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ABSTRACT
Purity balls, which were a part of larger evangelical Protestant social outreach projects in the U.S., illustrate the social and political impact of a theology of ‘family values,' constructed by cultural liturgies that prescribe parameters around sexual activity, gender identity, and marriage. These theological practices also perpetuate racialized structures by upholding purity specifically as whiteness. Examining this ritual as a representative segment of not only evangelical movements but projects around American national identity provides a meaningful exploration into the dynamic between religion and secularism with implications for how evangelicalism shapes social and political realities by delineating personhood. I analyze purity balls as presented in two documentaries, The Virgin Daughters and Virgin Tales and critique the effects of purity in terms of virginity and marriage, the figuration of gender through the female body, an ethos based on ‘family values,’ and the formation of U.S. American identity and white femininity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Jane Treays, The Virgin Daughters.
2 The first purity ball was held in 1998 becoming so successful it spread across 48 states and 17 countries since its founding. Numerous venues and publications have included write-ups about it from the Huffington Post to the Oprah magazine. For example, according to a 2012 New York Times article, journalist Jessica Valenti reported in her book that ‘more than 1,400 purity balls were held in 2006. Her footnote refers to a 2007 article by Jocelyne Zablit, who gives as the source of that figure Leslee J. Unruh, the president of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse, in South Dakota. Her organization had 4,600 ‘inquiries’ about purity balls in one recent 12-month period, Ms. Unruh said. The inquiries were ‘for purity ball planners that eventually went out, or that a staff person had a phone conversation with.’ Randy Wilson said that he doubted the figure of 1,400 purity balls a year, which he first heard in the news media. It was also reporters, he said, who gave him the figure he uses on his website. ‘They reported them being held in 48 different states,’ Mr. Wilson said. Ms. Unruh said that however many balls actually occur, the idea has spread, and many chastity-promotion events now go by other names. There are ‘father-daughter balls,’ and there are ‘Knights to Remember’ dances, for mothers and sons.’ (Mark Oppenheimer, “‘Purity Balls’ Get Attention, but Might Not Be All They Claim,” New York Times, July 21, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/us/purity-balls-local-tradition-or-national-trend.html)
3 The way I understand and use ‘whiteness’ is rooted in Black studies and critical race theories which broadly articulates it as a theologically, politically, legally, aesthetically, and socially constructed identity that not only produces and reproduces (the structures of) White supremacy but the normative standards by which all other peoples’ identities are constructed and simultaneously constitute the boundaries around the positionality of whiteness. I also adhere to the suggestion by the editors to follow Nell Irvin Painter’s critique that we capitalize the ‘w’ for White to signal the identity simultaneous construction in our racialized structures. Where it is not capitalized in terms of constructed identity is in quotations of another work and keeping to their style or when I use it in ‘whiteness.’
4 I use Virgin Daughters and Virgin Tales as there are relatively few sources available in terms of providing direct data of purity balls. They provide a balanced, ethnographic perspective on the phenomenon with interviews, conversations, and a view of the purity ball rituals themselves. A third documentary that I do not use is Daddy’s Little Girl by Amandajean Freking Nolte, which is a 2009 production that critiques purity balls through a materialist feminist critique of the event ‘specifically, the culture of chastity and abstinence-only education generally, and the societal control of girls’ bodies – namely, their sexual desire and agency – systemically through the institutions of education, religion, and the nuclear family.’ Freitag, “Daddy’s Little Girl,” 57–72. I chose not to use this third documentary because I wanted to focus on the Wilson family and their role in constructing this subculture.
5 I rely on Catherine Bell’s anthropological and theoretical work on ritual in terms of the fractal nature of rituals and how they are a part of the larger fabric of how people ‘make and remake their worlds,’ as well as the questions around the category of ritual and ritual studies, her engagement of the possibilities and problems of capitulating to performance theories and theories of practice, and finally her inclusion of power dynamics via Gramsci and Althusser in terms of ritualization, especially ‘ritualized environments.’ See Bell, Ritual; Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice.
