Pure

by Linda Kay Klein

  Still more of my critics will say, “You turned out alright. You’re happily married with a great family. You’re a strong Christian (even if you’re not an evangelical). Whether or not you liked the purity message, it appears to have been good for you.” Though evangelicalism offered me many gifts—a deep spiritual life, mentors I could rely on, leadership opportunities that boosted my confidence, and more—the purity message was not one of them. Intended to make me more “pure,” all this message did was make me more ashamed of my inevitable “impurities.”

  * * *

  When I was young, I thought God was in the hand that scooped me up when I joined the evangelical church. The hand cradled me, and I felt safe and protected. I believed that God lived here, in this one religious expression with all of its interpretations, rules, and regulations, including those that felt wrong to me even then, like the purity ethic.

  But as I grew older, the hand began to squeeze me, and I became uncomfortable. I tried to make myself smaller, squishing myself down so I could fit inside of it, but all of the ways in which I was not the “right” kind of Christian woman squeezed through between the hand’s fingers and I was exposed. I tried cutting parts of me off, the appendages that made it more difficult to fit, but I didn’t have the guts to really cut them off. I just hid them under my clothing, like a character in a B movie hiding an arm inside her shirt and pretending the dangling sleeve means it isn’t there. Finally, I decided I’d try to stretch out, make myself some room. Maybe, I thought, the hand will loosen a little in response. But instead, the hand tightened its grip. More and more of me came oozing out between its fingers until one day I came bulging out between its thumb and its pointer finger like a giant bubble, and with a plop, I dropped. Fell from grace. And landed flat on my face.

  I remember how I felt. Scared and alone. Lying there trembling on the floor while looking up at the hand that once held me. I had lost so much—my community, my purpose in life, and worst of all, God, whom I missed so badly my body ached. I looked up at the hand sometimes, and wished that I was there so I could touch God again. But I didn’t feel I was allowed to.

  Eventually, I gathered up my broken body. There on the floor, with no one paying attention to me, I uncovered those parts of me that I had tried to hide or make small. And I watched, amazed, as these parts of me unfurled—some gorgeous, some terrifying, and others plain. From time to time, I felt something I thought I had lost—a holy presence, the feeling someone was watching out for me. In time, I came to trust, to know, that God was still with me. That God was in the hand, yes. But also here . . . and here . . . and here. That no hand can confine something so great.

  Today, I am a Christian, but I stand outside of the hand I grew up in. Waving to those in it and saying, “It is good in the hand. God is there. And s/he is also here. So let’s come together to end the shame that hurts all of us. For there is much work to be done.”

  * * *

  I. Though I now see God as having no gender, I use masculine pronouns to refer to God in this book when the people themselves would have done so—as I certainly would have at this point in my life.

  II. The definition of this term depends on who you ask. Though historically a concert of prayer refers to a major prayer movement, in everyday Christian life it is often used in reference to group prayer organized around a specific purpose.

  III. In Totem and Taboo, Freud suggests that sometimes “a person may become permanently or temporarily taboo without having violated any taboos, for the simple reason that he is in a condition which has the property of inciting the forbidden desires of others and of awakening the ambivalent conflict in them.”2 This is what I experienced as an adolescent evangelical. I was taboo—guarded, and guarded against—long before I had ever done anything “wrong,” lest I awaken someone’s ambivalent conflict.

  IV. This object lesson also comes in a bicycle variety.

  V. A purity ring is a ring that a single person wears, often on their wedding finger, to remind themselves of, and communicate to others, their commitment to not having sex before marriage.

  VI. One’s testimony is the story of how they became a born-again Christian.

  VII. It should be noted that revirgination ceremonies (which I have personally only heard of being offered to and attended by women) are hosted by some churches. Though the idea of revirgination reflects the purity ethic that implies virgins are somehow “better” than non-virgins, and brings with it all the complications that come with that, I have heard these ceremonies described as healing experiences for some, particularly for those who have been raped or sexually abused.

  VIII. There is no definition for “half-kiss,” though it is a term I hear often in evangelical circles. One person might use it to refer to a peck or an otherwise short kiss, another to a kiss that she turned away from, etc. For many, the intention is to keep at least as many purity points as she deserves by not claiming a whole kiss when, for whatever reason, it didn’t really feel whole.

  IX. Fundamentalist Christianity was chief among these groups.

  X. However, a growing number of evangelicals are moving away from this emphasis on the born-again experience.

  XI. An altar call is an invitation for individuals to gather as a group and be led through a collective conversion or “born-again” experience. Generally (though not always), it takes place at the altar of a church.

  XII. The founder of Focus on the Family.

  XIII. A contemporary evangelical author.

  XIV. The Adolescent Family Life Act (FY 1982–FY 2010) was passed in 1981. Overall, AFLA received $209 million, a portion of which went to abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.

