Christian Purity Culture is Pretty Racist, Actually (with Sara Moslener)

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DISCLAIMER: This episode includes discussion of sexual assault and violence. Listener discretion is advised.

 

Introduction – 0:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: This is Relationscapes, the podcast where we explore the terrain of gender, sexuality, race, ability, and more in order to better understand ourselves and each other. I'm Blair Hodges, an independent journalist in Salt Lake City, and our guide in this episode about purity culture is scholar of religion Sara Moslener.

SARA MOSLENER: Because whiteness was seen as pure and perfect, it needed to be protected. Like, oh, we know we have to protect the genetic material of whiteness. And the way to do that is to protect white women's purity.

BLAIR HODGES: In the wake of the #MeToo movement, another hashtag reckoning emerged. #ChurchToo. Women are coming forward with stories of being harmed by Christian purity culture teachings about sexual innocence, submission to men, and the silencing of their own desires. And as Sara Moslener has helped collect stories from these women, she noticed a troubling trend. Purity culture wasn't just about controlling individual people's behavior. It was part of a much bigger project to gain political power, and it was deeply rooted in racism.

We can't fully reckon with purity culture without confronting the white supremacy at its core. Sara traces this history and calls us to account in her book After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America.

And she joins us to talk about it right now.

 

The Definition of Purity Culture – 02:04

 

BLAIR HODGES: Sara Moslener, welcome to Relationscapes.

SARA MOSLENER: Thank you so much for having me, Blair. Delighted to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: Can we start off with a really basic definition of evangelical purity culture?

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah. So this was a movement starting in the late 1980s, early '90s that focused on a sex education that prioritized abstinence only until marriage. And it was first and foremost for young people in evangelical churches and schools, promoted through the Southern Baptist Church, and really was a mix of religious and romantic ideology and wanting to encourage young people to live a pure life, which had lots of different implications.

It's funny, they went from using the language of abstinence to the language of purity because abstinence had too many loopholes. And so it grew from there into a trend beyond churches and became a real cultural force.

BLAIR HODGES: And it seems like not having sex before marriage wasn't, like, a new thing for Christians necessarily at that time, but maybe the rise of purity culture was an increased emphasis on it and really focused on, like, what people were wearing, what they were doing as teenagers, and tying it into their ultimate goal of, you do this because then you can become a worthy spouse and, like, a good parent and then build a good nation, too. 

SARA MOSLENER: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: So as for purity culture at this time, it's not like they didn't care about sex before. Christians have long had particular views about sex.

SARA MOSLENER: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: But it seems like this was a cultural moment that really foregrounded it for adolescents in particular.

SARA MOSLENER: Yes. And it was also about being an exemplar of what was the opposite in terms of what they considered mainstream sexualized culture. So in the 1990s, they were going to Washington, D.C., to put their pledge cards on the lawn of the National Mall while President Clinton was in office. President Clinton, who was reviled by conservatives because of his sexual proclivities.

And that was one of the arguments they made about his inability to be an effective national leader. So, yes.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, the irony.

SARA MOSLENER: Yes, exactly.

 

Sara's Early Experiences with Purity Culture – 04:34

 

BLAIR HODGES: You suggest in the book that one of the reasons purity culture takes root is because it taps into young people's desire to be good, or at least to be seen as good. And this starts from a really young age. I'm thinking of a memory you relate in the book where you were, I think, like six years old at school.

Take us to that moment, because it seemed pivotal for your understanding of your own body as a child.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah. And I kind of went there unknowingly because I interviewed so many people who were talking about sexual shame and disembodiment. And so I tried to think, well, when did that—what was my first experience of that? And that's where I started writing the story about my friend and I playing in the cloakroom.

There was, like, a bookcase with a ledge, and then on the other side—and this was like an old cloakroom where you had a bar, a couple of bars, right? And so we would, like, climb up and, like, have our legs on either side and then jump down. And that was, like, the thrill of just, like, you know, we're climbing on the jungle gym. And we were doing that, kind of facing each other and just sort of, you know, climbing around like kids do.

And that was when the boys were, like, peeking in. And it had nothing to do with them. It just had to do with us sort of playing, and then being pulled out into the hallway by my teacher and feeling deep shame about what I had been doing. And the memory of that just settled into my body as deep, deep shame.

And that really just came out because of the stories I was hearing from other people. And it was only in the last three years that I realized that that was not a true memory, that that's how powerful that moment of shame was.

BLAIR HODGES: And so your teacher's reprimand kind of put a different twist to what happened.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: It changed the meaning of what was happening. And that stuck with you. And that was an example of you being indoctrinated by purity culture, your perspective about who you were as a child.

SARA MOSLENER: Exactly, exactly. And those messages are so powerful. And as in that story, I also reference the Bible stories that we learn and the role that Eve played in the Garden of Eden and how, you know, for most of Christian history, it's been women and girls who've been seen as sexually dangerous—

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, tempting.

SARA MOSLENER: And tempting. Right. Which is a big part of purity culture. I mean, in all my interviews, I asked people as well, like, how would you define purity culture to someone who had never heard of it? And one of the things almost 100% of the time you hear is it's about girls learning that they are responsible for boys' and men's morality and, like, controlling their sexual desires because their sexual desires are dangerous and they don't have control over them.

And so that means that any kind of failing on a girl or a woman becomes exacerbated because it's not just her own. It's about her inability to kind of function within this moralistic ecosystem where she has to be contained, her body has to be contained and controlled.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And you continue to receive these messages growing up as a Christian, and you describe your teenage self as an enthusiastic evangelical Christian. This is in the late '80s. You were psyched to be part of the March for Life. What did it mean for you to be a young Christian woman in America in this moment, the late '80s going into the '90s?

