“Sex is the big issue that for some reason marks your spiritual standing with God,” Renee illustrated. “Like Jessica Simpson. People considered her a Christian because she waited to have sex until marriage. That was her whole marker of faith in God. And every testimonyVI you hear from someone, they have to mention the sexual sins of their past. They might not mention the fact that they . . . I don’t know . . . got rid of their shopping addiction, but they mention the fact that they got rid of their addiction to porn. It’s like, ‘. . . and then I stopped sleeping around. I became a Christian and I stopped sleeping around.’ ”
After all, what other sin is said to fundamentally change you forever? You can be born again and have your slate wiped clean of lying, stealing, even murder. And if you do these things again later but honestly apologize to God, your sin is again forgiven. But sex outside of marriage is the only “sin” that I have ever heard described as changing you. Before sex, you are a virgin. After sex, well . . .VII
I remember there was this girl’s high school retreat where the leader was talking about purity and how important it was and how she felt disgusting. Basically, she started breaking down crying because she hadn’t stayed pure, and this happened all the time in my church. My youth pastor’s wife, she had walked down the aisle pregnant and now they are married and she has two boys, but she would still weep about it. Not that the youth pastor who she had the baby with is weeping about it! But his wife still weeps about it and says how she feels ashamed, disgusting, and wrong twelve years later. (Muriel)
Sometimes one doesn’t even need to have sex to feel this way. The purity movement teaches that every sexual activity—from masturbation to kissing if it elicits that special feeling—can make one less pure.
What does it even mean to be “pure”? The lines were so blurred, and there was so much tragedy tied up with it: “Don’t do this, because if you do this you’re ruining your relationship with your future spouse . . .” “Don’t just be pure in body; you need to be pure in spirit . . .” Everything was just so intertwined with each other. It almost seemed like if you weren’t being physically impure, you were being spiritually and emotionally impure. Being “pure” became this really heavy, heavy weight to bear all the time. It almost made me go crazy questioning, “Well, is this impure? . . . Is this wrong? . . . Is this okay? . . . Is this going on?” (Holly)
Some purity movement advocates even teach that sexual thoughts and feelings can make one impure.
I sort of thought of being naked with a guy. I didn’t picture him naked. I didn’t picture me naked. I just sort of imagined, “I could marry him and be naked with him one day.” And I felt terribly guilty over that for a long time. (Rosemary)
And it is implied that the sexual thoughts, feelings, and actions of others can be signs of your impurity as well (because surely you did something to make them think, feel, or do what they did).
I had one half-kiss at the age of sixteen that made me brush my teeth for ten minutes afterward.VIII It wasn’t even a kiss. He kissed me but I did not kiss him back. I think I mostly just stood there, kind of horrified and fascinated at the same time. But I felt guilty, ashamed, dirty for years. How screwed up is that? I thought I was dirty and ruined, a soiled package. But you know how it is. They say, “Make sure you don’t have to tell your husband the high number of people you’ve kissed someday. Your first kiss should come from your husband.” And I had just ruined it. I ruined it by letting this happen. [But didn’t you say you didn’t kiss him back?] Yes, but I felt I let it happen. I didn’t read the signals. I wasn’t on my guard. We jump through hoops to make it about our shamefulness. (Jo)
The purity message is not about sex. Rather, it is about us: who we are, who we are expected to be, and who it is said we will become if we fail to meet those expectations.
This is the language of shame.
Shame is the feeling “I am—or somebody else will think I am—bad” (as opposed to guilt, for example, which is associated with the feeling “I did something bad”). The religious purity messages many of us received as girls were not about what we might do, but about what we would be, or be seen as. Of course, we are all different and therefore respond to shaming of this kind differently. Our family dynamics, the affirmation we receive (or don’t receive) for other aspects of ourselves, the intersecting messages we are given about who we are based on our race, our ethnicity, our socioeconomic status, our physical and mental health, and so on all have roles to play. But the conversations that I have been having over the past twelve years make it clear that the influence of the consistent shaming embedded into the religious purity message, particularly during stages of extreme neural plasticity such as adolescence is for sexual development, can be extreme for many.
After all, researchers have found that our brains bend toward whatever it is that our attention is directed to.3 It follows that if an adolescent is regularly given shaming messages—like the purity message that a girl or woman is utterly and fundamentally pure or impure, good or bad, pleasing or displeasing, desirable or undesirable, et cetera, based on her sexual expressions or lack thereof—she will become more likely to experience shame in association with sex than she otherwise may have been. As psychiatrist Dr. Curt Thompson explains in his book The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves, “With repeated exposure to events [in which we feel shame], we pay attention to and, via our early neuroplastic flexibility, more permanently encode these shame networks. Thus, they become more easily able to fire later on, even when activated by the most minor or even unrelated stimuli.”4
This is not good news for the shamed individual, or their potential partners. Shame tends to make people feel powerless and even worthless. It creates a fear of abandonment that, ironically, makes us push others away. We want to hide those aspects of ourselves we are ashamed of, so we may emotionally withdraw from those close to us, lash out at them to keep them at bay, or isolate ourselves in self-blame. Whatever it takes to keep the world (including ourselves) away from those parts of us that we have come to believe make us bad.
