Liberate Your Story Podcast

I was a teen in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. I was a committed member of Purity Culture. I could have been a poster child for the movement if there had been one other than Joshua Harris. Purity Culture suited me in more ways than I understood back then. It was safe and actionable. It had outcomes and it felt really good to be good.

Here’s the thing though. I have spent over 27 years recovering and healing from it. It wrecked me. And not in a holy and good kind of way. It stole from me.
It stole my femininity, my sexuality, my wholeness.
It created in me a human on a mission to destroy and bury a part of who I was.

This healing didn’t come through a great personal rebellion or a coming-out experience. This healing came through a crushing blow of my entire being and my marriage.
It literally set a course for living as the most inauthentic person I could possibly be. It was a journey of epic denial, self-hate, and not-enoughness.

I will not be kind to purity culture today. If you are listening and hoping I will redeem this deeply embedded belief, you will likely want to move on to another podcast right now.
What I do want to do here is bring light to the tragedy it created and call out the parts of our daily living that find its way back to this oppressive idealogy.
It took me 27+ years to see all the writing on the wall but when I did…I couldn’t unsee it. It had entwined itself into my carefully crafted spiritual DNA.

I am not the only one who was ripped to inner shreds by this culture. Nearly every one of my friends from that time was too.
Some of them have awakened to it’s reality and others are still making sure it rewards them in some godly way.
Either way, we were all wrecked.

Side note…I like to listen to a certain playlist while I write these episodes. Just happens that as I write in this moment the song Wrecking Ball performed by Dustin Kensrue (Kenz-roo) (former member of Thrice, worship leader, and now exvangelical). This rendition feels like a freedom song filled with the grit of what the soul, my soul, feels exiting this culture. As I said..just a side note.

The premise of Purity Culture was an Evangelical Christian belief about purity and holiness before God.
The Christian faith declares that we are saved by Grace and that there is nothing we can do through our works to receive this gift of grace and salvation other than confessing Jesus as Lord.
Without going into all that could be said about this, I just want you to know that there was nothing free about my ticket to heaven.
Purity culture gave us the rules and the sticker stars to put on our chart of reasons to be accepted by God. It WAS how we earned God’s favor. It was our grand test of self-control.

If there was ever a movement to divide the human being into separate operating systems, this was it. Here’s what Purity Culture asked of us.

In order to have a Godly marriage one day, we needed to enter it without blemish, scar, or guilt.
We were told that these things would bring about a marriage that was not as holy as God would like and that the baggage we brought with us would destroy a Godly marriage.
We were to offer ourselves blameless to our future spouse on that wedding day.

We used lots of language in this culture. Virginity. Pure. Blameless. Clean. Holy. Chaste. Sanctified. Blessed. Whole. Untouched. Perfect. Honored. Self-control. True love. Real. Authentic.Good.Saved.

We also used words like dirty, used, guilty, unclean, selfish, fleshly, darkness, evil, soiled, second virginity, incomplete, lust, bad, tarnished, lost.

Our worth was determined by sexual purity.
Our identity was formed by our purity journey.
Our acceptance was acquired by our compliance.
Our motivation was shame.
We were introduced to the powerful motivator called guilt.

We were oppressed in the most base way. Denying ourselves was our goal. Our literal goal.

I participated in many rallies, concerts and events around the cause of abstinence. I say cause because it was a mission we took up as our highest calling.
We did this collectively in emotionally driven settings designed to create a positive peer pressure. Together we would conquer the flesh and strive for a holy life worthy of God’s love and approval.
The reward for this collective endeavor?
We were told we would be approved by God in the most beautiful way possible.

True Love Waits by Josh McDowell.
Concert after concert of every popular Christian band giving you an opportunity to commit or recommit to your Purity Commitment.
And youth group events…oh the youth group events.
The girls got retreats to understand what being a good and pure wife was. We learned that there was a clean and a dirty option in our life. We were either clean or we were dirty.
The boys…they got the L&B nights. Lust and masturbation talks about conquering the flesh.

We all got purity rings and contracts to sign.

As girls in this culture, we were told we would be giving our future husbands the gift of our virginity. That it would be the highest joy to our marriage to only have been enjoyed by each other.
This sounded beautiful, despite our lack of understanding of sex.
It was our honor to walk down the aisle and hand over the keys of our virtual chastity belt. And that first night would be the most magical experience we would know.
And let’s not forget that we were also taught that our lovemaking in marriage would be worship to God…which honestly always kind of creeped me out.
I had, even then, this visual of God sitting up in heaven watching me have sex with my husband and receiving this viewing like He did our songs in church. I know…creepy. But it was..creepy. Why were we ok with this teaching?

As girls in this culture, we would also earn that white dress on our wedding day. We would get to walk down the aisle wearing our badge of accomplishment for all to know who we were at our most fleshly level. It was a public display of our sexual life… or the absence of it.

Purity wasn’t just defined by the act of sex. We had varying levels of virginity. Had we had oral sex? Over the clothes sex? Watched porn? Masturbated? Wanted to masturbate? Had we kissed? Had we dated?

You see this wasn’t really about sex. This was about control. If we could make it to the altar as a “virgin”, then the next class behind us had to make it there without masturbating. And the next, without kissing or even dating. It just never stopped. Purity was a moving target. We could never do enough good to be approved.

This kind of oppression leaks out. Oppression can’t stay boxed up. The human soul has a need to rise out and act.
For some, it created worship music to express our journey of depravity and hope. For others, it created an explosive rebellion. For others, it came out in art and other forms of self-expression. But many of us took the energy and kept the ball moving forward. That was me.

