Here we go again.
Evangelical “purity culture” is getting royally trashed these days for being responsible for a multiple murder last week in Atlanta. If only, these stories suggest, this man hadn’t been so messed up by primitive Christian morals, he might not have gunned down eight people.
Members of the GetReligion team have written before (in this 2019 piece by the Religion Guy) about how reporters consistently don’t get the doctrinal issues that are linked to purity culture. Here we are again with a string of murders by a Southern Baptist man who had a sex obsession. Suddenly, the national conversation is about the Christian teachings that might have driven him to it.
A number of media took a whack at the topic. I’ll start with Business Insider, which, in a piece headlined “The Atlanta shooting and the dangers of American evangelicalism’s trademark purity culture,” commits tons of journalistic sins starting with its fourth paragraph:
"It's not a jump to say white conservative Christianity played a role here," said Joshua Grubbs, an assistant professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University. "The facts need to come to light, but all the facts that are in the light right now suggest it's at play." …
Huh? All white conservative Christians are now complicit in the shootings? This whole marrying of what various writers hate about Christianity to “white evangelical culture” shows a massive ignorance of evangelicals.
First, a lot of evangelicals, especially younger ones, aren’t white. Show up at a college InterVarsity meeting sometime (that is, those that are still are allowed to use university facilities, which many aren’t these days because of their views on gay marriage) and take a look at the variety of folks there.
Back to the Business Insider piece:
Two key concepts here are "temptation" and "sex addiction." Both feature heavily in evangelical "purity culture," a set of rituals and beliefs around gender roles, designed to encourage believers, especially young men and women, to abstain from sex outside of heterosexual marriage.
The article marshals a list of scholars to trash white supremacy, the boogeyman in all this.
Grubbs' own research, meanwhile, and his work with sociologist Samuel Perry, suggests that "sex addiction" is a thing that mostly white evangelical Christians will say. In several studies, Grubbs found a significant relationship between religiosity and self-reported sex or pornography addiction. (Non-evangelicals may use pornography, or struggle with sexual impulses, but are unlikely to call these behaviors "addiction.")
Considering that porn is a $15-billion-dollar industry (in the US alone), it’s pretty clear that non-evangelicals DO use pornography. Re the “addiction” terms, has this reporter ever heard of Sex Addicts Anonymous? Lots of non-evangelicals there. And just because the American Psychiatric Association left out sex addiction as a DSM-5 disorder back in 2013 doesn’t mean they’re right about this.
There’s more out there trashing purity culture, including this opinion piece by Religion News Service, and an opinion piece, written by an Asian woman in the Jesuit-affiliated America magazine that plays the race card. It said in part:
Temptation. A familiar word for anyone raised in the Christian tradition. “Lead us not into temptation,” we are taught to pray. But this week the bodies of Asian women were reduced to just that: a temptation, something to be eliminated for the sake of preserving white male innocence.
Where does one start when dealing with the assumptions in that last sentence? Hate crimes against Asians, this survey says, tend to be from other minorities. The fact that the Atlanta shooter was a white man goes against the trend.
Certain casual mentions were inaccurate, such as this aside in a Washington Post piece about the gunman’s church.
Experts this week have said the mentality Bayless described is common within evangelical “purity culture,” which teaches that sexual desire outside of marriage is sinful and those who fail to control their lust are sometimes considered “sex addicts.” The church’s bylaws assert that adultery, fornication and pornography are “sinful and offensive to God.”
Do various books associated with purity culture stress that sexual desire outside of marriage is sinful? Activity, yes, but desire?
This is another one of those cases, as tmatt discussed yesterday, that it would really help if journalists quoted actual source materials to support these claims.
Meanwhile, the quoted parts in the church’s bylaws refer to centuries of basic Christian teachings, not simply purity culture extracts.
The culture vs. Christian teaching differences were best explained in a weekend column by commentator David French: “Why the Atlanta Massacre Triggered a Conversation about Purity Culture.” It’s long, but French nails it.
“Purity culture” is not a synonym for traditional Christian teachings about sexual morality — specifically the belief that sex is reserved for a marriage between a man and a woman. No, “purity culture” refers to the elaborate set of extra-biblical rituals and teachings that became popular in the 1990s and were designed to build safeguards and “strongholds” of sexual purity in Christian communities.
The Gospel Coalition’s Joe Carter has written an excellent FAQ about purity culture, and he identifies a number of common characteristics, including specific “purity pledges” that young men and women would take, father-daughter “purity balls” where dads would often given their daughters “purity rings” to symbolize their commitment to chastity, and strict “courtship” relationships that would often feature parent-supervised meetings in lieu of dates and written “purity contracts” prohibiting physical contact.
All of this was distinctly different from what one might call normal or conventional Christian sexual teaching.
Later in the piece, French explains that, central to this purity culture was the Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts, a week-long series of seminars about the Christian life that were the rage among evangelicals starting in the 1960s. I attended during my freshman year of college in 1974-75, and the movement was still going strong in the 1990s, when purity culture was at its height. (Its originator, Bill Gothard, was later forced out in 2014 under sex abuse allegations).