6 Valenti, The Purity Myth, 9.
7 I use both liturgy/liturgical and ritual to talk about purity balls, and while they may seem similar, when I use liturgy/liturgical I aim to emphasize the Christian theological characteristic of the practice and performance of purity in its social and political impact.
8 Gardner, Making Chastity Sexy, 15.
9 Gibbs, “The Pursuit of Teen Girl Purity”.
10 According to the website, the fathers and daughters speak these vows, and sign a pledge, which reads: I, (Daughter's Name)'s Father, Choose Before God To Cover My Daughter As Her Authority And Protection In The Area Of Purity. I Will Be Pure In My Own Life As A Man, Husband And Father. I Will Be A Man Of Integrity And Accountability As I Lead, Guide And Pray Over My Daughter And My Family As The High Priest In My Home. This Covering Will Be Used By God To Influence Generations To Come. (“The Pledge,” Generations of Light, http://generationsoflight.com/html/thepledge.html.)
11 A comprehensive look into the sexual behavior of U.S. Americans, D’Emilio and Freedman give us a deeper understanding of how sexuality has dramatically influenced politics and culture throughout our history, and the religious traditions that shaped values around certain behaviors. D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters. See also Blank, Virgin.
12 John Bartkowski provides historical, ethnographic, and textual analysis of how in recent history evangelical families negotiate gender roles in marriage and family life by comparing historical or ‘elite’ evangelical prescriptions for godly family living with the day-to-day practices in conservative Protestant households. Although his research looks at the development of these tensions and contradictions, and how they are worked out in individual families, it is pertinent here as another example of how gender is constructed in terms of relationship in the evangelical cultural context. Bartkowski, Remaking the Godly Marriage
13 DeRogatis, Saving Sex, 148.
14 “American Virgins,” BBC United Kingdom, January 22, 2004 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/3412783.stm.
15 Like the purity ball, purity campaigns like True Love Waits and the Silver Ring Thing rely on a similar discursive model that upholds virginity as the basis for a Christian engagement of purity as the foundation for the only legitimate morality. Both True Love Waits and the Silver Ring Thing host church youth rally-like events, though True Love Waits is widely credited with launching the contemporary evangelical sexual abstinence movement, and known for their stadium filled rallies and hugely dramatic public displays of signed abstinence pledge cards. The Silver Ring Thing program was created in 1995 by Denny and Amy Pattyn as a response to the escalating numbers of teen pregnancies in Yuma, Arizona, and was moved to Pittsburgh, PA in 2000. Since that time, SRT has hosted nearly 1,300 events in 9 countries, reaching 684,000+ total attendees. Of this number, more than 255,000 students have received rings as a symbol of their commitment to remain pure and abstain from sex until marriage. ‘True Love Waits,’ Lifeway, http://www.lifeway.com/n/Product-Family/True-Love-Waits, ‘What is Silver Ring Thing?’, Silver Ring Thing, https://www.silverringthing.com/what-is-silver-ring-thing
16 Blank, Virgin, 10–11.
17 Jennifer Baumgardner, "Would You Pledge Your Virginity to Your Father?”, Glamour, December 31, 2006 https://www.glamour.com/story/purity-balls.
18 Fahs, “Daddy’s Little Girls”.
19 This is a phrase used by scholars of evangelical Christianity to describe a mode of outreach whereby evangelical faith communities seek to provide experiences that are culturally legible and relevant through processes and procedures of adaptation but still emphasize a Biblical authority. Noll, American Evangelical Christianity, 2.
20 Black, “Evangelicals, Politics, and Public Policy,”128.
21 This is a direct quote from the ‘Generations of Light’ website and more information can be found here: http://www.generationsoflight.com/html/theschoolofgrace.html.
22 Evangelical Christian Women gives us a nuanced angle on the story of evangelical women negotiating their gender identity and faith, and offering a critique of how terms like ‘submission’ are used in problematic ways. It confirms the conservatism of these evangelical purity movement adherents especially in the careful and intentional construction of the female subject. Ingersoll, Evangelical Christian Women.
