Pure

by Linda Kay Klein

  * * *

  The root meaning of the English word text is “to weave”—to wind one perspective, one interpretation, one context around another. I like this idea, as even the most tightly woven tapestry is invariably full of holes. It is the holes in the tapestry—the space between the thread—that make it a living thing, able to be undone and done again.

  The tapestry I was presented by the evangelical Christian church included only one color of threads—the stories of those who thrived in purity culture, women who found bliss with their husbands for whom they had “saved” themselves, men who would never leave or hurt their wives whose supportive, feminine submission made them feel strong, masculine, and protective of them. In this book, I offer threads of another color—stories from those who did not, or who are not, flourish(ing) in purity culture.

  Yet this text too has holes.

  As this chapter illustrates, the purity message cuts across racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, national, and even religious borders, intersecting with a range of cultures and identities. And so the tapestry must be unwoven and woven again, as the multicolored stories of individual experiences from across multiple spectrums are told. Until, one day, perhaps we will see the loose end of shame’s thread appear, and know, the spool is empty.

  * * *

  I. Laura asked me to add that she created the #noshamemov hashtag that led to the creation of the No Shame Movement website with friends, and that a number of friends and collaborators have been involved in the No Shame Movement’s work over the years.

  II. Josh Harris is himself biracial—his mother is Japanese—but he rose to the most fame in the white evangelical Christian subculture.

  III. I Kissed Dating Goodbye received the Evangelical Christian Publishing Association’s Platinum Award for selling over one million copies in May 2005.3

  IV. www.LifeAfterIKDG

  16

  * * *

  Sanctuary

  Pastor Rachael McClair grew up in an evangelical megachurch in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She remembers smoke machines, rock music, and kids getting saved every week. And shame. She remembers shame.

  “It was always this war,” she told me, propped up by pillows on her bed, her computer on her lap as we spoke over Skype. “I really wanted to be a good Christian; I wanted to be a pure person; I wanted a relationship with a guy who was going to be the head of my household. Or, I was trying to want those things. But I always felt like I was just on the verge of getting called into the principal’s office. I’m vocal. I’m loud. It’s how I’m made. We would do these women’s Bible studies on being a woman of a gentle and quiet spirit and I’d be like, ‘Oh shit.’ ”

  Rachael loved her church in New Mexico, but it was beginning to make her hate herself. When a couple of friends said they were driving to Denver for a concert, she decided this might be her chance to start over. Rachael drove out with them, and stayed.

  In Denver, Rachael began attending, and then working at, a church called Pathways, which was part of evangelicalism’s emergent church movement, popular in the nineties and early 2000s.

  “Which—just to be sure I understand,” I interrupted Rachael’s story, “means that its rules around sexuality and gender would have been the same as a traditional evangelical church’s rules, but it being ‘emergent’ means there would have been some real intentionality around being loving and nonjudgmental toward anyone who were to break those rules, rather than going down the shaming route with them.”

  “Yes,” Rachael confirmed. “I was on staff at Pathways for about seven years. And at one point, I heard God’s voice.”

  “What did God say to you?”

  “He said, ‘We’re going to go somewhere new. But I can’t take you there if you keep looking behind you wishing that things were like they used to be.’ ”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Wishing it was like when I was in my Bible study in New Mexico, for example. God was like, ‘I’m not there anymore. You have to follow me into this new frontier.’ ”

  Rachael was later approached by a fellow Pathways staff member named Mark Tidd. Mark had been an evangelical pastor for twenty-five years but had recently taken on a more supportive staff role at Pathways in preparation for planting a new Pathways Church. When Mark confided in Rachael that he wanted this new church to be inclusive, she wondered if this might be the new frontier God was talking about.

  “You mean LGBTQ+ inclusive?” I interrupted Rachael again.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “Okay, go on.”

  Rachael was one of the first people at the church Mark talked to, but eventually, his intentions became more widely known. Not everyone was as interested in Mark’s plans as Rachael had been. Many, in fact, were so upset that they left the church, and Mark himself was defrocked.

  So there they were, eight people sitting around a table—Rachael, Mark, and six others asking one another: “Should we make a go of this?” The collective launched Highlands, an independent, inclusive evangelical church, in 2009. Less than a year later, Rev. Dr. Jenny Morgan—a newly ordained United Church of Christ minister who was in a long-term relationship with a woman (both Mark and Rachael, who were co-pastoring Highlands at this point, are straight)—completed what is now the church’s improvisational three-pastor team. At the start of each service—which averages around 400 attendees but can draw up to 1,000—Highland’s ethos is read aloud:

  Married, divorced and single here, it’s one family that mingles here.

  Conservative and liberal here, we’ve all gotta give a little here.

  Big and small here, there’s room for us all here.

  Doubt and believe here, we all can receive here.

  Gay and straight here, there’s no hate here.

  Woman and man here, everyone can here.

  Whatever your race here, for all of us grace here.

  In imitation of the ridiculous love Almighty God has for each of us and all of us,

  let us live and love without labels!I

  “But how did your church go from LGBTQ+ inclusive to rethinking the whole sexual ethic?” I asked Rachael.

