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ABSTRACT
This study contextualizes U.S. evangelical Christian sexual purity rhetoric in a long tradition of purity frameworks that attempt to properly order the world, manage “dirt,” and prevent “matter out of place.” Purity rhetoric is dependent on the idea that there is a proper way that communities and the world should be ordered, and that people should play specific roles and embody specific subjectivities within this order. This fixation on keeping a particular order can serve as bulwark against fear, chaos, and perceived or actual threats, yet this ordering often has an antidemocratic hierarchy. This study shows how rhetorics of bodily, racial, hygienic, and sexual purity are mutually co-constructing and cannot be understood apart from each other, and how many purity frameworks contribute to antidemocratic structures. Theologians are well-positioned to imagine more just and loving forms of subjectivity, community, and salvation that are not predicated on fantasies of impossible purity ideals.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 For more on this, see Noëlle McAfee’s Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019) which uses a psychoanalytic framework to help account for the ways that resistance to and inability to cope with fear, fragility, and loss have contributed to our current political, and in many ways, epistemological and existential, crises.
2 Shotwell, Against Purity, 8.
3 Freedom House, “Freedom in the World 2022: The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule, February 2022”; Boese et al. “Autocratization Changing Nature? Democracy Report 2022. Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)”.
4 Siripurapu, “The U.S. Inequality Debate”.
5 Tollefson, “Climate Change is Hitting the Planet Faster than Scientist Originally Thought”.
6 Lemos et al., “Texas Begins Investigating Parents of Transgender Teens”.
7 Goodman and Ghorayshi, “Women Face Risks as Doctors Struggle With Medical Exceptions on Abortion”; Bansinath and Heaney, “How to Protect Yourself When Seeking an Abortion”.
8 Rigau, et al., Groundswell; Solomon and Pronczuk, “A New Refugee Criss Stirs Uncomfortable Issues for Europe”; Shepherd and Masih, “Nearly 15 Million Deaths Related to Covid-19, WHO Estimates”.
9 Because this paper is not primarily grounded in a psychoanalytic framework, I use the traditional spelling of “fantasy.” In a psychoanalytic context, this would be spelled “phantasy,” and has a particular meaning focused on imaginations or hopes that are often difficult if not impossible to attain, grounded in unconscious longings or desires. Both “fantasy” and “phantasy” are quite apt here.
10 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 44–50, 197, and 203.
11 For more on the various ways purity can be framed, see Kazen, “Levels of Explanation for Ideas of Impurity,” 75–100; and Lemos, “Where There Is Dirt, is There System? Revisiting Biblical Purity Constructions,” 265–94.
12 Kyriarchy is a term developed by biblical scholar and feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, intended to “redefine the analytic category of patriarchy in terms of multiplicative intersecting structures of domination … . [It] is best theorized as a complex pyramidal system of intersecting multiplicative social structures of superordination and subordination, or ruling and oppression.” Wisdom Ways, 211. See also Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic, ix, 6.
13 For instance, Gish, “‘Are You a Trashable Styrofoam cup?’”; Gish, “Producing High Priests and Princesses”; Hart House, “The Afterlife of White Evangelical Purity Culture”; Houser, “Altared Bodies”; Moslener, Virgin Nation; and Valenti, The Purity Myth.
14 Ibid. Not all sexual purity teachings do all of this simultaneously.
15 For more on the complexities of what is meant by virginity, see, for instance, Bernau, Virgins; Blank, Virgin; or Kelto Lillis, Virgin Territory.
16 As a few examples, see Brückner and Bearman, “After the Promise: The STD Consequences of Adolescent Virginity Pledges,” 271–78; Bersamin and Walker, “Promising to Wait,” 428–36; Rosenbaum, “Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers,” 110–20; Trenholm et al., “Impacts of Four Title V, Section 510 Abstinence Education Programs: Final Report”.
17 For more on girls and women as a stand-in or representative of the whole, see Gish, “The Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Conservative U.S. Christianity,” especially 32, 123; and Ortner, “The Virgin and the State,” 43–58.
18 I do not imagine that anyone is somehow fully in control of their desires, longings, or fully free subjects exercising unconstrained agency, but I do operate from the perspective that people and communities have some ability to shape their desires, longings, and futures and should be able to do so. Further discussion of this complex and contested view is beyond the scope of the work here. On agency as a contested concept, see Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, in particular xii, 5, 10, 14–5, 33; or Hollywood, “Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Historiography,” 514–28. On the shaping of desires and the possibility of agency even given the structures of power to which we are subjected, see Allen, The Politics of Ourselves.
19 On counternarratives see Peters and Lankshear, “Postmodern Counternarratives”.
20 Yoo, “Theory of Purity,” helpfully points to an overreliance on Douglas's account of purity and a more general lack of serious theoretical attention to purity in the study of religion. See 3–4.
21 Ibid, 44.
22 Ibid.
23 Smith, Clean, 6.
24 Ortner, “Virgin,” 1996.
25 Lugones, “Purity, Impurity, and Separation,” 464–65.
26 Schüssler Fiorenza, “Re-Visioning Christian Origins,” 225–50.
27 Lugones, “Purity,” 468.
28 Douglas refers to the need for objectivity and/or to objective reality in several places in Purity and Danger: xix, 29, 89, 110, 204-205. She also notes her interest in objective analysis in Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Routledge, 1996), 55 and 110.