SARA MOSLENER: I mean, the certainty of knowing what was true and right, I think, was for me the most important thing. And just the confidence of that and knowing that what I believed, what my family, what my community believed was what was best for everyone. And that the closer that we could get the nation as a whole, our government, to move toward our understanding and our belief system, the better everyone would be for it.

BLAIR HODGES: That included anti-abortion, abstinence-only sex education. Sex education needed to be just absent. Don't even, like, talk about it. Contraception and safe sex were not even on the radar. And you, as a girl growing into young womanhood, were kind of a sexual gatekeeper. Like, you were supposed to keep the boys—don't tempt the boys.

SARA MOSLENER: Right, right, right. And the focus on—you know, and I certainly picked this up in the pro-life movement—your focus regarding sexuality was around motherhood and learning to kind of prepare for that. And that motherhood, you know, in that time period was very much the moral motherhood of the 19th century, right?

That is, you know, aside from purity, motherhood was the way that white women, in particular, established their moral authority, and that I was learning how to establish that and portray that, embody that.

 

Sara's Deconstruction – 10:22

 

BLAIR HODGES: And the book does a great job digging into that history. We'll talk about that in a minute.

By your senior year in college, though, you say that you'd started “dismantling the religious lessons of my youth.” That's a quote from the book. What kind of things had you started to dismantle by then?

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah, I think there was a sense of boundaries that no longer served me, in the sense that they didn't help me make sense of the world. I was very fortunate. I don't write about this in the book, but I spent my whole time in college doing theater, and that really kind of gave me some deeper skills in empathy and in understanding why people get in bad situations.

BLAIR HODGES: I mean, I grew up with an understanding of grace that was basically grace is the ability to not make bad choices, rather than what you need because we're not perfect.

SARA MOSLENER: Exactly. And so when I started reading and really getting into plays like A Streetcar Named Desire, it helped me think about why women, why girls stay in abusive relationships, right? What are the complex dynamics of that? And really just gave me a more complicated understanding of the world than my sort of evangelical upbringing, where, you know, the line between good and bad was a very thick one, and realizing that life is so much more complicated.

BLAIR HODGES: And so did you start questioning the basics of your religion here? Because, I mean, that can be a really scary process.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah. And that started early on in my first year. One issue that I had never considered was about, you know, gay people in the world. And of course, I grew up in a world where, you know, gay people didn't exist. Wink, you know, wink, wink. And so it wasn't until college that those conversations were happening in a more public way.

BLAIR HODGES: And you're in theater, so.

SARA MOSLENER: Right. Although it wasn't until I graduated that, like, people started coming out.

BLAIR HODGES: That was my high school years. I didn't know I knew any gay people in high school. And I was in all the plays and all the theater and stuff. Now, of course, I know, right? Many people from high school were gay. I just didn't know.

SARA MOSLENER: Exactly. And maybe there was a culture, you know, that I wasn't aware of. So, yeah. But as soon as, you know, we had this event with a guy named Dr. David Noble who worked for Focus on the Family. He's the one who produced The Gay Agenda, this really homophobic film, and they showed it on campus, and he was there, and it was a huge thing.

And there were gay people in the audience from the community. And just like that, I was like, wait. To be Christian is to hate gay people? That doesn't make sense to me.

BLAIR HODGES: And so that actually seems sort of new to you. Like, there hadn't been a huge emphasis on anti-LGBTQ stuff until then.

SARA MOSLENER: There was no—I mean, it was very implicit, for sure.

BLAIR HODGES: Sure. And this was probably when, like, Ellen was probably coming out around this time, and, like, it was becoming more publicly known, maybe. So.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, I was still kind of moving down that track, but I was also at a Christian college, and I remember talking to one of my professors about it, and it was the first time I heard the word homophobia. And she just got really, really angry, and I was like, oh, oh, I need to think about this.

And, yeah, so I think from there, that really kind of crumbled everything and said, like, look, you can't—there's so many more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than you have ever considered. And you need to just be open to seeing the world in a new way. And doing that in the context of studying theater was, I think, you know, really what saved me, saved my humanity from kind of being sucked into something, you know, deeply ideological and damaging.

And I think I had been needing that my whole life, because that's what you need for creativity to grow. And so I'm really grateful, even at a very Christian college, I was able to access that.

 

The Personal Side: Gender Roles and Bodily Controls – 15:08

 

BLAIR HODGES: And since then, you've gone on to study the history of religious and racial discrimination. You've studied evangelical purity culture for over 20 years, and you did a study called the After Purity Project, where you interviewed a bunch of former evangelicals, mostly, I think, about their experience of purity culture. And that informed this book.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: In those interviews, it seems like two big themes kind of started to emerge, or two ways into thinking about purity culture: the way that it affects people on a personal level, and the way that it was tied into a nation-building project and was actually also connected with politics. I want to talk about both of those.

Let's start with the personal, what purity culture—and we've touched on it a little bit already—but now we can really dig into what it does concerning gender roles and bodily controls.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, all the women I talked to talked about sort of their gender identity and the way that that was shaped in very narrow ways, and the things that they were discouraged from doing and being, including intellectual pursuits, including just, you know, being able to wear a regular bathing suit, and the clothes that you wear and the clothes that your parents, you know, find inappropriate.