23 Sally K. Gallagher argues that both traditional and egalitarian evangelicals draw on long standing beliefs about gender, human nature, and the person of God. Although this historical and sociological work traces two characteristics of evangelicalism – one of husbands’ authority and leadership, the other of mutuality and partnership in marriage – there is resonance here with what is occurring in the purity ball specifically, and more broadly, what is enacted in the Wilson’s home. The voice of authority is clearly located in Randy as father and figurehead of the family, but the single interviews with Lisa, or when they are together but only she is speaking, suggests an agential role in upholding a particular kind of partnership that is acceptable in this framework. Gallagher, Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life.
24 Once more, Bartkowski explores the disputes and ambivalence concerning traditional gender roles and patriarchal models of family life, which derive from the tension between evangelical Protestantism as a religious subculture and the broader American secular culture in which it is embedded. He reveals how evangelical men and women jointly negotiate gender roles within their families and selectively appropriate values of the larger culture even as they attempt to cope with the conflicting messages of their own faith. Bartkowski, Remaking the Godly Marriage, [xxx].
25 See Dowland, Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right for the historical connections between politics and purity, and establishing the Christian Right through the white, heteropatriarchal family unit.
26 Gardner, Making Chastity Sexy, 24.
27 Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, 53.
28 See especially the chapter on “The Kinsey Revolution and the challenge to Female Chastity,” in R. Marie Griffith, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2017) where she traces the impact of Kinsey’s publications of sex and religion especially around female chastity, and the response by well known evangelicals like Billy Graham, who warned, ‘It is impossible to estimate the damage this book will do to the already deteriorating morals of America,’ (140).
29 Moslener, Virgin Nation, 11.
30 Ibid., 78.
31 Ibid., 101.
32 Ibid., 10.
33 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor, March 1965).
34 Coates, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.”
35 Sophie Bjork-James argues in her recent work that: ‘the main theological emphasis in post–civil rights era white evangelicalism is on the supremacy of the heterosexual, male-headed nuclear family. This theology of the family inherently enforces racial inequality in that it draws moral, religious, and political attention away from problems of racial and economic structural oppression, explaining all social problems as a failure of the individual to achieve the strong gender and sexual identities that ground the nuclear family,’ and to convert to evangelical Christianity is about gaining new ‘political sensibilities as much as spiritual ones’ (21) and she embarks on a project to examine this connection between religious ideas with political views, race relations, and family values. Bjork-James, The Divine Institution.
36 I came across a compilation of photographs of father-daughter couples who are participants of purity balls all around the country by David Magnusson. See his personal website at http://www.davidmagnusson.se/purity/purity as well as Canbra Hodsdon, “‘Purity’ by David Magnusson,” Juxtapoz. February 18, 2015, https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/photography/purity-by-david-magnusson/ and Aline Smithson, “David Magnusson: Purity,” Lenscratch, April 12, 2014, http://lenscratch.com/2014/04/david-magnusson-purity/.
37 Moslener, Virgin Nation, 17.
38 My work is informed by Laura Hyun Yi Kang's critique of the category of ‘Asian/American women’ as an ‘overlapping but also distinct racial gender formation’ through three intertwined processes – of visibility, surveillance, and documentation – that together produce intelligible and exploitable human bodies, especially looking at how Asian female working bodies have become vital features of the political and discursive economies. In her most recent work she analyzes the varied violences towards Asian/American women in the literal and physical trafficking of (Asian-raced) women to sustain nation-state projects and the collateral damage towards women in the discursive work of campaigns raising awareness around ‘violence against women.’ One of the through lines in all her work (and what is useful here) is the racialized representation of Asian women made intelligible (through numerous state-craft methods like documentation, governance, media coverage, academic scholarship) through methods of violence and their ‘violability.’ See Kang, Compositional Subjects; Traffic in Asian Women.
39 Although I am specifically citing her work in this article, Shimizu has a wide range of work on media and film representation of Asian/Asian American women critiquing systems that inscribe standards around race and sexuality on their bodies. Shimizu, “The history of fetishizing Asian women.”. See also: The Hypersexuality of Race.
40 Moslener, Virgin Nation, 17.
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Mihee Kim-Kort
Mihee Kim-Kort is a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies at Indiana University.