The Performativity of Purity: Evangelical Sexual Purity as a Mechanism of Misogyny

A Thesis submitted to the faculty of

San Francisco State University
In partial fulfillment of
the requirements for
the Degree

Master of Arts

In

Humanities

by

Christy Lynn Ailman Banasihan

San Francisco, California

August 2020
 Copyright by
Christy Lynn Ailman Banasihan
2020
 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read The Performativity of Purity: Evangelical Sexual Purity as a

Mechanism of Misogyny by Christy Lynn Ailman Banasihan, and that in my opinion this

work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Humanities at San Francisco State University.

.. . ug-s urg 1 1. .

Professor

Laura Garcia-Moreno. Ph.D.

Professor

David Pefia -Gu znrnn Ph.D .

Ass.i tant Professor
 The Performativity of Purity: Evangelical Sexual Purity as a Mechanism of Misogyny

Christy Lynn Ailman Banasihan

San Francisco, California
2020

This thesis is an interdisciplinary humanities project analyzing texts of

Evangelical purity culture to understand what it means to embody purity as a woman.

Drawing from performance studies, poststructuralist theory, critical theory, feminist

philosophy, religious studies and auto-theory, I decode a misogynist logic within four

pieces of purity literature: Elizabeth Elliot’s Passion and Purity, Joshua Harris’s I Kissed

Dating Goodbye, John and Stasi Eldredge’s’ Captivating, and Kristen Clark and Bethany

Baird’s Sex, Purity, and the Longings of a Girl’s Heart. Specifically, I analyze purity

literature’s structure, affect, and images using Van Gennup’s rite to passage structure,

Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, and Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. I

conclude purity is a performative accomplishment within a misogyny system of sexuality.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.

ate
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As an aspiring academic, I did not believe my undergraduate philosophy professor

when he said that one day I would have to face my Christian heritage. To my surprise, it

only took one semester in graduate school, and I was back wrestling with my very own

embodiment of the evangelical Christian purity culture. Thanks to my thesis chair,

Professor Tanya Augsburg, for hearing my voice and validating its significance I turned a

first semester seminar paper into a master’s thesis. Without Professor Augsburg’s

encouragement and motivation, this project would not have been possible. I would like to

also thank the School of Humanities and Liberal Studies at San Francisco State

University for enabling my interdisciplinary inquiries and for continuing the diligent

work of teaching how to critically engage cultural texts. More importantly, I would like

to thank my partner and husband, Joey Banasihan. His patience and commitment to my

goals carried me through the emotions of such a personal project. Finally, my hope is

writing this paper is to inspire the critical examination of everyday texts. In particular, my

hope is to inspire others to critical analyses of purity texts as they continue to shape

another generation of adolescent women.

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables.................................................................................................................vii

Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1

Scope ................................................................................................................... 3

Key Terms ........................................................................................................... 6

1. The Desire for Purity: Innate or Acquired?................................................................. 16

1.1 A New System of Desire ............................................................................. 17

1.2 The Ritual Process........................................................................................ 21

1.3 The Strategy of Indoctrination ...................................................................... 24

2. The Affect of Purity: Longing or Horror? .................................................................. 35

2.1 The Horror of Impurity................................................................................. 37

2.2 The Affect of the Abject............................................................................... 41

2.3 The Strategy of the Abject ............................................................................ 45

3. The Ideal of Purity: Real or Illusion? ......................................................................... 51

3.1 Gender Performativity ................................................................................. 51

3.2 The Strategy of Performativity ..................................................................... 53

Concluding Remarks ..................................................................................................... 61

Works Cited .................................................................................................................. 66

Notes ............................................................................................................................. 72

vi
 LIST OF TABLES

Table Page

1. Ritual Structure of Purity Literature......................................................... 25-26

2. The Good Girl and Bad Girl Gender Tropes................................................. 55

vii
 1

Introduction

Purity consists of more than abstinence in Evangelical purity culture.1 Growing up in

purity culture, I listened to Christian music, i.e. Zoe Girls and Jump 5. Top music hits

including Brittney Spears, NSYNC, and Christina Aguilera were off limits. Modest

clothing was required. Nothing too tight, too short, or too low cut or else my friends

would gossip. I could not watch certain television shows, TV stations, or movies rated

PG-13 throughout high school. Even the books I read were censored, banning the Harry

Potter series for The Babysitters Club series. My Christian high school took purity culture

seriously. Proms were banquets. We got all balled up to sit around a table in the cafeteria

and eat. The problem here is not censorship itself; but the desire to be censored. I wanted

to be pure. I believed in the goodness of being pure for marriage and so I fought to

protect my own. While I did not oppose the censorship of purity culture, I could not

comprehend what purity was actually doing to me. That is, until I sat across from my

counselor, who said to me, “You have good girl syndrome.” Then and there began my

deconstruction of purity culture and the texts which shaped my understanding of my

body, my identity, and their relation to men.

A decade ago, New York Times journalist and bestselling author, Jessica Valenti,

proclaimed America’s virginity movement a misogynist movement. In her book The

Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women, Valenti

argues the virgin and whore dichotomy is created by the lie that virginity exists. Virginity
 2

is underdetermined (what counts as sex?) and indeterminate (some women are born

without intact hymens) she explains. Nevertheless, the virginity movement enabled the

labeling of women as “other” for being too sexual or not “young, white, and skinny” (30).

The virginity myth continues on today in spite of Valenti’s poignant critique. Just this

year, American rappers Kanye West and T.I. supported annual hymen check-up’s on their

daughter saying they are “God approved” (Kiley).

While Valenti acknowledges that the misogynist beliefs permeating pop culture

originated in Conservative Christianity, she neglects to investigate religious texts as a

source of these misogynist beliefs. Unlike pop culture’s virginity movement,

Christianity’s purity culture emphasizes moral purity in addition to sexual purity. Like

virginity, women are supposedly born with their purity intact. Growing up within the

Conservative Christian culture of purity and wearing a purity ring for twenty years, I

believe Christian purity literature contains a more fundamental and more insidious myth

than the lie that virginity exists. Namely, the myth that purity exists.2

This thesis is an interdisciplinary humanities project analyzing the cultural texts

of Evangelical purity culture to understand what it means to embody purity as a woman.

Drawing from performance studies, poststructuralist theory, critical theory, feminist

philosophy, religious studies and auto-theory, I decode a misogynist logic within four of

the most widely read pieces of purity literature: Elizabeth Elliot’s Passion and Purity,

Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye, John and Stasi Eldredges’ Captivating, and
 3

Kristen Clark and Bethany Baird’s Sex, Purity, and the Longings of a Girl’s Heart.3

Where misogyny is understood to be a moral system in which women are “not allowed to

be in the same ways as [man] is” because women are “positioned as human givers” and

men the takers, I assert purity to be a performative mechanism of misogyny (Manne, xix).

Said otherwise, drawing from French poststructuralist and existentialist feminist thought,

purity is a linguistic system in which women’s sexuality determines their otherness in the

eyes of God, humanity, and future male spouses.4 I argue that women are not born pure,

but become pure. More specifically, I argue purity literature’s structure, images, and

representations of purity encode its readers with a misogynist logic for doing purity such

that the embodiment of purity is a performative mechanism of misogyny.

Scope

Although Evangelical purity culture has been criticized for its white nationalist

origins (Moslener, Cooper), capitalist rhetoric (Garner), and salvific implications

(DeRogatis), the embodiment of purity—the doing of purity—has not been critically

examined outside of religious studies (Anderson, Bolz-Weber, Moultrie), psychology

(Finch, Schermer Sellers) and social work (Mann, Levy). This thesis begins to fill the gap

in scholarship on purity culture as an interdisciplinary humanities project on the

embodiment of purity as a performative accomplishment within a misogyny system of

sexuality. Specifically, I analyze purity literature’s structure, affect, and images to assess

the logic of purity—how and why do women do purity. Following Paul B. Peciado and
 4

Maggie Nelson’s methodology of auto-theory—using first person narrative as a tool of

analysis in critical theory—I integrate personal recollection into a theoretical discussion

of purity literature’s strategies for encoding a misogynist logic.

Other than DeRogatis’ Saving Sex, purity literature has not been analyzed. Most

other studies of purity culture rely on ethnographical data including interviews and

observation of purity events such as purity balls or True Love Waits rallies.5 Purity

literature consists of autobiographical, self-help styled texts, or purity manuals as

DeRogatis calls them, written for Christian teenagers entering the dating scene. Each

author uses their own experiences with love, sex, and desire to inform teenagers’ sexual

conduct. From providing five steps to avoid masturbation to seven reasons not to date, the

images, representations, and affects within these texts are constitutive of the embodiment

of purity—or, as I call it, the logic for doing purity. The trouble is decoding the

Evangelical creation narrative and discourse of salvation to see that women’s sexual

purity is truly a mechanism for misogyny.

To analyze each of these texts, I apply a poststructuralist reading to the structure

of purity culture texts in terms of ritual and to the affect of purity culture texts in terms of

horror. A structuralist analysis would prove unproductive. For example, if we apply

anthropologist Mary Douglas’s structuralist analysis of purity, as expressed in Purity and

Danger: An Analysis of The Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, then not only is the coded

language, or symbolic system as Douglas calls it, of Evangelism purity taken for granted
 5

but a structuralist reading perpetuates the binary of purity and impurity. It is, as Butler

explains, “Assuming the inevitability binary structure of the nature/culture distinction,

Douglas cannot point toward an alternative configuration of culture in which such

distinctions become malleable or proliferate beyond the binary frame” (Gender Trouble

179).To elaborate, Mary Douglas states that purity is the absence of dirt—i.e. pollution.

The removal of dirt is described as a “positive re-ordering” of (a well-structured) society.

This “filtering mechanism” of objects is responsible for constructing the cultural

conception of dirt. Douglas admits, what is labeled dirt is labeled dangerous and therefore

physically controlled to stabilize the normalized cultural values. The normative

evaluation of an object—the filtering mechanism of a society—is not critically examined.

While this may be productive for the anthropologist, as a critical theorist, I am

unsatisfied.

For the sake of scope, I do not take on a Foucauldian analysis of power relations in

the “discourse” of purity culture. While certainly applicable, critical theorist and

philosopher Foucault’s analysis of power and discourses of sexuality must wait for

another day. I simply do not have the space to explore what would include racial,

religious, and political relations of power. Instead, I focus here on Evangelical purity

culture just as a discourse of gender and sexuality.

Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge, as Foucault demonstrates in The History

of Sexuality Vol. 1., a repressive discourse of sexuality can operate as a method of

 6

incitement for a normative form of sexuality. That is to say, evangelicals are not anti-sex.

In fact, they are very pro-sex. As one purity author explains, “The desires still exist, are

still strong, natural, and human, but they are subjugated to the higher power of the Spirit.

They are purified and corrected as we live day by day in faith and obedience” (Elliot 95).

Sexual desire is natural and encouraged in the correct context.

Finally, unlike the majority of the existing critical analyses of purity culture, my

project is not ethnographical in nature.6 While inspired by anthropologist, Margaret

Mead’s ethnography of Samoan girl’s adolescence in Coming of Age in Samoa, my

project is restricted to a critical analysis of texts, interspersed with personal narrative.

Mead lays out the rituals of girlhood in Samoa in order to falsify the assumption that

adolescence is a trying stage of life. What she found in Samoan adolescent girls was a

simple transition into womanhood. Their sexuality was not sacred, nor was it made taboo.

