The space between: liminal time within purity culture

ABSTRACT

Purity culture is an evangelical Christian approach to teaching sexuality and gendered relationship expectations to adolescents. Formal induction to purity culture often begins with an event that mirrors the opening of a rite of passage and is expected to culminate in heterosexual marriage, a ceremony that acts as a reintegration ritual and completes the rite. The author employs her positionality as a biracial Indigenous woman raised in purity culture to bring an Indigenous perspective to this topic. She uses autoethnography and an ethnographic look at data from a large-scale qualitative research project about purity culture’s outcomes to argue that the intensity of the separation rite that introduced the participant to purity culture, the amount of time spent in a liminal purity culture space, the participants’ acceptance of the role of ‘ritual agent,’ and how purity culture ‘ends’ for a participant all significantly impact the way they experience purity culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Purity culture
• Christianity
• liminality
• rite of passage
• race

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Gardner, Making Chastity Sexy.

2 Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, 84; Ludy and Ludy, When God Writes Your Love Story; Gardner, Making Chastity Sexy; Moslener, Virgin Nation; Elliot, Passion and Purity.

3 Gish, “Producing High Priests and Princesses”; Gish, “Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation”; Fahs, “Daddy’s Little Girls.”

4 Gish, “‘Are You a “Trashable” Styrofoam Cup?’”; Klein, Pure; Sellers, Sex, God, and the Conservative Church.

5 Allison, #ChurchToo; Klement, Sagarin, and Skowronski, “The One Ring Model”; Klement and Sagarin, “Nobody Wants to Date a Whore.”

6 Schultz, “Purity Culture’s Racist Fruit”; Natarajan et al., “Decolonizing Purity Culture”; Moultrie, Passionate and Pious; Lomax, Jezebel Unhinged.

7 Baldy, We Are Dancing; Gennep, The Rites of Passage; Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice; Shapiro and Talamantez, “The Mescalero Apache Girls”; Mahdi, Foster, and Little, Betwixt & Between; Markstrom and Iborra, “Adolescent Identity Formation.”

8 Gennep, The Rites of Passage; Thomassen, Liminality and the Modern; Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. The Rites of Passage was originally published in French as Les Rites de Passage and not translated into English until 1960, after the author’s death.

9 Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 11.

10 Ellis, Adams, and Bochner, “Autoethnography,” 273.

11 Chang, “Autoethnography”; Iosefo, “Moon Walking.”

12 Brave Heart et al., “Women Finding the Way”; Mankiller, Every Day.

13 Sefa Dei, “Rethinking the Role of Indigenous Knowledges.”

14 Ibid.

15 Natarajan et al., “Decolonizing Purity Culture,” 4.

16 To be clear, in an era of academics claiming Indigenous heritage for decades and then retracting their claims as not-documentable, falsified, or based only on family stories: I am a registered member of The Cherokee Nation, Oklahoma, with ancestors documented in the Dawes Rolls. One of my grandfathers, several generations removed, was forcibly relocated during The Removal (also known as The Trail of Tears), which is how much of my family ended up in North Eastern Oklahoma. In 2019, while visiting the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, I was pleasantly surprised to see a familiar family photo on display: my great, great aunt, Ruth Muskrat Bronson whose poem, “The Trail of Tears,” is credited with bringing attention to the Indian Removal Act’s impact on American Indians around the United States and who was a well-known and fervent defender of Indian rights throughout the twentieth century.

17 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 129.

18 Schultz, “Purity Culture’s Racist Fruit,” 4.

19 Ibid.

20 Moslener, Virgin Nation; Natarajan et al., “Decolonizing Purity Culture”; Schultz, “Purity Culture’s Racist Fruit”; Moultrie, Passionate and Pious. The work of scholarship on purity culture, race, racism, purity movements, and Christian nationalism is ongoing. The authors listed above are a great place to start, and I expect we will see more scholarship on this topic soon.

21 Miranda, Bad Indians. Though this book is more about racialized religious abuse than purity culture, I consider it required reading as an introduction to the impact that Christianity has had on Indigenous peoples across the American continents. This book shattered me in all the best ways, and the author’s work on the concept of the Bad Indian has significantly informed my understanding of where my own internalized racism came from, and how to begin to exorcise it.

22 Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye; Harris, Not Even a Hint; Ludy and Ludy, When God Writes; Elliot, Passion and Purity.

23 Harris, “Trip to Japan.”

24 Natarajan et al., “Decolonizing Purity Culture”; Klement, Sagarin, and Skowronski, “The One Ring Model”; Allison, #ChurchToo; Moslener, Virgin Nation; Newland, “Federal Indian Boarding School.”

25 Manning, “Exploring Family Discourses About Purity Pledges”; Manning, “Examining Health and Relationship Beliefs”; Klein, Pure; Natarajan et al., “Decolonizing Purity Culture.” Manning interviewed thirteen families (in a single community) in which at least one daughter wore a purity ring and had signed a purity vow, and Klein incorporates interviews and academic research in her analysis of the impact of purity culture on people’s bodies, health, sexuality, and identity. Natarajan et al. was published after my qualitative project was begun.

26 Not all participants completed demographic questions. The numbers listed are totals of those who selected race, gender, or orientation options. Other participants identified as Latinx (n = 30), Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander (n = 21), Black or African American (n = 19), American Indian or Alaskan Native (n = 11), and Asian (n = 6).

27 Reimer, “The Taboo of Virginity,” 218.

28 Baldy, We Are Dancing For You.

29 Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 206.

30 Harris, Not Even a Hint, 57. Emphasis in the original.

31 Turner, The Ritual Process, 103.

32 Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, 111–19.

33 Ludy and Ludy, When God Writes Your Love Story, 187–93.

34 Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye; Ludy and Ludy, When God Writes Your Love Story; Elliot, Passion and Purity.

35 Moultrie, Passionate and Pious; Schultz, Olivia, “Purity Culture’s Racist Fruit”; Lomax, Jezebel Unhinged.

36 Natarajan et al., “Decolonizing Purity Culture.”

37 “Rites of Passage.”

38 Rosenbaum, “Patient Teenagers?”; Rosenbaum and Weathersbee, “True Love Waits”; Barnett, Martin, and Melugin, “Making and Breaking Abstinence Pledges.”

39 Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 221.

40 Turner, The Ritual Process.

41 Natarajan et al., “Decolonizing Purity Culture,” 10.

42 Thomassen, Liminality and the Modern, 90.

43 Ibid., 92.

Additional information

Funding

I would like to thank the McNair Scholars Program of the University of Missouri, the Mizzou Honors College, Peggy and Andrew Cheng, and the Panda Charitable Foundation for their financial support of my work on this project.

Notes on contributors

Tessi Muskrat

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.