After all, we’d learned together that there were two types of girls-those who were pure and those who were impure, those who were marriage material and those who were lucky if any good Christian man ever loved them, those who were Christian and those who. “I think that God wants me to break up with Dean,” I told them, trembling. Later that afternoon, I called my girlfriends for an emergency concert of prayer. the way he makes you feel, you know must be wrong?” “Who makes you feel so utterly alive every time he touches you? Who you are sure is sin incarnate, even if he is a born-again Christian and thus ‘technically’ safe to date, and sure, all you’ve ever done is kiss, but the way he makes you feel. “Who you think about all day and every night?” God continued. “Would you give up your parents?” God continued. Satisfied with this new image, I opened my eyes and looked back into the sun.
I imagined my dress dirty and the skin under it covered in burns and unidentifiable wounds. I could become deathly ill from serving the sick I might not have access to clean drinking or bathing water I might spend days working in the hot sun without any protection. God is asking if I’m willing to make a sacrifice for him, I I reminded myself. In my imagination, I wore a thin, cotton dress and my long brown hair whipped around my face in a way that could only be described as romantic. I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured myself a poor missionary living in a small, rural village somewhere on the other side of the world. “Giving up the lavish life of an actress that you dream about?” “Would you become a missionary in a foreign land?” God tested me. “God, I would do anything for you,” I remember saying there one afternoon. I dug my bare feet down deep, cooling them in the damp sand. ExcerptĪs a teenager, I went to the sandbox in the empty playground beside my church when I wanted to be alone. Offering a prevailing message of resounding hope and encouragement, “ Pure emboldens us to escape toxic misogyny and experience a fresh breath of freedom” (Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior and founder of Together Rising).
Part memoir and part journalism, Pure is a horrendous, granular, relentless, emotionally true account" (The Cut) of society’s larger subjugation of women and the role the purity industry played in maintaining it. These intimate conversations developed into a twelve-year quest that took her across the country and into the lives of women raised in similar religious communities-a journey that facilitated her own healing and led her to churches that are seeking a new way to reconcile sexuality and spirituality. She contacted young women she knew, asking if they were coping with the same shame-induced issues she was. When the youth pastor of her church was convicted of sexual enticement of a twelve-year-old girl, Klein began to question purity-based sexual ethics. This is the sex education Linda Kay Klein grew up with.įearing being marked a Jezebel, Klein broke up with her high school boyfriend because she thought God told her to and took pregnancy tests despite being a virgin, terrified that any sexual activity would be punished with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. This message traumatized many girls-resulting in anxiety, fear, and experiences that mimicked the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder-and trapped them in a cycle of shame. Purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls came with a dangerous message: girls are potential sexual “stumbling blocks” for boys and men, and any expression of a girl’s sexuality could reflect the corruption of her character. In the 1990s, a “purity industry” emerged out of the white evangelical Christian culture. In Pure, Linda Kay Klein uses a potent combination of journalism, cultural commentary, and memoir to take us “inside religious purity culture as only one who grew up in it can” (Gloria Steinem) and reveals the devastating effects evangelical Christianity’s views on female sexuality has had on a generation of young women.