Christian Purity Culture is Pretty Racist, Actually (with Sara Moslener)

And since then, you've gone on to study the history of religious and racial discrimination.

You've studied evangelical purity culture for over 20 years.

And you did a study called the After Purity Project, where you interviewed a bunch of former evangelicals, mostly, I think, about their experience of purity culture.

And that informed this book.

In those interviews, it seems like two big themes kind of started to emerge or two big Two ways into thinking about purity culture, the way that it affects people on a personal level and the way that it was tied into a nation building project and was actually also connected with politics.

I want to talk about both of those.

Let's start with the personal what purity culture.

And we've touched on a little bit already, but now we can really dig into what it does concerning gender roles and bodily controls.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

I mean, all the women I talked to talked about sort of their gender identity and the way that that was shaped in very narrow ways and the things that they were discouraged from doing and being, including intellectual pursuits, including just... you know, being able to wear a regular bathing suit and, you know, and the clothes that you wear and the clothes that your parents, you know, find inappropriate.

And again, these are, this kind of thing is happening at very early ages and, you know, and women who felt called to ministry but knew that that was not something that was available to them and so on.

And so lots of those constraints happened.

And of course, many of the, interestingly, and you know, I don't do statistical work, but well over 50% of the women I interviewed identified as bisexual or pansexual.

which is really interesting, thinking about how their sexuality was formed around this idea.

They

were supposed to become moms.

Exactly.

You become moms and your husbands will lead

and that's what life is.

And you're

supposed to be attractive enough to attract a good Christian young man.

They say, but not too sexy now.

But not

too sexy.