Pure

by Linda Kay Klein

  “How do you fix things when you can’t even find a voice to discuss them?” she said, looking away from me. “When you’re not even comfortable talking about these things yourself? I would be very embarrassed and ashamed to talk about sexual relationships. That’s not something I can do. But it’s a conversation that needs to be had.

  “I had always thought that if something was going on with my daughters, the youth pastor would talk to me. But after I went to youth group that time, I realized he wouldn’t. The relationship was between the youth leaders and the children. It was almost like a secret relationship, a private, secret relationship, and you realize, now, that’s how you control people. With really young ones, with teenagers—oh my God they’re so vulnerable.” Solange and I sat in silence for a moment, the thought of the twelve-year-old girl unspoken between us.

  “I can’t tell you what my daughters were taught in youth group,” Solange continued, picking her glass back up off the table. “But I can tell you some of the results I saw: I saw them embarrassed about their feminine selves; I saw them more self-conscious about how they dressed and how they looked. They were just—I don’t know. There was an underpinning of shame. When I read the Bible I see God’s powerful love for women. I do not see in the Bible God treating women as second-class citizens, as little girls who aren’t quite grown-up and will never be. But when you see your kids struggling at school and church, what do you do? Pull them out of school? I didn’t realize homeschooling was an option. Change churches? The girls didn’t want to leave their friends. How could I differentiate between what was normal growing-up stuff and what was abnormal? What was teenage angst and what was true anxiety?”

  “Did you see other parents struggling this way?”

  “No. I really didn’t,” Solange said. “The people I remember, they were all in. And in the beginning, I was too. I couldn’t see it back then. I just could not see it.”

  “Did you ever try to talk to anyone about it?”

  “I do remember trying to talk to some people who I felt had an education and an awareness. I did not try to talk to any pastor or associate pastor because the messages were so ingrained in them. I just wasn’t going to bother with that. But some other parents, and some of the women who were actually working in ministry. And I either was not properly articulating my concerns or there was just this wall I was coming up against. It was like, ‘If you don’t agree 100 percent, it’s hit the highway. There are other churches. Either be a part of this and get on board, or leave.’ ”

  Over the course of my research, I have been surprised by how many of the conservative Christians closest to adolescents—parents, youth pastors, and other youth group leaders in particular—have told me they are concerned about the damage they see purity culture doing to adolescents’ lives. Many silence their concerns, however, knowing they are not welcome within the community, and those who do voice them are often given the same message Solange was: The religious purity movement isn’t going anywhere, so you can either get behind it, or you can go.

  * * *

  Around the same time I talked with Solange the first time, I met up with a former evangelical youth pastor from the area at a local coffee shop. “It was so important that everyone was in lockstep,” Pastor Bob, who spent twenty-five years in youth ministry, told me through his long, bushy beard. “They would talk about it in pastoral meetings: ‘We all have to be on message, on the same page.’ ”

  Bob went on to describe a series of extremely troubling things he knew to be happening to some of the kids under his care. “It was somehow seen as, ‘Oh great, those kids are here for this sexuality class,’ ” he continued. “But I thought, ‘No! They shouldn’t be in this class! We’re just a church! We’re not equipped to handle this!’ I was disgusted, because the church put itself in a position of authority when it came to sexuality, and we had no business doing that. That’s why I didn’t want to teach the purity message anymore. I made up all these excuses not to do it, but I got hounded to. Finally I admitted, ‘I just don’t believe in it: the material, the delivery, everything about it.’

  “My old head pastor, he is passionate, and one day he threw his arms out wide and he said ‘Bob, you are waaaaay out here.’ ” Bob splayed his arms as an illustration. “ ‘And we want you to be—’ ” he brought his hands together. “ ‘We want you to be here,’ ” Bob made a physical box with his hands. “And it dawned on me. ‘Of course! That’s it!’ I was starting to be more open. I was thinking ‘maybe this narrow rail of evangelicalism is not the only answer; maybe there are more answers.’ That was the soul of my decision to leave the church.”

  “Which is when you started The Bar Church?” I asked, referring to the experimental church Bob started and led in local bars for five years before leaving the ministry altogether.

  “Yes,” he said. “The Bar Church was for people moving away from shame in every way. At one point, we had every old evangelical pastor and youth pastor from the area there. The nicest way to put it is that a lot of them had had the crap beat out of them in their churches. Here. I want to show you something.” Bob pulled a laptop out of his backpack. He searched for an episode of the series One Punk Under God about Jay Bakker, the more progressive preacher son of famed televangelists, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Bob scrolled quickly through the episode searching for a particular scene.

  “Here!” he said, moving the curser back a bit. I scooted closer to him to see the screen better. “Here.”

  “Oh wow!” I exclaimed.

