The problem with “purity culture” is not purity

Posted on Thursday, April 23, 2015 by Rebecca

She was raised in an ultra-conservative Christian homeschooling family, with loving but legalistic parents. Or maybe they were more protective than legalistic; as an adult, she is still trying to puzzle that out. There is no doubt in her mind that they loved her and meant well.

The circles in which they traveled, especially as she approached her teens, emphasized — among other things — purity. Although her brothers got what came across to her as somewhat of a token, “Oh, by the way, boys and men need to stay pure also”, the real targets of the “purity message” were the girls. Whether or not her parents, pastors, youth leaders, and the authors of the books and articles she read intended to teach her the following, this is what she came to believe:

Purity is defined exclusively in sexual terms. Sexual deeds make you impure. Thoughts do too, but to a much lesser extent.
The single most important and valuable thing about a girl is her purity. It is the most precious gift she can give her husband, yet it is also owed him to the extent that she is robbing him should she squander her purity on anyone else.
Boys and men have many other things that are important and valuable about them, and many other things to offer their future wives. Their purity is of lesser value, does not define their worth, and is not the most important thing about them.
The most valuable thing about a girl or woman is her sexuality. It might be the only thing of value about her, unless she marries a man who also appreciates her homemaking skills. However, even the most amazing domestic talents and abilities will never make up for being sexually impure, broken, or lacking.
Men are far more valuable than women, because they are not judged and defined solely by their sexuality.
While it’s nice if your future husband does not have a sexual past, he does not owe you his purity. You have no right to be judgmental or unforgiving of anything he might have done. His past, if he has repented of it, should no longer matter.
A girl is not only responsible for guarding her own purity, but the purity of everyone who encounters her. She needs to scrutinize her actions and appearance at all times in order to make sure she is not causing anyone to stumble.
It is impossible for boys and men to maintain purity in their thought lives. In fact, there is no such thing. Males are wired in such a way as to be on the verge of sexually explicit thoughts and desires at all times, and thus the most seemingly innocent thing can set them off. For example, if a boy sees a girl with wet hair, he cannot help imagining her naked in a shower, begging him to have sex with her.
Men and boys are incapable of respecting a girl or woman that they want to have sex with. This would seem like a problem in marriage but, while it’s important for an unmarried woman to gain the respect of men, wives supposedly no longer need respect. Only husbands do.
Men and boys are incapable of respecting a girl or woman who has lost her purity. It’s kind of debatable whether the sex act in marriage causes a woman to lose her purity or not. After all, the fact that she “gives” her purity (as the greatest gift she could possibly give) to her husband implies that she no longer possesses it. Luckily she only needs love from her husband and not respect. Marriage apparently mysteriously transforms a woman that way.
Once a girl or woman loses her purity before marriage, she is ruined forever. She can repent and be forgiven by God, but her purity is gone, never to be regained. She has robbed and cheated her husband out of the only thing of real value about her.

The young woman I am writing about is not the only one to believe these things. Not by a long shot.

I would hope that readers would see this as a problematic message. Whether or not this is the intention of the proponents of “purity culture”, it is what many young women are learning in homes, churches, youth groups, books, articles, blog posts, homeschooling conferences, etc., often with heartbreaking and disastrous consequences. One need not search very hard on the internet to find tragic story after story. Some young women who were harmed by growing up with these pervasive messages are now speaking out quite strongly against not only “purity culture” itself, but the very idea of remaining sexually pure until marriage.

The problems with “purity culture” are legion, but I will address only three of them for now:

1. It sexualizes women and girls — even very young girls — and repeats our media-saturated culture’s false message that women’s value is measured by sexuality and little or nothing else.

I mentioned the creepy sexualization of little girls when I wrote about “Purity Balls” on my old blog. In many ways, “purity culture” robs little girls of their innocence by forcing them to view themselves as sexual beings when they should be running and playing and learning — free of concerns about their future wedding nights. We should be teaching them what it means to be a follower of Jesus now, as wonderful little girls, and how they are of infinitely more value to Him, and more beloved, than they could ever imagine.

We need to tell girls and women that their worth rests in far, far more than their sexuality. The most valuable, precious gift a woman can give her husband is herself, in all her fullness and complexity. Sexuality is a part of that, yes, but I must emphasize again that her worth is in her personhood — who she is in the totality of her being, her talents and abilities, her personality and character, her knowledge and wisdom, her life experiences, her accomplishments, her relationship with God, her morals and values, her thoughts and opinions, her hopes and dreams — all that and more makes her uniquely who she is — and that’s what she brings into marriage.