Some prominent evangelicals have noticed how the idea of sexual abstinence outside of marriage is so foreign to current American culture, reporters have had to twist themselves up in knots explaining basic Christian precepts. In his Monday podcast, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler explained that sexual abstinence outside of marriage has been a major feature of American Protestantism all the way back to the Puritans and that reporters who breathlessly attributed such a concept to white supremacist evangelicals didn't have a clue about church history. He wrote:
In other words, this is just basic Christianity. It's also very important for Christians to understand that the Christian reputation for holding to a unique sexual ethic isn't new to the 21st century. It was actually present in the first century.
In a piece published last Saturday, Ruth Graham of the New York Times had the unenviable job of explaining how pornography and evangelicalism intersect. It’s difficult material to research because not a lot has been written about the topic in the secular media. An excerpt:
White evangelicals do not use pornography more than other demographics, said Samuel Perry, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma who has researched the role of pornography in the lives of conservative Protestants. In fact, white evangelicals who regularly attend church look at pornography less than the general population.
But they report significantly more anguish around the practice. …
“So many men boil down how they’re doing spiritually to how often they have looked at porn recently,” Dr. Perry said, reflecting on his research in evangelical settings. “Not whether they’d grown in their love toward others, given generously of their time, or spent time connecting with God, but if they masturbated.”
Well, there’s a reason for this anguish. For a clue, look at 1 Corinthians 6:18 (NIV translation: Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body). Agree with it or not, there are some biblical concepts at play here and these are concerns that unite leaders in all forms of traditional Christianity.
So, there’s a reason why the above-mentioned men are in some mental torment over something clearly labeled as sin.
This very dated Christianity Today 1995 story about sex lives of America’s Christians said 41% of men polled struggled with porn, as did 16% of women. And the Internet was just taking off then, so the numbers today are of course higher.
Speaking of the above New York Times story, the Letter & Liturgy weblog criticized it for being way too simplistic about Christian men.
I think stories like this are frustrating because they offer genuine insight mixed with a journalistic framing that is deeply untrustworthy. Brad Onishi, Jeff Chu, and Samuel Perry — the three voices brought in to criticize evangelical purity culture — are all examples of LGBT-affirming post-evangelicalism.
Because of this framing, the subtext of the article is that there are really only two choices for evangelical Christians: double down on hating women and empowering shooters like Robert Long, or abandon core evangelical doctrines. This is exactly the posture that defines nearly all anti-purity culture writing I see, which is why I get so frustrated by it…
What’s confusing is that evangelicals themselves are split over the matter and are sending out an uncertain note. In recent years, there’s been a ton of evangelical diatribes against purity culture in general, as opposed to criticizing specific abuses of purity culture rites and messages.
What’s replaced purity culture? We learn the answer from last week’s Christianity Today, which came out with a piece on this exact topic. Cohabitation outside of marriage, it said, “is the new norm among young, professing evangelicals in America.”
Being that my first two books were about single Christians and sex, I used to follow this topic a lot. Most frustrating part: Your typical pastor never preached on the sexuality and certainly not on sexuality for singles (yes, there is such a thing and it’s not the ascetic, asexual existence that’s pushed on people). Most of them had married young and hadn’t a clue what it was like to stay chaste in a secular world.
Attend a typical women’s Christian event. Is sexuality ever discussed? Nope.
So you have one-quarter of the U.S. population that identifies as evangelical that gets little or no real teaching on the topic and, when crises like this Atlanta shooter come up, are mute when asked to explain biblical sexuality.
I think reporters have gotten a lot of the facts wrong, but when given only a few hours to throw together a major piece on the topic, they tend to go with whomever they can find on Google (which tend to be folks who operate on social media) and who they can get on the telephone. The result is second-hand reporting on purity culture themes, instead of quotes and information from source materials.
It makes a difference when news stories quote original sources. Note the powerful ending of that Times piece:
In November, an associate pastor at the church, Luke Folsom, preached a sermon on the “battle” against sin. He quoted a verse from the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus tells his followers that it may be worth gouging out an eye if it causes them to sin.
He continued, addressing the use of pornography directly. “Cut it out by getting rid of your smartphone, getting rid of internet connection, anything and everything that would allow you to do it,” he said. “Your soul is at stake.”
Lust, he added, is “a heart problem, not just an eye problem.”
The church, which declined a request for an interview with its leaders, issued a statement on Friday that condemned the violence at the Atlanta-area spas, as well as the suspect’s “stated reasons for carrying out this wicked plan.”
The church also emphasized that the gunman alone was to blame for his actions. “The women that he solicited for sexual acts are not responsible for his perverse sexual desires nor do they bear any blame in these murders,” the church stated. “These actions are the result of a sinful heart and depraved mind.”
There is one glimmer of hope out there.
While researching this piece, I came across a podcast featuring Christian sexologist Celeste Holbrook, who grew up in a conservative Christian household. When she got married, she found sex much less than ideal and the podcast describes her switch to a positive Christian sex ethic that could fit into some very conservative spaces.
In the weeks following the Atlanta shootings, I wish reporters would interview someone like her, to balance out the narrative of purity-culture-obsessed-sex-hating evangelicals. There is another side to that story but you do have to look for it.