Pure

by Linda Kay Klein

  “It reminds me of what you and I talked about on the phone,” I said. “How we both prayed for God to break us when we were young. How we asked to suffer.”

  “We were so dumb,” Muriel answered. “Suffering is a bitch.”

  * * *

  Muriel had calculated all of her life decisions around the equation that if she was pure, God would bless her. She would be gifted with a loving, romantic, sexual marriage. She would be kept safe in a strong, supportive, always-there-for-her religious community. “I was not one of those 99 percent faith, a little bit of question, people,” she insisted. “I was 100 percent: I will be pure; I will believe; I won’t crack.” But when the purity and community equations proved to be bad math, everything “just crumbled.” How could she believe anything evangelicalism taught her if the one thing they said was most important—remain pure before marriage and you will have a blissful sexual life after marriage and be supported by the larger community—wasn’t true?

  “To me, it meant there was no God,” Muriel said, before going on to explain that, as an absolutist, she felt that if anything the church taught wasn’t true, then nothing the church taught was true. I see this logic among many of my interviewees when they first begin to question the church’s teachings. They hold on to the good/bad binary they were taught growing up; they just swap everything around on it. In their new reverse binary, evangelicalism goes from good to bad; the secular world goes from bad to good; sex outside of marriage goes from bad to good; abstinence goes from good to bad. But, most of my interviewees eventually have come to the conclusion that the binary itself is the problem. From here, they become uniquely sensitized to fundamentalism in all forms, distrusting any community that claims they have all the answers, that assumes they are all right and that those they oppose are all wrong, be that community conservative or progressive, religious or secular.

  “I just didn’t trust any kind of formal framework, because frameworks were problematic,” Muriel said of her own journey away from the binary. “For forever it was Christians versus non-Christians, people who had the spirit of Christ in their hearts and the people who didn’t. And thinking that, it made Christians seem completely different from non-Christians. But lives are just lives. I had to stop and see that dichotomy didn’t exist. You know, no absolutist thing is going to work. So what were you left with? I didn’t know. I really didn’t know.

  “I was the kind of girl who would walk around with my hand a little bit open when I felt lonely because I was imagining Jesus holding my hand, you know? And when I had insomnia, I would talk to God all night. To lose those things, it just felt devastating. It was like grieving a death. I felt completely lost, destroyed, confused. What do you do when there’s no more absolutes? What do you fill that up with? How can you know anything? I’m left with this world and I don’t know anything.

  “My secret fear was, ‘Well, maybe there is a God and I’m just not one of the chosen ones to be in a relationship with him. I don’t see evidence of the Spirit in my life; therefore, maybe the Spirit is not in me. Fair being fair, maybe I’m just not chosen.’ I would go back and forward occasionally, breaking down and praying, ‘Oh God, if I’m just not one of the chosen, please, please let me back in.’ I would wake up with nightmares, terrified. I’d be about to die and in my last minutes I would quickly recant and accept Jesus into my heart. Right before I died I’d say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I do believe.’ And God would always take me back.

  “But then, I started to masturbate.

  “The thing that you cannot do if you’re a Christian.

  “The first time I masturbated it was like, ‘It’s really true. I really don’t believe in God.’ It was the last door shutting. Me saying, ‘I actually don’t believe.’

  “I was terrified while I was doing it, and afterward I felt like crying. It was a weird shame/freedom thing. Both of those. I was freaking out. I thought, ‘Because I’m masturbating I can’t go back to God now. I can’t ever be forgiven.’ ”

  “How did Dmitri react to your loss of faith?”

  “He was just like, ‘You don’t want to go to church anymore? Awesome.’ ”

  “Was he being sarcastic?” I asked.

  “No. He just said, ‘Okay.’ I was going through all of this angst and he was just ‘okay.’ Punk,” she rolled her eyes.

  After leaving the church, Muriel came out as a feminist. “I realized I had fought tooth and nail against feminism all these years because, secretly, I was a feminist,” she exclaimed. “I was the person who’d started a Bible study in high school and college; I was the one leading these things. Dmitri and I would try to have these two-people Bible studies, where he was supposed to be the male and lead and teach and I was supposed to be submissive. So then he would try to do that but then he would wrongly, in my opinion, interpret the verse. I would be like, ‘But no, if you look at it this way and this and this and this,’ and then we would both just kind of sit there and stare at each other or get into a little argument and then be uncomfortable because I wasn’t supposed to teach him.”

  But when Muriel finally gave herself permission to step out of the submissive position, it allowed her to do something “that had always felt ridiculous. I started writing poetry,” the author of several poetry collections recalled.

  In the years that followed, Muriel launched a new life. She went back to school for a graduate degree in poetry. She made several new friends. She was social for the first time in years. And accordingly, her health improved. But she was haunted by the feeling that the one thing other than her son that she carried with her into her new life—her marriage to Dmitri—was based on a lie.

  “I started to question the marriage,” she admitted. “What did we really get married for? The whole reason we got married when I was nineteen was so we could have sex, right? So we would not fall down slippery slope and fornicate and do the sin. Which has worked out really great,” Muriel huffed. “We’d never really been sexually compatible; we were more best friends than lovers.” And so, after twelve years together, Muriel told Dmitri she wanted a divorce.