Mead demystified a truism of adolescent sexuality. In a similar manner, I will lay out the

rituals of Evangelical purity provided within purity literature in order to falsify the myth

that girls are born pure. My method here is strictly in line with interdisciplinary

humanities scholarship. While I do use my own narrative as support, the primary

evidence rests upon my analysis the texts of purity culture.

Key Terms

Purity, in the words of interdisciplinary humanities scholar Mieke Bal, is a

traveling concept. From racial purity to mathematical purity, purity plays a significant
 7

role within a large variety of cultural texts. The concept of purity, nevertheless, remains

the same: to be without taint of otherness. What constitutes otherness will vary. No

matter the context, however, purity invokes an ontological hierarchy. There exists a

superior form; a form untouched and unscathed by dirt as Douglas would say (Purity and

Danger). The superiority of a form can be measured and quantified. For example, the

purity of a diamond is a measurement of clarity just as mathematical purity is a

measurement of simplicity. Purity, moreover, is all encompassing. Any hint of otherness

equates to impurity. The object is judged in its totality as superior or inferior.

For the purposes of this paper, purity refers to the Evangelical interpretation of

God’s design for sex, marriage, and intimacy as sacred. Evangelist Billy Graham

famously states in his sermon “God’s View of Sex,”

From the very beginning, God has given us moral laws governing the subject of

sex that are absolute and unchangeable. Nowhere does the Bible teach that sex in

itself is a sin. But from Genesis to Revelation, the Bible condemns the wrong use

of sex. (Graham)

Specifically, the conservative Evangelical tradition interprets the purpose of sex to be

procreative, marriage to be heterosexual, and intimacy to only occur within marriage.

Evangelical leader and reverend, Jerry Falwell states, “To practice sexually anything

other than the heterosexual lifestyle for which God created and made us… is to go

against God's plan” (Falwall). Sex was “good,” according to American Evangelicalism,
 8

until humanity perverted it with pornography, homosexuality, and prostitution.7 In sum,

purity entails abstinence, asceticism of sexual pleasure, and monogamous

heteronormativity.8

The theological basis for Evangelical purity is contentious. Graham, Falwell and

other leaders in the preservation of sexual purity rely upon a literalist reading of the

Genesis creation narrative: God created Adam and Eve, therefore God intended for

heterosexual marriage. However, pastor and bestselling author Nadia Bolz-Weber

exclaims, “Adam is a genderless word for ‘from the earth’” (77). The story of Adam and

Eve has been maliciously misinterpreted, “distorting” (95) and “fracturing” (70)

Evangelicals’ understanding of holiness as purity (22). If the bible was interpreted

literally, assistant professor of Religion at Boston University and ordained American

Baptist pastor, Jennifer Wright Knust states, " We might have not only polygamy with

wives, we might have polygamy with concubines and slaves" (NPR). Suffice it to say,

Evangelical purity is the result of controversial biblical hermeneutics.

Purity culture, specifically, refers to the texts, images, and tropes of twenty-first

century American sexual politics. The fight to protect the sanctity of sex and the God

created order of man and wife took place within an increasingly liberal American sexual

politics. In the 1970s, adolescent sexuality became a central issue in American politics as

divorce rates increased, the Supreme Court legalized abortion, and the commercialization

of sexuality propagated. Adolescence, a relatively new concept coined by Christian

 9

psychologist and racial eugenicist G. Stanley Hall in 1904, was used by the YMCA

(Young Men’s Christian Association) to rehabilitate Christian morals and values into

future generations (Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology,

Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education). With the rise of

American conservatism in the late twentieth century, adolescent sexual purity became a

key moral force that would shape American politics for generations to come (Rightward

Bound 5).

Although contemporary purity culture appears isolated within its religious

context, the Evangelical purity movement is both a political and a social movement at its

core. Purity culture began as a religious, political, and social conservative movement led

by Evangelical figures such Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham, and James Dobson. Their

message was “pro-life, pro-family, pro-moral, and pro-America” (Schulman, Zelizer 44).

These initial figures of purity culture aroused leaders of the Republican Party to adopt a

standardized sex education program in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. The act provided

abstinence-only sex education programs with millions of dollars in place of

comprehensive sex education programs. Abstinence only sexual education programs

continue to receive federal funding over comprehensive sex education programs. In fact,

the Trump administration awarded a $75 million sexual education contract to an

abstinence-only organization. Now, while it is necessary to acknowledge this relationship

between the purity movement and sex education, my analysis of purity focuses on the
 10

relationship between sexuality and gender, not the relationship between sex, health, and

wellness. What I hope to make clear here is contemporary purity culture remains both a

religious movement and a socio-political movement to this day.

The embodiment of purity is what I term the logic for doing purity. In Pure:

Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I

Broke Free, Linda Kay Klein explains the consequences of embodying purity. She states,

“Evangelical Christianity’s sexual purity movement is traumatizing many girls and

maturing women haunted by sexual and gender-based anxiety, fear, and physical

experiences” (8). This was true of my experience and many others according to

psychologist and specialist in religious sexual trauma, Tina Schermer Sellers. For the

twenty-first century evangelical women to be pure requires that she be “utterly and

absolutely nonsexual until the day she marry a man” (Klein 77). Any sign of sexual

desire or even sex appeal is seen as disobedience against God’s divine design. One

interviewee of Klein’s expressed her frustration saying, “Either you’re bad, or God is”

(73). The system of sexual purity within American Evangelicalism is set against women.

Specifically, your body and your sexual desires are measured against the divine order of

God where you are made out to either be pure or impure. Suffice it to say, purity within

Evangelical purity culture is the measurement of a woman’s sexuality against the socio-

political, biblical hermeneutic of conservative Evangelicalism.

 11

What role does purity literature play in the logic for doing purity? What did

reading purity literature do to me? To answer these questions, I deploy a performative

analysis of purity. Allow me to explain. Performance is a way of knowing by doing

something done. Originating in anthropology, performance studies analyzed human

performances beyond the theater and into the streets. When you are the actor and the

world is your audience, the doing of something done becomes a way of belonging—

socially, legally, religiously, politically, etc. We perform every day through behavior,

gesture, and speech twice behaved. These performances, performance studies scholar

Diana Taylor explains, “operate as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge,

memory, and a sense of identity” (25).

Performativity is when language has an operative effect on reality. The theory of

performativity can be traced back to philosopher J.L. Austin’s Doing Thing with Words.

He argues that speech acts alone can do something. The quintessential example of

Austin’s is “I do.” Uttering of this set of words in a matrimonial ceremony does

something to you. Legally, you are now married. The speaker is both the subject and the

object of their own words. Take another example, the Lord’s Prayer. Each time the prayer

is repeated, you are forgiven of your sins. There is an action taking place within the

performance of the speech act.

Now, speech acts can misfire if not performed properly within the constative

context. Austin explains, “Speaking generally, it is always necessary that the

 12

circumstances in which the words are uttered should be in some way, or ways,

appropriate, and it is very commonly necessary that either the speaker himself or other

persons should also perform certain other actions” (8-9). The context of the utterance and

the coinciding actions of the speaker determine the performativity of speech acts. In the

case of the examples above, “I do” is performative only within the context of a marriage

ceremony. In the same way, “Forgive us our Sins” is not performative outside the

ritualistic context of prayer. The words themselves are not inherently performative.

Philosopher and associate of poststructuralist thought, Jacques Derrida, elaborated on

the importance of context and the irrelevance of intention for performative speech acts in

“Signature Event Context.” He argued, in order for speech acts to be performative, they

require a mark or a code. This requirement is what Derrida calls iterable. Performative

speech acts retain meaning only when take place within a recognizable form. In other

words, a speech act is performative if and only if the context is sufficiently structured to

determine the meaning. As a result, “The first consequence of this will be the following:

given that structure of iteration, the intention animating the utterance will never be

through and through present to itself and to its content. The iteration structuring it a

priori introduces into it a dehiscence and a cleft [brisure], which are essential” (18). The

intention of the speaker does not, and cannot, determine the meaning of a performative

utterance. The iterability of the utterance operate independently of the speaker’s

intention.
 13

Ritual, and rites of passage in particular, contain iterable utterances because of its

form. Richard Schechner defines rituals as “collective memories encoded into actions”

(52). In other words, rituals are a series of actions, both physical and spoken, endowed

with meaning by the linguistic community. They carry meaning as a recognizable social

practice, i.e. iterable. Rituals are performative regardless of the speaker’s/participant’s

intention.

For instance, philosopher Judith Butler argues in Gender Trouble and Bodies that

Matter that gender is performative. Gender is not a stable innate identity. Butler argues,

gender is constituted by bodily gestures and bodily stylizations—clothing, speech, and

behavior—constituting what I will refer to as gender rituals. Bodies are determined

“female” and “male” not by some essential quality, but by normative social

categorizations. Hence, “femininity” and “masculinity” are performative: acts performed

by the subject which then act upon the subject as object. Regardless of intention, gender

acts upon one’s body. Furthermore, bodies which fail to conform to the binary construct

of gender are disowned and ostracized from society as precarious. In sum, gender is

performative. Gender is the illusion of an interior essence when in fact, gender is a social

construct enacted by and upon bodies.

In the case of purity culture, the most common purity ritual would be the purity

ring. Both the virginity movement and purity culture consist of public declarations of

virginity, and the commitment to remain so until marriage. Purity rings act as proof of
 14

their commitment. Even celebrities such as Brittney Spears, Beyoncé, and the Jonas

Brothers wore purity rings. The purity ring signified a commitment to purity thanks to

national organizations such as True Love Waits, Silver Ring Thing, and others. It could

be a ring of any kind, but it must be worn on the ring finger. As a vow of one’s

commitment to remain virgin until marriage, the purity ring would be replaced by a

wedding ring. Citing the institution of marriage, the ring is an existing form of

signification repurposed. Purity rings instantiate an iterable form.

As such, the material artifact that is the purity ring is performative. Wearing it

makes an unspoken statement to the world—I am taken. It operates as a public symbol of

your commitment. The ring is recognized by your parents, teachers, friends, and church.

Even outside of the Evangelical context, the purity ring operates as a sign to men that she

is married. No words are necessary; a ring is a material marking of purity. Instead of

using material artifacts to mark purity, I contend purity literature utilizes a linguistic

strategy of purity iterability—namely, the performativity of gender.

To make the case that purity is a performative accomplishment, I begin by

showing that purity literature is not reinforcing an existing desire for purity but creating a

new desire for purity. Structured as rituals, doing purity instills the value and therefore

the desire for purity. This desire, however, is reliant upon a logic of horror. Female

sexuality is made into the abject within Evangelical purity culture. Women, I argue, have

internalized their sexuality as a sin, thereby subjecting themselves to the binary logic of
 15

purity and impurity. Finally, I show that where the exemplars of purity and impurity are

gender tropes—the good girl and the bag girl—performing purity rituals enacts the

illusion of a gendered identity. Purity rituals are performative. Indoctrinated into the

horror of their own sexuality, I argue, women’s embodiment of purity is nothing but the

performativity of heteropatriarchy’s image of femininity.

