Purity Culture, Sex and Race - A Conversation with Jenny McGrath and Abby Wong-Heffter

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danielle asks who came up with this shit?

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

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

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

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

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

Abby talks about the intersection of purity culture and race—she says converge in the vision that was cast of a knight in shining armor was saving the damsel in destress who was a Northern European female, pure and virginal. It was this place where the “holiness and goodness” of being chosen met the standard/ideal (of womanhood) that she could never fit as a woman of Asian ancestry. Because she could not change her ethnicity, she focused on what she could control: her purity, and being rigid with rules. 

Jenny hears in that the set up for continued/perpetuation of harm. The only access to power that Abby would have is by disempowering her own agency, her own body. It was taking any sense of choice and desire off the table. It stripped her of agency, voice and consent. 

Abby had proximity to the language around “the Jezebel,” though she didn’t grow up with it. So where there could be any sense of power, even in being able to flirt, it had already been deemed bad. She could honestly not think of a worse word in the Christian culture to call a woman. Where young people are meant to learn to play, explore and rein in their sexuality, she would be made fun of for not doing it right or she would be called some form of “slut.” This is a place where we come into our power—learning how to bring ourselves sexually into the world. 

Jenny agrees. Sexuality is not compartmentalized—it is intertwined in how we show up in other areas of our lives. So the purity culture takes away freedom and curiosity. Jenny, as a white heteronormative woman did fit the ideal of “purity” [that Abby was talking about] and it led to a sense of needing to be dissociated. Whether it was flirting or enjoying a PG 13 movie, there was immediately shame for her. She felt she would have to spend hours journaling to purge her sin. The only thing that was safe was to be completely disconnected from sexuality, from eroticism, from life. All the things that are a part of being embodied beings.

Danielle, having grown up as a child who’s been traumatized sexually, she felt like she would always have to ask for forgiveness and she would never attain it. There was a sense of “will I ever get to heaven?” There was no framework for sexual trauma, abuse or harm. It was all lumped in the same boat of “purity.” At that point, you’re always striving for something you know you can never get to. It was maddening and so she eventually gave up. Danielle said others would change themselves, through eating or exercise, to try to get rid of this thing that happened to me since they could never be pure?

Abby said even the language is crazy-making. In Youth Group, or in her case she went to a Christian High School, there was “cute-sy” form of sex education – purity culture is married to false naivety that doesn’t acknowledge that 1 out of 2 kids has been sexually abused. They treated kids like they have a lack of experience in the world as teenagers, and that there is some way to be pure now without having named/acknowledged what they’ve already been exposed to by this age. It required the kid to stay ignorant. Abby said that for Danielle it would be she would have to remain an outcast because she already knew something of this “thing” (sex) that is being talked about. 

Danielle said it is like already knowing the end of the story, and know more than your teacher. You’re not supposed to know, and they know that you’re not supposed to know. Danielle says it makes you feel trapped or chained, binding to the sources of additional harm. 

Abby says “damning” is the word that comes to mind. 

Jenny says it’s very normative categories of gender. This was the message that so many folks who were socialized as “girl experience” heard. The people who were socialized as male were told “you are going to perpetrate harm, you are not in control of your sexuality.” The sense was that “he” feels so threatening. There is an entire sector of people in-between these who don’t have language and are not seen. Non-binary and gender fluid received no teaching about what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit in these very binary categories of gender. 

 

Abby was listening to something on the radio recently about the set up for the gay and queer community in the 1980s. This experience of “I only have these two options” bumps up against so many areas of injustice where purity culture is part of oppression. Of course, oppression creates more oppression for people who are already oppressed. Purity culture gives a false sense of being able to accomplish something and gain power. It wouldn’t have been as intoxicating if it weren’t for the sense that you could be more powerful if you were “pure.” There are so many people who couldn’t actually get there, and even more so for non-binary, trans and queer folks. For them, sitting and listening to lectures and sermons on what it means to “pure” there would be an immediate sense that there is nothing they can do here, outside of being a eunuch. Words are weaponized so we know where to stay to be right and good. 

