Pure

by Linda Kay Klein

  “I have had to learn instinct, to learn how to stop distrusting myself. Now, it would be different. Now, I could walk out.

  “A couple of years ago at a party, I got drunk. This guy came out and tried to have sex with me on my friend’s porch, and I kicked him and chased him around the house yelling, ‘No means no!’ ” She laughed. “Yeah. Drunken me is a badass. Surviving gives you a very unique set of skills. It costs a lot. But it also makes you powerful.”

  * * *

  I. To be sure, not all sexual violence is male-on-female, and that which is not is often even more silenced than that which is. Sexual violence against males is deeply stigmatized, and violence against gender nonconforming people, which is disturbingly common, is often entirely ignored.

  II. The origin of this quote is a matter of dispute, but it is often attributed to Edmund Burke.

  * * *

  MOVEMENT IV

  * * *

  How We Get Over

  14

  * * *

  Going Home

  I was thirty years old when I called my parents and told them I was coming home again.

  “Oh Linda!” my mom exclaimed.

  “To write a book about sex and the church,” I finished my sentence.

  “What’s that now?” Mom said.

  It had been five years since I started doing interviews, and it would be another five before I would finish them, going back and re-interviewing many of the people I began this journey with. But if you had told me I was only at the midpoint then, I never would have believed you.

  For the first time, my path appeared clear of purity culture’s stumbling blocks. I was sure I was healed. And I was ready to help heal others. I quit my job in New York City, put my things into storage, and purchased a ticket to my hometown so I could write full-time from my parents’ house, where I didn’t have to pay rent. All I needed now, I thought, was the gumption to get up and go.

  But all the while, my shame was still there. Waiting to rise into a new kind of stumbling block, one I wouldn’t even recognize until I lost my balance. Until I tripped. Until I fell.

  * * *

  One of my first nights home, my mom and I sat together talking on the couch until late.

  “So you’re actually doing this,” she began.

  “I actually am,” I replied.

  Mom shook her head, pulling the afghan off of the back of the couch. She wrapped half of it around her shoulders.

  “Why?” she asked, offering the other half to me.

  “I just have to,” I answered, taking the afghan from her.

  “To what? Talk to these girls about . . . womanhood and . . . sexual things?” she said, still shaking her head. “Just be sure you don’t wreck your salvation, Linda. Even if your intentions are good, if people misconstrue what you say and get bad feelings about God, that isn’t good for you. For your salvation.”

  “Mom,” I tried to explain, “God is why I’m doing this. I feel called to write this book.”

  “Did he say that to you? Did he actually tell you to do it?”

  “Not in words.”

  “Then are you sure that it’s God who’s calling?” she pressed. “That it isn’t someone else?”

  I felt the blood rush to my face. “Are you talking about Satan?” I pulled away from her. “Are you saying that Satan is making me write this book?”

  “No,” she hesitated. “I’m just saying that . . . he may be.”

  “Mom,” I groaned. “It’s so not cool for you to say that I’m a tool of the Devil.”

  “Linda, Satan is the Prince of Lies,” she said with fear in her eyes. “I don’t want him using you. What if people turn away from God because of what you say the church did? Those people will go to Hell. Which is a lot worse than whatever is happening to you and your friends. So, it may seem like a good thing to bring this all up now but—don’t you understand? I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  Under the afghan, I could feel her shaking.

  “Here,” I said, handing my half to her.

  “Just promise me you’re praying, Linda,” Mom pleaded as she wrapped the rest of the afghan around herself.

  “Just because I don’t go to church anymore doesn’t mean I’m not praying,” I answered.

  “Well, are you?” she demanded.

  “Yes,” I retorted.

  “All right,” she wiped at the tears gathering in her eyes. “Good!” Then she sighed and said more softly, “Good Linda, good.”

  Conversations like this one were common in the five months I lived with my parents at the age of thirty. And they weren’t all with my mom either. Several of the people I had interviewed five years earlier expressed concerns over having their stories told publicly when I said I wanted to write them down in a book. They worried their stories would lead people away from the church, costing them their salvation. They told me they didn’t want to make their God look like “a meanie,” and that they struggled with whether or not they could trust me—as someone who had left the community—not to “twist” their stories.I

  I never stopped knowing I had to tell this story. But the more my friends and family expressed their fears and concerns, the more self-conscious I became about how I told it. When I tried to write, my head was clouded by all the ways I might write it “wrong.” Some days, I would sit frozen in front of my computer screen. Other days, the words poured out of me and my laptop was wet with tears. I was writing some of my most painful personal stories, and some of the most painful stories I had been told by others, but the hardest part, for me, wasn’t how writing these stories made me feel. It was my fear around how reading them might make others feel. People like my parents, my youth pastor (the one who was there before and after the one who was convicted of child enticement), and the people from church who had supported me and my family when we needed them.

