Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free - Softcover

Linda Kay Klein has spent her career working at the cross section of faith, gender, sexuality, and social change. She is the founder of Break Free Together. A Midwesterner at heart, she now lives in New York City with her family.

Pure Introduction

As a teenager, I went to the sandbox in the empty playground beside my church when I wanted to be alone. I dug my bare feet down deep, cooling them in the damp sand.

“God, I would do anything for you,” I remember saying there one afternoon.

“Anything?” I imagined God’s reply.

“Anything,” I promised.

“Would you become a missionary in a foreign land?” God tested me. “Giving up the lavish life of an actress that you dream about?”

I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured myself a poor missionary living in a small, rural village somewhere on the other side of the world. In my imagination, I wore a thin, cotton dress and my long brown hair whipped around my face in a way that could only be described as romantic.

No, I shook my head abruptly. Not like that. God is asking if I’m willing to make a sacrifice for him,I I reminded myself. I could become deathly ill from serving the sick; I might not have access to clean drinking or bathing water; I might spend days working in the hot sun without any protection. I imagined my dress dirty and the skin under it covered in burns and unidentifiable wounds. Satisfied with this new image, I opened my eyes and looked back into the sun.

“Yes God,” I promised. “I would do that for you.”

“Would you give up your parents?” God continued.

“Yes,” I said quickly.

“Would you give up . . . your boyfriend?”

I winced.

“Who you think about all day and every night?” God continued. “Who makes you feel so utterly alive every time he touches you? Who you are sure is sin incarnate, even if he is a born-again Christian and thus ‘technically’ safe to date, and sure, all you’ve ever done is kiss, but the way he makes you feel . . . the way he makes you feel, you know must be wrong?”

“Yes,” I whimpered. “Yes, God. I would.”

Later that afternoon, I called my girlfriends for an emergency concert of prayer.II

“I think that God wants me to break up with Dean,” I told them, trembling. Not one of them asked me why. They didn’t have to. After all, we’d learned together that there were two types of girls—those who were pure and those who were impure, those who were marriage material and those who were lucky if any good Christian man ever loved them, those who were Christian and those who . . . we’re not so sure about. So, God wanting me to break up with a high school boyfriend who made my whole body scream every time he looked at me?

Yeah.

Sure.

That made sense.

It’s only now, more than twenty years later, that I can see another story beneath the only one my friends and I were able to see then. It’s the story of me—a sixteen-year-old girl in her first real relationship. Willing, no, wanting to be tested so she could prove to her God, her community, and herself that she was good.

After all, my sexual energy, sometimes off-color humor, and the ’50s pinup va-va-voom of the hips I’d recently acquired were already worrying some in my community. If I wasn’t careful, they warned me, I might just become a stumbling block. And maybe I already was one.

In the Bible, the term stumbling block is used to reference a variety of obstructions that can be placed before a Christian. The concept is used in reference to sexuality just once: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”1

Yet, in the years I spent as an evangelical Christian, I never once heard anyone use the term the way it’s used here—in reference to the onlooker’s lustful eye. Instead, I heard it used time and time again to describe girls and women who somehow “elicit” men’s lust.III As I have heard it said, sometimes our interpretations of the Bible say more about us than they do about the Bible itself.

In junior high, the term stumbling block annoyed me. The implication that my friends and I were nothing more than things over which men and boys could trip was not lost on me. When half the guys stripped their shirts off and began a water fight at the youth group carwash outside of the Piggly Wiggly, I thought it was unfair that it was me who got reprimanded for having my shirt sprayed by their hoses. But even as I bristled, I obeyed. I went home and changed into a dry shirt, longer shorts, longer skirts, higher backed dresses, and higher necked tops. By the time I was in high school and had my first boyfriend, I had been “talked to” about how I dressed and acted so many times that my annoyance was beginning to turn into anxiety. It began to feel like it didn’t matter what I did or wore; it was me that was bad.

In the evangelical community, an “impure” girl or woman isn’t just seen as damaged; she’s considered dangerous. Not only to the men we were told we must protect by covering up our bodies, but to our entire community. For if our men—the heads of our households and the leaders of our churches—fell, we all fell.