Over the years, shame adds up, but it can happen so slowly we don’t even notice it. We may look at each shaming incident one at a time and tell ourselves that what was said or done to us wasn’t that bad. In time, we become less and less sure that we can, or should, heal. Rather than seek help, we bury our shaming experiences deep in our bodies, where they are held similarly to trauma.
Shame researcher Dr. Brené Brown explains this phenomenon in her book I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think” to “I Am Enough.” She references the work of Harvard-trained psychiatrist Dr. Shelley Uram, who calls attention to the importance of recognizing “small, quiet traumas” which she has found “often trigger the same brain-survival reaction” as larger traumas, such as a car crash. In I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t), she writes:
After studying Dr. Uram’s work, I believe it’s possible that many of our early shame experiences, especially with our parents and caregivers, were stored in our brains as traumas. This is why we often have such painful bodily reactions when we feel criticized, ridiculed, rejected, and shamed. Dr. Uram explains that the brain does not differentiate between overt or big trauma and covert or small, quiet trauma—it just registers the event as “a threat we can’t control.”5
Perhaps this explains why I have heard so many stories of PTSD-like experiences in association with people’s sexuality, their bodies, and the church.
Today when I go into a church, I can’t stop panicking. I feel like I am going into a place in which I was raped, though I wasn’t. It is light-years easier for me to talk about being sexually abused as a child—I could give a public lecture about that—than it is for me to talk about what that religious community did to me. Sexual abuse is something that happened to me, but this was at the core of my identity. I participated in the community’s messaging about who I was, and allowed it to define me for
years. The fear, the obsessing, the anxiety. It’s torment. It is Hell. It felt like torture. (Nicoletta)
And yet, the impact that shaming can have on people’s lives generally goes unacknowledged and sometimes even unnoticed within the communities in which it most regularly occurs. In some cases, shaming is so common it is coiled around core beliefs, laced through theology, and twisted into doctrine, making it nearly impossible to see.
I’m trained as a therapist, and I didn’t even recognize the trauma that I had in my life around religion until a few years ago. I’ve never spoken about these things with anyone else, not even with my closest friends. I have been through years of therapy and I’ve never once mentioned it to a therapist. (Nicoletta)
Shame can become like the smell of our own homes. The hum of an air conditioner. The feel of a wedding ring. It’s just . . . there. Which is when it is most dangerous. Because it is then that we are most likely to dismiss, rather than deal with, its dangerous effects.
I can’t tell you how many people are experiencing the kinds of things that my interviewees and I have and do. But the regularity with which I am approached and asked if I will talk to someone, or someone’s friend, or someone’s partner about the way in which religiously rooted sexual shame is impacting their lives makes one thing clear: It’s enough people that we need to be talking about it.
* * *
“So, what exactly is an evangelical?” I’m asked by non-evangelicals and evangelicals alike. After all, most evangelicals simply call themselves Christians. By which they mean real Christians (as opposed to those who think they are Christians but have got it all wrong, like non-evangelical Catholics and mainline Protestants).
Evangelical Christianity is a very new religious expression, though it has roots in older forms of Christian faith. It was just 1948 when a group of largely conservative individuals calling themselves the new evangelicals branched away from various Protestant groupsIX to form the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE).6 And it wasn’t until the 1990s that evangelical Christianity became the political and cultural force we know it as today.
Some say the word evangelical comes from the Greek euangelion, which translates to “good news.” Evangelicals define the Good News as Jesus’s death and resurrection, which allows sinful people to enter Heaven. Most believe a person must be “born again” to receive this salvation (so many, in fact, that the Pew Research Center considers people evangelical if they report either being “evangelical” or “born again”).X An individual’s born-again experience can happen during a group altar call,XI or sitting alone in one’s living room the day one decides to give up trying to do things one’s own way and start trying to do them God’s way. However one is born again, afterward, he or she is expected to spread the Good News to others—that is, to evangelize. Evangelicals are often further distinguished by their theological and moral conservatism, biblical literalism, emphasis on personal piety, conservative political positions, and engagement with technology, popular culture, and capitalism. But I can personally think of exceptions to every single one of these definitional rules.
Even the core tenets of evangelicalism around believing in, and evangelizing about, the Good News are often defined, and engaged with, differently by various individual evangelicals. As an illustration of the diversity among evangelicals, one evangelical woman recently told me that an evangelical must have three things: “First, intimacy with Jesus, which looks different for everyone. For example, my brother can have a beer with Jesus, whereas I wrestle and beg and devote time to biblical study. Second, trying to be like Jesus, which leads some people to vote Republican and others to vote Democrat depending on how they read who Jesus is and what he stands for and against. And third, promoting the Good News, which, when I was young, I understood to mean getting born-again decisions for Jesus, but today I consider to be about spreading loving, forgiveness, and acceptance.”
