initiation within purity culture to those of traditional indigenous societies. She demonstrates how the rites of purity culture are practiced without any concern for stages of spiritual or sexual development. By focusing on liminal experiences of adult initiation, Muskrat points to the ways that purity rituals in White evangelicalism disrupt self-development rather than create continuity for young people on the cup for adulthood. Furthermore, she argues, purity culture offers only one form of re-integration to the community through heteronormative marriage.

Jenny McGrath is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, and independent scholar. Jenny’s private practice focuses on the psycho-somatic impacts of religious trauma and sexual abuse, and her research engages these personal experiences through the collective lens of Christian Nationalism.

In McGrath’s essay ‘Pure to Purpose Pipeline: Socializing Purity in White Women’s International Aid Work’, McGrath interrogates the intersection of purity culture, Whiteness, and international aid work. McGrath begins by familiarizing readers with insidious binaries of purity culture and the required sexual and racial performances of its praxis. She maps purity culture's commitments and attends to personal and systemic harms – always raced, gendered, and sexualized. McGrath situates her analysis within her experiences of growing up steeped in evangelicalism in Colorado Springs, CO. She narrates critical moments and characteristics of her formation and de/formation in purity culture in ways that illumine purity culture's constriction of self-knowledge and intuition, its rigid patriarchal commitments, and its enfleshed messages. Her stories are particular and powerful, and they bear resonances with so many stories of confusion, shame, and a desire to self-correct that are common among those who bear witness to the problematic legacies of purity culture.

McGrath then makes poignant connections between her experiences with purity culture teachings and her desire to become a missionary in Northern Uganda, giving readers a glimpse into her forthcoming work on the cross-pollination of purity culture teachings and the narratives that compelled young, White women to pursue missionary work in the 2000s. She describes the impact of the film Invisible Children on her own decision and gestures to uninterrogated intersections of Whiteness, power, and purity that she is continuing to explore in a forthcoming ethnographic research study and manuscript entitled I'll Save You: White Women and the Transnationalization of Purity Culture.

Olivia (Liv) Schultz is an independent scholar living in Ottawa, Ontario. They hold an MA in Religions and Cultures from Concordia University and co-founded the Purity Culture Research Collective. Olivia’s essay ‘Navigating Evangelical Affect: Convictions, Promises, and Dissonance in Adolescent Adherence to Purity Teachings’ explores how evangelical purity culture utilized affect to convict adolescents to adhere to traditional Christian lifestyles, despite demonstration of harm. Drawing on Sarah Ahmed’s work in affect theory, Liv interrogates purity movements as projects that use the thrall of happiness and pleasant futures to increase adolescents’ investments in evangelical belief systems and communities.

This essay asks the reader to use a hermeneutics of suspicion when considering the demands of purity as a promise of happiness. Happiness is not a gift freely given, but one that needs to be earned through obedience. Purity culture, Liv argues, does not extend happy futures to those deemed disobedient and unable or unwilling to conform to its practices. Like Ahmed, she wants us to lift the curtain on the happiness project of White evangelicalism and attend to the ways that its demands create insiders and outsiders and to ask why these divisions exist, who is situated on which side, and why.

They go on to argue that evangelical affect acts as a cover, or an interpretive lens for youth to understand stories of harm and disaffection. Learning that evangelicalism and purity are functions of happiness, youth often interpret the harm as a result from individual sin or disobedience rather than a systemic issue. To face the harm may mean breaking the happy story youth have learned to tell about their lives. That may stop youth from critically engaging with those narratives and allows for the continual perpetuation and embodiment of evangelical purity culture.