29 As a few examples, see Klein, Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free or Lenz, “‘I Kissed Dating Goodbye’ Told Me to Stay Pure Until Marriage”.
30 This literature has expanded notably in the last decade. See, in particularly, Blyth, Rape Culture, Purity Culture, and Coercive Control in Teen Girl Bibles; Houser, “Altared Bodies,” 2021; Moslner, Virgin Nation; House, “The Afterlife,” 2020; Klement and Sagarin. “Nobody Wants to Date a Whore: Rape-Supportive Messages in Women-Directed Christian Dating Books,” 205–23; and Sawyer, “I Stumbled/I Caused You to Stumble”.
31 Writing about “Christianity” during the late second temple period can me fraught. For more on when “Christianity cease[d] to be Judaism” or “when and why Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism stopped considering themselves and recognizing the other, as belonging to the same religion,” see Boccaccini, “History of Judaism,” 279–302. For more on Christian identity formation, particularly as it relates to the term “Christian,” see Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World, 1–26, 240–41, 250–59.
32 Two relevant books came out just as this research was being completed and thus I was not able to fully consider them for this article, but future work in this area should take note of Lillis, Virgin Territory: Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity and During, The Chasity Plot.
33 Kazen, Jesus & Purity Halakhah, 350.
34 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 242.
35 Countryman, Dirt, Greed and Sex.
36 Countryman, Dirt, 90.
37 Ibid., 91.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., 91, 108, 124, 128–29.
40 Ibid., 91.
41 Ibid. Countryman goes on to say that it is absurd to suggest that Christianity has been free of the same tendency (91), although it is unclear how this caveat fits in with the overall thrust of his argument.
42 deSilva, Honor, 279. “[W]e must remember that Jewish observance of purity codes was not a matter of externalistic religion but was regarded … as a meaningful component of living out the covenant God gave to Israel that also included strong ethical dimensions – the pious Jew knew that ‘a clean heart’ was as critical as ‘clean hands.’”
43 deSilva, Honor, 294–97.
44 Ibid, 295.
45 For instance, the main thrust of Jonathan Klawans’ book Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism is to articulate, clarify, and explore the distinctions between moral and ritual impurity in ancient Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). See also Fredriksen, “Paul, Purity, and the Ekkēlsia of the Gentiles,” especially 207-209; Maccoby, Ritual and Morality, especially 193-208; Kazen, Jesus, especially 200–22.
46 For instance, Klawans, Impurity.
47 Fredrickson, “Paul,” 208.
48 O’Grady, “The Semantics of Taboo,” 12.
49 Everyone Is NOT Doing It: Abstinence and Personal Identity, 75.
50 Kinder and Sanders, Divided by Color, 105–08.
51 I have engaged Berthold on this, but see also Carl Zimring’s compelling Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2016) for a more thorough account of this powerful and harmful trope.
52 Berthold, “Tidy,” 7.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., 1.
55 See Shotwell’s separate but equally compelling discussion of the problems and contradictions of hygienic purity in chapter 1 of Against Purity, in particular pp. 1-6, 10, and 13.
56 Why This New Race? Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005), 7–16; “Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth,” in Race Critical Theories: Text and Context, eds. Philomena Essed and David Goldberg (Medford, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 369-391.
57 Stoler, “Racial Histories.”
58 Buell, Why This New Race, 7.
59 “Faces of Abstinence: Ashley, Tampa, FL,” The Abstinence Clearinghouse, Sioux Falls, SD, Original link was www.abstinence.net/about/testimonials.php?testimonialid=10.
60 The now defunct The Abstinence Outlet sold a rose pin with an accompanying card stating: “You are like a beautiful rose. Each time you engage in premarital sex, a precious petal is stripped away. Don’t leave your future husband holding a bare stem. Abstain.” Abstinence Outlet, Wilding Industries, Inc., “Abstinence Rose Pin.” Original link www.abstinenceoutlet.com/abropin.html. Discussed in Valenti, Purity Myth, 32.
61 Baker, “Dance with your Daughter, but Not for Purity”. For more on “purity balls,” an event where fathers take their daughters to a dance with the theme of sexual purity, often involving sexual purity pledges and jewelry exchanges, see Gish, “Producing,” 2016.
62 Baker, “Dance.”
63 Ibid.
64 “This was birthed out of our home, not the abstinence movement. It is a fatherhood event, not a virginity or abstinence event.” Dahleen Lanton, “Abstinence Enshrined at ‘Purity Balls’; Conservative Christians Make a Night out of Father-Daughter Togetherness Sealed with a Vow of Chastity”.
65 Baker, “Dance.” Wilson often uses similar language of “extravagance” and “beauty” in discussing adolescent girls and purity. For instance, Randy and Lisa Wilson, Celebrations of Faith, 8, 12, 20, 45, 58, 114, 136.
66 Baker, “Dance.”
67 St. James, Wait for Me, 1.
68 Mally, Before You Meet Prince Charming; Hendall and Jones, Lady in Waiting.
69 Silver Ring Thing Sexual Abstinence Study Bible, 14.
70 St. James, Wait, 1.
71 Silver Ring Thing Sexual Abstinence Study Bible, 14.
72 For more on the inadequacy of purity frameworks to address the ills of late-stage capitalism in the Anthropocene, see Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in a Compromised World.
73 Shotwell, Against, 5.
74 Emilie Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, 123.
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Elizabeth Gish
Elizabeth Gish is the Senior Program Officer For Democracy and Community at the Kettering Foundation.