Episode Details

A scholar’s perspective after decades of research: “we’re talking about a whole network of politicized ideals that has used the bodies of adolescents to gain political power … Purity Culture has become rape culture.”

This movement seems to be anything but what it appears to be. Evangelical leaders compelling adolescents to be sexually pure (Purity Pledge cards and rings; Joshua McDowell’s True Love Waits, and Josh Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye), while they themselves were embroiled in sex scandals and cover-ups (the Southern Baptist Convention; Falwell Jr; Swaggart; Haggard; Ravi Zaccharias). The rise of a Purity Movement based on so-called “Biblical” principles which are not found in the pages of the Bible. A movement with laudable goals (purity; integrity) and naive promises/hopes which ended up causing an immense amount of pain and suffering through shame, guilt, and condemnation.

We talked to Dr. Sara Moslener, who has spent decades researching this movement, interviewing people and scholars, and writing a book about her findings. Some of the things we talked about include:

• the rise of this movement was driven in part by religious pressures (the Moral Majority, the Religious Right; True Love Waits [SBC]; purity pledge cards and purity rings), but also political pressures (Federal Welfare Reform bill; Abstinence-Only education) and federal funding
• boycotts against Disney (Ellen Degeneres “coming out”)
• the Free Love generation and the Sexual Revolution
• Evangelicals borrowed much of their sexual ethics from Roman Catholicism, but didn’t take the corresponding theology because “that’s Catholic theology” …. Evangelicals don’t have a theology of the Feminine Divine, or of celibacy, but do have confused and naive ideas about “a Biblical marriage” and other “Biblical principles”
• “we’re talking about a whole network of politicized ideals that has used the bodies of adolescents to gain political power”
• the backlash against the Purity Culture movement, both within Christianity and from the public/secular sector
• Purity Culture tells young girls that “if you have sex before marriage, you’re a chewed up piece of gum”
• female authors like Rachel Held Evans, Sarah Bessy and