 16

1. The Desire for Purity: Innate or Acquired?

On an image of a cliff, I was given five spaces. In a Christian sex education

program called Passport to Purity, the cliff represented the edge of purity. Each space

represented an act, desire, or thought that brought me closer towards the edge. At the ripe

age of 12, I filled in the cliff edge as “kissing a boy after dating him for a month.” In

other words, I defined impurity as kissing! That one kiss would be enough to push me

over the edge (to never return). Swept away on an adventure-filled weekend retreat with

my mom, I performed a series of exercises to earn my very own passport to purity and

purity ring. At the end of the cliff exercise, I signed my passport of purity. Now, I am

pure. Or, so I was told. These artifacts—passport and ring—marked a change; they

signified a new identity. What was I before? Why a retreat? What happened to me over

the course of this program?

Purity and impurity—a descriptive system of sexuality within Christianity is also the

normative system of womanhood for Evangelicals. Purity was presented to me as both a

descriptive reality (who you really are) and as a prescriptive reality (what you ought to

do). In my experience, I did not doubt the value of purity over promiscuity. Nor did I

doubt the definition of purity. It seemed as if purity were an objective truth about my

body, about women’s bodies, and therefore of inherent value. Sexual purity and moral

purity are a woman’s greatest treasure in the eyes of God and man. It was as simple as

that. Women living in accordance to their innate design are pure and women living in
 17

defiance to their innate design are impure. Reflecting back on my adolescence, I ask

myself, was purity desirable because I was designed to be pure or because I was taught to

believe purity was better for me?

Going back to the books I read as an adolescent, I uncover the logic for doing purity--

the subjective motivation for subscribing to purity culture—to be prescriptive, not

descriptive. First, I identify what each author defines as purity, detailing what it means to

embody purity as an adolescent woman. I conclude the logic for doing purity is

conditional to a misogynist system of desire. Next, I analyze the structure of the texts. I

find the structure is significant to an adolescent girl’s evaluation of purity. More

specifically, the texts are structure to indoctrinate girls into the value of purity. Based

upon their structure, Evangelical purity texts function as rituals of indoctrination. The

logic for doing purity, I contend is conditional to a misogynist system of desire.

1.1 A New System of Desire

In 1984, wife to the martyr Jim Elliot and author of eleven publications, Elisabeth

Elliot published Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ’s

Control. In this book, Elliot describes purity as the passion to be loved by God over the

passion to be loved by men. She exclaims that you cannot love God fully and love a man

at the same time. She states, “Discipleship usually brings us into the necessity of choice

between duty and desire” (51). For a woman’s attention is divided even in small acts such

as prayer, Elliot exclaims. The same assertion, however, is not made of men. Interlocking
 18

purity and passion, the key to a woman’s purity is the process of dying to one’s own

passions and finding contentment in pursuing God’s passion—i.e. evangelism, service,

prayer. In other words, a woman’s sexuality is inferior, if not imposing upon the will of

God. Here, we already see how the system is stacked against women. According to Elliot,

purity is a process of being “purified and corrected” (95). A woman’s duty in loving God

is to relinquish her sexuality. This process of self-sacrifice ought to be inherently

desirable. If you love God, then it is your duty to sacrifice your romantic desires for the

work of God. Since the first edition, two new editions have been printed, selling over half

a million copies in sum.

Focusing more on pleasure, Joshua Harris states in his book I Kissed Dating

Goodbye: A New Attitude Toward Romance and Relationships that true purity is “a

direction, a persistent, determined pursuit of righteousness” (88). Despite common belief,

purity is an ongoing process, not a state of being. Written at the young age of twenty-one,

he confesses his own past mistakes saying, “I’d only be using that girl to meet my short-

term needs…I wouldn’t truly be loving her and putting her interests first” (19). Now

transformed supposedly, Harris defines purity as an orientation in life. Harris explains,

“This direction [of purity] starts in the heart, and we express it in a lifestyle that flees

opportunities for compromise” (88). Purity is choosing to be single; purity is choosing to

prepare for marriage. Now, the logic for doing purity is based upon pleasure and
 19

avoidance of pain. According to Harris, “the joy of intimacy is the reward of

commitment” (28). In other words, short term intimacy is harmful and less fulfilling.

Then John and Stasi Eldredge posit in Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a

Woman’s Soul there is an innate essence of womanhood. Although they do not use the

word “purity,” this text sold over three million copies during the height of the purity

movement. Captivating is a sequel to the men’s version, Wild at Heart. In both, the

Eldredges’ plea for a return to the essence of masculinity and femininity. “Your true

heart,” or as it is called elsewhere “the essence that God gave to every woman,” is to be

“captivating” (x). Women naturally desire to be desired; they say. Hence, the captivating

women satisfies her need to be desired by being “romanced by God” (112). The pure

woman is the satisfied women—a woman who knows she is loved. Satisfied in the love

of God, these women are then able to create a space for men to breathe in. They are not

demanding, needy, or desperate for attention. A woman’s purpose is to love and affirm

men. The purity of womanhood ought to be desirable for its own sake. It is clear even at

this point, the Eldredges’ definition of purity contains a logic of misogyny where the

woman’s essence is predetermined as the giver and the male essence is predetermined as

the receiver.

Lastly, Kristen Clark and Bethany Baird explain in Sex, Purity, and the Longings

of a Girl's Heart: Discovering the Beauty and Freedom of God-Defined Sexuality,

“Sexual purity is not just about saying no to sex before marriage; it’s about taking every
 20

thought captive and living in a way that reflects the perfect holiness of your Father”

(109). Purity is a behavioral disposition consistent throughout your sexual identity,

sexual desires, and sexual acts. Purity is embracing God’s design. This design, according

to Clark and Baird, is cisgender, heteronormative, and complementarian. Again, we find

an essentialist belief that women’s sexuality is inferior to men’s sexuality. “Women,”

they say, “are physically designed to receive from the man in a sexual relationship. A

woman’s physical design is only a mere reflection of her overall distinct role” (30).

Women are dependent upon men. They are designed to complement and not co-exist.

Clark and Baird go on, “[purity is] ultimately about embracing your identity as a daughter

of God and striving every day to become more like Him” (109). Described as a marathon,

purity is less desirable in the moment but will in the end be the most rewarding with or

without marriage (184). Ultimately, although every woman wants a hero, the pure

women’s hero ought to be Jesus, not a man.

From this brief analysis, the logic for doing purity is conditional to a particular belief

system. This system of belief, however, is more complex than your typical Evangelical

belief system which consists of 1) the infallibility of the Bible, 2) the death and

resurrection of Jesus Christ, and 3) the great commission of God’s disciples to go out and

evangelize. In Damaged Goods, freelance writer and blogger of Faith and Feminism,

Dianna Anderson catalogues five biblically inaccurate beliefs that purity culture assumes

to be true. Providing biblical evidence to the contrary, sex is not equal to marriage,
 21

biblical marriage includes polygamy, thinking lustful thoughts is not sinful, spouses do

not own our bodies, and premarital sex is not clearly sinful. Similarly, New York Times

bestselling author, Nadia Bolz-Weber, unapologetically attacks purity culture’s creation

narrative as false and misleading. Purity consists of a more complex system of beliefs.

What we find here instead are misogynist beliefs surrounding duty, pleasure, gender,

and sexuality: 1) a woman’s sexual desire conflicts with her duty to God, 2) pleasure is

greatest inside monogamous relationships, 3) gender is binary and hierarchical, and 4)

sexuality is heteronormative. These beliefs are not deducible from the Bible nor are they

deducible from the Evangelical belief system. In fact, these beliefs establish a system of

male supremacy. The woman is framed as other and less than insofar as male sexual

desire remains unlimited. Throughout the rest of the paper, it will become clear that to

desire purity is to believe in a misogynist system of desire, pleasure, gender, and

sexuality. That is, stemming from both a religious movement and a socio-political

movement, the logic for doing purity is conditional to a misogynist system of desire.

1.2 The Ritual Process

Predicated on a new system of desire, the question remains, is this system of

desire innate or acquired? In Arnold Van Gennep’s foundational work, Rites of Passage,

he uncovers three universal phases of ritual: preliminal, liminal, and postliminal.

Specifically, this structure belongs to rituals such as ceremonies, indoctrinations, etc. that

transform the social identity of the participant. Take for example the Quinceañera. This
 22

communal celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday marks her transformation from

girlhood into womanhood. Only after this ceremony are the participants endowed with

new responsibilities, new privileges, and even new desires. After examining the structure

of each text, I propose that purity literature follows the structure of a ritual. Although a

solitary act of reading, purity tests such as Passion and Purity, I Kissed Dating Goodbye,

Captivating, and Sex, Purity, and the Longings of a Girl’s Heart operate as a

transformative process for Evangelical girls.

Within a rite of passage, Van Gennep identified the first step in transforming

one’s social status is to create literal or metaphorical distance from the old self, i.e. a

metric distance away from home or a metaphorical death of self. The rituals at this stage

emphasize the sacred and differences from normal, everyday life. What is normal is

stripped away and the participant lay bare and exposed, ready to take on new meaning.

The neophyte is transformed from orphan to member through a series of rituals

constituting the liminal stage. Unlike the preliminal phase, the liminal phase is elusive.

The participant is in between the two identities. Training and disciplining or gift giving

and sacrificing, the orientation of the identity is transformed. The third and final phase of

a rite of passage is labeled reincorporation or postliminal. These rituals constitute the

identity with markings, documents, or artifacts of some sort. These act as certifications of

complete passage, allowing those who were not present to verify their new identity. Now
 23

transformed, the new self is reintegrated into the community and affirmed with this new

identity (Van Gennep).

Now, it is possible for there not to be a postliminal stage. According to

anthropologist and performance theorist Victor Turner,

“These three [phases of a rite of passage] are not always equally important or

equally elaborated,” he goes on, “in certain ceremonial patterns where the

transition period is sufficiently elaborated to constitute an independent state, the

arrangement is reduplicated.” (11)

Some rites to passage may have minimal postliminal rites or no postliminal rites at all

when there is an extended liminal period. Using his own example, engagement is a well-

defined state between singleness and wedded. It is not, however, a stable identity. The

liminal ritual of proposal and putting on a ring is reiterated in the marriage ceremony.

Only in the wedding ceremony, it is a public and legally binding ritual. The “sufficiently

elaborated” state Turner refers to cannot be more than a transitory state. The in-between

identity of being promised to one another, not yet betrothed, does not afford legal rights

as marriage does. Although a possible stage of its own, the liminal, cannot provide

permanent identity.

Analyzing the texts I read as an adolescent, I find that the texts are doing

something to the girls. Namely, these texts are in fact indoctrinating young girls into a

system of desire. Set up as a ritual, girls are endowed with new identities—i.e. pure. Girls
 24

are fed the narrative that they contain a precious gift, a gift that God himself endowed

upon her. Only, she must perform particular rituals in order to continue to preserve this

gift for her husband. What I find in my analysis is these women are unconsciously

creating a new reality. Women are ‘making belief” as Richard Schechner described in

contrast to ‘make believing,’ the conscious acting out of the unreal (Schechner,

Performance Studies 43). Purity texts function as indoctrination rituals into a liminal

identity. I did not innately desire to be pure; I was indoctrinated into a desire to be pure.

1.3 The Strategy of Indoctrination

Structured as individual rites of passage, each book contains their own preliminal,

liminal, and postliminal rites. Beginning with the preliminal, purity rituals vary from

breaking up with boyfriends to praying for forgiveness of past sexual sins. We see here

both a metric and metaphorical distancing from the old self. Moreover, we see the

assertion of authority over the neophyte. Girls are described as “the servant” (Elliot 48),

“God’s daughter” (Clark and Baird, Sex, Purity, and the Longings of a Girl’s Heart 109)

and “a Beauty to rescue” (Eldredge 18). Released from their old habits and old identity,

girls begin their transformation into a new identity.

