Linda Purity

[Rebbeca Schulke]

ChrisStroop: Thanks for agreeing to this interview, Linda! For readers just getting to know you and your work, could you give us a little background on your life and how you came to write Pure?

In high school, life in the church became more difficult for me. My youth pastor was convicted of child-enticement with the intent to have sexual contact with a 12-year-old girl in our youth group after having been quietly asked to leave two previous evangelical institutions for essentially the same behavior. I withdrew from Bible college two weeks before I was to start school, and a year later I began attending one of the most liberal secular colleges in in the nation.

I further appreciate the way you take care in discussing the sociological reasons for why your sample is overwhelmingly white, making sure to devote some space in the book to considering the work and perspectives of people of color. And in terms of inclusivity, I think your highlighting the story of a trans man socialized as a girl in evangelical purity culture adds significant value to the book.

CS: Also with respect to representation, I found the book on the whole to be so sympathetic not just to Christians, but even to evangelicals, that in places I, as someone harmed by evangelicalism (including its purity culture) who ultimately landed outside of organized religion altogether, got quite emotionally upset. I kept waiting to see you highlight a story of someone harmed by purity culture who made the choice to leave the church and Christianity for good, and by representing and sympathizing with that person, to validate that choice. But you never do. Instead, time and again, the interviewees you choose to highlight talk about how much they still love God and Jesus, albeit a couple of them, like you, no longer go to church.

In addition, you spend much of this chapter sympathizing with Josh Harris and with a group of people who were relatively sympathetic toward his documentary project looking back at I Kissed Dating Goodbye and supposedly taking his critics seriously. This was before the documentary was released, of course. You seem to sympathize far less with the Josh Harris skeptics than you do with those who extended some trust to him, although, in my view, it was very predictable that the skeptics would be proven correct, and that Harris was not really going to change his views about sex.

Some of us absolutely need to leave Christianity, whether for paganism or atheism or something else, in order to heal. To my mind, a robustly victim and healing centered book could certainly still e.g. highlight the use of non-shaming sex ed curricula in mainline Sunday schools without making readers feel like you have no validation to offer those of us who leave Christianity and religion altogether.

Regarding your evident sympathy for evangelicals, of course, not everyone in evangelicalism is a monster, but the adults who raised us in purity culture, forced us to learn #ChristianAltFacts via homeschooling and/or Christian school, and mobilized us for culture wars are still accountable for their actions. The harm done to us is more important than their feelings. Your book at best sends mixed messages here.

LKK: I appreciate this question. I was really torn about using his work. His research on same-sex parenting showed a deeply problematic anti-LGBTQ bias as you note and, though I was focusing on other research untainted by that bias, I struggled with whether to include his work in any way for that reason. All this to say, your point is very well taken, Chris.

CS: This might be a weird question to ask given the heaviness of much of the subject matter, but what is your favorite part of Pure? And what were the best and worst things about your writing process?

Meanwhile, I am working on my nonprofit, Break Free Together, which uses story exchange to help people release shame and embrace their whole selves. We work primarily with churches, providing them with a healthy way to have community conversations about sexuality.

According to Klein's faith, girls and women were responsible for keeping male sexual desire in check by wearing modest clothing, maintaining a sexless mind and body and taking a "purity pledge," in which they promised to remain virgins until marriage.

Klein says the central tenet of the purity movement is to delay the age at which young people first have sex. But in practice, she says, the movement is most effective at stifling women's sexuality and creating a "deep, long-lasting shame" among its practitioners.

Because she was a curvy teen, Klein was often chastised for not being modest enough. Even after leaving the church when she was in her 20s, Klein continued to experience anxiety and shame about her body and sexuality.

"When I left, I thought that I was going to be completely free of sexual shame and fear and anxiety," she says. Instead, she says, "I had so internalized the sexual shaming, that I no longer needed external shamers. ... I was more than capable of shaming myself."

Klein is the founder of Break Free Together, an organization that tries to help people escape the sexual shame from their upbringing. Her new memoir is Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free.

I spent a year sitting down with people in coffee shops and in living rooms and in bars and talking to them about their adult experiences with sex and gender and sexuality, having also been raised in the purity movement. That year was such an "a-ha" for me because I kept hearing the same stories that mirrored the pain of my own life, this, again fear and shame and anxiety that for many of us was manifesting physically in ways that even mimicked classic PTSD.

The first exposure I had to the purity message was actually about gender. Gender and sexuality are deeply intertwined in the purity movement. You aren't just supposed to be sexually pure, but you are supposed to be pure in your gender expression. So women and girls are expected to be hyper-feminine, supportive followers of men and boys who are expected to be hyper-masculine leaders, supportive and loving leaders, but leaders nonetheless. And if either the man or the woman or the girl or the boy strays from their gender expectation, for example, if the woman leads too much or the man becomes her follower, the idea is that the whole picture topples. ...

The purity message that I was raised with in the evangelical church is not very different than the message that we learned in society. In the church we learn that you are either "pure" or "impure" but in society we hear about "good girls" and "bad girls."

I remember most clearly learning this lesson on my very first mission trip to Tijuana, Mexico. I was 13 years old and wore the same shirt nearly every day, it was a comfort to me in my changing body. The problem was that when I rose my hands above my head a small sliver of my mid-drift would show. I was told by my youth pastor that it would make men stumble, and that I needed to change my shirt immediately.

As I grew older, I clung to my purity, and even when I was only kissing my boyfriend. I still had an irrational fear that I was pregnant, and I would lose everything I loved. It was irrational, but some part of me feared that if I lost my purity, I would lose everything.

Environment may be the most important factor in determining meat purity and safety in beef. Nearly 100% of the beef sold through grocery stores are finished in feed lots, most of which are in the western United States.

Feed lot confinement consists of crowding large numbers of cattle mixed from all over the country on concrete slabs with limited overhead cover. This mixing, places animals that may not have been properly vaccinated with every other animal. Also shipping may stress perfectly healthy cattle reducing the natural immune system. Finally, regional viruses and bacteria are integrated once cattle come together in a feed lot. The reality is a certain percentage of cattle in feed lots are always sick or dying. Feed lots address this simply by administering steroids and antibiotics to all the cattle in confinement.

At Noche Linda Farms, all our cattle spend their entire life on our farm. They are turned out on pasture and given our special blend of local corn, dried molasses, and whiskey distillers to add marbling and flavor. Preventive antibiotic treatments are simply not needed because our cattle avoid shipping, confinement, and mixing with unknown animals.

On Friday, November 9, at 7 p.m. at Women and Children First, you can catch Linda in conversation with Deborah Jian Lee, author of Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women and Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism.

The purity movement taught girls like my interviewees and me to experience shame in association with our sexuality. We learned that others would determine worth (pure or impure) based on their assessments of our sexuality and that this was right and good. The results, for many of us, are life-long.

The P.O. box allows people to send me a post card with a word, a picture, or a story about what they learned about sexuality growing up and what the legacies of those teachings have been on their adult lives. I post the post cards on the Break Free Together Instagram page with #BreakFreeTogether. People who are ready to share their stories more publicly are invited to post with the hashtag as well.

Though my book focuses on people who were raised in white American evangelical Christian churches as girls, the audience for Break Free Together is much broader, as sexual shame is by no means only experienced by people raised in communities like the one I grew up in.

Jera writes about sexuality, spirituality, and social justice. They are the author of Just the Tip, a queer-friendly, sex-positive, relationship advice column and the editor of Sacred and Subversive,...More by Jera Brown

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