  XV. The Title V abstinence-only-until-marriage program (FY 1998–present) allocated $50 million per year in federal funds to states until FY 2015, at which point it went up to $75 million per year.

  XVI. The Community Based Abstinence Education (FY 2001–FY 2009) funding stream has allocated $733 million in federal funds for abstinence-only-until-marriage programming.

  XVII. Rings range in cost and quality and are often engraved with a Bible verse or personalized message. They are marketed to adolescents, parents, and groups that may be interested in bulk orders. Parents can even buy special purity rings for themselves, which are intended to remind them to pray for and daily encourage their kids’ sexual abstinence.

  XVIII. This effort was organized in conjunction with Youth for Christ’s DC ’94.

  XIX. According to US Census Bureau estimates, in 2015 there were over 41 million ten- to nineteen-year-olds in the United States and Puerto Rico Commonwealth and Municipios. It should be considered, however, that this curriculum’s reported numbers likely span the curriculum’s over-twenty-year lifespan, whereas the census estimates represent only one year.22

  XX. I was able to confirm with the lead researcher that what the research team calls sex guilt is the same as what I am in this book calling shame.

  XXI. The researchers later clarified that this doesn’t mean that the guilt gets more intense over time, but that the relationship between guilt and sexual anxiety, sexual efficacy, and sexual satisfaction is stronger for guilt more recently felt than guilt remembered from the first sexual experience. In this study, participants reflected on past feelings; longitudinal data was not collected.

  XXII. Please be aware that stories of rape, intimate partner violence, and incest do appear in this book.

  XXIII. The Me Too movement was founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke to support and unify sexual violence survivors, particularly women of color in underprivileged communities. In 2017, actor Alyssa Milano encouraged her Twitter followers to use the hashtag #MeToo if they had personally experienced sexual harassment and/or assault. The hashtag went viral.35

  XXIV. #ChurchToo was founded by poet Emily Joy and writer and religious trauma researcher Hannah Paasch. Many women—and men—used the #ChurchToo hashtag to document personal stories about the
church’s contribution to sexism and violence against women on Twitter.36

  * * *

  MOVEMENT I

  * * *

  The Stumbling Blocks

  1

  * * *

  Sin, Psychosis, or System

  I yanked my T-shirt up, exposed my twenty-year-old belly, and strained to lift my head from the bed so I could survey the damage. A nearly foot-long open wound, freshly stuffed with gauze, ran the length of my abdomen. Bandages of various shapes and sizes papered areas around it. And in the lower right-hand corner of my stomach a plastic ileostomy bag was attached to a nub of small intestine that protruded from my side. The bag would catch my waste and gas for a year until my surgeon would one day bend a piece of my small intestines into a makeshift colon to replace the one I’d lost.

  I closed my eyes, and I whispered, “I take it back, God.”

  * * *

  Growing up, my mom and I were an evangelical Christian community of two. Though we were technically Episcopalian, everything Mom learned about evangelical Christianity from her friends or the Christian radio station, she shared with her fellow congregant: me. When she told me about “praying your way through the day” (being in a constant state of prayer), I did my best to master the art of studying for a grade school spelling test and praying at the same time. And when she told me that demons were always lurking around me trying to lure me away from God, and that to get rid of them I had to command them to leave in Jesus’s name, I spent whole nights sitting up in my bed repeating the phrase: Be gone all evil by the blood of Jesus Christ; be gone all evil by the blood of Jesus Christ. In the process, I formed a very real, albeit roughly made, relationship with God, and a deep love for the Christian faith.

  Then one day I was crying, gulping in air, my head spinning, my heart on fire. I was thirteen years old, responding to a flashy altar call that, in a moment, altered the course of my life. That day, I left my intimate church of two and joined what I would soon come to recognize as a powerful religious network.

  My brother had also been born again as a teenager, though he and my sister—who are much older than me—now lived across the country. So when I was also born again, it tipped the familial scale and my parents and I started attending a nondenominational evangelical church. My parents watched proudly as I joined a titanic community of teens from around the country dedicated to advancing our faith. Teeming with youthful energy and abandon, my new friends and I craved depth. We craved profundity. We craved intensity. We craved the truth of Jesus Christ in our lives at every moment, without exception.

  The eight years I spent as an evangelical didn’t seem like a phase, like adolescent experimentation, or an outlet for teenage passions or emotions. They seemed like a beginning, the beginning. Being a Christian became my life’s purpose, the embodiment of my entire identity.