And again, this kind of thing is happening at very early ages. And, you know, women who felt called to ministry but knew that that was not something that was available to them, and so on. And so lots of those constraints. And of course, interestingly—and, you know, I don't do statistical work—but well over 50% of the women I interviewed identified as bisexual or pansexual, which is really interesting, you know, thinking about how their sexuality was formed around this idea.

BLAIR HODGES: They were supposed to become moms.

SARA MOSLENER: Exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: You become moms and your husbands will lead, and that's what life is.

SARA MOSLENER: And you're supposed to, right, be attractive enough to attract a good Christian, you know, young man.

BLAIR HODGES: But not too sexy.

SARA MOSLENER: Not too sexy, right. You want to be good. You want people to know that you are good.

BLAIR HODGES: And the girls aren't supposed to be paying attention to their own desires, right? Now you call this a sort of disembodiment, actually, that they're taught that their bodies are evil.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah. And we see—I mean, I write about this, and this came up in my interviews—there's also significant research on the relationship between purity culture and eating disorders.

And the other piece—and this came out, too; Rebecca Wolf was the scholar whose dissertation this focused on—but then she realized that there was a third element of that, and that was sexual abuse.

And so you see that disembodiment connects all three of these because, first and foremost, purity culture teaches girls and young women to not know their bodies, that their bodies belong to God, and to prepare themselves for, you know, to belong to a man, right? You belong to your father, and then eventually, you know, your husband.

BLAIR HODGES: The men have ownership here. Like, your husband asks your father for permission to marry you, and then your father walks you down the aisle and, like, literally gives you away.

SARA MOSLENER: And so what that does—in the second chapter I talk about, the focus is on sexual abuse within evangelicalism and just how purity culture creates an environment where girls and young women have no resources for saying, “No, I don't want this.” And there's this hyper-romanticization of young girls and men in the church.

And so we have numerous examples of those kinds of relationships.

 

Rape Culture and Sexual Abuse – 19:16

 

BLAIR HODGES: Rather than seeing problems with the difference in age and the different power dynamics between an adult man and a teenager, when something happens to them, they can be blamed. They're implicated in it.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Or they would attribute some sort of perverted intention to a child in a closet playing a game. Like, it would be your fault if something happened. Yeah, it's the “what was she wearing?” script. This is what people are referring to when they talk about rape culture.

SARA MOSLENER: Yes, exactly. And there's some great research on the connections between purity culture and rape culture, which, when I started studying this, even throughout my first book, I didn't see that connection anywhere. And people weren't talking about it. There was no research.

BLAIR HODGES: And that was in 2015 when that book came out.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah, yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: But, like, right before MeToo kind of kicked off.

SARA MOSLENER: And everyone, I mean, everyone knew. 

BLAIR HODGES: Well, a lot of the women did, mostly. 

SARA MOSLENER: Right, because the idea is that women don't have sexual desire.

BLAIR HODGES: That's what I "learned" growing up.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah. That women don't have sexual desire and men are sexually animalistic and uncontrolled. That naturalizes rape. And everyone knew that.

BLAIR HODGES: A lot of women, anyway!

SARA MOSLENER: Right. But also, as an academic, I have to think in very conservative—like, it's a very conservative process. And so I was able to do this research and interview people. But also, I mean, the biggest—so MeToo happened, and then #ChurchToo happened. And Emily Joy's book, ChurchToo, she really brings that together.

And now there are scholars doing that and demonstrating sort of the parallels between purity culture and rape culture. And so I also spent the last several years studying religion and sexual abuse and coming to understand the ways that purity culture can make communities into places that harbor and also normalize age-inappropriate relationships and then also protect abusers.

And then the other thing that happened in 2017 was the Houston Chronicle came out with their Abuse of Faith series about the sexual abuse crisis in the Southern Baptist Church.

BLAIR HODGES: Right up until then, it was all about Catholicism and its problems with priests. Now in 2017, as your book points out, the lid is blown off. This is a much bigger problem in many more religious spaces, spaces that share these ideas about purity culture.

SARA MOSLENER: And again, like, when my book came out in 2015, I was like, I can't, as an academic, kind of make that argument. I'm making different kinds of arguments. But then, yeah, just to have this watershed moment that's still—and things are still pouring out. I don't know if you saw it most recently, everyone's reading through the Epstein files, and people have found that Epstein read James Dobson, and he sent James Dobson to someone as a way to—

BLAIR HODGES: Right. To learn how to handle this, how to keep this under wraps. Uh-huh.

SARA MOSLENER: So, yeah, I mean, these are—and we're still—

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I just want to tag that name. You mentioned James Dobson. He was with Focus on the Family, this fundamentalist Christian group. And apparently Epstein was kind of a fan.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah. So, man, it just feels like we are chiseling away at this. And purity culture is very much part of the story.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. When a person doesn't have bodily autonomy, choice isn't part of it. They're supposed to suppress sexual desires. Bodily desires are bad. They're supposed to defer to men. And if something happens to them, it's partly their fault. All of these types of things lend themselves to systems of abuse.

 

"Sex Positive" Purity Culture – 23:17

 

BLAIR HODGES: There are also some mixed messages, though, and I don't think this is the first thing that comes to mind for me. But you point out in the '90s there was also a lot of sex positivity going around, and evangelicals wanted to tap into that too. So there was this new element of purity culture that, I don't know, had a lot of purchase in earlier eras, which was like, guys, sex is actually amazing.

