Pure

ldquo;To those outside the church, Klein offers a well-researched insider’s point of view. To those affected by the purity movement, Klein offers a healing balm through personal testimony. To both she offers an invitation to further discourse as we seek to make our culture a safer place for all people.”

Auteur
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.

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In Pure, Linda Kay Klein uses a potent combination of journalism, cultural commentary, and memoir to take us "inside religious purity culture as only one who grew up in it can" (Gloria Steinem) and reveals the devastating effects evangelical Christianity's views on female sexuality has had on a generation of young women. In the 1990s, a "purity industry" emerged out of the white evangelical Christian culture. 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-resulting in anxiety, fear, and experiences that mimicked the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder-and trapped them in a cycle of shame. 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 despite being 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, Klein began to question purity-based sexual ethics. 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 twelve-year quest that took her across the country and into the lives of women raised in similar religious communities-a journey that facilitated her own healing and led her to churches that are seeking a new way to reconcile sexuality and spirituality. Pure is "a revelation... Part memoir and part journalism, Pure is a horrendous, granular, relentless, emotionally true account" (The Cut) of society's larger subjugation of women and the role the purity industry played in maintaining it. Offering a prevailing message of resounding hope and encouragement, "Pure emboldens us to escape toxic misogyny and experience a fresh breath of freedom" (Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior and founder of Together Rising).

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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 t…