  The church is like a bundle of sticks, I remember an evangelical leader once saying. As long as we stand together, we are strong. But when someone leaves the bundle, they weaken themselves and weaken the rest of us too. The stories I heard as an adolescent about women ideologically leaving the bundle by demanding equality or evangelical insiders challenging the church’s positions on other issues came back to me along with the fear of being seen as such a damaging dissenter.

  And there it was. The shame I was sure I was over.

  One afternoon while my parents were out, I went into my childhood bedroom, now my father’s office. The Bible verses that had papered the walls had been taken down, and the white, crib-like daybed replaced with a desk. Still, if I closed my eyes, it was easy to see the way it used to be. The tall white dresser there by the big window, I rearranged the room in my mind. The short white one here. And the daybed, just there.

  I thought I was so grown-up, I realized as I opened my eyes again. But it was all right here where I left it—not in this room, not in this house, but in me.

  Research shows that when we challenge old ideas about ourselves and the world and replace them with new ones, we can break down old neural connections through what’s called synaptic pruning and strengthen new ones. And if we keep at it, eventually we can create a new way of looking at the world long enough to pave new neural pathways, to shape new memories, to internalize new stories—narrowing the gap between what were, in my and my interviewees’ experience, the ideas our bodies long ago internalized and the freedom our spirits now called us toward. This is the miracle of brain plasticity. A miracle I had thought I’d already finished experiencing. I had learned how to listen to my inner voice, even when it contradicted the voices around me. I had won the freedom to reinterpret the religious texts of my childhood and to listen to the voice of God I heard. I had learned how to express the full range of my emotions, and how to speak freely about my thoughts, my feelings, and my beliefs. And I had liberated my intimate life from purity culture’s control, making me believe I could have a healthy romantic relationship.

  But under every layer of sh
ame is another layer. And this latest layer—the shame I had around telling this story publicly—felt as hard as granite. Every day, I sat down with my computer, hoping the shame would splinter as I metaphorically rammed my body into it, but the shame wasn’t breaking. I was.

  My parents watched me closely as the months wore on. They both became increasingly determined to stop me from writing this book, each for their own reasons. And I fought them hard, pushing back in ways I didn’t when I was a “good Christian teenager,” which was unsettling for us all. Mom and I talked often about her fear that my exposing the damaging effects of the purity movement would be akin to my committing mass murder on an eternal scale as my words could turn people away from faith and secure their fate in Hell; her fear that God would hold me accountable for the blood on my hands and I would be sent to join them in Hell as a punishment; and even her fear that what I was doing was so taboo that I’d be utterly destroyed by the evangelical community for doing it, that even if this was God’s will and I wound up in Heaven where I would be rewarded for having answered God’s call, it would be only after years of experiencing Hell here on earth at the hands of the community whose harmfulness she begged me not to expose.

  It had to stop. So I sent what I had of the book to agents, even though I knew it wasn’t ready. More than one replied with the message that the book was too dark, too painful to read, one even saying that it “hurt to turn each page.” They asked me to write with more levity or at least to offer readers breaks from the intensity. I laughed at the request. I had no levity in me, and I hadn’t taken a break from the pain since I left New York City. I thought to myself, Their comments may as well be about my life. My life had become dark. My life had become painful. It hurt for me to turn the page of each day.

  So I stopped.

  I stopped writing.

  I stopped interviewing.

  I told God that it would be great if someone else could do this book.

  I moved back to New York City, took my things out of storage, got a new job, and told myself it was over.

  But the call remained.

  * * *

  A few years later, I was lying in the grass in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park at dusk, talking to my mom over the telephone.

  “When in your life have you felt most alive?” I asked my mom wistfully. “Like you were really living?”

  “I’ve never thought about it,” she answered me.

  “Think about it now,” I said playfully.

  “I don’t know, Linda,” she protested.

  “Think about it.”

  “I don’t think about things like that. I don’t ask myself questions like that one.”

  “Well, start now then.”

  She was silent. I waited. A breeze ran over me.

  Finally, Mom sighed. “It’s when I’m with God,” she said.

  “Really?” I asked. “Like, alone in your room?” I pictured her sitting on the floor by the window where she often goes to pray.

  “No. When I’m with God.”

  “Right. But otherwise, you mean, alone?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “It’s the only time that I can really be myself,” she said quietly. “God is the only one who loves me unconditionally. And approves of me. Unconditionally. No matter what mistakes I make. So I can just . . . be myself.”

  “I understand,” I answered her softly. It was what I had wanted from religion my entire life, perhaps what we had all wanted. But maybe we were looking in the wrong place. Looking for it from one another, when all the while only God could give it. We sat in silence together for a moment. Then, I heard myself ask her, “Mom?” My voice was high, the way it used to be when Blue told me I was acting like a child. “Do you still think God has his hand on me?”