And if you follow purity culture, you're going to have, like, the most amazing sex ever when you finally get married. And so you were also promised this amazing sex life as a reward. And this was part of purity culture as well, trying to say sex is awesome if you do XYZ.

SARA MOSLENER: And there was a similar moment in the 1970s, which was the height of that era's kind of sexual revolution, where you had people like Tim and Beverly LaHaye writing evangelical sex manuals so that they could make the argument that, yeah, sex is best. This was the era of Marabel Morgan and The Total Woman.

If you don't know who she is, look her up. It's—yeah, she's, she's something. 

BLAIR HODGES: We're far away from the Apostle Paul here, where he was basically like, sex is sucky and terrible. It's actually terrible. And if you can't help but do it, go ahead and get married, but it's like you're kind of a loser if you do that.

SARA MOSLENER: But also it still prioritizes men's sexual pleasure. But yes, you have an even more interesting—in the late '90s, early 2000s, you have people like Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears, these Disney kids, highly sexualized teen pop stars who are also talking about sexual purity and about not having sex until they get married.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh yeah. This is the "True Love Waits" brand, right? True Love Waits for marriage before sex.

SARA MOSLENER: And so I think Jessica Simpson was part of it, she performed at True Love Waits events at one point. And then, yes, all the Disney kids were wearing purity rings. There was a significant purity culture at Disney, and that had everything to do with the Southern Baptist Convention threatening a boycott of Disney and ABC and accusing them of being anti-family.

And so, in fact, Christine Gardner, who wrote the first book-length study of evangelical purity culture, her book was called Making Chastity Sexy.

BLAIR HODGES:  Yeah, “modest is hottest.”

SARA MOSLENER: It is an interesting dynamic!

 

The Political Side: Purity Culture as Nation Building – 26:07

 

BLAIR HODGES: Okay. So far we've talked about how purity culture ideas worked on the individual level. But you also show in the book how purity culture was a political project. This wasn't just about controlling adolescents having sex. It was also about gaining political power. And evangelical leaders had this theory of civilizational greatness and expansion that wasn't new, but it was basically, if we follow this God-given order of things with men ruling over women, we're building these nuclear families that will make strong homes, which will make strong communities, which will make a strong nation.

We will conquer the world. We will be the best in the world. So it was also tied to this highly political project as well.

SARA MOSLENER: Yep, absolutely. And specifically in the 1980s, you had the HIV/AIDS crisis, and you also had this concern over the increase in teen pregnancies among white teenagers. And this is what evangelicals are really good at, is identifying a widespread cultural panic, something that's sort of beyond their circles, and asserting the solution to the problem.

And so that's part of why purity culture caught on so well. Because for young people, it was, hey, you'll have the best sex ever. You'll have a wonderful romantic marriage.

BLAIR HODGES: Or they tell girls, you'll be wanted.

SARA MOSLENER: Exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: You'll be "chewed-up gum," girls especially. Like, oh, a guy wants a "pure" girl. You don't want to be a licked cupcake or whatever.

SARA MOSLENER: Exactly. Yeah. Oh, man, the object lessons!

BLAIR HODGES: Did you get those? I assume you went through the object lessons.

SARA MOSLENER: Well, in the piece I did for the book on Mormonism, it was all about that, but the LDS Church, I gotta say, they have the best object lessons.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, it's so messed up.

SARA MOSLENER: It's messed up. Yeah. So you can go through this as a teenager and not realize the political significance of it.

BLAIR HODGES: It's not really on your radar.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah. But that was primarily what it was. Because the very first event that True Love Waits did that was public was, they had over 200,000 purity pledge cards that they attached to stakes and pounded them into the lawn of the National Mall and had this extensive display as Bill Clinton was in office.

So it was very much a middle finger.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. It was contrasting themselves to the sexually profligate person in the White House and all the evil liberals that supported him, etc. And I, side note, have my own problems with Bill Clinton. I'm not here to shill for Bill, but yes, this was a political project, but it also had deeply personal implications.

And for lack of time, I'll just tell people the book goes into detail about some of the developmental trauma that people who have been raised in purity culture experience, some complex developmental trauma around their sexual experience, around their embodied experience, around their marital relationships.

There's some really interesting stuff in the book about that, but for lack of time, I want to pivot here. We're talking about the book After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America with Sara Moslener.

 

The Invention of White Purity – 29:29

 

BLAIR HODGES: Let's look at the word "white" in the title because we'll pivot to race at this point. The After Purity Project that you did, where you interviewed a bunch of former evangelicals about purity culture, it wasn't designed as a project about racial identity, and your sample of participants was mostly white, but you did notice a pattern as you went along that people of color would bring up race as a component of purity culture and how they experienced it.

So you actually came to realize, and then connecting with all this other scholarship, how race is actually central to this whole story. And we haven't mentioned it up to this point.

Let's talk about race. In your growing-up era of evangelicalism, it was a so-called "colorblind era." So there wasn't as much open racism as part of your faith, but there was this idea that you don't talk about race, that race doesn't matter, and so they're kind of papering over it. But under the radar, race was an important part of how people viewed sex, how people viewed procreation.

I want to start with how white identity was created. White identity is a creation. It is a human creation. Let's talk about that creation and what it was about.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah, so I like to go back to the origin of the term Caucasian. And this was a term that was adapted by Johann Blumenbach, who was a German naturalist who studied skulls. And he was trying to make sense of skull shapes and whether or not they had similarities based on where they were from.