I made sure that I did everything I could to be pure on that wedding day. Until that day, that moment, sexuality was my enemy. My body was my enemy.
I put all my tension and energy into following the rules. I had one high school kiss, but it was one of those that I could say I WAS kissed but I didn’t give my kiss away. I could even convince myself that it was stolen from me. I dressed in a way that made sure I would not make my fellow brother in Christ stumble.
In fact, I had one high school boyfriend who thanked me for not dressing in a way that made him stumble. I guess that was a double-edged sword.
But I was winning at purity…at least I thought I was.

After a year of community college, college ministry group and lots of Bible studies, I sent myself to missionary school. I decided that my life was going to be completely dedicated to the mission of God. It was in this school that I met my husband. Sounds a bit clique doesn’t it.

10 months after meeting him, we decided we liked each other. There’s actually a really beautiful story in that 10 months, but that’s for another day.
When we decided we liked each other we sat across from each other at a table and confessed our “like” to each other. We were not going to date unless we thought we could marry each other.
So this dating we were beginning was to see if we could move from the friendship zone to “future mate” zone.
There wouldn’t be anything happening between us except holding hands. We walked into this new space carefully and cautiously.

We created accountability circles and dated in groups….until we realized we were just simply crazy about each other. Two months into dating and we were engaged. We set a wedding date for 5 months later…long enough to get a wedding planned and soon enough to protect ourselves.

Somewhere in that time, we started dating alone and we even kissed. But in that time, we were also labeled and lived in the spotlight among our friends and our church. One of our pastors started referencing our dating relationship as courting. This was a new idea for me. Remember, the classes of students behind me were getting even stricter rules than I had. We were being made an example of something we didn’t understand. This meant lots of involvement from our community as to what was ok and what wasn’t. We had one friend call us out for kissing at a red light…she saw us from the car behind us. I can’t tell you the guilt that flooded in from this public outing.

The pressure was becoming intense. We almost eloped to get out from under it. I often feel like our wedding day was for everyone except for us. It was a show that courting and purity commitments worked.

So I walked down that aisle in my glowing white dress as my dad handed me over to my one true love, I exchanged my purity ring for a wedding band. It was everything I had saved myself for, right?

Well, the problem with living into a mission for all those years is that you deeply engrain in yourself that sex is bad. Sexuality is bad. So then you walk down that aisle, say I do, dance all night in celebration with your friends and family, eyes peering at you in a way that says “ I know what you’re doing tonight” and then you drive off to your honeymoon.

That first night as a wife, a bride, was supposed to be magical like they told me it would be. But here’s the thing. Two things happened that night and neither were magical.

1- I had to walk through a hotel room door and move from “sex is dirty” to “sex is worship to God”.
2nd…I had to somehow suddenly engage with a sexual side of myself that was absolutely unknown to me.

I didn’t feel magic. I felt guilt. I had been so trained to understand this act as one that would induce guilt. I wasn’t taught how to embrace or understand the joy of my body, femininity or sexuality. How do you slip into that knowing in a matter of hours? So I was told that sex would make me dirty, guilty, and blemished….so that’s what I felt.

Of course, I kept this piece to myself. I spent a lifetime keeping it to myself. I operated with a mindset and belief of purity while doing this thing of sex in my marriage. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it…it was that I felt guilty for liking it. So purity came out in other ways if it could no longer be about my body. It came out in parenting, being a pastor's wife, dressing in a way that didn’t draw attention from other men, and controlling things. It also came out in repeating the cycle in with the students in the youth groups we oversaw.

You see, we were taught that our acceptance by God was about our sexual purity. And without my sexuality, I had to find other ways to maintain this acceptance. Good now had to be defined by things outside of me. It was a terrible way to live. Guilt is a terrible way to live.

My husband has his own story of purity culture and the depths in which it destroyed his humanity. We didn’t know the damage it was doing to us until we nearly had no marriage left. It was in the loss of ourselves and our marriage that we found a way out of this toxicity. And that too, is its own story.

But freeing each other, freeing ourselves, from the belief of purity and its culture, led us to an awakening of each other we have never known before. Yes, it's about sex, but its about all of it. We bring our whole and healed selves into our partnership now. It’s honest, without expectation, and raw. You see I am a sexual being but it is not absent or separate from the rest of my being. Bringing all the parts of me into one beautiful cooperative experience allowed a knowing of myself that Purity Culture robbed me of.

I also want you to know that this belief was not pushed on me by my mom. She tried to find ways to show me a way to myself. But this was a belief driven by my dad and many of the men in our church (local and beyond). The leaders of this movement were men. The voice of this movement was patriarchal and misogynistic. But I do believe that we all suffered for it. Boys learned how to treat women through their own guilt and unrealistic expectations. Girls learned how to be a prize and a commodity. None of us actually learned about our sexuality. We just learned how to modify our behaviors, suppress our bodies, and manage guilt.

It’s like I said…purity culture is partly about sex, but it is mostly about control. No one should have told me how to be a sexual human. They should have encouraged me how to know myself. But I’m afraid that would have meant admitting that my humanity was actually good…without my striving or divine saving.

I believe there is a beautiful story of sexuality to be lived by each of us…and it has nothing to do morality. It has to do with being a fully realized human being.

There is so much more to be said about Purity Culture. I may revisit it in other ways in the future. Until then, if you connect with me or the pain of living in purity culture, I am here for you. There is healing to be experienced and there is a way of living that isn’t about this. There is a way to be whole and feel whole. We can change how we understand ourselves and believe new things about who we are. We are not fixed or obligated to a linear experience. Expanding and evolving is not wrong…I think it's actually required to be fully integrated into our human experience. I’m here for this with you. You don’t have to heal alone.

Liberate your sexuality and you liberate your story.