Imagine growing up in a castle and hearing fables about how dragons destroy villages and kill good people all your life. Then, one day, you wake up and see scales on your arms and legs and realize, “Oh my God. I am a dragon.” For me, it was a little like that. I was raised hearing horror stories about harlots (a nice, Christian term for a manipulative whore) who destroy good, God-fearing men. And then one day, my body began to change and I felt sexual stirrings within me and I thought, “Oh no. Is that me? Am I a manipulative whore?”

My Diary—May 1995:

My senses are never so alive as they are when I’m with Dean. I don’t deserve this happiness. We sit across from one another, and we are so close that our cheeks rub up against each other. If he shaves in the morning, he is already ruff by evening. I rub his back. He rubs mine. It is sweet. It is innocent. But can we be moving too quickly even in the midst of our innocence?

“I think you have gotten prettier since I first met you,” Dean said to me.

“I don’t think so.”

“I do. You used to be pretty, but now . . .” He took a deep breath and gazed at me.

“You are so beautiful,” Dean mused, as he rubbed my face tenderly. He is always touching my face. It makes me feel precious.

“What do you think it means to fall in love?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he answered me.

“Do you think it’s possible that I could be falling in love with you? Puppy love?”

He kissed me.

“Do you think it’s possible,” I spoke the words between kisses, “that you,” a long kiss, “could be falling in love with me . . . puppy love?”

“Puppy love,” he answered me.

I am in the middle of reading Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ’s Control by Elisabeth Elliot in my small group right now. In it she says that her husband Jim touched her for the first time by rubbing his finger across her cheek. AFTER he was already her fiancé.

So what does that mean? Once again, I worry that Dean and I are moving too quickly. We have already French kissed. You know, with tongue and all. Yeah, that’s too fast.

Dear Jesus, Dean is a sweet gift from You. Please don’t allow me to destroy this gift that You have given me with foolish passion. Dean doesn’t want to push me. He respects me. How far we go is in my hands. But I don’t want it there, because I don’t know where exactly You do and don’t approve of my hands being . . . Father, please show me what is “too far.”

This is going to sound disgusting, but when Dean rubs his face in my hair or breathes into my ear, my groin kind of flips. I don’t know how else to put it. Is that what it means to be “turned on”? I don’t know.

Have I turned into a slut? I feel dirty and worthless. How can respect exist when I am such a slut?

A slut.

What is one?

Who is one?

I am not a slut.

Nobody is a slut.

That is a despicable word.

But how dare I call myself a Christian? I spent my morning primping. I spent my afternoon making out with my boyfriend. Then I spent my evening leading a Bible study!

My girlfriends rushed over to my parents’ house for the concert of prayer. We sat in a circle on the floor of my parents’ basement, bowed our heads, and together asked for God to help me fulfill his command: To break up with Dean.

When the last of them later filed out of the front door, I walked to my bedroom, called Dean, and told him we needed to talk.

Dean cried.

He said he didn’t understand.

I said I didn’t either. But I was sure. It was what I had to do.

* * *

Five years after I broke up with Dean, I was still calling myself a slut—though it was no longer high school kisses that spurred my shame, but college attempts to have sex with my long-term boyfriend. Now twenty-one, I had left my religious community, having determined that I was incapable of being the woman they made it clear I needed to be in order to belong. I had changed my mind about attending Bible college and begun attending a secular liberal arts college outside of New York City.

Yet, when the lights were turned low, it was as though nothing had changed. The closer I got to losing my virginity, the more likely it was that the word slut would run through my mind on ticker tape. Eventually, I’d find myself in a tearful heap in the corner of my boyfriend’s dorm room bed, tormented by the same fear and anxiety that had driven me to break up with Dean when I was sixteen.

I had left the evangelical church but its messages about sex and gender still whirred within my body. Even after I calmed myself down and apologetically kissed my boyfriend goodbye, I couldn’t let go of the lingering fear that we had gotten too close to having sex this time, that I had gotten pregnant, and that my sexual sins would soon be exposed to the religious community I’d left but still desperately wanted to approve of me. Eventually, I’d walk to the local drugstore and buy a pregnancy test. I was still a virgin, but taking the test was the only way I could steady my breathing.