And so he had a collection of skulls, one of which he referred to as European. But then there's different stories about him encountering people from the Caucasus region, which is an actual place. And either he saw a skull and decided that was the most perfect and beautiful skull, or he saw a woman who was the most perfect and beautiful woman.

We're not quite sure. But he decided that because the Caucasian people were the most perfect and beautiful people, that they were the origin of a group of people. And so he swapped out European for the word Caucasian. And so that's how we ended up with this word. And then he goes on to define it as being the group of people that are the most superior.

BLAIR HODGES: So he's kind of going by biological markers, phenotypes like shape of heads, skin color, geography. And he would tie that into cultural development. So he'd be, the more you look like me, the more culturally advanced you happen to be.

SARA MOSLENER: And of course, the race sciences all said this because it was all European and eventually white American people. And the idea that being European, being Christian, being white meant you were civilizationally more advanced. And of course, it's all made up. But then this word Caucasian ends up getting into American racial vernacular because of court cases in the early 20th century.

They got serious about the law that said in order to become a U.S. citizen, you have to be white, which had been law since 1790 and, for different reasons, had never been prioritized. One of which was, no, it wasn't clear what white was.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, yeah. How do we define that?

SARA MOSLENER: So there were court cases in which two men, one from Punjab, one from Japan, both very well socialized into the U.S., but they were declared not white, not Caucasian, which at this point was considered a scientific category. And so then Caucasian gets entered into the lexicon of race on the legal and scientific level.

And it's one that still shows up as if it means something and that it means that all white people have some kind of scientific connection, and it's complete bull. So one of the themes in the book is what I call innocence myths. And that is especially pronounced when we think about the creation of white racial identity.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. The innocence myth is so central to this. When you were growing up in the '90s, it was the pure youth who were going to save the country. The pure youth of America.

SARA MOSLENER: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: But in this earlier era, it was white women. They were the pure vanguard.

SARA MOSLENER: Absolutely.

BLAIR HODGES: In both cases, whiteness and purity are going hand in hand.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah. Which was a huge shift from Christian history, which said Eve and all women are tempters.

BLAIR HODGES: Because Eve tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden.

SARA MOSLENER: Right. But the reason for that had to do with the economics, with white families entering the middle class, which is a whole different argument. But it was also really helpful for maintaining the boundaries between Black and white. And in the context of slavery, that was really important.

Because whiteness was seen as something that was pure and perfect, it needed to be protected. And then once the science kicks in, that becomes even more, oh, we know we have to protect the genetic material of whiteness. And the way to do that is to protect white women's purity. And of course, this moves us into the time period of racial terror, lynchings, where Black men, even just a rumor of being inappropriate toward a white woman could raise a lynch mob.

And these were moments of celebration for white communities, that there was something that they were being reassured of in their own goodness, their own sense of importance.

BLAIR HODGES: And again, it was tied to the nation as well. White Christian women were bearing and rearing the next generation of white people who were superior to other races, and they became the pure ideal.

SARA MOSLENER: Yes.

 

How Racism Covers Its Tracks – 36:15

 

BLAIR HODGES: Then, sadly, other races start to aspire to that as well. So you see purity culture have an uptick in Black communities, for example, because they're pursuing that idea of, oh, if purity is respectable, then we can out-pure you guys.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah. And it's great to see someone like Dr. Brittney Cooper, whose work is just phenomenal, also Dr. Monique Moultrie. They both talk about the ways that Black communities and churches have embraced white purity and, in doing so, are embracing white supremacy. And that does not serve them well.

BLAIR HODGES: And the tricky thing about the story is that whiteness has worked to obscure itself. As you describe, white supremacy hides itself. The reason white identity has been so persistent and racist is because it also covers its tracks and it tries to generalize, based on race, a superior set of attitudes and abilities.

And then it hides that and just says, oh, this is just the natural order of things.

SARA MOSLENER: Right. This is the norm, that women being sexually pure is the norm. And then those who don't fit the norm end up becoming the Jezebel—

BLAIR HODGES: She is a Biblical figure who becomes the stereotypical "temptress."

SARA MOSLENER: Yes, yes. And all these tropes about Black women's sexuality, which were promoted in order to justify their rape, especially in the context of slavery.

BLAIR HODGES: It's one of the ways white women were incentivized to buy into purity culture.

SARA MOSLENER: Yes, because it provides racial privilege. And so, of course, in the 1990s, we're in an era of colorblindness, especially that the evangelicals have invested in. And this is a moral claim.

BLAIR HODGES: It seems good on the surface, this colorblind idea. Like, I don't think color matters at all.

SARA MOSLENER: Well, didn't Dr. King say?

BLAIR HODGES: Yes, they always quote that, "we'll be judged by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin." Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it seems good on the surface, this colorblind idea. Like, "I don't think color matters at all. So who are we to disagree with Dr. King? What could possibly be wrong with that?"

SARA MOSLENER: Well, the problem is it is a myth. And in fact, Jesse Curtis, who's a historian at Valparaiso University, wrote an incredible book called The Myth of Colorblind Christians. And he looks at evangelicals post-Civil Rights Movement and the way that they used this colorblind rhetoric, claiming that they were working within the tradition of Dr. King. And yes, I mean, when you claim that you don't see race, you have no tools for seeing racism.

BLAIR HODGES: That's the whole point right now, too, by the way. And we're seeing this in closing down African American studies departments at universities, opposing the discussion of racism in schools because it might make white kids—because it's all about making white kids feel bad instead of telling the truth about history and giving us a context for it.