Her sexuality is not a commodity that she sells in exchange for a wedding ring, or that her father sells on her behalf. Marriage is neither prostitution nor domestic service. Or at least it shouldn’t be. Any teaching or belief that even hints that it might be, or that virginity is owed as part of the transaction, is ungodly. Any boy who does not truly understand what is most precious about any woman — far, far more precious than her virginity — is not ready to be a husband…or at least not a very good one.

2. “Purity culture” has no idea what purity really is. Purity is not some treasure that girls are born with and that they need to guard desperately and fearfully until the day that they give it to their husbands. No one need weep on her wedding night, as one distraught “purity culture” young woman did, over the loss of what once defined and gave her worth.

Purity is not an intact hymen. It is not virginity. It is not a lack of sexual experience. It is not even saving your first kiss for the wedding. Purity is not a “thing” that you can give away or that someone can steal from you.

More times than I care to count, I’ve been told heartbreaking accounts of young girls being sexually abused, molested, and raped, often by people they loved and trusted. Such despicable evil perpetrated against a child damages and wounds his or her soul in a way that is indescribable.

It is all the more devastating if you believe that the most important thing about you, the precious gift you owe your future husband, has been stolen forever, obliterated and destroyed. Your body may heal. The deep wounds no one sees may heal as well. But your purity is gone forever. And, if you are a girl, so is most of your worth.

Of course that is a lie, an evil lie, from the very pit of hell itself. Unfortunately, it is one that many deeply hurting young girls have learned from “purity culture”.

Old Testament Jewish law had a lot of perplexing and burdensome commandments about cleanliness and purity. The good news is that, as followers of Jesus, we are no longer under that system of law. In Mark 7:14-23, Jesus declared all foods clean, teaching that what a person eats does not defile him or her. He was doing more than lifting the dietary law; he was teaching what makes a person defiled or impure:

Are you so lacking in understanding also? Do you not understand that whatever goes into the man from the outside cannot defile him, because it does not go into his heart…That which proceeds out of the man, that is what defiles the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man.

To be very graphic, when a rapist invades the body of his victim, she may feel defiled, but she is not. He may have robbed her of her innocence, by the horrible evil he has inflicted upon her, but he has not robbed her of purity. He has defiled himself — long before he committed the sin of rape — not her.

The Bible talks about different kinds of purity: of heart, of devotion, of doctrine, and more. No one is born with pure devotion and pure doctrine, and then needs to avoid giving those forms of purity away prematurely to the wrong person. We would laugh if someone taught, “Save your doctrinal purity for your spouse, because it’s the most valuable gift you can give him or her!” No man except a lunatic would say, “Well, she started believing some really messed up stuff there for awhile, some actual heresies, and she lost her doctrinal purity. Thankfully, she repented and has seen the error of her ways but I’m sorry, I want to marry a woman who saved her doctrinal purity for me.”

I’m not making light of the fact that sexual pasts can invade the present. I firmly believe that avoiding sexual sin is a good, righteous, and important thing, but it is something that should be undertaken to obey God, not to avoid “losing the most precious thing one can give to one’s spouse”. Also, if we are going to emphasize purity, we need to emphasize true purity, in all its forms, and not just female virginity. We need to make sure those of us who are teaching purity are pursuing it as well — in our thoughts and our actions.

I would also argue that it is a sign of impurity when a father looks at his sweet, innocent little girl and becomes overly concerned about her hymen, as if it belongs to him until he turns it over — hopefully still intact — to another man. I would argue that it is a sign of impurity when a man buys his little girl a beautiful dress and takes her out to a fancy ball, the fulfillment of her sweet childish princess dreams — and then makes it all about sex. It takes a certain amount of impurity for a man to begin teaching his little girl that a fancy night out with a man always has strings attached, this time that she must promise him, “I pledge to remain sexually pure…until the day I give myself as a wedding gift to my husband…”

The lack of understanding of true purity is because of my next point.

3. “Purity culture” lacks a real understanding of the gospel.

In Isaiah 1:18, God says, “Though your sins are as scarlet, they will be white as snow.” In other words…pure as the driven snow…

In 1 Corinthians 6, we read a list of all the sorts of sinners who will not inherit the kingdom of God, followed by these words:

Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.