Jumping ahead, the postliminal stage assumes women are married by this point.

Women began the purity ritual process single and uninformed and end married and

informed. In some cases, singleness is more than a stage. God ‘calls’ on some to live a

life of singleness as a missionary. It is not “sensible” in this case to look for a man to
 25

marry (Elliot 37). In Elliot’s case, Jim had the call to the mission field. Part of their long-

distance relationship was determining whether Jim would ever marry. She had to silence

her wishes in order to honor his duty (54). In her journal she prayed, “wash me now,

without, within, or purge with fire, if that must be” (32). If the vocation of missionary

(including both international and local missions) is the calling for a young woman, then

her desire for romance must be put to rest.

For most, however, the postliminal stage consists of living out a set of new desires.

As seen in Table 1, love, romance, and beauty take on new meaning within marriage.

Stage of Ritual Preliminal Liminal Postliminal

Stage of Purity Learning Purity Performing Purity Married/Missionary

Elliot 1. Put honor above 1. Die to Self, case Love is charity, not

passion. 2. Revere aside sexual desire erotic.

the owner of your 2. Wait on God in

body—God. prayer and obedience

Harris Start with a clean 1. Set boundaries. God honoring

slate—break up or 2. Make your parents romance.

redirect your teammates. 3. Find

romantic positive influences.

relationships. 4. Guard your heart.

 26

Eldredge Let Christ’s love 1. Cultivate your inner Entice, inspire, and

heal the female beauty. allure men.

wound of 2. Be romanced by God.

loneliness.

Clark & Baird Acknowledge that 1. Make Jesus the Hero Walk in

you are sexually of your life. 2. Align righteousness.

broken and pray for your sexual identity

forgiveness. with God’s design.

Table 1. Ritual Structure of Purity Literature

Elliot argues pre-marriage, women are “holding” themselves from men to be pure. Once

in marriage, women are “giving” themselves to men to be pure (Elliot 180). Their body is

central to this shift be it physically or emotionally. As the Eldredges’ state, “true

femininity arouses true masculinity...a true Beauty is [a man’s] inspiration” (151). Love

is no longer eros, pleasure, and self-fulfillment. Now, love is self-sacrificing. Love is

charity to your spouse. Restraint is the key before marriage, and submission is the key

within marriage. As a single woman, you are measured by your obedience to God’s will.

Here, at the end of the indoctrination, women are measured by their obedience, allure,

and charity to their husbands. What happens in the liminal period? What changes?
 27

According to Van Gennup, the liminal period is elusive because the participant is

neither here nor there. Girl’s reading these texts are neither pure nor impure. In fact, I

label the liminal period of purity as “performing purity.” Waiting for marriage, women

are held in a holding pattern. They want to get married but should not engage in a serious

relationship if marriage is not the end outcome.

In spite of using different methodologies, each author leaves the reader with a set of

rituals to navigate the liminal phase of purity.9 I identify three types of liminal rituals

present in the texts: preventative, redirecting, and self-developing. Allow me to elaborate.

Preventative rituals prevent the arousal of sexual desires. For example, Harris instructs

women to dress modestly and refrain from flirting. He says, “Yes, guys are responsible

for maintaining self-control, but you can help by refusing to wear clothing designed to

attract attention to your body” (Harris 99). To learn what is modest and what is not,

Harris encourages girls to ask their fathers every day if what the clothes they are wearing

are appropriate. Clark and Baird also emphasize modesty to the point of modeling modest

outfits for each season on their blog.10 Dressing modestly is specifically a preventative

ritual performed by female for the sake of males. Note, the object of prevention is male

arousal, not female arousal. More on the double standard of male and female sexuality in

the next section.

A redirecting purity ritual reorients the desire for intimacy and the longing for

romance with a man towards intimacy and romance with God. Take Clark and Baird’s
 28

“strategies to win the inner struggle for purity” as an example (Clark and Baird, Sex,

Purity, and the Longings of a Girl’s Heart 132). They list five steps to get rid of lustful

thoughts and sexual fantasies: 1) purge the source of these thoughts (i.e. magazines,

movies, erotica), 2) study the Bible to know what is right and wrong, 3) memorize

scripture to repeat when you are tempted, 4) strategize new routines to replace the old

habits, and 5) pray for strength. Repeated as often as needed, this five-step process is a

ritual to replace impure thoughts with pure thoughts. In other words, this ritual replaces

sexual desire with a desire for purity. Note, these rituals function to delay the attachment

and commitment of adolescent relationships. They do not necessarily dissuade intimacy

and romance out right.

Performing purity encodes women with the value of purity which therein

increases the urgency to maintain purity. In other words, as they perform redirecting

purity rituals, their desire for purity increases. Clark and Baird’s five step ritual aligns

your sexual desires with God’s design for you—i.e. no masturbation, virgin, no porn, etc.

Redirected towards God, the desire for male attention or physical pleasure is mitigated.

Replacing the desire for male attention is the desire for attention from God. Redirected,

not quenched, purity rituals are built to increase the desire for purity. The logic for doing

purity in redirecting rituals is premised upon circular reasoning.

Finally, performing purity rituals, in particular self-developing rituals, lead to a

new identity. Prayer and scripture are more obvious types of self-developing rituals.
 29

Their function is to rewrite or reorient the self. Less obviously, after redirecting their

romantic desires away from dating, Harris says, “Girls can view their relationships with

men in their lives as training session for loving and respecting a future husband” (158).

Girls should learn “the art of sharing life” in the liminal phase (Harris 158). Redirecting

rituals such as writing a letter to your future spouse or talking with are supplemented with

self-developing rituals such as learning what love is from your parents. In self-developing

rituals, your attitude and behavior are modified. For Harris, the liminal period consists of

taking responsibility of your finances, learning to love your family, practicing parenthood

with your siblings, and building healthy life habits. He urges, “As singles, part of good

stewardship involves gaining the skills we’ll need in marriage” (162). What some see as a

natural stage of development, Harris sees as a training session for marriage. The result is

a new sense of self.

To be clear, the text is structured as an indoctrination, but to perform purity is to

perform purity rituals. These three types of liminal rituals easily flow together in Elliot’s

exposition of navigating singlehood. For instance, Elliot advocates that women adopt the

preventative ritual of playing hard to get. Do not initiate, she warns. “Females are made

to be receptors,” not “initiators” (Elliot 110, 98). Where women want “recognition,

response, protection,” according to Elliot, men “wander, experiment, conquer” (31). She

is essentialist in these claims. Women ought to “let [men] do the chasing” (103). Be
 30

mysterious and “keep them at arm’s length,” she encourages. Chasing women is what

men desire. Male initiative is natural; female initiative is not.

Therefore, rather than pursuing men, Elliot redirects female sexual energy towards

the home. Women ought to be the “hostess,” the “mother,” “womanly,” “modest,” and

“companionable” (Elliot 111, 181). Quoting Stephen Goldberg’s The Inevitability of

Patriarchy, Elliot stands behind “the concept of matriarchy and an absence of male

domination as absurd” (Elliot 109). Because women have broken ranks with their

assigned gender roles, society is breaking down. She states,

The conduct of men and women in every society on earth up till now has always been

seen as a fairly delicate and potentially explosive business. For that reason, it has

been surrounded with customs, taboos, rituals, prohibitions, protocol, and courtesies.

(108)

In the face of the woman’s liberation movement, Elliot exclaims women becoming

firemen and women paying for a man’s meal is “the order disordered” (111). Women

ought to return to the rituals of homemaking and serving the family.

Finally, Elliot calls for a change in the female disposition. Accusatory of women’s

assertiveness in relationships and eagerness to be loved, she states, a woman’s place is in

“submission” to men (Elliot 103). Elliot’s position is made explicit in her principle of

love as charity. She explains, charity is “down-to-earth, everyday, tangible, visible,

practical, willed obedience...There is no other way to control passion. There is no other

 31

route to purity” (185). A woman must submit to her husband and obey him for “It is the

husband’s assignment to exercise the authority of the head,” moreover, “it is not the

husband’s job to demand obedience” (183). Women ought to know their role is to obey

without being asked to.

To developing themselves, Elliot provides a self-developing ritual—the ritual of self-

sacrifice. In a quote from her journal Elliot states,, “The disposition to leave the dearest

objects of our hearts…involves a present process of inward crucifixion which is

obviously unfavorable to the growth and even the existence of the life of the self” (151).

The self must dissolve for purity to exist. Women ought not to grow too attached to male

attention. Our affinity for them is a distraction, she explains after an episode of “whetted

appetites” with Jim on the beach (124). The principle of love as charity which Elliot

advances is one in which women must withdraw their advances as to not “distract [male]

energies” from their “call of God” (133). To achieve a love of charity is not only to

respect and submit to men, but also to maintain a state of noninterference. Elliot’s self-

developing ritual for women of self-crucifixion is a steep ask. Male initiative is the only

permissible awakening for the pure woman’s sexuality. A woman’s sexuality ought to

remain otherwise dormant.

Caught in between single and married, I conclude that “purity” is a liminal

identity. As Turner explained, if a liminal stage is sufficiently elaborated, then the liminal

stage may amount to an independent identity apart from the postliminal identity (11).
 32

With three types of rituals—preventative, redirecting, and self-developing, I argue that

purity is a sufficiently elaborated stage. A pure woman is easily identified by her

performance of purity, i.e. modest clothing, not watching porn, and writing letters to her

future husband. However, to acquire and maintain the identity of “pure,” women must

perpetually perform purity rituals. If you are pure then you will do y and not do x.

Remember, liminal identities are transitional and therefore unstable. More akin to a

process of becoming than a state of being, purity is a liminal identity.

Obviously, purity is not a trait inherently possessed by women. To say “no” to sex

is one thing, but to be a particular type of woman presents a new set of complexities.

Purity is a matter of willfully doing or acting out what has been prescribed as pure. Purity

is clearly a performance. In my own experience, I had to physically travel to away from

home to become pure. What occurred after my Passport to Purity weekend was not a

celebration. No, after that weekend, I was expected to perform perpetual rituals to

maintain my purity. Haunted by the eyes of my parents, God, and future husband, my

adolescent years were filled with anxiety. I was responsible for preventing men from

desiring me by dressing modestly and not flirting. I would ask myself, am I doing this

right? Is this okay? Am I still pure?

More than just a performance, throughout the indoctrination process, women’s

identities are redefined by doing purity. According to Austin’s theory of performativity,

purity would be performative if purity is achieved by doing purity rituals. Indeed, doing
 33

purity enacts a new identity. Regardless of intent, purity rituals do something to those

who embody them. If I wanted to be pure, I had to perform purity rituals over and over

again. The achievement of purity is temporary; the finality of purity is only attained by

marriage. In the case of missionary women, it is less clear. On one hand, purity is

foreclosed by their decision to serve God as an unmarried woman. Yet, that could

change. Marriage is for life; missions is not necessarily so. Regardless, purity rituals

make women both the subject and the object. Now, in line with Derrida’s requirement of

iterability for performative speech acts, I will argue in the final section that purity rituals

have an iterable form—gender tropes.