Melissa Payne is a Registered Psychotherapist living in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and founder of Grounded Psychotherapy. Her essay, ‘Women’s Sexuality and Embodiment in Canadian Evangelicalism’ examines sexuality, embodiment and the spiritual lives of women in Canadian evangelicalism. As someone who spent her early years in evangelical contexts, her research is informed by her own experiences with purity culture in Canadian evangelicalism. In her research, she interviewed 11 women between the ages of 23 and 35, including 10 White women, 1 Black woman, and 1 woman with Chinese, Black and White mixed racial identity. Recognizing that Christianity as a religious tradition has a historic investment in sexual repression, she demonstrates how these women from four different Canadian evangelical contexts have navigated the demands and expectations of their religious communities.

In her essay she points toward an important comparative analysis of Canadian and US evangelicalism with differences stemming from a more expansive and diverse understanding of Christianity in the north. Following shifts toward the far-right in US churches, Canadian evangelicals have sought over the years to define itself in contrast to the broader religious landscape. In doing so, she helps to establish the ways that evangelical beliefs, including purity culture teachings, move between across borders as conservative evangelicals seek to secure a religious system which they feel needs to be consistent in belief and practice.

The analysis of her interviews reveals several important insights into the experiences of Canadian women. The themes that emerge in Payne’s research reinforce other findings about the adverse impact of purity culture on the lives and bodies of women. She identifies her interviewees sexual shame as feeling the need to hide their bodies, even from themselves. Taught their bodies were a temptation to men, they also learned that they had no right to their own sexual pleasure and no opportunities to discover their own bodily autonomy. As a result of being socialized in this context, these women learned that being a faithful Christian and experiencing oneself as a sexual being were incompatible.

Mihee Kim-Kort is a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at Indiana University. Her article: ‘“Daddy I Do”: Purity Balls, Evangelical Ideals of Femininity, Family Values, and Whiteness’, examines the rituals associated with purity balls in order to understand how evangelical purity culture reinforces racialized norms of Whiteness in relationship to national belonging. Kim-Kort’s analysis of two documentaries on the purity ball phenomenon tease out the relationships between female sexuality, intimacy, and community within White evangelical groups and how of romance becomes a source of sacred meaning.

Kim-Kort explains how purity balls combine fantasy and theology to enact a liturgy of sacred fairy tales. Reinforced by parental approval and family cultures, the romanticization of purity at these events relies upon the belief that the father/daughter relationship is the starting point for a successful heteronormative marriage life. By parsing the romantic idealism of purity culture, Kim-Kort is able to demonstrate how its advocates have been able to map a young women’s desire for marriage onto her spiritual formation. By doing so, virginity becomes a mark of personal salvation and marital fulfillment.

As in most of evangelical purity culture, the purity ball events situate virginity as a distinctly feminine trait, one that draws on long established ideals of a ‘Godly’ woman. Maintaining these ideals is not simply a matter of aspiration, but a test of one’s fidelity to God. And the states are high, for a young woman incapable or unwilling to meet these expectations risks her relationship to God, her family, and her status within her community. Ultimately, Kim-Kort argues, these purity practices and rituals point toward a particular form of American exceptionalism that marks the White, evangelical family as the foundation of U.S. national thriving.

Lauren Sawyer holds a PhD in Christian Ethics and currently serves as the Curriculum Coordinator at The Allender Center in Seattle Washington. Victoria Houser holds a PhD in Rhetoric from Clemson University and is a Lecturer in the Writing Program at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Together they have co-authored an essay entitled, ‘Purity Culture and the Limits of Queer Evangelicalism’ in which they explore how ex-gay movements within evangelicalism makes use of sexual purity rhetoric to carve out an identity for people who identify as LGBTQIA + within their evangelical communities.

In their essay, they raise questions about how this arrangement both endorses queer politics while remaining committed to heteronormative and anti-queer beliefs that characterize evangelicalism in the U.S. By analyzing the popular celibacy narratives of Gregory Coles and Jackie Hill Perry, Lauren and Victoria invite readers to consider how the rhetorical strategies deployed by these texts draw from both purity culture and queer politics. By design, purity culture is one of mandatory heterosexuality. By reading this alongside queer theories of futurity, Sawyer and House are able to demonstrate how evangelical celibacy narratives challenges the reproduction of heteronormativity, while also claiming the moral authority that purity denotes.