That’s the part of the gospel that the “purity culture” people seem to be overlooking. When God forgives our sins, He washes them away and we become pure. We negate the work of the Cross, the tremendous sacrifice our Savior paid, when we act as if purity has some source other than Him, and when we act as if the stain of sexual sin is so deep that God’s grace is insufficient to purify it.

Many of us who grew up in the church memorized 1 John 1:9, which says, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Unfortunately, proponents of “purity culture” do not really believe that verse. If they did, more husbands would be honest in admitting, “I feel jealous and insecure because my wife had sex with other men in her past, and I’m having a hard time not holding it against her” — instead of maligning both the gospel and the character of their repentant wife by saying, “She was not pure when I married her.” To hear some men talk, one would think their wives had gone straight from working in a brothel to the wedding, without even bothering to take a shower in between. It doesn’t matter how long ago a woman’s sexual past may have been, or how fervently she pursued righteousness in the meantime, or how pure her devotion to Jesus — her husband still sees her as impure. The gospel means so little to him.

The irony is that few of these same men want a truly pure wife. What they want is a “whitewashed sepulchre”, all clean and beautiful on the outside but not so much on the inside. They want a wife who is pure in body but not necessarily in heart, a wife with a virginal body who will somehow automatically know how to fulfill her husband’s porn-driven masturbatory fantasies. Too much purity of conscience, too much innocence, too much devotion to God might get in the way of that.

As for the young woman at the beginning of this post…according to “purity culture”, she lost her purity, first because of what someone did to her against her will and then later by her own choice. After a few years living as a prodigal (I love prodigals!) she returned, not quite to the faith of her youth but to a new, more life-giving, fervent, simple yet profound, intimate faith. She eventually met a man who recognized her purity — along with many of her other wonderful qualities, including her approach to Christianity — and fell in love with her. Last I heard, they are living out their own happily ever after story, as far removed as possible from the false teachings of “purity culture”, and instead pursuing together what 2 Corinthians 11:3 refers to as “simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ”.

Sex Trafficker? Me?

Posted on Tuesday, March 31, 2015 by Rebecca

A simple but uncomfortable truth: even if the men in our lives never go to places like Pattaya, Thailand…even if they never hire the services of a prostitute…even if they never go to a strip club…even if they never pay for porn…if they use porn, even infrequently, they are contributing to and fueling the demand for sex trafficking.

That is a very uncomfortable fact. Husbands may try to pretend their use of porn “doesn’t hurt anyone” and that their wives are being overly sensitive and prudish. They may insist, “I only look once in a while! Every guy does!” They may try to blame their wives, make excuses, justify and defend…but it’s time wives stopped buying into the arguments of porn-using husbands, and time the husbands faced up to what it is that they are supporting and encouraging every time they log into a porn site.

I weigh in about vaccines

Posted on Sunday, February 8, 2015 by Rebecca

Back in 1985, I was somewhat more educated about vaccines than the typical parent, having taken a college course on the history of virus diseases — a fascinating and hugely informative course taught by an amazing man whose many accomplishments in the field of medicine included being the head of the CDC’s virology division. So, while I was unquestioningly pro-vaccine to the point that it never dawned on me not to vaccinate, I knew there were things about virus diseases that were yet mysterious and unexplainable. For instance, the two brilliant doctors and researchers who taught my course, experts in the fields of virology and epidemiology, could not entirely explain why certain diseases had obviously been on the decline before vaccines against them were introduced, or why the polio rates in an unvaccinated populace outside the U.S. dropped at the same time and almost the same rate as the newly vaccinated U.S. population.

None of that, for a moment, caused me to question the wisdom of full vaccination against any and all diseases. In all my reading and study, nothing had made me think that vaccines were anything but entirely safe.

Then my infant son experienced syncope following his routine vaccination. I recall holding his limp, seemingly lifeless body in my arms, his breathing so shallow that I could not detect it, and screaming for the doctor, the nurse — anyone — to help. I thought my son was dead.

You don’t get over that quickly.

My son was not dead. The nurse, impatient with my state of shock, and unfamiliar with information like this, told me my son was obviously “shutting down from overstimulation” — even though he was long past the newborn stage and never reacted like that to anything else. She refused to summon the doctor and insisted that I leave immediately.

Still in shock, and not knowing what else to do, I left.