Until the next time.

I searched for books, articles, and online communities that might help me understand what I was experiencing. And when I was unable to find any, I called up first one, then two, then several of my childhood girlfriends from my former church youth group. I told them what was happening to me, and then, I sat in stunned silence as they told me they were experiencing many of the same things. The relief I felt knowing I was not alone sustained me, but my struggles continued. Until, at the age of twenty-six, I quit my job, drove across the country to my midwestern hometown, and set out to find the others.

I sat down at my parents’ kitchen table and paged through old church directories. One by one, I called the families of girls who I thought might still live in town: Hi, I don’t know if you remember me but I went to youth group with your daughter . . . Linda Kay Klein . . . Right, right! . . . It’s nice to hear your voice too . . . Yeah absolutely . . . You know, I haven’t talked with your daughter in so long, do you think I could get her number or email address from you?

I spent a year meeting with childhood friends. Some were single; others were married; some had had sex before marriage; others had waited to have their first kiss at the altar; some were still evangelical; others were decidedly not. Yet in many of their whispered stories, I heard themes I recognized from my own life—fear, anxiety, shame.

That year, I began to piece together an epidemic that I have not been able to turn away from since: evangelical Christianity’s sexual purity movement is traumatizing many girls and maturing women haunted by sexual and gender-based anxiety, fear, and physical experiences that sometimes mimic the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Based on our nightmares, panic attacks, and paranoia, one might think that my childhood friends and I had been to war. And in fact, we had. We went to war with ourselves, our own bodies, and our own sexual natures, all under the strict commandment of the church.

This was the beginning of a twelve-year journey. In these years, I earned an interdisciplinary master’s degree for which I wrote a thesis focused on white American evangelicalism’s gender and sexuality messaging for girls; I worked alongside inspiring gender justice warriors to create change within the world’s major religions; and I connected with hundreds of evangelicals and former evangelicals from across the country and talked with them about the impact that the purity movement had on their adult lives.

* * *

“So, freshman year of high school, sex ed. The PE coach decides to do abstinence education,” Renee told me, sitting cross-legged on the couch in her college apartment, where she was telling me about her upbringing in the South. I moved my recorder closer to her to be sure I was capturing her voice. “She said, ‘Who wants this Oreo?’?” Renee continued. “Everybody raised their hand. Then she passed it around the class and had everyone spit on it, or drop it on the ground, and when it got back to the front of class it was disgusting.

“Then she said, ‘Okay. Now, who wants this Oreo?’ No one raised their hand.

“It was an analogy for: ‘If you’re sexually promiscuous, no one will want you.’?”

I have heard many stories about object lessons like this one being taught in churches, community-based organizations, and public schools like Renee’s. One object lesson uses a car metaphor: virgins are described as a shiny new car that everyone wants to buy, and all those who have had sex are described as used cars that nobody wants (having gotten stained, rusty, and more and more broken down with every “ride”).IV Another uses a tape metaphor: virgins are described as a new piece of tape that can easily bind to things (a virgin woman capable of emotionally binding with her husband), but that picks up more dust and dirt each time that it is stuck to something new until it is too dirty to stick to anything (or anyone) anymore. Then there is the unused tissue versus the “used” tissue full of snot, mucus, and phlegm, which is said to represent a girl or woman who has had sex; the clear glass of water versus the one to which food coloring has been added (the tiniest drop changing it forever); and the seemingly endless iterations on food: the untouched cookie or candy bar versus the one that has been chomped into; the unwrapped lollipop versus one that decreases in size and desirability after being licked for the first time, just once, and then licked again by anyone who is willing to put somebody else’s saliva in their mouth; the new piece of gum versus the one that has been chewed; and so on.

Though shaming language is embedded into sexuality messaging for both boys and girls, it is especially intense and embodied when delivered to girls. In fact, the only one of the ...