To answer the question, why do women do purity, my response is indoctrination.

The structure of the texts is indicative of transformation via a rite of passage. The logic

for doing purity lies within the purity rituals themselves. For instance in preventative

rituals, women internalize male lust as their responsibility. When women dress modestly

to mitigate male lust, what they are doing in effect is labeling their own bodies as

dangerous. Redirecting rituals distinguish a woman’s sexuality insofar as the pure body is

the desexualized body. In these rituals, female desire is mitigated, if not transformed to

be completely absent. Finally, self-developing rituals reiterate the necessity of purity.

From Elliot’s ritual of crucifixion to Harris’ ritual of writing love letters to your future

spouse, purity is acquired and maintained in ritual. Reorienting their desires and longings
 34

away from men and towards God, women do purity to be pure. The desire for doing

purity is created in the doing of purity.

The indoctrination strategy of purity literature, specifically, encodes women to

believe in a particular system of desire. As I stated earlier, these beliefs consist of 1) a

woman’s sexual desire conflicts with her duty to God, 2) pleasure is greatest inside

monogamous relationships, 3) gender is binary and hierarchical, and 4) sexuality is

heteronormative. The logic for doing purity is premised upon these misogynist beliefs. In

sum, purity is not some innate design or natural quality of women; no, it is a liminal

identity acquired and maintained by performing purity rituals.

 35

2. The Affect of Purity: Longing or Horror?

Before I explore performativity at length, I want to pause and reflect upon the

desirability of purity. Since purity rituals operate on you as you embody them, encoding a

logic for doing purity, I am suspicious of girls’ emotional responses to purity. Looking

back on own adolescence, my affect towards purity appears to be less of a longing for

purity and more of a horror of impurity. My church and high school teachers supplied me

with a plethora of analogies as to explain why I should be pure. Impurity, for instance

was analogous to a piece of tape that lost its stickiness after being ‘stuck’ on too many

things. It only takes one touch for you to lose what makes you special, they would say,

rather hauntingly. Another troubling analogy had to do explicitly with a woman’s

marriageability. Women are like paper heart cut-outs. They are fragile and unique. But

once they lose their virginity, that heart is crumpled into a ball. If you try to unfold it,

there will always be creases. It will never again be perfectly smooth. What I find in my

analysis of purity literature’s affect are several examples similar to the one’s listed above.

What is an affect? Longing and horror are affects. An affect refers to an emotional

reaction evoked by an experience, a book, a movie, etc. which limits one’s power to act.

Literary theorist Simone Ngai explains in Ugly Feelings, affect is an aesthetic category of

emotions, a cathartic response. Ngai’s catalogue of “ugly feelings” consist of envy,

irritation, anxiety, and paranoia. I mention these because Ngai summarizes their cathartic

function as “ironic distancing” (10). Rather than drawing the subject in closer, these
 36

emotional responses contain the subject and can even consume the subject. The affective

form of anxiety, for instance, is the form of projection, a “thrownness hyperbolized”

(Ngai 212). Alfred Hitchock’s Vertigo illustrates this concept in Scottie’s dream,

according to Ngai, when he is thrown into the empty sky. Anxiety defamiliarizes the

subject with reality to the point of dysphoria. Ngai calls this “suspended agency” or

“passivity” (12).

I believe, a woman doing purity is in a state more akin to Ngai’s suspended

subject than the state Clark and Baird describe as freedom. Imagine being a young

teenager again, unfamiliar with your body, and ignorant of the hormonal changes to

come. Then add on what seem to be monthly “sex talks” about how often guys imagine

you to be naked and what you must do to prevent their imaginations from spinning wild.

Imagine hearing this. I sure did, and I internalized these messages as ‘my body is bad.’ I

was sickened by the thought of men subjecting me like that. I was afraid of what had

been seen and what could be seen by men. I had an initial affective response of horror.

Suddenly aware of my desire, if not responsibility, to mitigate this subjection, I distanced

myself from my body. My body became the object I manipulated to gain control of my

fear. The affective response I experienced turned me into a suspended subject—I could

not exist without controlling my body’s appearance. Horror consumed me. Rather than

dismissing male imaginations of my body, I turned my body into an object of male

imagination and an object unto myself.

 37

2.1 The Horror of Impurity

The embodiment of purity certainly results in negative consequences. Sellers and

Finch detail cases of body shame, sexual trauma, and PTSD. It seems odd that girls

would long for their own demise. Why did I self-elect my own asceticism? What did I

have to believe about my body to believe in the necessity of hiding it from the eyes of

men? I know that I was led to believe that purity would result in delayed gratification.

Just wait till you are married, adults would say, the most pleasurable sex is sex within

marriage. Is purity just a utilitarian pleasure principle? No, this seems inadequate for a

religious community. I argue, what made the conversion to purity culture successful was

not an altruistic longing for purity (longing for sexuality as God designed it) nor was it a

strategic maximization of pleasure (longing for the highest form of pleasure). Rather,

purity literature’s indoctrination strategy is successful because the texts evoke the affect

of horror.

Even Jessica Gardner’s rhetorical analysis in Making Abstinence Sexy of purity

culture’s capitalist tactics identifies a subliminal fear. Gardner observed at evangelical

sexual abstinence rock concerts that horny high schoolers are consistently convinced to

suppress their provocative inclinations by the allure of the fairy-tale narrative. “Complete

with beautiful princesses in distress [and] valiant princes on horseback” teenage girls and

boys identify with these heroic figures (Gardner 19). Only, the princess requires rescuing

because of some evil force threatening her purity.

 38

The most telling example of horror in purity literature, and what I will soon explain as

abjection, is on the opening pages of I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Harris retells the dream,

or rather the nightmare, a young woman had of her wedding day. She sees a picturesque

wedding scene facing her fiancé, ready to repeat their vows. Only it is interrupted by a

line of six women walking down the aisle. One by one, they link hand in hand in between

the couple. Confused by the presence of these women, the fiancé whispers and lowers his

gaze to the floor, “I’m…I’m so sorry.” He explains, “They’re girls from my past…they

do not mean anything to me now…but I’ve given part of my heart to each of them”

(Harris 14). Woken to feeling betrayed, this young woman felt sick at the chance that she

too could have lingering romances. Just as much as she would not want to get married to

a man separated by six other women, she knows a man would not want to marry her if

any man stood in between them. She experienced an affective response—sickness,

disgusted, horrified. There is not enough information to determine what affect she

experienced. However it is clear, there was a cathartic response of purging herself of that

possible outcome.

Following the young woman’s dream, Harris admits, “I gave my heart away too many

times. And I took from girls what wasn’t mine” (14). Harris frames sex as an amputation

of the body and dating as a form of consumption. Value depletes after every use. It is

implied that in each relationship, you give the other person a physical or emotional part

of yourself that cannot be returned or regenerated. Harris forewarns adolescents,

 39

“intimacy without commitment, like icing with the cake, can be sweet, but it ends up

making us sick” (32). Impurity will only lead to pain and loss. Again, Harris describes the

response to impurity as affective. Doing impurity will sicken you.

Elliot echoes Harris’ sentiment explaining, “by trying to grab fulfillment everywhere,

we find it nowhere” (22, 23). She flips the logic of pleasure on its head saying, “There is

dullness, monotony, sheer boredom in all of life when virginity and purity are no longer

protected and prized” (Elliot 23). In her opinion, sleeping around depletes the sanctity of

sex and therefore depletes the pleasure gained from experiencing it. Elliot compares

sexual pleasure outside the sacred consummation of marriage to a leaking water tank.

Even within a relationship, sexuality is dangerous. Clark and Baird explain pleasure

as a zero-sum value. They think having sex outside of marriage turns sex into a chore.

“With access to unlimited sexual opportunities and experiences, boredom was the

outcome,” according to another evangelical women (Clark and Baird, Sex, Purity, and the

Longings of a Girl’s Heart 87). Freedom of inhibition is not true freedom. According to

these female authors of purity, woman’s sexuality is not liberating. Instead, sexual

liberation “deepens our discontentment” (87). Sex requires stewardship or else it loses its

value.

In agreement, Harris calls the contemporary dating system “entertainment-driven,

disposable-everything American culture” (29). Society says love is romance, dating is

important for learning who you are, and a kissing is just fun. This system of dating is
 40

counterfeit dating—recreational, shallow, isolating, and obsessive (Harris 41, 31). He

criticizes this “hook-up culture” for a lack of discipline and restraint (129). Not alone in

his feelings, Clark and Baird reiterate a gloomy sentiment towards dating culture. “We

don’t see a beautiful landscape…rather, we see a vast sea of confusion, pain, and hurt”

(Clark and Baird, Sex, Purity, and the Longings of a Girl’s Heart 38). They describe sex

as cheap, broken, and complicated. The only way to avoid this emotional turmoil is

through purity.

Moreover, all four books contain the rhetoric of war: a woman’s purity is under

attack. The irony is women have to battle themselves to protect it. Bethany Baird

specifically describes her struggles with masturbation in terms of “powerlessness” and

“victory” (Clark and Baird, Sex, Purity, and the Longings of a Girl’s Heart 146).

“Militant morality” is what Elliot calls women’s responsibility towards purity (146).

Draw the line, then hold the line she instructs. Women are put on the defensive,

ruminating in a state of unease and caution. Like a “criminal tied to a chair who would

like to break free and knock you over the head,” Harris says women must stand guard

over their desires (141). There is hope for women who embrace their “inner warrior,”

says the Eldredges’ (188). Put on “the full armor of God daily” and take a stand against

“the powers of darkness” (201). Set up as war waged by women against women, the only

result is an ironic distancing of the self.

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Clearly, purity literature is written to encode an affective response. The literature is

written to say, women cannot act upon the problem of male desire. Women can only take

the action of separating from their bodies, manipulating them, and doing so consistently

to avoid the sickness, dullness, and victory-less state of impurity. Women are suspended

subjects within purity culture.

Now, I propose the subjective logic for doing purity is premised upon the affective

logic of the abject. In the following sections, I use Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to

elucidate purity literature’s use of horror as an affective strategy. Where the abject is

“one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to

emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside,” the abject is an object once a part of its

subject (Kristeva 3). Now divided, it stands opposed to, as the opposite of, at the limit of

the subject. The abject is not you, and yet it is you. This is to say, purity literature not

only indoctrinates girls into a system of desire but divides her subjectivity against herself.

2.2 The Affect of the Abject

In The Powers of Horror, Kristeva spends two chapters on the Judeo-Christian belief

system and the role of the abject. It operates uniquely from other systems. Normally, the

abject is excluded as taboo. In the case of Christianity, however, the abject is absorbed

into subjective existence. Sin is “subjectified abjection” (Kristeva 121) insofar as sin is a

defiant action willfully made (128). Therefore, the “I” is both subject and object (i.e.

abject). Kristeva calls the interiorization of the abject the “persecuting machine” because
 42

“abjection is no longer exterior. It is permanent and comes from within” (112-113). Sin

as the abject is a system of infinite purging without reprieve.

Now, according to Kristeva, there is no innate social or subjective logic. There is only

an innate mechanism—the affective response—that brings about subjective and social

order through abjection. This affective mechanism is a universal phenomenon just like

Freudian incest (Kristeva 68). The speaking subject is civilized into unique socio-

historical symbolic systems of the abject. To uncover the determination of a socio-

historical system’s abject, Kristeva says to look at what that system classifies as “filth”

(69). Since the logic of the abject is a binary logic, examining what does not fit into the

system will illuminate where the border is. The border determines subject from object—

i.e. what is from what cannot be.