To make a long story short, my infant son — who usually slept very little during the day — remained in what I can only describe as a coma-like state for over 8 hours. I could not rouse him. Repeated calls to the doctor’s office finally resulted in my being told by the nurses that I was an overwrought new mother and should enjoy the “break from my son” for as long as it lasted, and to stop calling them. It was that day that I discovered we had a family history of “bad reactions” to the pertussis vaccine, which prompted me — once my son seemed back to normal — to head off to the UCLA Biomed Library to try to find out what on earth had happened to him.

This was before The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, and my son’s frightening reaction was not reported to VAERS. The CDC admits this database is incomplete, even today. How incomplete is anyone’s guess.

In the next two to three years, I read everything I could lay my hands on about vaccines. I questioned medical professionals. I attended seminars. I did all the study and research that I could.

What I discovered during my research was that my son’s reaction, while sounding trivial — oh, he just slept deeply all day — was actually considered serious because it is usually accompanied by neurological damage. Two years later, another pediatrician told me emphatically, “I cannot in good conscience give any member of your family the pertussis vaccine.”

“You might not be so lucky next time,” more than one doctor told me.

I decided to take their medical advice. Unfortunately, I foolishly mentioned this to some other mothers — and that’s when I discovered just how angry, hysterical, and irrationally selfish the radical fringe of the most extremely pro-vaccine parents can get. I discovered that the ones urging me the most vociferously to “Do some research!” had never actually done any of their own, and were totally unfamiliar with what I considered the most basic knowledge about vaccines. When one distraught woman went so far as to scream in my face that she didn’t care if all my children died from vaccines just as long as hers weren’t exposed to whooping cough, I decided this topic was too emotionally loaded to discuss rationally with some people, and it was probably best to keep my mouth shut in the future.

The current hysteria reminds me of those days, only now it seems so much more widespread and virulent. I would recommend parents, and all those concerned about measles, to read this information from the CDC. If you are going to lambaste people for their medical decisions, or clamor for the government to take draconian measures against non-vaccinators, at the very least you should acquire some basic knowledge and make sure your own vaccinations are up to date.

If you think every person who decides to forego a particular vaccine is a dangerously ignorant wacko anti-vaxxer, I would like you to know:

Some of us felt very much like you until something scary happened to one of our children
Some of us are not at all “anti-vaccine”, but carefully consider the merits of each one, weighing the risks and benefits
Some of us have done a lot of research and study in order to make the difficult decisions we have made
Some of us are following medical advice
Some of us will forego a particular vaccine for reasons that have nothing to do with autism
Some of us are so concerned about people with compromised immune systems that we do our best to prevent their exposure to people who are not only possibly ill, but might have recently received a live vaccine (and, contrary to what you may have been told, the measles vaccine in the U.S. is a live vaccine)
Some of us understand that no vaccine is 100% effective, which is why we might get argumentative when you insist your fully vaccinated — but obviously sick — child could not possibly have an illness he was vaccinated against, even if his symptoms seem glaringly obvious to everyone else. When we point this out, we aren’t on an anti-vax tear; we just don’t want your kid infecting other kids, vaccinated or not. Besides, if you’re right that the cough that sounds so alarmingly whooping-like isn’t pertussis, or that what your child is covered with is some entirely different pox, then I really don’t want to be exposed to whatever it is your kid has — so please keep him/her home, OK?
Some of us understand that not all diseases have a vaccine. We also understand that what might be a “simple cold” or “I hope it’s not the flu, haha” to one person might be quite serious to someone else. That’s why some of us might seem a bit “paranoid” about germs, or overly concerned with maintaining healthy immune systems.
We have a wide variety of reasons for choosing against one vaccine, several vaccines, or all vaccines. Don’t assume you know those reasons, or that we are all misguided, ignorant zealouts out to infect your children…after all, I try not to assume all stridently vocal pro-vaccinators are misguided, ignorant zealouts who — because they can’t be bothered to make informed decisions for their children and themselves — want to take away my right to do so.

Note: Since my youngest is almost 18, I no longer have a dog in this fight. And, frankly, that’s a relief.

Oh, that John Piper…

Posted on Friday, January 23, 2015 by Rebecca

Sorry if you are a fan of his, but I have to take issue with something he recently tweeted:

A friend on Facebook alerted me to it, and linked to the following discussion of the tweet. I felt compelled to weigh in with two comments:

The topic of rape, in my opinion, does not lend itself well to sound bites and tweets. I have no idea if this tweet of John Piper had any sort of context or if it just appeared willy-nilly out of thin air — but that is the very problem of Twitter in general. John Piper spends far more time there than I do, and one would think a pastor/teacher of his reputation would know better than that. Well, I keep thinking that and getting disappointed, and maybe someday I’ll wake up, smell the coffee, and simply say, whether it’s him or others of his ilk, “That wasn’t surprising—he often says things like that. That’s just the way he is.”