  The cameraperson pulled away from Jay Bakker’s sermon to pan the audience, and there, on the screen, was Bob. It turns out that the show visited The Bar Church at one point. Bob pointed at the screen and named various audience members. I saw more than one of my evangelical friends’ youth pastors; I even saw the youth pastor that my teenage boyfriend, Dean, had confided in when I broke up with him for God.III

  “These guys,” Bob said, “a lot of them are just out now. They are the walking wounded. But some people felt, ‘I need to go back to the mother ship.’ If they wanted to be in ministry, they felt they had no other choice. I’m not in the church anymore, but I’m still connected by friendship enough to know that when it comes to sexuality, shame is still the thread that runs through it. Every time I hear another story about it, I think, ‘The beat goes on.’ ”

  Who knows how many of our youth pastors were like Bob and our mothers like Solange. How many of those who worked with evangelical young people day after day saw what was happening to us—the fear, the anxiety, the shame—but felt as powerless as we did to do anything about it. How many were told to get with the program or go. And simply made their choice. As we all did.

  * * *

  The truth is, Solange’s concerns weren’t just dismissed by church leaders; for a long time, they were dismissed by her daughters as well. Until they became adults, Solange’s daughters didn’t want to hear her counter the teachings of the evangelical church. They had been taught that anyone who disagreed with its tenets was simply not a good Christian and so shouldn’t be trusted when it came to those things. (Even if that person was your mom.)

  “The church talked a good talk of ‘we’re going to support the family; this is all about the family.’ You heard ‘the family, the family, the family.’ You kept hearing that,” Solange said, topping our glasses off. “But the reality is they taught kids not to trust their parents. They told the kids, ‘Your parents didn’t go to Bible college. They don’t know what they’re talking about. We do. We’ve studied the Word of God in Latin and Greek.’ ”

  She’s right. As adolescents, we were taught that, if ever they came into conflict, the perspectives of the church—which we were taught was God’s representative—should be trusted over the perspectives of our parents.

  Youth group leaders were more trusted than parents. I longed for the perfect Christian home. I criticized my family for not being as spiritually minded as I needed, and neglected to nur
ture family relationships. I looked down on my parents for years. I had a superiority complex because I was more spiritual than they were. I was a “real” Christian; they weren’t. I went to church every Sunday; they didn’t. I went to seminary, youth group, whatever; they didn’t. (Jo)

  My mom was supposedly a Christian, supposedly a born-again Christian, but I definitely thought that I was a better Christian. I was in touch with Christ and she was not at all because she was kind of horrible. (Muriel)

  Meanwhile, parents were similarly taught to prioritize the perspectives of the church over those of their children. I have seen tremendous devastation result from this thinking. As an example, when one young woman moved in with her girlfriend, her parents announced they were disowning her. “They said they were selling all my stuff and they had taken down all my pictures because I had turned my back on Christ, and the Bible says that if someone’s living a life of sin, that you’re supposed to kick them out of the church so that they feel the pain of what they’re doing, and then they’ll come back,” she explained. It took this woman years to create a new—and still deeply damaged—relationship with her parents. Many children are never so lucky.

  It seems to me that the family the purity movement seeks to protect is conceptual, not actual. So-called family values are about preserving the idea of what a family should look like, not preserving actual familial relationships. In fact, I have seen family adherence to purity culture’s black-and-white family values disintegrate families again and again.

  Feeling powerless to change her daughters’ trajectories as their relationship with the church advanced, Solange watched as her “brainiac, brilliant” daughters gave up childhood dreams and ignored big opportunities they no longer felt were appropriate for their religious identity.

  “We knew our girls would be told, ‘You have so many gifts but you don’t have enough testosterone so you’ll never have it all,’ ” she lamented. “I knew they’d be taught that. But I didn’t know how to fight it except to tell them that they could do whatever they wanted to when they were at home. They could follow their dreams. What would have been the course of their lives?” her eyes began to glisten. “What college would they have gone to, and how would they be expressing their passions and their true callings now if they had not gone to youth group?

  “They were going to go to four-year colleges. That was my dream for them. That was my big dream. I’m getting emotional. We are third-generation Americans. I said, ‘We are going to do it right. My girls are going to go to college and find their dreams and passions and live them.’ Then you find something that’s supposed to help them because the world is a scary world. You think the church is going to come along and be your friend and your helper, and it turns out to be just the opposite. I have them on this path and here comes youth group, and it totally changes the trajectory of what I was trying to do for them.

  “Would I send them to youth group again? Never. I think the church hurt more than they helped. Do I want a do-over? I do. I want a do-over. Being my age—sixty-one!—my husband and I, we want do-overs all the time. We always want do-overs.”

  Solange wiped upward at the edges of her eyes with her pinky fingers. “You are going to make me cry, Linda,” she said. “Those are my kids. And you have hopes and dreams for their lives. It changed the trajectory of their lives. I get very upset about that, because I feel very protective of my girls. I always felt very protective of my girls even when they were little. And they are still dealing with the ramifications, the effects of going to youth group today. They still live that today. You get it. Don’t you? You get what I’m talking about? You know what I’m talking about? I think you do. Nobody else knows what I’m talking about.”

  * * *

  I. Though these days many people think of Solange Knowles, Beyoncé’s sister, when they hear the name, perhaps it’s worth noting that I’ve read that Solange is the French form of a Latin name deriving from the word for religious.