So colorblindness persists right now. And it basically says, if you talk about race, you're the racist.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah. I want your listeners to know about an amazing resource we have here in mid-Michigan. I was recently talking to Dr. David Pilgrim, who is the director and founder of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, which is about 40 minutes from me. They are in the process of expanding. They have, I think, 30,000 objects, but they've only had enough space to display 7,000 of them. But they are building a new building and will be reopening in the fall. And I think they have been a destination for groups and individuals wanting to hear some true history.

And I think that's so important now. But because we have, especially those of us socialized into whiteness, we are so convinced of our own innocence and of our collective innocence as a nation. And sexually pure women and children, teenagers, are the avatars of that.

And so that is why I think all of the money got put into abstinence-only education. There were claims of public health and so on and so forth. But I think it had to do with our need to see this nation as a place where we are exonerated from a very violent past.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes, the nation itself is exonerated. That's another way that racism covers its tracks, is redefining racism as individual actions, behaviors, and attitudes. Like somebody burning a cross, isolated incident, someone using a slur against somebody, or beating someone up, which, sure, all those things are certainly racist, but racism's bigger than that. It's embedded in systems.

It's embedded in the economy, in access to housing, in how much people get paid, and who has access to clean water. It's a systemic, social thing. And this is where white supremacy has been so effective at obscuring the social element and even saying, hey, yeah, we don't like racism. Don't say a slur.

Although they're losing ground on that as well right now. So.

SARA MOSLENER: Right, racism has been having another moment for a while. Very overt racism. And that concerns me because I think it is so easy to point to people's racist language and behaviors right now that this idea that, well, as soon as we get them out of office, we'll be back.

And it's like, there's so much more. I mean, even I, when Harris was the candidate, I was like, okay, we can do this. This would solve everything. And it's like, no, even if she had won the election, there's still so much work that we need to do.

Just on the level of education and on the level of collective trauma.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. The economy.

SARA MOSLENER: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: And as we were talking about today, purity culture—if you had to sum up in the simplest way how purity culture is racist culture, what would you say? What would you put on a note card to really drive that home for people?

SARA MOSLENER: Purity is about separating the pure from the impure. It's the belief that purity is necessary and cannot be contaminated. And so white supremacy culture is going to identify that which is pure and is going to make sure the impure does not encounter it. So what I've just outlined has to do with fears of sex, but also fears of race mixing.

And I know younger people have a hard time understanding this, but we have a history of deep, deep fears of miscegenation, of race mixing. And purity culture has exacerbated that. I think any teachings around sex that are fear-based are based in fears of racial mixing. And this is a conversation that we don't have because it's a very difficult one.

BLAIR HODGES: Which is why the claim itself might be shocking to some people.

SARA MOSLENER: Absolutely. Because today it's like, what are you talking about, people?

BLAIR HODGES: When you really start looking at the history, as you've laid out in this book alongside a lot of other great research, it's this creation of pure whiteness and pure white women. That's the key?

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Sorry to keep moving us along, there's just so much we could talk about, Sara.

We're talking about the book After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America with Sara Moslener. She's a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Anthropology, and Religion at Central Michigan University, where she teaches courses on the history of religious and racial discrimination in the U.S.

She's been studying evangelical purity culture for over 20 years, we mentioned her other book, Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence. Also a great read.

 

Deconstructing and Racial Reckoning – 45:03

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, Sara, we've been talking a lot about conservatives so far, but racism's been a problem among white progressives for generations as well. The first and second waves of feminism had some white supremacist assumptions baked in.

Here's a quote from the book here I'd like to read. It says, “The most prominent form of racism in the United States is not perpetrated by extremists, but by white moderates, liberals even, who are unable and unwilling to address racial identity and racial violence and have distorted that failure into a virtue.”

This is another big claim here where you're saying perhaps some of the strongest racism in the country is perpetrated by white moderates and liberals. What do you mean here?

SARA MOSLENER: I was thinking about things that Dr. King has said about preferring the racists, the openly racist, to the white moderates. And I think what's really tricky here is that white moderates, liberals, progressives, have their own set of innocence myths about racism, about their own goodness, and yet are unable to understand the depth and reality of white supremacy.

And so when faced with it, will respond with hostility and dismissal. And I profile some of those people in my book.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. The book really digs in deep here, talking about white former evangelicals, women in particular, who are deconstructing from the harmful effects of purity culture, and they're seeking more fulfilling sexual expression in their lives, but at the same time, they're not doing any work to understand how racism was tied up in purity culture.

Talk about some examples of that.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah. So there was a group of women who went out into Joshua Tree National Park, and these were women, many of whom were from L.A., who had connections to Hollywood, who were working as actors and models. One was even a former beauty queen. So these were not the dumpy folks like me from the Midwest.

And they decided to do a naked photo shoot of themselves, which is something a lot of people do in terms of just re-embodying yourselves. And they posted that and got some pushback on the message that, hey, if you want to recover from purity culture, you need to embody a white ideal, which all of these women did.

There were women of color who were present, but all still kind of embodied these beauty ideals that are associated with whiteness.

BLAIR HODGES: Which can really grab a lot of attention. The focus is gonna be on sexual liberation among white women who are traditionally sexy.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah, and it really did. The image itself looked like one of those advertisements for jeans where they don't actually show the jeans. I mean, these are professional people who go in front of cameras for professional reasons, and they did not respond well.

And sort of made use of all of the tropes of white womanhood that white women use to kind of wiggle their way out of responsibility.

BLAIR HODGES: Like what?