In the meantime, since I am not fully conversant with Piper-speak, only tending to run across him when he’s spread some other doozy all over the Internet, I am left trying to stay charitable while puzzling out his meaning. It seems to me as if he is saying, with the words “united in sin” and “two distinct forms”, that rape is the male version and seduction the female version of the same sin. Perhaps he refuses to believe that women can rape since there is no such thing recorded in Scripture. But the Bible does describe men seducing women AND it makes a clear distinction between rape and seduction.

I am tempted to say something disparaging about celebrity preachers and their lack of scholarship. (I’m a preacher’s kid whose father set the bar very high in that regard, and it has taken me years to stop getting dismayed and annoyed that few people take Scripture as seriously as he does.) But instead, I think I’ll make this observation: when it comes to the topic of rape, most men simply don’t get it.

The blog author had used a definition of the word “seduce” that referred to coffee, which inspired me to add the following:

An addendum: Coffee is extremely seductive to me. When I am at my weakest, it sometimes seeks me out, like a smooth-talking cad, luring me in sensuously, promising me unspeakable pleasures and delight. Were coffee-drinking a sin, I could try to avoid its siren calls and delicious scent. If forced to be around it, I could pray for strength to avoid its enticements. I could apply the Biblical admonitions regarding how to resist temptation. It would be silly for me to frequent coffee houses and surround myself with cups of coffee.

The Bible contains advice on how to avoid falling for seducers. That’s because, no matter how overwhelming seduction might feel, we always make a choice to allow ourselves to be seduced. We don’t say no. Instead, we say yes. The Bible does not tell us how to avoid falling for rapists. There is a definite distinction.

I drink coffee willingly. Yes, I was enticed, but I am not a victim of coffee. Coffee has never forced itself on me against my will.

For a seduction to succeed, it requires two willing participants, both of whom have sinned. Rape, by definition, has only one willing participant (unless there is more than one rapist) and he is the only one who has sinned.

Very different sins.

If John Piper is a man of integrity with a high view of Scripture, we can expect, very soon, a profound apology and correction.

Call me cynical, but I’m not holding my breath. John Piper has deleted his tweet, although as of yet without explanation, so perhaps I should try to be satisfied with that.

A valuable article about childhood sexual abuse

Posted on Friday, January 23, 2015 by Rebecca

How do sexual abusers gain the trust of their young victims and why do parents “let” them? How do they get by with it? Why don’t the child victims say anything? How can a mother insist she had no idea what was going on? These are questions that trouble people whenever the subject of childhood sexual abuse comes up.

I found an article online that offers a concise explanation of the “grooming” process. It is all valuable information, but I wanted to highlight this:

Mother blaming tactics

The myths around child sexual abuse often describe the reasons the offender sexually abused the child as being the mother’s fault. Some of these reasons could be that the mother was sick, worked long hours, or was frightened of the perpetrator. As a mother, you are not to blame for the sexual abuse. The sexual abuse of children is just one part of a system of trickery and abuse created to maintain secrecy, isolation and the offender’s absolute power over the child and all others in the child’s life. The offender sets up a web-like structure of traps, lies and distortions to isolate the victim and recreate the child as problematic in the eyes of siblings, the mother, friends, family and neighbours. In particular, offenders admit that their prime target is to destroy the child’s relationship of trust with the mother (Morris, 2003).

The relationship problems between mother and child that are commonly seen after the abuse is disclosed are more likely to be the result of a campaign of disinformation orchestrated by the offender. The offender’s actions create a context in which the mother and child are blind to his role in creating the difficulties in their relationship (Laing and Kamsler, 1990). In fact, one of the most common tactics by the offender is creating a division between the mother and child. The mother blaming shifts the focus from the offender to the mother, in search for someone to blame.

Research shows that the vast majority of mothers do not know that sexual abuse was occurring, and this is part of the offender’s campaign to keep the abuse secret. Offenders work hard to be seen as the idea father, uncle, grandfather, brother or a trusted family friend who is wonderful with children.

Read more here: Sex offender tactics and grooming