From a woman who has been there and back, Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free is an inside look at the devastating effects purity culture has had on a generation of young women (and many others).
In the 1990s, the Purity Movement and a correlating purity industry emerged out of the white American Evangelical Christian subculture. Purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls came with a dangerous message: girls are potential sexual “stumbling blocks” for boys and men, and any expression of a girl’s sexuality could reflect the corruption of her character. This message traumatized many girls, though the depth of its damage often didn’t reveal itself until adulthood. Trapped in a cycle of shame, many raised in purity culture face sexual anxiety, fear, and experiences that mimic the symptoms of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).
This is the sex education Linda Kay Klein grew up with.
Fearing being marked a Jezebel, Klein broke up with her high school boyfriend because she thought God told her to, and took pregnancy tests though she was a virgin, terrified that any sexual activity would be punished with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. When the youth pastor of her church was convicted of sexual enticement of a twelve-year-old girl in her group, Klein began to question the culture’s sexual ethic. She contacted young women she knew, asking if they were coping with the same shame-induced issues she was.
These intimate conversations developed into a 12-year quest that took her across the country and into the intimate lives of individuals raised in religious communities similar to her own—a journey that facilitated her healing and led her to churches that are seeking new ways to reconcile sexuality and spirituality.
Sexual shame is by no means confined to women raised in evangelical Christian churches. Pure is a powerful wake-up call about our society’s subjugation of women, our largely shame-based sexual ethics, and the role these things play in everything from rape culture to the suppression of LGBTQIA people’s rights.
A potent combination of journalism, cultural commentary, and memoir, Pure was named One of the Best Books of 2018 by Library Journal, and was a finalist for the Association of American Publishers’ 2019 PROSE Award for an Outstanding Scholarly Work by a Trade Publisher. Pure has been called “impossible to forget” by Bust Magazine, and “a revelation” by New York Magazine’s The Cut. The book has been praised by luminaries like Gloria Steinem for explaining “how the system of mind-and-body shaming works within a religious movement so culturally and politically influential that it must be understood by us all,” and Glennon Doyle who calls Pure “an important book (that) emboldens us to escape toxic misogyny and experience a fresh breath of freedom.”