  “He was brokenhearted. He wept and I felt horrible. I said, ‘We’re just best friends; we barely talk anymore; we have nothing in common.’ Our lives had been separate. I said, ‘We’ll get separate apartments but in the same building so we can raise our son together.’

  “We almost got divorced,” she told me.

  But when Muriel watched Dmitri lug her boxes and furniture to the apartment next door for her, Muriel still too weak to move them herself, she saw her husband with new eyes. They may have gotten married quickly because of the sexual purity rules, but somewhere in there, she realized, they really had fallen in love. Dmitri was a good man. He was carrying her boxes, for God’s sake, after she left him! And he had stood by her when no one else had. She asked him to stop moving the boxes for a moment and to come sit next to her. He did and then, she asked if the two of them could start over. Letting everything go—her beliefs about herself and the world, her relationship with God, even her marriage—allowed Muriel to look at it all for the first time, and to choose which things she wanted to let go of, and which she wanted to hold on to.

  “For the first time, I got to choose Dmitri for me,” she said. “That night, I slept in his bed and we had sex. It was the first time it felt natural. It was just because we wanted to, because we needed that connection with each other. Then we kept doing it. It was like, ‘Oh my gosh. This is how people have sex!’ So we finally figured out how to do it.”

  “That’s beautiful,” I said.

  “I think it’s totally beautiful!” she exclaimed. “Our love story is gorgeous and I love him so fucking much. Like, he’s the best thing. I feel like we will be one of those couples that lives together until a really old age and then dies together because we just literally don’t function without the other.”

  Today, Muriel and Dmitri are still learning about their own and one another’s bodies and finding crea
tive new ways to connect. When Dmitri is masturbating, for example, Muriel snuggles up next to him and joins in. And when Muriel is masturbating, Dmitri does the same. “Getting used to doing that with somebody, the sin, the ‘bad’ thing, together,” she said, “it brings us closer. I had no idea that my starting to masturbate would end up helping my marriage! We almost lost each other. We pushed it to the limit, but ultimately we decided we loved one another and could do our changing side-by-side. My husband and I are still together after fourteen years.”

  A month after the day Muriel asked Dmitri if the two of them could start over, her health failed again.

  “I went from feeling the best I’d ever felt to feeling the absolute worst. I couldn’t get out of bed for months. But instead of feeling horrible and angry and furious at the world, I felt totally at peace and joyful. I was like, ‘This is not the way you’re supposed to feel. This is not historically the way that I’ve felt when this has happened in the past.’ And I realized, ‘This is grace. This is an unasked-for gift from God. This is God.’ ”

  “It made you believe again?”

  “Not in a personal Jesus, or even a personal entity, but more . . . I’m open to God existing today. And I like to pray, so I do pray, but I have no idea if he’s out there.”

  “So, suffering really did bring you closer to God.”

  “Not in that naïve way I expected. But eventually I have come to experience grace through it. In the church, suffering was a fanatic place. We wanted it so we could get past it: ‘Break me so that you can remake me.’ But now I can be silent and find joy in that silence, which is really helpful when you can’t get out of bed or do anything, like I can’t some days. It’s very powerful. I feel God in the space of emptiness. I feel him when I am at my rock bottom, when I am in sickness, like those people wanted me to be,” she laughed under her breath. “But it is through just sitting with it, being with it, learning to accept it.” In these moments, Muriel says, she feels peace. Euphoria even. In her greatest moments of suffering, Muriel feels God—and he or she feels nothing like Muriel thought God would.

  * * *

  I. In a later edition, the subtitle for this book was changed to: The Beauty of Sexual Love.

  II. This book is not about men, but it bears mentioning here that within a society that equates masculinity with sexual expression, if not aggression, men who find that they do not have as high of a sexual drive as they are expected to—some perhaps due to the fact that they repressed their sexuality before marriage in order to be “pure”—face their own difficult challenges.

  8

  * * *

  Family Values

  “I’m so careful not to sound negative about the church,” the mother of a childhood girlfriend insisted as she poured me a glass of Chardonnay. “I don’t want to be that person who’s tearing it down. There are so many good people there, who do good things, who have wonderful hearts. So . . .” She paused to look me in the eye before filling her own glass. “This is just within a framework of raising our girls there. And the impact the church had on our family. Within that context.”

  I nodded.

  “Good,” she said. She filled her glass halfway, thought about it for a moment, poured a little more, and then set the bottle of Chardonnay down and crossed her legs neatly at the edge of her couch. Then she gestured for me to begin.

  “Right,” I said. “The last time we spoke on the record was almost ten years ago. So one thing I want to do is read you everything you said then and see if you still agree with it all now and would be comfortable with my using it in the book.”

  “If Solange is comfortable,” the mother smiled. She drew the name out in a long drawl—Solaaaaange. Moments ago, she had theatrically announced that this must be her pseudonym in the book.

