Unruly Bodies, Pure and True Hearts: The PATH of Purity Culture
Purity culture is a term that people mainly use to describe the messages, events, and effects of the abstinence campaigns in the 1990s and early 2000s. There are a great many things about purity culture that have led to terrible beliefs about bodies, sexuality, gender roles, relationships, and community building. Over half of the 100 respondents to my purity culture survey reported that purity culture had a significant and lasting impact on their lives.
The messages at the heart of purity culture taught us that our bodies are full of sin and untrustworthy—desire, pleasure, and the intuition of our bodies were understood as aspects of our identity that needed to be repressed as much as possible. The promise was that if we successfully eradicated sexual desire we would eventually arrive at healthy (hetero) marriage where we would have amazing sex and lots of it. All we had to give up in exchange was our entire self. If this seems slightly ridiculous, just wait until we get to the guidance section for achieving purity.
This is part of my story about purity culture. Some of it is difficult, but most of it is just very cringe-worthy.
I remember being sixteen and sitting in a church basement with twenty other teenage girls. On the tables in front of us were books with bright pink covers and the title The Lost Art of True Beauty placed above a picture of a girl smiling and holding a flower. We were gathered to discuss sexual purity and what we were learning and applying from Leslie Ludy’s work on the topic.
We called the group Pure and True Hearts—PATH for short. Our weekly meetings included talking about what we read, praying for specific issues related to sexual purity, and singing hymns together. On the surface, all of this was fine and there were lots of ways this space was intended to create community and connection. Many of us were seeking affirmation and validation. We wanted to know that we were making all the right choices for our spiritual life, our bodies, and our relationships.
Authors like Leslie Ludy had all the answers for us. Countless teenage girls were being handed texts by authors like Leslie Ludy as educational resources about our sexuality, our bodies, and our relationships. This was part of the abstinence-only sex education craze—without any formal sex ed, we were reading books that taught us to keep our legs crossed (literally) and our mouths closed.
Leslie Ludy made her first big appearance as a Christian writer when she co-authored When God Writes Your Love Story with her husband, Eric Ludy. The books she wrote after this were addressed exclusively to young women as manuals for being “good,” Christian women (read: good wives and mothers). In a chapter dedicated to dressing modestly, she explains that it is women’s responsibility to protect men’s honor, and this “means respecting the men around you by not putting temptation right in front of their noses, and then blaming them for viewing you like a sex object.” To avoid any ambiguity she elaborates on all the ways that women should dress in order to never tempt men, and these include:
When sitting in a skirt, cross your legs at the ankle or place them to the side.
When wearing pants, place your feet together on the floor and keep your knees together, or cross them at the ankle.
Try to never bend over, but if you must, make sure you bend at the knees and hold your shirt tightly to your chest to avoid any possible cleavage.
The list goes on for quite awhile, but you get the idea. Shortly after this, she encourages her readers to never show any part of their body that they would not want a man touching—shoulders, legs, and certainly nothing that reveals cleavage. If she shows any part of her body that she wouldn’t want touched, she has to accept that men will think of her as a sexual object and treat her as such.
This logic worked to shame young women into believing that if they were sexually assaulted or harassed, it was most likely invited by their actions and dress. These books were published before conversations about rape culture were heavily circulated in mainstream media, but they never received scrutiny for the messages that so clearly aligned with the victim blaming inherent in rape culture. Part of this is because these texts were never really part of the mainstream purity culture, even though they were incredibly popular within evangelical settings.
Purity culture has become a far more popularized term in the last ten years. Many women who grew up in purity culture are now processing and writing about their experiences within, and we have a clearer image of what this means in secular contexts. Linda Kay Klein’s book, Pure has now been widely read and has helped so many others make sense of their experiences with purity culture. There is also a significant amount of recent scholarship on purity culture (including my own research on the topic) that addresses the social and religious phenomenon of the movement. Books like Sara Moslener’s Virgin Nation, Christine Gardner’s Making Chastity Sexy, and Amy DeRogatis’s Saving Sex all address the historical and cultural impacts of the purity culture movement.
As more people join the conversation about purity culture and its long lasting effects, it is obvious to me that the group I belonged to was not an anomaly. PATH is an example of how purity culture was being popularized and enacted within communities and on large scale social levels. Millions of young adults across the nation signed purity pledges and wore the rings. Millions of people supported a belief system rooted in shame and fear. A system that taught young women to blame themselves, to blame their bodies for sexual harassment and assault they experienced.
I have a lot of grace for the fifteen-year-old version of me attending the Pure and True Hearts purity group. She craved belonging and validation, and she found it in the promise of the group—as long as she followed the rules, she would find true love, lasting happiness, and eternal salvation. We were all vulnerable to the promises offered in stories like these. As I continue to research and write about purity culture, empathy remains the first and most important thread I follow. Leslie Jamison writes that “Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion.”
We all have work to do. I believe we all have the capacity for greater understanding, for creating better spaces for social belonging, and for developing a deeper sense of what it means to belong in this world together. The story of purity culture is one that many of us carry in some version of our lives. We all have fault lines. Healing is something that we can only do in the context of relationships, and it happens when we recognize that we all have choices to make in developing a world we want to live in.
Over the next several months, I’ll continue to share stories about purity culture and the ways I’ve navigated religious trauma across my researched and lived experiences. Some of these are funny and light and some are heavier. But all of them include living life in a body that is free, full of joy, and deeply loved. May we all continue to find healing in our stories.