Danielle said it was often a white male pastor that was preaching this message to young teens. When you dig into some of the leaders’ stories, they never held themselves to this standard. The same is true with your parents, it’s not what they held themselves to, even coming out of the same faith tradition. So it’s almost like these white leaders were able to reenact their own kingdoms, to maintain their own power in their churches and youth groups like mini power centers. You can gain a lot of control over diverse groups in that scenario. 

Jenny said this reminds her what Danielle was saying earlier: If you’re told that you’re going to be like chewed up gum, and that you’re only value isn’t valuable if you have sex or any sexual experience at all, then when you’re a survivor of sexual abuse you’re not going to tell anyone or go to anyone because in that world it means you’re “spoiled.” Rather than giving someone full language around their sexual abuse and telling them that it doesn’t take away their value, dignity or worth nor it is a reflection doing something wrong. This idea of spoiling something pure really perpetuates the system, enabling abuse and preying on victims because perpetrators know that victims have nowhere to go to have nuanced caring conversations in that world. 

Abby says Jenny is speaking to how the purity culture has created a foundation for exploitation. One level of vulnerability to this system is anyone who has felt a sense of not belonging, a sense of orphan-ness, that there was no one there to attune to you, the purity movement would feel compelling because it provides a sense of being contained and parented inside a set of norms and rules. Another level would be to add in places of race, gender, sexual orientation or neurodivergence, all the places where there is marginalization and sexual abuse. Abby has heard again and again in her work of people being betrayed by the purity culture. For instance someone who is “saving themselves” (to have sexual intercourse until they are married) is vulnerable to someone who is in the know of that language. There is a sense of grooming, saying to them, “I’m going to help you become pure.” This is a normal way that predators work within the vocabulary of purity culture. If you want to sexually exploit people, the purity culture is a prime place to find vulnerable people. 

 

Jenny says purity culture, Focus on the Family, James Dobson … they are all part of the system of the Christian Right. She says there is often a myth that it is because of abortion that the religious right exists. However, it was actually in the 1970s when Bob Jones University was going to lose their tax-exempt status because they were discriminating students of color. This was the reason Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right formed in order to fight against what they were calling Religious Freedom in the name of discrimination. From it’s very origin, it was a system to uphold racism in the name of Christianity. Jenny believes the Purity Culture was just another reiteration of the same thing, gaining power towards the larger Christian Nationalism movement. 

 

Danielle read Kristin Kobes Du Mez’ “Jesus and John Wayne” so she knows the information but hearing it again it shuts her down. “It’s staggering that there have been reiterations of this since the first invasion into this land that we’re calling the United States. Where sex and race has been married to religion” not faith. She’s stuck by the need to continually reinvent this in order to maintain power. In 2022 we’re dealing with the aftereffects and it’s still circulating in churches and communities today. The legacy of harm has continued and how hard it is to break out of this system. 

Abby said it reminds her of how distorted Jesus gets as the Religious Right is committed to policing bodies. Purity Culture is a way for our bodies to be policed. In her understanding of reading the Gospels, this is so opposite of who Jesus was. Abby thinks this has been a way to gain power for a particular group of people. 

Danielle said it wouldn’t be reinvented if it wasn’t working. Abby adds, exactly.

 

Danielle jokes, “come to our workshop.”

 

Danielle says this is why we continue to talk about it. Abby wonders how many years each of them have spent to detox from this message that was so thorough. As people who are working actively for the liberation of others, they too are still having to seek their own therapy, go on yoga retreats… to keep enforcing the goodness of their bodies, desire and arousal. Especially in raising teenagers, Abby says she can feel the ghost of purity culture that she has to constantly fight. 

Jenny says that is what makes it so insidious and powerful, when you’re hearing all the messages from when you’re a child. If you question them your eternity is hanging in the balance. It’s an ingrained fear of hell, punishment and eternal damnation as well as the fear mongering that happens around what could happen if you have sex outside of marriage or outside of these heteronormative categories. There is so much fear that is takes literal years to work out all the implicit messages. Even if Jenny’s head believes something, often times her body responds totally differently. 

