Episode Details

Jenny McGrath is a licensed mental health counselor who does somatic psychotherapy and teaches movement. She offers online classes and courses that help individuals find their way back to their body. She is passionate about helping folks who grew up in fundamental Christianity work through deconstruction in a way that honors their faith and their body.  She is researching purity culture and Christian nationalism by focusing on the impact of purity culture on people's subjective experience as well as the social impacts of the movement. You can learn more about Jenny and her work at www.indwellmovement.com

Abby Wong-Heffter grew up in the Pacific Northwest with a 1st generation Chinese father and a white mother. Her experience of evangelical church and Christian education had her often in the experience of being a minority and haunted with a feeling of being on the “outside.” Abby is passionate about freedom for people at the cross sections of sexual and spiritual abuse, race, and our longing to belong.  She currently teaches at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology as well as The Allender Center for Trauma and Abuse. Her primary work is offering psychotherapy where she specializes in the experience of transracial adopted adults, childhood sexual abuse survivors, and those addressing racial identity. She also supervises new clinicians in a narrative approach and consults and coaches organizations working toward liberation.

Purity Culture. Salt-n-Pepa's "Let’s Talk About Sex Baby!"
Abby’s Guilty Pleasure was John Mayer’s Your Body’s A Wonderland. 

Jenny says, Salt-n-Pepa were singing these songs about sex and sexuality in the middle of the AIDS crisis. It was so powerful. 

Danielle remembers being introduced to “secular music” like Missy Elliot and not being able to stop listening to it. She felt deeply connected. 

Abby says it was right and good for her to have a crush on an older married man because it was “Christian” – speaking of her Michael W Smith poster in her bedroom. 

Danielle asks who came up with this shit?

Jenny said it was a conglomerate but one of the biggest contributors was the True Love Waits Campaign of 1993. A large group of youth gathered in Washington DC to put their “purity cards” staking in government land. This was the time of “purity rings” and “purity conferences.” Soon after the infamous book, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” came out. All these things were happening within the first few years of the 1990s.

Abby said it feels like it was built upon the work of James Dobson and Focus on the Family –There was a big push on families and for the Christian community to create manuals for “How to Raise Your Children Godly.” There were conversations about appropriate touching, and messaging around massages and dances leading to sex. Purity culture had a big platform to build off of. 

Focus on the Family was the foundation for the churches Danielle grew up, for how to view family.

Jenny adds it was a very narrow, white heteronormative patriarchal view of family. James Dobson talked about how he didn’t agree with interracial marriage because people were unequally yoked. There were other racists ideas propagated as well. Focus on the Family was always about focusing on the White Christian Patriarchal Heteronormative family. 

Danielle says looking back she can now see why I never felt at peace in any of these places. It feels less crazy-making; it was designed to be this way. 

Abby talks about the intersection of purity culture and race—she says converge in the vision that was cast of a knight in shining armor was saving the damsel in destress who was a Northern European female, pure and virginal. It was this place where the “holiness and goodnes