This belief is rooted in the teaching that women and girls aren’t very sexual, whereas men and boys are sexually voracious-again, as it is said we’re each designed by God to be-making it girls’ and women’s responsibility to “protect our guys” from sexual temptation by walking, talking, and dressing just right so they never have a sexual inclination. In purity culture, girls and women can lose their “purity” - and with it, they’re told, the likelihood of ever finding a good Christian husband and having a happy, Christian family-through their own sexual thoughts, feelings and expressions, and also through the sexual thoughts, feelings and expressions of others, especially men, toward them which they are said to have elicited.
Though everyone is expected to remain a virgin until marriage, here again we find a set of special rules, and consequences for breaking those rules, for women and girls. “Purity” teachings overlay complementarianism. On the contrary, it looks a lot like inequality. Savvy readers may notice that this doesn’t actually look a whole lot like equality, despite the word equality actually appearing in the description. LKK: Where do I even start! Core to purity culture is a concept called “complementarianism.” This is the teaching that men and women are equal in God’s eyes, but were designed to “complement” one another here on earth in a very particular way: Men were designed to be stereotypically “masculine” leaders, and women their stereotypically “feminine” supporters. JB: Why is the ongoing effect of the purity culture a feminist issue? I spoke to Linda about her book and her activist work. at Women and Children First, you can catch Linda in conversation with Deborah Jian Lee, author of Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women and Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism. Linda also interviewed several dozen women and others with similar backgrounds about the lasting impact of the purity movement’s toxic messaging around sex, relationships, and gender. She writes about it in her new book Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free.
Linda Kay Klein was a teenager then, raised in the evangelical church during the height of the movement. Chief among them was “True Love Waits,” an organization that created an abstinence pledge signed by over 2.5 million young people throughout the decade. Rooted in the evangelical church, the movement was comprised of various individuals, nonprofit organizations and church groups. In the 1990s, the Purity Movement spread across the United States encouraging young people to remain abstinent until marriage.
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