More specifically, the abject is a “mechanism of subjectivity” (Kristeva 208).

Formulated in the pre-linguistic unconscious, the abject is a symbolic system of desire.

Perhaps more accurately, the abject is a symbolic system of horror. Out of horror, a sense

of self is created. Kristeva explains, the abject starts out as something not yet “detached

and autonomous” from the subject and is distinguished within “the twisted braid of

affects and thoughts” (1). Constituted by emotive reactions, the abject divides what once

was one into two: subject and object.

For example, in Kristeva’s example of the corpse, the corpse is the abject to the living

being because it exceeds what constitutes alive. The body, while still human, evokes the
 43

affects and thoughts of horror—what is the border of life and death? Expelled as other,

the corpse constitutes both the border of the living and what lies beyond the border as

death. Kristeva theorizes that the subconscious process goes something like this—1)

apprehensive of x, 2) desire what is not x, 3) sickened by x, and finally 4) rejects x. This

“spasm,” she calls it, is an inescapable cycle where an understanding of the self becomes

irrevocably reliant upon the abjection of the other (Kristeva 1). Horror clearly operates as

the mechanism of subjectivity for the abject.

As a result, the “I” in Kristeva’s theory of the abject, is always in danger. She says,

“’I’ am in the process of becoming other at the expense of death. During that course in

which “I” become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit” (Kristeva 3,

my italics). Like a boomerang, what constitutes the essence of subjectivity is the very

presence of the abject. The abject is a precondition of the self. Exerting power over the

other and creating meaning for the self through horror, the sense of self that results is a

narcissistic convulsion of symbolic logic, i.e. I am not that.

Refusing to fit into an existing structure or system, the abject does not exist outside of

the system, but on the contrary, is a necessary part of defining the system itself. It creates

a “topology of catastrophe” or the effect of “the constant watchman” insofar as the

dissolution of the border would entail the assimilation of the self into the abject (Kristeva

9, 13). Kristeva says the only way to pacify this danger is through sublimation—
 44

dissolving the horror of abject into the fascination of the sublime (11). The sacred and the

defiled exist in a dialectical relationship with one another.

This dialectic instantiates itself into the binary coding of our lived reality in systems

of difference and systems of purification. Kristeva says, “One is led to conceive the

opposition between pure and impure not as an archetype but as one coding of the

differentiation of the speaking subject as such, a coding of his repulsion in relation to the

other in order to autonomize himself” (82). Purity refers to the unity of self /order/system.

Purification then pacifies the horror of the abject/disorder/otherness. Out of the pre-

linguistic, the social order is arranged, predicated upon difference and purity of what is

labeled defilement.

Specifically, within a Judeo-Christian discourse of the abject, purification rituals

function as one of three things, 1) purge pollution from the self (i.e. confession), 2) to

achieve sublimation with the divine (i.e. communion, reconciliation), or 3) to pronounce

the divine apart from the pollution (i.e. baptism, ordination). If the abject is sin,

Christianity does not try to separate man from sin, for sin is essential to salvation. What

Christianity does instead is cleanse bodies of sin through confession. Kristeva explains,

confession functions as “an enunciation that amounts to a denunciation” (130). Although

abject, sin is accepted as the state of humanity and surrounded in prayer, confession, and

ritual. The abject is, in Kristeva’s words, “reabsorbed into speech” in the most auspicious

places, “as the point where the scales are tipped towards pure spirituality” (113, 127).
 45

Never separated, confession pacifies the horror of the abject that lay within. Hence, the

primary function of religious ritual has less to do with restoring relations to the sacred

and much more to do with differentiating the subject from the sin.

Purity culture also differentiates subject from sin. If the Evangelical system of purity

is predicated upon the logic of the abject, then impurity is the abject, correct? No, if this

were the case, then why are men not regulated in the same way as women within

Evangelical circles? Why is female virginity the prize, the object of protection, etc.? The

source of danger is not both male and female sexual promiscuity. The danger, according

to Evangelical purity culture, is solely female sexual promiscuity. In the next section I

analyze the images of impurity within each of the four texts of purity literature. I find that

not only is purity culture predicated upon the logic of the abject but that female sexuality

is the abject.

2.3 The Strategy of the Abject

It began with Eve. Each purity author references Eve as the image of impurity—

the source of the abject. Now, according to Christian tradition, Eve was the first sinner.

She wanted her own version of happiness, not the happiness God provided for her in the

Garden of Eden. Tradition has it that Eve is responsible for tempting Adam to take a bite

of the apple. Moreover, she is made responsible for the sexual pollution of man and all of

humanity. Wanting more than what God designed and intended, Eve is ostracized as
 46

other than. Her persuasion over men led to the fall of all humanity. This persuasive

power is still feared today.

Purity culture is especially fearful of women’s sexual persuasive power.

Mitigating the arousal of male desire, females are the object purity culture is

apprehensive of and therefore must be purged. We know from the first section, women’s

sexuality is the object of purification rituals. Women absolve themselves of their

sexuality by not initiating, dressing modestly, and removing sexually stimulating objects

(i.e., porn). Women label themselves dangerous. Men are not labeled and do not label

themselves as dangerous.

Women are made other through purity literatures images of impurity. Take

Harris, for instance. His image of impurity is the seductress and wayward adulteress of

Proverbs 7. There is no male image of impurity. Harris is disgusted by the way the

adulteress of Proverbs lures her victim in with romantic gestures and sexual favors,

achieving her own pleasure, and then rejecting her lover (31). The image of the adulteress

he says, is the image of fraudulent love. It is unclear if the fraudulency is the existence of

female sexual desire or the independence of female sexual desire. Both seem to trouble

Harris. When referring to women he uses adjectives such as naïve, fake, petty, and flirts,

while men are referred to as innocent, engaging, and objectified. Women, and not men,

are capable of trickery, seduction, and enchantment in his opinion. Moreover, it is unclear

if the pure woman even exists. Harris does not refer any woman living up to his standard
 47

of purity, only failing. We are left to conclude that impurity is essentially female

according to Harris.

Indeed, Harris is especially skeptical of a woman’s intentions while dating. To

describe dating in general, Harris uses words such as “selfish,” “irresponsible,”

“immature,” “compromise,” “short-term,” “impatient,” “poison,” “twisted,” “emotional

fulfillment,” “instinctual,” and “petty” (16, 22, 27, 39, 54). Alongside these descriptions

are references to the women’s physical characteristics—blonde, big brown eyes,

picturesque. To women, Harris instructs, “Please be aware of how easily your actions and

glances can stir up lust in a guy’s mind” (99). More poignantly, “Your job is to keep your

brothers from being led astray by her charms.” Girls must prevent the arousal of male

sexual desire. Forget male self-control. It is the women’s responsibility to mitigate her

own “charm.” Inherently desirable, a woman’s sexual attractiveness is a temptation for

men and therefore must be purified. Women must purify themselves of their own

sexuality—they are the abject.

Although Elisabeth Elliot acknowledges masculinity as a cause for social

instability noting, “men aren’t men unless they’ve proved it by seducing as many women

as possible,” she ultimately places the onus of social instability upon women’s

promiscuity and newfound liberation (22). Women, Elliot believes, “hold the key to the

situation where a man’s passions are involved” (146). Men are following your lead— “he

will measure her reserve, always testing the limits, probing” out of lust or sometimes out
 48

of “a confused sense of obligation, or even chivalry” (146). Men are given the excuses;

women are given the responsibility to say no! Therefore, the responsibility of a women’s

sexual purity rest upon nothing else than her own self. To women, Elliot says, “Keep you

distance” (146). To men, Elliot says, “be careful with us, please. Be circumspect” (102).

Again, reinserting the order of patriarchy, male sexual desire is permissible while female

sexual desire is mitigated.

John and Stasi Eldredge attempt to justify the double standard of male

permissiveness and female purity. Women, they explain, “uniquely carry the glory of

God to the world” as the image of perfect beauty (85-86). Women carry the image of God

in their beauty. “Beauty is powerful,” they explain, “Beauty may be the most power thing

on Earth” (133). Women exhibit their beauty by inviting, nourishing, comforting, and

inspiring men. Specifically, a woman of pure beauty “offers others the grace to be and the

room to become” (137). The Eldredges’ state this ability is something men lack. Women

are designed to “minister something to the heart of God that men do not” (126).

Therefore, “They are hated because of their beauty and power” (86).

However, instead of justifying the double standard, the Eldredges’ explanation

points to the origins of the logic of the abject within purity culture. Supplying their own

interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative, John and Stasi believe Eve is endowed

with a special gift. Men, apprehensive of the power of beauty and desire to be greater

than women, are sickened by the gift of beauty, rejecting beauty as the abject. Women’s
 49

beauty, ultimately desirable, is turned into a source of horror. The only way to sublimate

this horror is to reject women’s beauty as the abject. Hence, the Evangelical system of

purity where it is the woman’s responsibility to prevent male arousal. Their attractiveness

becomes a source of sin.

Reiterating the same logic, Clark and Baird only see two options for women. “The

desire to be enticing and feel attractive is a core aspect of our womanhood,” but “our

sensuality was created to be a private gift for the marriage bed” (Clark and Baird, Sex,

Purity, and the Longings of a Girl’s Hear 90). As a result, women can only use their

beauty in one of two ways: modest stewardship or self-affirming flaunting. They explain,

“we can use [our beauty] for selfish gain (power, immorality, manipulation, personal

gratification, etc.) or we can embrace [our beauty] is ways that bless others and glorify

God” (91). Women must choose between “wisdom and folly.” The way of wisdom is the

way of purity.

Across all four texts, the image of impurity is essentially female. Moreover, the image

of purity is the image of an asexualized female. Women’s sexuality is labeled dangerous

in purity literature. Purged from their bodies and purified of their desires, women may

become pure. Therefore, women’s sexuality is the abject of purity culture. As a result,

women are divided against themselves in horror of their own sexuality. Clearly an

affective strategy, purity literature follows the logic of the abject. Women do purity

because they believe their sexuality is the abject.

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In the first section, I argued that Christian women are indoctrinated into a new desire.

Now, I argue that this desire is premised upon the symbolic logic of the abject. Naming

their sexuality as the abject, Evangelical adolescent girls are imprisoned in a perpetual

performance of purification. The subjective logic of purity is not one of longing but of

horror. Looking back upon my own adolescence, I feared my body even though I barely

knew anything about it. I did not even know what my clitoris was until college.

Now having discussed the rite of passage structure and then the affect of horror

purity literature as strategic tools of indoctrination, in this final section, I bring the

discussion back into performance theory. Specifically, my task is to explain the iterability

of purity such that purity is performative. After performing purity rituals, is there a point

in which the woman finally reaches an affirmation of purity? Do women ever actually

become pure? If so, what marks this performance as successful? As I mentioned earlier,

purity is a liminal identity. As such, the achievement of purity is ambiguous. Purity is a

placeholder for marriage or missions work. If a woman reaches marriage a pure woman,

then one might say she has achieved purity. However, several of these authors claim

purity extends into marriage. What I find is a pattern is purity literature’s representations

of the pure woman and impure woman, regardless or single or married. The pattern turns

out to be a pattern of gender tropes. Therefore, what makes purity performative are purity

rituals’ incorporation of gender norms.