  “It’s been an ongoing conversation,” she answered, adjusting the pillows behind her. “As soon as you become inclusive, you have to face all kinds of things. Right when we first started the church, for instance, we had a straight married couple that was very frustrated that we were okay letting an unmarried straight couple who were living together host a small church group. They felt that was inappropriate. But they were okay on the inclusive thing. As soon as you open the door, you begin to recognize all your biases and other stuff.

  “So it was like, ‘We have to talk about this or it’s going to become a problem.’ ” As the years went on, Rachael told me, more and more complex questions arose. Whether the pastors were approached with questions about polyamory or about sadomasochism, she told me, they guided parishioners to reach their own morally rooted conclusions rather than telling them what was “right” and what was “wrong.”

  “Our role as pastors is simply to ask the right questions in order to help people find the answers themselves. And that’s what I’m hoping the sexuality sermon series we are doing now will accomplish: that it will give people some questions that they can ask themselves that will help guide their decisions around sexual behavior.”

  To give you a taste of what the sermons in the series Rachael referred to are like, I’ve included an excerpt from one below. This sermon just so happened to have been given by a trans woman parishioner who is herself a reverend and had been the CEO of a large evangelical church planting company before she was forced to resign upon announcing her intention to transition.

  The Bible has very few rules and regulations about sexuality. The church didn’t develop its fixation with sexuality until 400 years after Jesus. That was Augustine’s fault and he had issues. But that’s not to say the Bible does not give us a touchstone for our sexual experience, a place from which
to begin to understand a healthy expression of our sexuality, and I believe it happens in the twenty-second chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.

  It’s Jesus’ last public day with crowds at large. After this he’s only going to meet with a smaller group of followers, particularly his disciples. So it kind of has a press conference kind of feel. . . . The last question of the last press conference . . . is “Which of the laws is the greatest?”

  There were 613 of them.

  Jesus answers: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind.” There’s a second one: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

  Now, it’s important to note there was zero surprise in his answer. That’s exactly what they expected him to answer. In fact, they began all their religious services quoting those laws. It’s what Jesus said next that bothered them so much. He said, “On this, are all the laws and the prophets based.” . . . Jesus comes along and says, Yeah . . . no, it’s not about 613 laws; it’s about three things: Loving God, loving neighbor, loving self.

  The forty-sixth verse of Matthew says, “There was dead silence.” This was a press conference! They could have enough questions to take until next Tuesday, but they are stunned into silence. And he says, “From that day on, no one dared to ask him any more questions.” . . . It was devastatingly simple: Love God, love neighbor, love self. Simple. Not easy. But in that instruction, we have a touchstone for our sexuality. . . . Does our sexual expression show love for God? Does our sexual expression show love for our neighbor? And does it show love toward self?”1

  When Rachael and I ended our Skype call, I knew: I needed to go out to Denver and see this church for myself.

  * * *

  Susan Camp, a midcareer seminary student interning at Highlands Church, pulled up to the airport pickup in a black Jeep. She leaned across the passenger seat and pushed the Jeep’s door open for me. “Linda!” she called my name—her short hair and wide smile visible through the open door. I raised my hand and hurried across the drive toward her. As Susan drove, I asked her to tell me her story.

  “I ended up at a Texas Southern Baptist Church revival in the seventh grade because I had a crush on my basketball coach,” she laughed as we [[p275]]drove down the highway. “She invited me to go. I was like, ‘Yes! We can go anywhere! Let’s go! Let’s do it!’ Little did I know, the joke was on me. Because there was a moment there at that revival when I intersected with God for the first time, and something changed. Something ontologically changed in me. I’m not the same person that I was before, even though I was just a kid.”

  But the spiritual change Susan experienced wasn’t enough for the evangelical community she joined after her conversion. They wanted her to change in other ways too.

  “I think what fascinates me about being a gay person is that from the minute that that part of me comes out, that’s all I am, right?” Susan said. “As a heterosexual person, can you imagine that that is all the identity you get? When you walk in the room, that’s what people see? It’s who you are?” Susan turned to me for a moment. I shook my head. No, I couldn’t imagine it. She turned back to the road.

  “It wasn’t that I expected they were going to be okay with it. But what I couldn’t see was that they were going to completely reject all the rest of me because of it. I was very active in the church; every time the church doors were open I was there. And I knew I had a calling in my life to be a pastor even then. But when they find out you are gay, that’s that. My sexuality became my entire identity. So I kept myself out of this transformational spiritual thing that had happened in my life because of the shame that I was carrying about my sexual orientation.

  “What Highlands has done for me is help me to understand that the transformational power of the Gospel, it’s for me too. It includes me as a gay person. And not only includes me, but because each of us are created in the image of God, each of us brings some part of that image that only we can carry. So we’re not done until we’ve opened this thing up to everyone.”