  “Oui, Solange,” I laughed.I

  Solange is the only mother I interviewed for this book other than my own. Years before we drank Chardonnay, she had reached out to me, having heard I wanted to interview her daughters. She told me she was beginning to notice the effects of the church’s sex and gender messages on her daughters’ lives and wanted to be interviewed as well. I agreed.

  “I chose our church specifically for their youth group,” Solange had explained the first time we met for an interview. “I wanted it to supplement our work as parents, counteracting the negative impact of a secular high school and its peer pressure. I think that we viewed youth group as ancillary help to get them through those crappy, hard, teenage years. We wanted it to help us protect our little girls. I didn’t realize until later that they needed me to protect them from youth group.”

  I looked up at Solange expectantly after reading aloud her own quote from nearly a decade ago.

  Solange lifted her glass, took a sip, and set it back onto the table. The soft music that she had turned on in the background filled the silence.

  “I was being polite,” she observed quietly.

  The first time I interviewed Solange, she was still part of the evangelical church. But over the past ten years, she had shared many a bottle of Chardonnay with her daughters as well, and listened to them tell her about their religious shame, fear, and anxiety. So when Solange’s daughters left the evangelical church in their early adulthood, she understood why, and soon afterward, she and her husband left too.

  “At that point I was still working it out,” Solange said, reflecting on the quote from her younger self. “Talking with you that day was my first opportunity to put it into words, to search to articulate, to tell somebody. Because there was nobody to tell. My girlfriends, my peers, they were all in the same church. They were raising their kids there. I just felt lost and didn’t know where to go. So I was being polite. But there’s nothing in that I would change. Not a word. I totally support everything I said if not even more strongly. You can bold it, italicize it, and then underline it.”

  * * *

  Several studies have found that, generally speaking, parents play a very small role in their children’s sexuality education.1 Parents who go to church regularly are even less likely to talk to their kids about sex than their peers (especially if they’re white), and the conversations they do have tend to focus on their desire for their kids to make “moral” sexual choices, especially if they are talking to girls with whom they are more likely to emphasize the virtues of virginity than they are with boys.2 The truth is, a lot of parents just don’t know what to say. Many never received a proper sexuality education themselves, so they bring their kids to church hoping the institution will help them.

  “I had hoped that the church would more than partner, that it would take the lead, especially about sex,” Solange confessed. “I talked to my girls about it: ‘This is A, B, and C; A goes into B.’ I was very clinical and very specific about how you get pregnant. But I didn’t know how to say the romantic part of it, the intensity of the feelings, and how things can carry you away when you’re fifteen years old. I met my husband at seventeen; I was engaged at seventeen; I was married at eighteen. While it worked out for me, it’s not what I wanted for my daughters. I thought youth group would be an extension of my teachings,” she said. “But it wasn’t.”

  “What did you hope the church was teaching them, and what do you think that your daughters were actually learning?”

  “What I had hoped they were teaching was that you should want the best for yourself, sexually. And God wants only the best for you. I think abstinence protects women. Not that sex is bad, not that it’s shameful, no. But it protects your body from diseases, from babies, et cetera. I thought youth group reflected those values. But I don’t really know what my daughters were taught. I can’t tell you. Because that wasn’t shared with me. I asked the youth pastor if I could sit in on youth group because I wanted to know what was going on, and I was told ‘no.’ ”II

  “We actually talked about that ten years ago,” I said to Solange. “You said then: ‘It was all kept behind a shroud of secrecy. They said they wouldn’t open u
p the space to us because if it was open to parents, then kids wouldn’t want to come.’ ”

  “Bingo. Absolutely true. Then you-know-who became the youth pastor,” Solange said, referring to the youth pastor who was later convicted of child enticement with the intent to have sexual contact with the twelve-year-old girl from my youth group. “He did let me go, but it did not go well. Did not go well. I remember the night I visited youth group it was game night. They took a baby’s potty chair and they filled it with Mountain Dew to represent urine, and a Baby Ruth bar to represent feces. They were making kids eat it and drink it as some kind of game. There was a girl gagging. In what universe is this acceptable behavior? I went to the head pastor and told him. I didn’t go in there screaming and yelling, shaking my fist at him, but he dismissed me so fast it was so embarrassing. What I remember is being embarrassed. Because the times that I did speak with ‘the men of the church,’ ” she said making air quotes, “I was so dismissed.”

  “Do you remember what about his response felt dismissive?”

  “The nonverbals. You know nonverbally when someone’s dismissing you. You’ve been dismissed by men. You’ve been dismissed plenty of times, Linda. It’s in the lack of eye contact; it’s in the tone of voice; it’s in the words they choose and the utter lack of concern. The utter lack of concern.

  “He said, ‘Take it to the youth pastor.’ So I took it to him. He was mad. I kept my composure. I didn’t get angry back at him, but I was really upset. He didn’t listen; he didn’t care; he was defensive and angry. And had my husband been there by my side, I know I would’ve been treated differently. But I really felt as an adult, as a mother, as a parent, I should be able to talk to these people myself. The youth pastor said, ‘Take it back to the head pastor.’ After that, I was never allowed to go to youth group again.