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3. The Ideal: Real or Illusion?

Finitely measured since the womb, training me for my profession of purity, my

sexual awareness was scripted, subscribed, and even nullified, all to never be self-

analyzed. Now, I find myself in the couch across from a counselor who is telling me that

I have ‘Good Girl Syndrome’: the quiet, perfect, well rounded, follower, who is modest

but flirtatious, who is confident but doesn’t get mad, who is intelligent but has no

opinions on things, thereby towing a tenuous line between being something, but not being

it too much (Simmons 2). In response to criticism and judgement, I crumble, shamed into

my limbic system as my six-year-old self being told, “You are bad!” My behavior was

monitored just as my virginity was measured. Somehow the messages overlapped: you

good or bad; you are pure or impure.

Using Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, I aim to show that purity is

performative insofar as purity is a gender performative. If the pure woman is represented

as the good girl trope and the impure woman is represented as the bad girl trope, then

purity is marked by its conformity to gender tropes. If iterable, as Derrida requires, then

purity is performative. Therefore, just as gender is the illusion of a stable identity, purity

is the illusion of a stable identity. The pure woman does not exist.

3.1 Gender Performativity

When discussing gender, Butler is not convinced by the essentialist theories of

gender. In one of her earlier works, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An
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Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Butler posits that gender is more like the

acting done by a performer than the role played by a performer. Gender is not put and to

then be taken off; rather, gender is the embodiment of a character, of its manners. Butler

clarifies her position in “Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics”:

Gender performativity does not necessarily presuppose an always acting subject or an

incessantly repeating body. It establishes a complex convergence of social norms on

the somatic psyche, and a process of repetition that is structured by a complicated

interplay of obligation and desire, and a desire that is and is not one’s own (xi).

In other words, the cultural norms of “feminine” and “masculine” precede gender acts,

acting upon the psyche affectively to be reenacted. Gender is not like the playing out a

scripted role but the actions of the actors themselves. The “I” is produced upon

embodying these norms. Unlike a theatrical performance where the suspension of belief

is dissolved when the performance ends and reality resumes, the suspension of belief of

gender is never dissolved. Gender is a fiction naturalized into fact; it is an illusion

believed to be reality.

According to Butler, masculinity and femininity are a stylization of the body, not

innate or biological traits. Butler explains, “bodily gestures, movements, and enactments

of various kinds” (Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” 519) constitute

gendered identity insofar as “constituting acts not only as constituting the identity of the

actor, but as constituting the identity as a compelling illusion, an object of belief” (520).
 53

Gender is performative, meaning gender is created in the doing of gender. In other words,

gender categories are created and sustained by its performances. “One is not simply a

body,” Butler proposed, “but, in some very key sense, one does one’s body and, indeed,

one does one’s body differently from one’s contemporaries and from one’s embodied

predecessors and successors as well” (521).11 Gender is a normative system concealed as

a descriptive system—i.e. myth. Gendered selves exist only insofar as there is a body

putting on what is deemed feminine and masculine. Or, as performance theorist Diana

Taylor states it, the body literally is “the medium as well as the message” (Performance

60).

As a result, performativity is closely related to precarity. Who gets to exist is

restricted to how the social norms are defined. Gender identity is a performative

accomplishment “compelled by social sanction and taboo” (Butler, “Performative Acts

and Gender Constitution” 520). More specifically, performativity clarifies who is

designated as privileged in the social system with security and support. Performativity

reveals what one must do in order to be considered ‘real’ or ‘pure.’ Those who do not

perform their role correctly are criminalized and stigmatized as “unreal” or “impure.”

3.2 The Strategy of Performativity

In this final section, I posit that purity and impurity are particular types of bodily

stylizations and gestures of the body. Specifically, I find that the tropes of purity and

impurity mirror gender tropes. The pure bodies are praised as the good girl while the
 54

impure body is precarious like the bad girl. Instead of using physical artifacts like the

purity ring, purity literature employs a different strategy to mark purity and impurity. The

iterability of purity and impurity within purity literature is dependent upon the

associations of each with a gender trope. Connecting the moral and sexual behaviors of

Evangelical purity with gender enables the illusion of essentialist—i.e. the illusion that

purity is just as essential to women as gender is essential to women. The performativity

of purity is moralized insofar as purity is sacred meanwhile impurity is precarious.

Impurity should not and ought not to exist.

Analyzing the evangelical Christian textual representations of purity and impurity, I

find they consistently correlate to the binary system of gender. Specifically, purity

literature represents purity in terms of gender tropes: the good girl and the bad girl. If this

is the case, then purity is coded into a recognizable form and is therefore performative.

Purity is not an innate trait of women; purity is the embodiment of the good girl. See

table 2 for a comparison of the good girl and bad girl gender tropes.
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Gender Trope The Good Girl The Bad Girl

Gestures Controlled, homemaker, kind, Uncontrolled, assertive,

accommodating, passive, in manipulative, unapologetic,

need of rescue self-reliant, pleasure seeker

Stylizations Modest clothing, “cute,” Tight and revealing clothing,

feminine appearance “hot,” masculine appearance

Table 2. The Good Girl and Bad Girl Gender Tropes

In Captivating, John and Stasi Eldredge clearly associate purity with the good girl

gender trope. Purity in their opinion is to live to the full potential of your design. They

state, “you are a woman to your soul, to the very core of your being.” Woman’s essence,

moreover, “is the most important thing about [them]” (8). The design of women, or

God’s intent for women, is known according to the Eldredges’ by women’s base

desires—“to be romanced, to play an irreplaceable role in a great adventure, and to unveil

beauty” (9). In other words, a true woman will want to be rescued, to play the faithful

sidekick role, and to be a figure of beauty, grace, and kindness. The Eldredge’s

representations of a true woman are Disney princesses being rescued by a prince,

secondary characters in novels such as Lord of the Rings, and little girls playing dress up.

First off, these are all fictional characters. Even the little girl is in a state of play which

Richard Schechner explains is a state of make believe—the conscious acting out of the

unreal. The Eldredges’ do not supply any concrete examples of a pure woman. Their
 56

ideal woman does not exist. She is but a fairytale in book and movies, or as I argue, a

constructed gender trope.

Continuing to elaborate upon the true essence of a woman, John and Stasi

Eldredge include the image of complementarian wife, i.e. the homemaker. See here, the

essential qualities of pure woman are stated: “She is inviting. She is vulnerable. She is

tender. She embodies mercy. She is also fierce and fiercely devoted” (Eldredge 31). This

woman is subordinate and homely. Without explicitly stating her place is in the kitchen,

John and Stasi Eldredge believe the woman’s place is curating the home, the church, and

the emotional state of men. In comparison, the image of the impure woman is the

“dominating” woman and “desolate” woman (51-60). The impure woman can appear as

one of two extremes: “hard, rigid, and controlling” or “naïve, lost, or bereft of any sense

of self” (54). In either case, she is uncontrollable by way of will or emotion. Just as

women are either pure or impure, women are either good girls or bad girls.

Not far off, Kirsten Clark and Bethany Baird directly connect purity with the

feminine traits of the good girl gender trope. However, Clark and Baird lack a real-life

example of the pure woman just like the Eldredges’. They state the following in regard

to the pure woman,

Women long to be desired relationally by their husbands. This affirms their

femininity and lets them know they are loved and cherished…Women are
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physically designed to receive from the man in a sexual relationship. A woman’s

physical design is only a mere reflection of her overall distinct role. (30)

If purity is living in accordance with God’s design for our sexuality, then women are cis-

gendered, heterosexual, and complementarian. In their first book, Girl Defined, Clark and

Baird elaborate on biblical womanhood, i.e. how to express femininity as daughters of

God. Their recommendations extend from superficial acts, i.e. the vanity of selfies, to the

existential acts, i.e. the hopelessness of suicide. Only the woman living outside of God’s

design would have the vanity to take selfies or the hopelessness to take her own life. Girls

are either living “wild or wise” (Clark and Baird, “The Difference Between a Wild and a

Wise Woman”). They explain, a pure woman does not “cherry pick” what the Bible says

about her sexual identity (Clark and Baird, Sex, Purity, and the Longings of a Girl’s

Heart 77). She must encompass the entirely of what God intended for her—to receive

from men. For example, if a girl posts seductive photos or purses queer relationships,

then she is a wild woman. Clearly, the impure woman is the stereotypical bag girl. The

wise or pure women, on the other hand, is the patient woman waiting to serve and receive

her hero. The pure woman is the good girl.

There is a clear pattern throughout each of these texts. Harris’s and Elliot’s image

of the pure woman is the stereotypical good girl and the image of the impure woman is

the stereotypical bad girl. Specifically for Elliot, the pure woman is the missionary’s wife

and the impure woman is the feminist. The impure woman is selfish with her time and
 58

pleasure. She is not accommodating to men. Specifically for Harris, the impure woman is

the “slut” or “flirt” who flaunts her body to attract male attention without true care for

them. His image of the impure woman is the adulteress or temptress of Proverbs. The

pure woman will care for men by protecting them from lusting after her body and her

attention. She will dress modestly, and she will not flirt. In sum, the impure woman is the

bad girl who disrupts the social norms of the good girl, the good wife—the pure woman.

Deflating purity to a series of reiterated acts, purity rituals constitute not only the

appearance of purity but also constitute the reality of purity. The social construct of

gender marks purity performances, making these rituals performative. Performing within

a misogynist system of desire, women are relegated into one of two gendered tropes,

thereby perpetuating the misogynist system itself. Either pure or impure, good or bad, the

subjective logic for doing purity is to not be bad or impure.

I thought I was doing Biblical womanhood. No, I was performing the good girl

gender trope. I argue that young adolescent girls, like I once was, are indoctrinated into a

misogynist system of gender and sexuality. Taught to mark ourselves with stylizations

(modest clothing) and gestures (polite manners, play hard to get) in order to pass as

“pure,” girls are trapped in a system of double standards. Carefully navigating the

balance of beauty and sexuality, kindness and flirtatiousness, and service and strength,

girls master the art of appearances to the point of self-deception. Girls believe in the

system of purity—they are in fact pure if they do x, y, and z. Indoctrinated and horrified
 59

into the system of purity and impurity, girls do purity to save themselves from what

appears to be no other option.

I argue that successful performances of purity will engage the bodily gestures and

stylizations of the good girl gender trope. Only then will purity rituals successfully refer

to the pure woman. For purity is measured not only according to a girls’ ability to

mitigate her sexuality but is also measured by her ability to adopt the gender constructs.

A pure woman is not only a woman who wears modest clothing, who prays, or who is a

virgin, but a woman who will serve and give to a husband without complaint, who is

gentile and not disruptive, who is controlled by societal norms not recklessly breaking

them. Purity is performative only insofar as purity is a performance of both sexuality and

gender. Regardless of a girl’s intention, purity performances operate on her body, making

her sexuality inferior to men’s and determining her gender identity. Women are both the

subjects and objects of a misogynist system.

Hence, the power of purity lies within its performativity. Where purity is

performative, purity rituals conceal their misogynist fabrication. Horrified into a system

where woman’s sexuality is the abject, purity acts appear to be “saving” women. So long

as a woman performs purity, she is not impure and therefore not abject. Purity rituals are

her only way of proving she is not that—i.e. the abject. When in fact, purity acts are

perpetuating the systematic abjection of women’s sexuality in so far as participation is

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validation of the system. Purity is a mask unto itself. Therefore, purity is a mechanism of

a misogynist system of desire.