  II. Many sexuality educators agree it is best practice not to have parents sit in on sessions about sensitive topics, such as sexuality. However, they also agree it is best practice for educators to openly share with parents what is taught in these sessions. For example, educators trained in the Our Whole Lives (OWL) program are encouraged to offer opportunities for parents to watch the videos their children will later watch and read the curricula their children will be engaging with in advance.

  III. Dean said the youth pastor had advised him to suggest incorporating more prayer and Bible reading into our relationship as a way to get me back. It was good advice. But my anxiety was far too great for such reasonable fixes.

  9

  * * *

  The Stained-Glass Ceiling

  Half of the women Jo went to Bible college with were there to earn their MRS, the thirty-one-year-old told me as she dug her spade around a weed growing in the flowerbed alongside her house. In other words, “they weren’t there to get a degree; they were there to meet a man”—and become his Mrs.—“so they could get married and be in the ministry together.” She yanked hard at the weed and it came up with a jerk.

  “You mean the way some girls used to say their career goal was to become a pastor’s wife,” I suggested, sitting cross-legged beside Jo in the grass with a notebook in my lap.

  Jo turned around. “Marrying youth pastors,” she smiled at me with recognition. “That was a big deal.”

  Jo had no interest in getting her so-called MRS in college. She wanted to have her own ministry.

  But, you know, Jo was a woman.

  “I’ve felt from the age of . . . always . . . that if you were a woman in the church you weren’t respected. I saw that the church intrinsically believed women were not as important to God as men. It was in how we were treated. Were we girls taught that God had amazing plans for us—married or not, with kids or not, that we had our own purpose? No. We were taught to support somebody else’s purpose, and given biblical reflections on ‘partner and submit.’ Were we girls taught to be warriors? To gird ourselves and be as prepared for life as possible? No. We were trained to be supportive, nice, and caring to a warrior man.

  “I felt tricked. Like, ‘Oh. I’m supposed to give my entire life to this God, and go into the ministry, which is supposed to lead to meaning, purpose, and fulfillment. But wait . . . I can’t do it? Because I’m a woman?’ For me, who gave up my whole life for Christianity, that was unacceptable,” Jo said digging forcefully. “I wanted to give Christianity my all, and be my all. I felt like I had a lot to offer, but I was stuck. I became sexist in my own way. I thought being a woman was a handicap that I had to overcome, that to be feminine was to be weak and unthinking. I was ashamed of being a woman and wanted no part of that.

  “I accepted my shamefulness as a woman as a starting point, even as I dared them to call me out on it. ‘Yes it’s shameful that I’m a woman, but I’m going to be brave enough to talk to you anyway. I’m going to rise above my shameful womanhood and I’m going to talk to you as an equal.’ I thought, ‘I am so strong a person that I’m going to embrace my humanity, not my womanhood.”

  * * *

  For decades, what are often called “women’s issues” have been one of the most divisive issues in the church. Two sides have formed: complementarianism (which you’ll recall from chapter two teaches that men and women can only complement one another when men stick to leadership and women to following, especially in the church and the home) and egalitarianism (which I mentioned previously, teaches that the roles we play should never be determined by gender).

  Scholars of feminist theology, womanist and African American theology, mujerista and feminista theology, Asian and Asian American women’s theology, and other theologies have been working at the intersection of religion and women’s rights since before I was born. Among these thought leaders are some who call themselves “evangelical feminists,” “biblical feminists,” or “egalitarians.”

  Egalitarian women began organizi
ng in the 1970s. In the eighties and nineties, complementarians fought back. Hard. Christian colleges that had embraced egalitarian thinking in the previous decades, for example, now fought to prove their commitment to complementarianism as demonstrated by their hiring practices, course offerings, and assignments. One of my interviewees even recalls having to write a college paper titled “Why Feminism Is Wrong.”

  Tensions were particularly strong at Southern Seminary, the Southern Baptist Convention’s flagship seminary. In the early to mid-1990s, the school made so-called women’s issues a litmus test for whether or not a faculty member was conservative enough to teach there, its president calling them “clear dividers in our time.”1 As Dr. Julie Ingersoll writes in Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles: “Southern Seminary . . . moved from considering a candidate’s views on the issue of women’s ordination as only an indication of that candidate’s views on inerrancy [that is, the belief that the Bible is without error, a standard litmus test for conservative Christians] to making hiring decisions solely on the basis of a candidate’s views on that issue.”2 Faculty hired before the new litmus test was put into place were now required to articulate a complementarian perspective if they wanted to keep their jobs. Among many Southern Seminary faculty members, there was anger, crying, even vomiting.3 The seminary lost about a third of its faculty and half of its student body to the subsequent firings.I4 Many also left the Southern Baptist Convention.II But Southern Seminary had certainly proved its allegiance to complementarian thought.

  * * *

  Jo took her orange Crocs off and threw them on the grass behind her. She wore an oversized men’s button-up, a pair of jean shorts, and thick gardening gloves. Her short dark hair was tied back from her face with a bandana and she wore dark red lipstick, in rockabilly style.