Danielle agrees. Even with all the ups and downs of her relationship with her partner they are still working things out, with things like talking through who does the finances. When they were first together they came in with a set of norms and expectations. She said to him, you have to do the finances because you’re the man. He was like okay. But it didn’t work for them. Not because he wasn’t capable, he just didn’t like doing it. One day he said to her, this is nowhere in the Bible! And he was right. And she asked who told them this?! Danielle thinks of all the little things that she and her husband Luis are constantly renegotiating to find out what’s in the Bible and ask why they feel terror if they do things a way that is different from their formative faith tradition. Our bodies are trying to constrict and they’re not meant to. 

 

Abby asks Jenny if she has come across where the purity culture meets the post-WWII white picket fence and standard gender roles; what a good woman is? What are her duties? Where is the women confided to? Because it does feel connected to Purity Culture. 

Jenny says the more she has researched, the farther back she’s had to go in time. She’s looked at the creation of the Bourgeoisie Woman and Pre-US history, the idea of this White European woman. The first US colony was Virginia because the queen was supposedly a virgin. There is the hyper-emphasis on white woman’s virginity while we know settler colonial men were raping and abusing indigenous women all throughout the Americas. The justification for raping Indigenous or enslaved African Women was that they were Jezebels and that you couldn’t rape someone who always wanted to have sex. This justification was both for harming women of color and creating a distinction what is “proper.” Jenny believe that white women are very much complicit in this through the disembodiment and disavowal of agency, autonomy and sexuality that perpetuations these tropes and gender and racial norms. These racial and gender norms got more infused after WWII when the GI Bill expanded what white meant. Before the GI Bill, Polish and Irish were not “white.” 

Once “white” expanded, Jenny explains, this is when norms were created around what a white woman should look like, act, do, etc. This is where skirts and casseroles and all these ideas of what being a white woman meant. It was meant to separate white women from women of color who were not able to get the same kinds of home loans through the GI Bill because of redlining, thus continuing (and widening!) the disparity. 

 

Abby says listening to Jenny talk about this history brings to her mind what happened last April in Atlanta with the shoot of 6 Asian Women by a man who claimed that purity culture is what forced him to become mentally ill and justified him acting out in violence. Here again, Abby says, is the convergence of race and purity culture. Here, Asian women are seen as both meek, submissive and demure as well as wild tigers. It is propagating this idea that what women of color offer sexually is different than what white woman offer. 

Danielle adds, and access. That the body of a woman of color is quick, not literally physically all the time but at least mentally to go there it’s “quick” and built-in permission to do that. 

It makes Jenny think of this “protect the family” at the same time, the government is forcibly removing Indigenous children from their mothers and putting them in foster care system. Missing and murdered Indigenous Women, Anti-Asian hate crimes, crimes against all bodies of color and the LGBTQ community are not protected under the guise of “for the family,” “keeping families together.”

Danielle says we saw that in Atlanta: it wasn’t only the legal system that let him walk off the scene without being killed. There was also the silence across religious and faith circles. 

Abby said that when people heard why he justified the killings they felt bad for him, offered him sympathy, “oh he’s struggling with a sex addiction…” 

“I’m going to go on a little patriarchal rant…” Abby said she is not suggesting that the purity culture didn’t wreak havoc on the male body, however even when we go back to our youth groups, there’s a sense that women are to feel bad about something that is out of control in men, and that makes us as women dangerous. In the Atlanta shootings there was a sheriff that made excuses for the shooter, and this didn’t surprise Abby because it comes from the same vein of making excuses for white men doing violence and acting out sexually. 

Danielle said she’s had that same thought (about justifying and excusing white men’s behavior) when a youth pastor shares about an on-going struggle with pornography and there was never the impression that they were in danger of not going to heaven. In fact, it seemed like it was kind of expected they would struggle in this way; 1 in 3 pastor’s struggles with porn because they’re so focused on being pure; they are tempted so much. This has led to permission to not only continue with this behavior but Danielle says it has led to violence and murders, like these shooting in Atlanta. “It’s like a blank check.”

Because, Danielle adds, if a woman of color walked into a porn shop and shoots seven white men, she would not get out of that alive. 

“No way” Abby chimes in.

Danielle says we have examples of that, a case of that actively in Texas—a woman of color is in jail for murdering her trafficker. She’s 17 and has life in prison. 

https://people.com/crime/zephaniah-trevino-case-texas-teen-accused-murder-says-she-was-sex-trafficking-victim/

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.