To conclude, purity is not something women’s bodies do or do not have; purity is

something women do to with their bodies. By doing purity, women become pure. The

desire for purity is premised upon a misogynist logic. This logic is insidiously encoded

into an indoctrination strategy of horror. Horrified of their own sexuality, women label

their bodies as dangerous and conform to the images of purity. This image of purity,

however, is the image of the good girl. Stylized into a gender trope, the performance of

purity is a performative accomplishment.

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Concluding Remarks

As I explained earlier, the Evangelical purity movement was the product of a

sociopolitical movement in the 1970s towards a right-wing conservativism. The rise in

sexual promiscuity threatened the moral order of America. The church and state

coalesced to reverse engineer sexual promiscuity into sexual purity. The rhetoric of purity

and impurity functioned as linguistic mechanisms to bolster the heteronormative family

structure. Moslener, however, argues the rhetoric of purity and impurity was weaponized

against women to preserve white male power in a time of contestation. In a brief

examination of the historical discourse of Evangelical purity, the threat of impurity is not

only a mechanism of a misogynist system of gender and sexuality, but a linguistic

mechanism for maintaining a white, heteropatriarchal system.

In Virgin Nation, American religion scholar Sara Moslener argues against the

common notion that the rhetoric of the twenty first century Evangelical purity movement

originated in socio-political climate of the 1970s. Rather, Moslener argues the rhetoric of

the twenty-first century purity movement dates back to the rhetoric of the twentieth

century’s social purity movement. The concept of purity as “a cultural project” of the

social purity movement was created to “ensure sexual purity, including heterosexual

development and racial virility” (Moslener 8).

Purity in this context is referring not only to abstinence but to the integrity of the

white race, i.e. racial hygiene. In the late 1800s, religious institutions such as the
 62

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the Young Men’s Christian Association

(YMCA) and the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago sought to preserve the Anglo-Saxon

race by equating social norms with religious ethics according to Moslener. Impurity

referred to pollutions such as intercourse with African Americans, disease, and

fornication. Holy are the white folks, heterosexual couples, and healthy individuals and

damned were the black folks, homosexuals, and diseased. I agree with Moslener,

American purity culture’s rhetoric originates from the white supremist discourse of social

purity.

Moreover, the social purity movement sought to secure not only white supremacy

but heteronormativity. Moslener explains, “A commitment to sexual purity was a

commitment to cooperation between the sexes. Ideal manhood and womanhood increased

the social stability of marriage and family life” (27). Moslener demonstrates that these

two purity movements contain a very similar rhetoric—preserve the American family

structure, i.e. the heteronormative family structure.

The difference between the two purity movements was their strategy for

preserving the heteronormative family structure. The social purity movement of the

twentieth century did not consist of regulating women’s sexuality but in regulating men’s

sexuality. Men were the ones asked to make purity pledges, not women.12 Moslener

explains, “Reformers challenged their culture’s permissive approach to male

sexuality…By reframing male sexual permissiveness as immoral and weak, the

 63

movement problematized the means by which manhood was achieved” (Moslener 26).

D’Emilo and Freedman support Moslener’s claim in their history of American sexuality,

Intimate Matters, quoting a New York Physician who “sounded the alarm for a social

hygiene movement” and stated, “the Male Factor is the chief malefactor” (204). Even

prostitution was understood to be a male creation for male pleasure for which men were

judged more harshly than female prostitutes (D’Emilo 210). The social purity movement

placed the blame of polluting of American civilization upon male sexuality, not women.

What changed? Why was there a shift between the twentieth and twenty first

century purity movements from male sexual purity to female sexual purity? Moslener

explains, “Concerned that women have had charge of the church long enough, liberal

protestant men sought to reclaim Christian piety” (57). Known as muscular Christianity,

historian William J. Baker explains, “Muscular Christianity represented a reaction against

the ‘feminization’ of American middle-class culture” especially “family and religious

matters” that were left to the women at the time (Baker 45). Men reasserted moral

authority over women, defeminizing images of Christ and the Church. Not only that,

male spiritual leadership was declared to be biblically mandated. Sexual promiscuity was

not encouraged in men, but it was excusable. Muscular Christianity enabled the

justification of male promiscuity with the claim that males had a higher sex drive. Men

cannot help themselves, but women can. Women were to blame for male promiscuity. All

the while, the resurrection of male strength, vitality, and health led to the importance of
 64

male adolescent health. Led by Torrey Johnson, Billy Graham, and James Dobson, youth

programs emerged around the nation to indoctrinate adolescence into a Christian sexual

ethic such as Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), Youth for Christ, and

YoungLife. In short, female adolescent sexuality was the new scapegoat.

The discourse of gender and sexuality in the Evangelical purity movement abided

to the white supremacist, heteropatriarchal rhetoric of America’s social purity movement.

A counter-culture discourse where women were rewarded for ascribing to the Victorian

gender roles, women belonged in the home while men belonged at work. Caught within a

double standard, young evangelical women performed what acts were scripted to them

within the repertoire of purity. In the same way gender acts upon the body to create a

gendered identity, purity acts upon the body to create a pure or impure identity for young

women. What it means to be pure is nothing more than successfully performing the

American gender trope—the good girl.

Either pure or impure, the Evangelical adolescent girl’s identity is determined by

her complicity and conformity to a misogynist sexuality. At best, purity is a linguistic

mechanism of misogyny; at worst, purity is a linguistic mechanism of white,

heteropatriarchy. Regardless of which, the concept of Evangelical purity culture that

purity is a trait women either do or do not possess is false. The embodiment of purity is a

performative accomplishment. To do purity successfully is to embody a misogynist logic

of sexuality. In this interdisciplinary humanities project, I used my own narrative to guide

 65

a critical examination of the texts of purity culture. The text’s structure, images, and

representations of purity demonstrate that an indoctrination strategy is employed to

encode a misogynist logic for doing purity and encode a gendered binary for purity to be

performative. The purity myth is the myth that purity exists.

 66

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D’Emilio, John and Estelle B Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in

America. University of Chicago Press, 1997.

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DeRogatis, Amy. Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation in American Evangelicalism.

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Elliot, Elisabeth. Passion and Purity. Fleming H. Revell, 2002.

Eldredge, John and Stasi. Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul. Nelson

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Finch, Jamie Lee. You are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of

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York, NY. 1973.

Graham, Billy. “God’s View of Sex: Moral Purity is Difficult, But Possible, with the

Help of the Holy Spirit.” Decision: The Evangelical Voice for Today. 31 August

2020.

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Company, 1904.

Harris, Joshua. I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Multnomah Publishers, 2003.

Hitchock, Alfred. Vertigo. Paramount Studios, 1958.

Klein, Linda Kay. PURE: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation

of Young Women and How I Broke Free. Touchstone, 2018.

Kiley. Rachel. “Kanye West said T.I. checking his daughter’s virginity is ‘God-

approved’.” Daily Dot. Jan 1, 2020.

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Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press,

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Levy, Denise and Edmiston, Autumn. ” Sexual Identity, Gender Identity, and a Christian

Upbringing: Comparing Two Studies.” Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work,

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Individuals with a Christian Upbringing: The Process of Resolving Conflict Between

Gender Identity and Faith.” Journal of Religion & Spirituality in Social Work: Social

Thought, vol. 32, 2013, pp. 60-83.

Mann, Rachel. Dazzling Darkness: Gender, Sexuality, Illness and God. Wild Goose

Publications. 2012.

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NOTES

1
Evangelical is a sect of protestant Christianity that emphasizes evangelism and the

individual conversion experience. Historically, this denomination is politically active and

politically conservative. Denominations such as Baptist, Mennonite, Presbyterian,

Assemblies of God, Covenant, Lutheran, and Nazarene can fall under the category of

Evangelical.
2
In fact, I find the purity myth to truly be a myth as Barthes defined in Mythologies

(1957): fiction naturalized into fact. Evangelicalism takes it as a matter of fact that

females are born “pure.”2 What I aim to show is the fiction of this supposed fact.

However, rather than demystifying the purity myth by identifying the semiotic

transformations of signifier, signified, and sign as Barthes proposed, I demystify the

purity myth by identifying the affective logic of purity as Julia Kristeva proposes in

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982).

3
Auto-theory is an emerging methodology within the humanities furnished by Paul B.

Preciado’s Testojunkie and Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts.

4
See Simone De Beauvoir’s Second Sex (1949), Helene Cixous’s The Laugh of the

Medusa (1976), and Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman (1974).

5
Similar to my project, Browning’s Acting out Abstinence examines gender roles in

abstinence-only education through a lens of feminist theology. Their methodology,

 73

however, is ethnographical in nature, observing and interviewing participants to gain

insight into the formation of gender roles.

6
See Klein’s Pure, Garner’s Making Chastity Sexy, and Browning’s Acting Out

Abstinence.
7
See https://www.epm.org/resources/2010/Jan/28/guidelines-sexual-purity/;

https://bible.org/seriespage/lesson-11-sexual-purity-1-thessalonians-43-8;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etsxCFblzqA
8
Opinions on sexual pleasure may vary within the Evangelical purity culture. Is it sinful

to find pleasure in sexual intercourse, even if it is between husband and wife? A few may

say yes, but the majority of Evangelicals believe that sexual pleasure within the correct

context of marriage is what God designed it to be. When I say asceticism of sexual

pleasure, I am referring to sexual pleasure outside the context of marital intercourse.

Bodily pleasure out of context, i.e. masturbation, is outright sinful. Sexual pleasure is

only acceptable within narrowly defined limits.

9
In the case of Passion and Purity, Elliot uses her own journal entries to demonstrate the

difficult but rewarding transformative process the reader must mimic. Similarly, Harris

and Clark and Baird retell their rite of passage experiences alongside sets of rituals. For

instance, to take on quitting porn and masturbation, Kristen Clark shares four steps she

took to shake her bad habits (repent, confess to a friend or family member, get discipled

by a mentor, and get rid of negative influences). In contrast, the Eldredges’ hardly refer to
 74

themselves. Instead, they reference pop culture, i.e. Disney movies. Then, perhaps most

obviously, Harris provides a literal guide to navigate dating. Between “seven habits of

defective dating” and “principles that can guide you from friendship to matrimony,”

Harris directs the reader through the liminal stage of performing purity using his own life

experiences as examples (35, 187).

10
See GirlDefined Blog: https://www.girldefined.com/modest-fall-outfit-ideas
11
Now, these norms are socio-historical norms. They are created within a discourse of

gender and sexuality. Gender acts are determined by the “punitive and regulatory social

conventions” of the time, not some internal essence (527). Inevitable within gender then,

is a question of taboo and therefore of power. What culture defines as taboo is stripped of

power in contrast to what culture defines as normal which is elated in power. “The ‘I’

that is its body is, of necessity, a mode of embodying, and the ‘what’ that it embodies is

possibilities” determined by the historical context (521).

12
For example, the White Cross purity pledge for men said, “1) To treat all women with

respect, and endeavor to protect them from wrong and degradation. 2) To endeavor to put

down all indecent language and coarse jests. 3) To maintain the law of purity as equally

binding upon men and women. 4) To endeavor to spread the principles among my

companions, and try to help my younger brothers. 5) To use every possible means to

fulfill the command, “Keep THYSELF pure” (32).