SARA MOSLENER: It's a way that white women can appeal to their own vulnerability. One woman talked about her sick child, so please don't be too hard on me because things are difficult. So playing to vulnerability. We have what became almost a meme of white women's tears and the way that white women reposition themselves as the vulnerable when they have done or said something racist, as a way to put the onus back on the person who was initially harmed.

And it's been an interesting moment to study white womanhood because there have been so many very prominent examples of white women weaponizing their vulnerability in order to maintain their racial integrity, innocence. And so that's what I write about. And in this case, in the context of people trying to demonstrate their resistance to purity culture and purity teachings.

BLAIR HODGES: So these white former evangelical women, they've got their beauty, they lean into that, and they're talking about sexual liberation, getting rid of sort of oppression that they were under. But it's also very individualized.

SARA MOSLENER: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: It's about an individual's right to sexual expression, and it's not paying attention to ongoing inequalities. Black women had been overly sexualized for years, and so it's a different experience for them to come out of purity culture. And then if they were to go do a photo shoot like that, there could be some different reactions to it.

So you're saying what women weren't paying any attention to was the racialized experiences of purity culture and the collective experiences of purity culture. They're just about, "hey, I feel free now, and I can be my sexy self"?

SARA MOSLENER: Right. And well, good for you.

BLAIR HODGES: But what about all the other stuff that's going on?

SARA MOSLENER: Right. These are the critiques we have of second-wave feminism, that it prioritized the concerns of white women, which are very much kind of high on the ladder of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and ignoring those other things—

BLAIR HODGES: Access to work, rather than people who had been working for generations because they're from lower economic classes—you know, Black women have been in the workforce.

SARA MOSLENER: Yes. And just sort of the inability to understand the historical significance of sexual purity. And I would say whenever I read or interview a Black person who has had experience in purity culture, there is always an awareness of historical precedents going back to the 19th century. And this is where womanist and Black feminist scholars have been really on point.

And why we need to go back that far to say, look, the origins of sexual purity are in slavery. And so when you start at that point, you have a completely different lens, and you can't simply talk about sexual liberation.

BLAIR HODGES: It also ties into queer issues. Being heterosexual, cisgender—we're not just seeing an uptick in racism and institutionalized and individualized racism right now, but also anti-queer sentiment and animus and lawmaking. And so all of these things kind of tie together. And I think we have to take all those things into consideration as we're looking at what to do when we move forward.

 

When the Work Is Hard – 52:33

 

BLAIR HODGES: But we're not going to solve it all today, unfortunately, in this episode. [laughs] But I do have one more question about the work in general.

I was reading the foreword to your book by Linda K. Klein, and she mentions that you have been trusted colleagues and have been bouncing ideas off each other and planning projects for years, and also confiding in each other when the work was hard. And she says, “And it is often hard.”

I wanted to hear a word about the difficulties of your work and why you do it.

SARA MOSLENER: I mean, first of all, I think both Linda and I have talked about being white women trying to make arguments about race and ways that we may not see race because that's what we have been trained to do, and how we can work through that and really genuinely do intersectional work.

Which is a question I have, because intersectionality is very much about your social education. So I've tried to do my best in this to really show how purity and race are deeply intertwined. And I think I did the best that I could. But even in that, I think it's limited.

And the other thing that we talked about is having to work through your own experiences and having to make sense of your own experiences and think about both primary and secondary trauma. So one of the main focuses coming out of this project for me is now on religious trauma and having to come to terms with that in your own life and realizing that this work requires you to face your own stuff.

This isn't an academic exercise. And how do we do that work? How do we find the support that we need to keep ourselves from just crumbling under the reality of it all? So, yeah, Linda's been great.

BLAIR HODGES: What growth have you seen there for yourself?

SARA MOSLENER: For myself, I would say, especially through writing creative nonfiction and being able to surface memories and write about these stories, I think I've become more comfortable doing creative writing and really valuing what that can do in terms of being able to encounter our trauma and realizing how important that is.

And I am not a survivor of sexual abuse, and I am hesitant to use the term survivor for just anyone who's come through purity culture because experiences are varied. But I do feel different traumas in my body and have been able—

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, there's still a recovering that needs to happen.

SARA MOSLENER: Exactly. And I think seeing the way that crafting your own stories, telling your own stories, telling the truth—as we saw with the cloakroom, I had been carrying around this lie about myself. And so being able to tell the truth of your experiences, which we know for survivors of abuse is incredibly difficult because trauma just scrambles your brain and your memory.

And the easiest thing to do is to think about your own culpability rather than creating a true narrative, even just for yourself.

BLAIR HODGES: That feels like you can control it a little bit. Yeah, you feel like—

SARA MOSLENER: Exactly. And so, in this moment, this is why—and I'm sure, like me, you've been following Dolores Huerta's—

BLAIR HODGES: We just found out about Cesar Chavez. The report came out as we're recording this, that he had sexually abused children and also co-laborers in the movement. Horrible revelations.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah. And just the ways that we hold that in our bodies. That we have been living in a culture of abuse for so long. And the way that I, as a woman, have internalized that. And, I mean, MeToo has been hard. I remember the Kavanaugh hearings. I was a wreck.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. That was brutal.

SARA MOSLENER: I did not see that. For me, I was like, there's—and I think a lot of people had that experience of just thinking about how we can—how we do this.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Are we going to be okay, Sara? [laughs]

SARA MOSLENER: Well, here's the thing, Blair. I mean, my burn-it-all-down solution is, okay, men in leadership have got to go. That's the first thing. You can stick around. We'll let you. There'll be things for you to do. But yeah, you're done.