In the end, the authors leave us with a set of questions about queerness, celibacy, purity, and evangelical identity to help us look more closely at ways that heterosexism is disrupted within evangelical communities. The concept of queer celibacy is one that offers a frame for thinking more deeply about the complexities of identity, religion, and sexuality.

Elizabeth Gish holds a PhD from Harvard Divinity School and is a senior program officer of Democracy and Community at the Kettering Foundation. Her article, ‘Matter out of Place? On Dirt and Fantasies of Salvific Purity’ theorizes the sexual purity within broader ideals that mandate order, cleanliness, and containment as protection against fear and chaos. She makes the argument that purity in all its forms promotes a fantasy that human beings be spared the complexities of the human experience. In religious terms, purity becomes a means of salvation.

Evangelical purity culture, in particular, is a means to control women and girls so that their efforts and representations are always invested in maintaining that status quo of the family, church, and nation-state. However, Gish contends that purity rhetorics are not circumscribed by evangelical Christianity, but used more broadly to construct frameworks of regulation that sustain the theo-political norms of the nation-state. These frameworks coerce bodies and behaviors into a pre-constructed world, rather than allowing for everyday human experiences and decision-making to create a world suitable for all bodies.

But the most significant contribution of Gish’s argument is her examination of theories of purity which aim to produce universal claims of what purity is and is not, an effort which itself is already bound up in the logics of purity: unity, singularity, separateness. In doing so she posits that purity is not an objective metric, but one that is deployed toward a particular goal. Evangelical purity culture, Gish contends, is not characterized by this fixed focus because the goal itself is unobtainable by design. The demands of purity culture by all accounts are ever-changing. As with efforts to order the disordered, ambitions for sexual purity reveal the failure of achieving an ideal.

We close this issue with a substantive bibliography developed by Elizabeth Gish and Kathryn House. Our hope is to provide scholars unfamiliar with evangelical purity culture a starting point, but also to publish a document that traces the development of what has become a niche field within a number of larger fields. The bibliography alone demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of studying our topic as well as the necessity of making our work accessible and meaningful to non-academic audiences.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathryn House

Kathryn House, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Leadership Studies and Practical Theology and Chair of the Rev. Dr. Lee Barker Professorship of Leadership Studies at Meadville Lombard Theological School. She holds a Ph.D. and MDiv from Boston University School of Theology. House is ordained through the American Baptist Churches USA and Alliance of Baptists.

Sara Moslener

Sara Moslener, Ph.D. is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Anthropology, and Religion at Central Michigan University. She is the author of Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence (Oxford: 2015) and After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America (forthcoming Beacon Press, 2025).

Notes

1 Purity Culture Research Collective, “Purity Culture Research Collective.”

2 Sara Moslener includes the True Love Waits pledge from which the phrase ‘biblical marriage relationship’ originates. See Moslener, Virgin Nation, 109. Painter, “Why ‘White’ Should Be Capitalized.”

3 Freitas, Sex and the Soul. Freitas describes purity culture in Chapter 4, “Evangelical Purity Culture: Its Princesses and Warriors.”

4 Brumley, “True Love Waits.” To read about Silver Ring Thing, see pages 130–154. Moslener, Virgin Nation. A sample of works from these authors include: Kirgiss and Stenzel, Sex Has a Price Tag; Ludy and Ludy, When God Writes Your Love Story; Arterburn, Stoeker, and Yorkey, Every Young Man’s Battle; Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye; Gresh, And the Bride Wore White.

5 Klein, Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement.

6 Anderson, Damaged Goods.

7 Moslener, Virgin Nation; House, “The Afterlife of White Evangelical Purity Culture.”

8 Moultrie, Passionate and Pious; Street, “For Purity’s Sake”; Natarajan et al., “Decolonizing Purity Culture”; Cooper, Eloquent Rage; Tamura Lomax, “#BlackSkinWhiteSin.”