In 1995, former president of Auburn Theological Seminary Barbara Wheeler said the best definition of an evangelical may be “someone who understands its argot, knows where to buy posters with Bible verses on them, and recognizes names like James DobsonXII and Frank Peretti.”XIII7 Her references are a bit dated, but her point is right on: evangelicalism is best thought of as a subculture. By this definition, a churchgoing Catholic who reads a lot of evangelical books, listens to an evangelical Christian radio station, and has a close circle of evangelical friends is more “evangelical” than the unengaged individual who occasionally attends an evangelical church, but is otherwise disconnected from the community. After all, you only get the real stuff of evangelicalism—the feelings, the fervor—by being in the room.
The evangelical subculture is diverse, decentralized, and constantly changing. After all, evangelical Christianity is the single largest religious grouping in the United States. More than a quarter of Americans belong to it, and more than a third of American adolescents do.8 Within the United States, some evangelical communities are predominantly white, some African American, some Asian American, some Hispanic, some more mixed, and so on. Some evangelical communities are charismatic, some fundamentalist, and some Pentecostal. Some are conservative, some moderate, and a smaller number progressive. When I use the term evangelical in this book, I am, unless otherwise noted, referring to the largest evangelical grouping—the white, conservative, American evangelical Christian subculture within which I was raised.
Within evangelicalism there are several denominations, like the Assemblies of God and the Southern Baptist Convention, but Mennonites, Holiness groups, and Dutch Reformed groups are also generally considered evangelical, as are many nondenominational church groups, such as the Christian and Missionary Alliance and the Acts 29 Network. Most nondenominational evangelical (and an increasing number of other) churches brand themselves independently, taking on inspiring names like New Life Church, or naming themselves plainly—for example, taking the name of the city or neighborhood in which they are based and adding the word church to it. There are also many evangelical house churches, missional communities, and experimental church groups, not to mention Catholic and mainline Protestant churches and groups that self-identify as evangelical.
Unlike other forms of Christianity, evangelicalism lacks a traditional hierarchy, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t rules within it. The rules are simply translated—as they are in any subculture—through a culture of cool (or “moral” or “pure” or “Bible-believing”) and disseminated through pop culture: celebrities, books, music, events, speakers, et cetera. Still, evangelical institutions—by which I mean colleges, publishing houses, music production houses, and so on—and organizing bodies like the NAE are anything but obsolete. When the subculture expands, evolves, or in some other way threatens to transform itself, as it has many times in its short history, these institutional forces often step in—declaring a former evangelical rock star who is pushing the boundaries of the belief system to be a heretic, or firing evangelical professors who too boldly challenge its conservative core. And because every kind of evangelical belief (spiritual, religious, political, and cultural) goes by the same name—Christian, a loaded term that defines whether or not you are going to Heaven—people’s beliefs about your salvation sometimes depends on institutional leaders’ assessments of your opinions on things that many would argue should have nothing to do with religion, like who you vote for. Those are high stakes for an evangelical who is considering going against the subculture’s dominant stance.
Within all of this diversity, the sexual purity message is one of the most consistent elements of the evangelical subculture. Among my interviewees, a remarkably similar language and set of stories about gender and sexuality surfaced. The same adages, metaphors, and stories from books, speakers, and events were described to me over and over again, though those I spoke with grew up around the country and in some cases the world.
As Donna Freitas writes in her study of college students’ spiritual and sexual lives, Sex and the Soul: Ju
ggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses, this creates a very consistent set of sexual attitudes among young adults who grew up in the purity movement.
Though the evangelical students I interviewed broke almost every liberal preconception about them, proving to be diverse in their politics, nuanced in their expressions and beliefs about Christianity, and perfectly willing to swim in a sea of doubt and life’s gray areas, their pursuit of purity is the one area where almost all of them could see only black and white. Falling short of ideal purity can jeopardize not only a young adult’s standing among her peers but also, as these young adults are taught through purity culture, her relationship with God.9
Overtly shaming messages, like the object lessons that I mentioned earlier, are easiest to identify. But the more powerful, and far more prevalent, messages are covert: shaming attitudes embedded into everyday language, shaming lessons slipped into stories, shaming treatment felt by those who are being shamed and observed by those who fear they will be shamed next. Sometimes, you can be in the room when these covert messages are relayed and not even hear them. They are that commonplace. If the messages don’t hurt you, you are less likely to hear them (for instance, a straight person is less likely to hear a covert homophobic message than a queer person is). And if the messages benefit you, you are even less likely to hear them (for instance, a husband whose pastor turns to him and asks if he can hug the man’s wife may not “hear” the pastor subtly referring to his wife as his property . . . but she might).10
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