  It was something she used to tell me almost every day. Don’t you ever think that you aren’t something, Linda, she would say while rubbing my head at night when I was small. Because you are. You are something special. Like Moses and the other saints. I knew when he protected you in my womb after my miscarriage. It was his way of saying he loved me. Because he was trusting me with something very special. As I drifted to sleep, she once leaned over me and whispered into my ear, I feel so privileged to be allowed to raise you, Linda.

  I waited.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Like you used to say when I was a little girl?” I continued. “That I am special? That God has his hand on me?”

  “God doesn’t take his hand off you,” Mom finally answered. “You will always be special, Linda. And he is still willing to guide you. I just don’t know if you are following him anymore.”

  I lay in the grass for a long time after that, as night fell around me. I wondered why I had asked Mom that question. It was the question of a child, and I wasn’t one. I didn’t need my mom to tell me whether or not God had his or her hand on me. I felt God’s presence every day. I asked, I realized, because I wanted her to believe it.

  Evangelicalism has always been about Mom for me. When I was an adolescent, both my mom and my dad told me on separate occasions that their favorite part about me was my Christianity—my mom because she thought it was the most valuable, precious thing in the world and she loved that she and I shared it, and my dad because, after having lost his faith as an adolescent, he saw in me what he wished more than anything he could have for himself. I knew my dad would be disappointed when I left the faith, but that he would understand. But deep down, I think I feared leaving the faith might mean losing Mom.

  When my mom continued to love me despite my having lost her favorite part about me, I counted myself lucky. Not every former evangelical gets this. And then, I had to go and push my luck. Talk to people about gender, about sex, and expose the harmfulness of some of the church’s teachings. I worried that if Mom ever felt forced to choose between evangelicalism and me—as she might when the book comes out—she might not choose me.

  And suddenly, lying in the dark grass, I realized, that’s why I went home. Not, as I told people, because I had been working at a nonprofit and had no savings and so needed to go somewhere I could write without having to pay for food or housing (though that was true). Those were reasons; they just weren’t the reason. After all, I had had other options: friends offered guestrooms in both Fort Worth, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia; a several-month-long house-sitting opportunity for a five-story mansion surfaced in New York City, and the man I had been dating said he would pay for me to write full-time from India for a year, where he himself was moving.

  But I turned them all down.

  I wanted to go home.

  To convince them, to convince her, that I was doing a good thing. Who am I kidding? To convince them that I was good.

  I didn’t receive the blessing I went home for.

  But in time, I realized I could go on and tell my story without it.

  And perhaps, that is what I really needed.

  * * *

  They say going home is the hardest part of any journey. It is there that we risk losing the gains we made elsewhere. There that we may ignore our hardest-won lessons, let down our guard, and find ourselves in the gravest danger.

  After that call with my mom, I started writing and interviewing again, waking early before work and setting aside at least one weekend day for a deep dive. I launched a blog. I published a few articles online. And then, a funny thing happened. My mom read them and it made her feel . . . better. Whatever she imagined I might have to say, it was far worse than what I actually said.

  Today, it’s my mom sending me daily text messages saying, “You can do it!” “Keep writing honey!” And my dad who tells me, “Don’t worry if people are mad at you for what you have to say; you are a truth-teller.”

  I think often about the fears my family and community expressed the first time I tried to write this book, but these thoughts no longer immobilize me. I am careful with people’s stories. I don’t ever want to be in
a position of shaming the evangelical community for having shamed me. The point is that we must all move past shaming. But today, I know that telling my story and the stories of those who have trusted me to tell theirs is about more than answering a call to help others. It is the only way to the other side of the granite block of shame that is still within me. Every time I tell my story—come what may—I am closer to free.

  * * *

  The thing about a wound is that, when treated, it heals. A light wound disappears altogether and a deep wound develops into a scar—that thick, dark fabric, raised and stronger than the skin around it, as Jane Hirshfield describes in her poem “For What Binds Us.”

  Today, I have a scar as strong as the literal scars that hold my insides together, as concrete as the black tar road that led me away and then home again. It has become a bond between me and the religion I grew up in that keeps me coming back. A bond between me and my family forged by having faced that which might have broken us, and not having been broken.

  This is not just a book about wounds.

  It is a book about scars.

  I can’t imagine what it must have been like for my mother, who once felt so blessed to be able to give to me the greatest gift that she had ever received—evangelical Christianity—to see me walk away from it. I can’t imagine how it must have felt for her to watch me deconstruct the values of the religion around which she had shaped her entire mothering of me. But I will never forget that every morning in the months I lived at home at the age of thirty—whether or not she or my dad and I had argued the night before—we ate breakfast together. Dad and I shared a pot of coffee. Mom gave me a hug. Then I walked down the hallway to the guest bedroom, closed the door, and did the thing that made us all most afraid.

  And afterward, we ate lunch.

  * * *

  I. This book does not include any interviews with individuals who remained uncomfortable with their stories being told.