  Pastor Jeana Pynes, Highland’s pastor of family and children’s soul care, was waiting for Susan and me at the restaurant when we arrived. We all ordered lunch and when Susan also ordered a beer, Jeana teased her for drinking midday, and Susan teased Jeana right back for ordering decaf, which “everyone knows is not real coffee.” This warm, playful teasing—characteristic of the evangelical subculture—was present in just about every group interaction I had with Highlands folks. And it was little things like this—a particular style of teasing familiar from my childhood, the passion with which people spoke about their beliefs, even the rock-and-roll band and the karaoke-style praise and worship service—that made Highlands feel evangelical to me, even though their positions on many issues countered most of their peers’.

  Over lunch, Susan and Jeana told me about Highlands’s adolescent sexuality education pilot, which they’d just completed. The curriculum they used is called Our Whole Lives (OWL): Lifespan Education Curriculum.II OWL was developed by the United Church of Christ (UCC) and the Unitarian Universalist Association. A secular model with religious supplements, OWL is used in a wide range of churches, schools, nonprofits, and community centers, though Highlands is the only evangelical church the curriculum’s UCC coordinator was aware of having tried it when I spoke with her. On its website, OWL is described as a “holistic program that moves beyond the intellect to address the attitudes, values, and feelings that youth have about themselves and the world.”2

  While Susan and her co-facilitator met with the adolescents, Jeana met with their parents to discuss what the young people were learning that day, answer any questions parents might have, and recommend how they could engage with their kids about what they were learning.

  “One of the parents said, ‘I’m not sure I can put my kid through this,’ ” they told me. “She said, ‘My kid isn’t even thinking about this stuff, and I’m afraid this is going to get them thinking about it.’ ”

  In conversation with sexuality educators, I’ve learned this is a common concern. Parents often want to limit their kids’ access to information about sex in hopes that it will delay their interest and involvement. But life gives kids its own sexuality education, and its lessons—learned from friends or on TV, engaged with on the Internet,III or experienced firsthand are rarely what parents want for their kids.

  But there’s something even more frightening for many parents than their kids having sexual information, and that’s their kids having sexual autonomy. Trusting young people to make their own safe, developmentally appropriateIV decisions is really scary. But whether we’re looking at school performance, healthcare maintenance, political activity, physical exercise, environmental activism, intimate relationships, or even religion, research continuously shows that external rewards and punishments (like “I do this because my parents will be proud of me” or “I don’t do this because my peers will judge me”) are less likely to support lasting healthy decision-making than internalized motivations (like “I do this because it’s important to me” or “I don’t do this because it makes me feel bad”).V Supporting people’s internal motivations requires supporting their autonomy, walking alongside them and helping them identify their own values (which may, for some, be religiously inspired) and how they can choose to act on them, rather than dictating to them what’s right and what’s wrong in every instance.

  As I shared earlier in this book, people who receive abstinence-only education, which tends to use external motivations, start to have sex around the same time as their peers and have around the same number of sexual partners overall.5 Meanwhile, people who receive comprehensive sexuality education, which focuses on giving people a broader range on information (including information on abstinence, condoms, and contraception) in hopes that they will use this education to make their own internally motivated decisions, report delayed or reduced sexual activity (not to mention an increased use of contraceptives when they do have sex).VI6

  The more parents at Highlands C
hurch understood this, the more comfortable they became with their children receiving a different tool to help them make sexual decisions than the one most of them had grown up with. Rather than receiving a metaphorical ruler by which to assess whether or not they have gone “too far,” their kids were getting a kind of Swiss Army Knife, with tools like self-worth, sexual health, responsibility, justice, and inclusivity all at the ready.

  Susan and her co-facilitator (a straight male) began each workshop with the adolescents by answering anonymous questions that had been placed in a question box at the end of the previous workshop. “We would bring the questions back to the kids,” Susan explained to me over lunch. “ ‘Okay, let’s think about this question through the lens of the values that we talked about,’ ” she illustrated. “Let’s start with self-worth, for example. ‘Through the lens of self-worth, how might we answer this question?’ ” Susan and her co-facilitator were shocked by how quickly the adolescents progressed from asking what they were supposed to think to thinking themselves.

  “We would just read the question and watch them go! For example, a member of the church was talking with the kids about how sex is powerful, like dynamite, and one of the kids—he’s a first year in high school—he raised his hand and said, ‘No, I don’t agree with that. Because that’s like saying sex is dangerous and bad.’

  “And I said, ‘Well, what would you say then? What’s the metaphor you would use?’

  “And he said: ‘I would use the sun.’

  “I said, ‘Say more about that.’

  “And he goes: ‘Well, if you spend too much time in the sun, you’re going to get burned. And if you get too close to it, you’re going to die. But yeah, if you don’t get any sun, you die too. It’s like, you have to have a healthy sun exposure.’ We’re going to steal that metaphor from him for next time we teach OWL,” Susan laughed.

  Highlands parents and other parishioners I spoke with often expressed a kind of generous jealousy over the programming adolescents were receiving. “A piece of me wants to go to the youth sexuality class that is being offered,” one parishioner told me in an interview. “I’m so grateful they’re getting that experience. And so sad that I didn’t. I spent so much of my adult life being ashamed of being a woman, and ashamed of being a sexual being. I’m thrilled to have a partner who is sitting beside me here talking about this,” she said, gesturing to her boyfriend, “but I’m also sad for what I didn’t have.”