![]() Pure compiles the voices of those who suffered, often alone, from their heroic struggles for purity – through broken relationships and self-hatred. ![]() ![]() For so many, purity was no path to bliss, but rather to a kind of spiritual obsessive-compulsive disorder, in which relationships were forever perceived as potentially tainted. His was originally among the gentler voices of the movement, emphasizing love and the possibility of forgiveness, but he saw the supposed blessings of purity turned into a curse. There is no peace.” Purity would be bountifully rewarded: not only with a proper “white” wedding, but with long lasting marital bliss and the knowledge that personal virtue would contribute to the rehabilitation of marriage and family in society.ĭecades later, promoters of purity culture, such as Joshua Harris, openly recanted their advocacy. So, you have to be struggling and suffering constantly. ’.” Pastors and counselors often praised this very anxiety as the path to salvation: “If we wanted to be holy, another woman remembered, “it was going to have to be a struggle. It almost made me go crazy questioning, ‘Well, is this impure? . . . “Being ‘pure,’ one woman told Klein, “became this really heavy, heavy weight to bear all the time. “Shaming,” writes Klein, was “embedded into everyday language.” The result was, unsurprisingly, an anxious self-interrogation of thoughts and feelings. Failure, they were told, meant swift and terrible shame. Klein and her fellow evangelical women heard less about love, and more about how to remain “pure” before the wedding day by tirelessly struggling with impure thoughts and desires. In her book Pure, Linda Klein recounts experiences of those who grew up in this world. “Chastity rings,” by contrast, signalled a commitment to spiritual cleanliness, the ring of purity worn before the ring of marriage, until impure sex became pure. To bring home the harms of sex before marriage, promiscuity was portrayed as physical defilement that contaminated marriage, grotesquely illustrated through props such as chewed gum and shared lollipops. In the 1990s, evangelical Christian churches and communities, rightly worried about young people growing up in a world of early sexualization, teenage pregnancy, abortion, and broken families, sought to unravel the effects of the sexual revolution. “Purity culture” is the term used to describe a form of evangelical Christian promotion of abstinence before marriage, one that has lately been much criticized. Social distancing and handwashing, once they become a habit, have the potential to transcend the mundane and become the rituals of a modern purity culture. To see the world symbolically is to see higher meaning in the ordinary, to understand that to practice social distancing and handwashing (however necessary) is to entrench certain spiritual realities, in which we begin to see others and the world around us as potentially contaminated. These recommendations are perfectly reasonable and practical during a pandemic. Modern recommendations on the spread of disease (“Stay six feet away from others…Wash your hands often,” according to the CDC) are, by contrast, issued and read in an entirely scientific manner: viruses spread through close contact, soap and water kills viruses. Take purity rituals: in the ancient world, as Matthew Thiessen most recently noted in Jesus and the Forces of Death, these rituals were both material (taking place in the realm of the biological and practical) and also transcendental (connected to a view of the mortality of human beings and their relationship to God). Our contemporary culture has become so one-dimensional as to be utterly blind to the power of symbols. So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood.” (Matthew 27:24)
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