But I'm seeing more and more men able to have conversations with other men about assault, about abuse, about heterosexuality. I mean, I think the root of it is just the way we think of heterosexuality and what it is.

BLAIR HODGES: And being cisgendered. What is gender? How are we experiencing it?

What I like about how you're answering this question—because I asked you about how the work had been hard for you personally—you talked about your personal struggles, but it tied directly into these broader struggles.

This is where I see you doing different work from the ex-vangelical women who posted their Joshua Tree pictures. They were really all about self-expression and self-progression and all that, which in and of itself, I'm not saying is necessarily bad, but they're not tying it into these broader conversations of inequality and how we can make a better world for everybody.

So I feel like the work that you're doing, that's why I prefer it to the kind of expressions we get from that side of things. And your book does a good job, I think, of calling liberals and progressives to account, including myself, considering those things without necessarily dismissing my own traumas or my own hang-ups, my own difficulties I've experienced, but to use those to connect emotionally with other people who oftentimes have had it even worse.

So that's the takeaway for me.

SARA MOSLENER: Thank you so much. That was my goal. And so I'm glad to hear you say that, because I didn't know if I had accomplished that.

BLAIR HODGES: I mean, no single book can fully do it, right? But that's part of the project.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah. And I hope I'm a model for other people. In fact, there was someone on social media who said, "yeah, I'm in the LDS Church, and this is a great model for thinking about how we dig into these issues." And that really meant a lot.

And I have to say, I have learned so much from Womanist and Black feminist scholars, for whom the individual and collective are never distinct.

BLAIR HODGES: Queer folks as well. It's almost like they can't not think of it that way because that's how the world so obviously works when you're in those positions. And they give us glasses to clarify our view.

SARA MOSLENER: Yeah. And that's part of whiteness.

BLAIR HODGES: "We" get to be individuals. For me, white cisgender malehood, too. So there are layers.

SARA MOSLENER: Exactly.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:00:28

 

BLAIR HODGES: I could talk about it forever, but I do want to get to Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises. We're talking about the book After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America with Sara Moslener.

We always close with this question, Sara, if there's anything you regret about this book now that it's out, something you would change. If there was anything that surprised you as you were putting it together, a new revelation in your research through this book. Or, what the hardest part about putting it together was.

You can answer any of those.

SARA MOSLENER: Well, I think the answer is all the same, actually, for all three. And that is my decision, which took me many conversations and many years, to include memoir.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. You're in the book.

SARA MOSLENER: I am in the book. And that was very deliberate, as I explain. But also, it was new. I am a trained academic writer, and I am trained into this disembodied practice that the scholar is always absent from the scholarship. And I knew that wasn't going to work when a key theme of the book was disembodiment.

BLAIR HODGES: It would almost be dishonest to bracket that out, though, because you'd be obscuring—

SARA MOSLENER: Absolutely.

BLAIR HODGES: —and there's scholarship that has done this—you'd be obscuring the stakes and the experiences of yourself, which is also not true. Like in the name of objectivity, you're being very subjective.

SARA MOSLENER: Exactly, exactly. But I also did not want it to be about me. I didn't want to be the focal point. But I guess I do wish there had been more. And I do want to write more. I have been, I think, shifting my writing. I'm actually hoping to do more training in creative writing so I can expand.

BLAIR HODGES: Cool.

SARA MOSLENER: So that was a big change, because it took me a long time. And I've read this from people who write creative nonfiction, that women especially are very hesitant to write about themselves, that somehow that feels egotistical or selfish, and who's going to want it? And I had that exact kind of response: what are my stories in comparison?

BLAIR HODGES: And maybe especially because you've listened to a lot of stories.

SARA MOSLENER: Right. And I barely get to cover them—there are so many stories that did not make it into the book.

BLAIR HODGES: And so that's your regret, challenge, and surprise. It's surprising to become more autobiographical in your scholarship. It's a challenge because writing that way is difficult. And there's a little bit of regret in feeling like maybe you could have executed a little bit better for this project and more.

SARA MOSLENER: But I think there's more to come. I think there's so much still left to write about, but I think I want to do it in different ways.

BLAIR HODGES: And there's a whole community of writers doing it, too. It seemed like toward the end of the book, you really were pointing us in a lot of different directions to show that there is a burst of projects covering this.

SARA MOSLENER: Absolutely. Very exciting.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, Sara, thanks so much for talking with us about the book. It's After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America. I really enjoyed it. I recommend it and would love to talk to you again sometime. Sara, this has been really fun.

SARA MOSLENER: Thank you so much, Blair. It's been great.

 

Outro – 01:04:01

 

BLAIR HODGES: And that's it for this episode of Relationscapes. If this is your first time listening, welcome to the journey. I hope you'll check out some other episodes while you're here. I've got a Fellow Traveler episode to recommend. If you liked Sara Moslener's episode, try another Sara's episode. It's called “When High-Demand Religions Control Sexuality” with Sara Glass.

If you're enjoying the podcast in general, I hope you'll rate and review it in Apple Podcasts or rate it in Spotify. Another way you can help me grow the show is by recommending it to a friend. So if you're listening to this episode and somebody in your life came to mind, then send them a link, let them know about the show!

If you want to see some video clips from this episode and other bonus stuff, you can follow me on Instagram or TikTok. @_relationscapes.

Mates of State provides our theme music. I'm your host, Blair Hodges, an independent journalist in Salt Lake City, and I hope to spend more time with you soon here on Relationscapes.