  I began to eye even my own parents’ teachings with increasing suspicion, putting my total trust in what a new set of teachers had to say—Christian pop stars, authors, pastors, and my peers’ more church-involved parents who, despite what I can only imagine must have been a multiplicity of perspectives among them, presented what is in retrospect an astoundingly consistent set of messages. I went to church, Sunday school, and youth group weekly; to Bible studies, retreats, mission trips, conferences, trainings, and concerts regularly; and to youth group–organized parties, movie nights, sleepovers, concerts of prayer, and church lock-ins whenever they were offered (and they were offered a lot). I sang and played guitar in the youth group praise band; started and led a very well-attended Bible study at my public junior high school; launched a girls’ Bible study for anyone in the city, which I led out of my parents’ basement; and made it a habit to talk to everyone I could about how they could ask Christ into their hearts and experience the spiritual awakening I had experienced. I got up early every morning to do daily devotionals before school, read the Bible before bed each night so its wisdom would settle into my subconscious as I slept, and continued my childhood practice of trying to pray my way through each day.

  And it may have stayed that way.

  Had I not been a girl.

  * * *

  The need I felt to prove that I was good despite my developing body was never quite so strong as when the cast list for a play was released. I would run eagerly up to the list in hopes that maybe this time I had been cast as the romantic lead only to see my name, yet again, next to the role of a demon or a Jezebel. And it didn’t just happen in church plays either. Even in school and community plays, I somehow always seemed to be cast as the same kind of character. Once, in a mime I performed for a church mission trip, I was even cast as sex itself. My role was to silently seduce Christian with my body. Christian would refuse me and then slam a Bible in my face, after which I would jump back and wither onto the floor as Christian moved on to his next temptation: money.

  After one performance, one of the actors, a pastor’s son, pulled me aside.

  “You’re good at that part,” he told me.

  “Thanks,” I replied. I had actually worked really hard at it, practicing my seductive moves and dramatic wilting until it was just right. This was what I wanted to do when I grew up after all! Find a beautiful, evangelical, actor husband and start a Christian theater troupe that would travel around the world changing hearts and minds for Jesus Christ through missionary mimes . . . sigh.

  The guy smiled. “Maybe too good at it,” he raised his eyebrows.

  “What do you mean?” I asked him, my face burning.

  “Nothing,” he said. Then he turned away, repeating in a singsong, “Nothing at all.”

  But I knew exactly what he meant. I wanted to make my leaders, my friends, myself believe I was good, but my stupid, floppy, breasty body was always getting in the way.

  Later on the same mission trip, one of the girls handed me a piece of notebook paper. “Rob [the guy I’d had the conversation with] drew this,” she said. “He told some of the other boys it’s you.”

  “What’s it supposed to be?” I asked, studying the long, thin pencil-drawn line with jagged teeth at the bottom of it.

  “He said it’s a hoe,” she answered, scrunching her face up in sympathy. My eyes hardened. A hoe? I had been around the public school block enough to know exactly what that meant.

  I found Rob and gave him a lecture about why it was wrong to call me, or anybody, a whore that was so long and passionate he almost cried. But the lecture itself, that wasn’t what mattered. Not to me anyway. What has always mattered to me is what happened next.

  Minutes after Rob limped away, a group of other guys on the mission trip formed a circle around me.

  Finally, one stepped forward.

  “That. Was. Amazing,” he said.

  “I thought he was going to cry!” another hollered, laughing.

  “Oh man! He will never do that again!”

  “Don’t mess with Linda, y’all. She will destroy you!” said Dean, the boy who would later become my boyfriend. (Until, of course, I broke up with him for God.)

  It was one of those moments, those rare moments in which you learn something about yourself by seeing yourself through others’ eyes. That day, I learned that I was tough. And that that was cool. But I would’ve given anything to be the kind of good girl that the pastor’s son never would have said those things about in the first place.

  And so I prayed: “Don’t just give me the milk, Lord. Give me the meat.”

  I was referring to 1 Corinthians 3:1–2.

  And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Even now, you are still not ready.

  I had heard a sermon in which the milk was interpreted as easy living, and meat was interpreted as suffering. The message that suffering is somehow “good for us” is repeated often among some Christians, particularly Christian women. Our reward for suffering “wi
th joy”—smiling and not complaining—is being told we are “good.”

  Even outside of the church, everyone loves the good suffering woman: the pretty spinster who never admits her unending love for her sister’s husband (who secretly loves her too, of course); the single mother who gives up her dream so she can make enough money for her kids to pursue theirs; the pregnant woman who forgoes treatment for her terminal illness because she fears it could endanger her unborn baby and dies in childbirth. In books, movies, and just about everywhere else, girls get the message that the more selflessly and painfully a woman suffers, the more we love her. But nowhere is this message quite so clear as it is in religion.

  As an example, in her book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master,” progressive evangelical author Rachel Held Evans highlights a subcategory of female martyrs that we especially love—suffering virgins “like Agatha (scourged, burnt, torn with meat hooks for refusing to marry the pagan governor of Sicily), Agnes (beheaded for refusing suitors and consecrating herself to Christ alone), Lucy (executed for distributing her wealth among the poor rather than marrying), and Blandina (a young slave thrown to wild beasts in the arena for professing Christianity).”1