Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
‘Purity culture’ isn’t just a sex thing. It’s a do-nothing thing.

‘Purity culture’ isn’t just a sex thing. It’s a do-nothing thing.

Last updated on: September 3, 2015 at 7:05 pm by Fred Clark

‘Purity culture’ isn’t just a sex thing. It’s a do-nothing thing. 2015-09-03T19:05:20-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

A great deal of great stuff is being written about white evangelical “purity culture” and the perverse, pervasive and pernicious effects it has on Christian ideas about sex, gender, “modesty,” marriage, etc.

This obsession with “purity” isn’t just a sex thing. That’s where it finds its main expression these days, but purity culture is a fountain flowing deep and wide. It influences how white evangelicals view everything — themselves, God, “the world,” all of it.

A verse from the epistle of James provides an almost-perfect distillation of this view. James 1:27 says:

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: … to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

That’s the idea in a nutshell. This is how their religion is defined — the thing to which they are converted and the sum total of their understanding of discipleship. It’s all about being “pure and faultless” and doing everything possible to avoid pollution or contamination or “defilement” from the entire world. That’s what religion is.

And that’s also, according to this purity ideology, what “the world” is — a great big ball of pollution, a cosmos of disease, defilement and contamination.

What then, is a good Christian to do in such a world? As little as possible. Faith is a blank page that must be kept blank. It is a spotless, pure and undefiled white sheet that must be hidden away from anything and everything that might stain its pure whiteness.

At the moment of salvation, Jesus’ blood washes us white as snow. It’s all downhill from there. (Or, as Steve Taylor put it, “They all start dying from the day they’re born again.”) Purity ideology means that no Christian will ever again be quite as pure and righteous and clean as they are at that moment of conversion. Given that ideology, any talk of “sanctification” or discipleship rings hollow. Those things are a trap — a temptation to start defiling that blank page by writing on it.*

This is something Peter Leithart circles around, but can’t quite pin down, in his First Things post on “Why Evangelical Films Fail“:

Evangelicalism is also a conversionist faith. The key crisis of life is the moment of commitment to Christ. In Woodlawn, most of the characters convert early in the film, necessarily so because the story is about the effect of the revival on race relations. But that means that the line of character development is flat. The really crucial character development has taken place in the moment of conversion. …

Theologically speaking, character development is “sanctification.” A conversionist form of Christianity places less emphasis on sanctification than on conversion and justification. In films, that translates into drastic oversimplification of human psychology. For Evangelicals, there are only two sets of motivations, as there are two kinds of people: Saved and unsaved.

This precludes the possibility of storytelling. Stories require characters to choose and change and grow. Purity ideology warns against any of that. You started out spotless — any change from there will mean “being polluted by the world.” The story cannot go anywhere.

This also precludes the possibility of living a story. Or of living. Period.

Keep yourself from being polluted by the world.

And I know from personal experience, and then from my years of youth ministry, and from the email in my inbox, that this story-stopping, life-throttling ideology is a source of enormous anxiety for many white evangelicals. They believe. They want their faith to define them and to be the Most Important Thing in their lives. But they aren’t allowed to do anything about that, or with that. They’re warned that doing anything would be dangerous. Doing anything is to be avoided.

The alternative — doing nothing, on principle — is frustrating and meaningless. The few bits of permissible world-avoiding busywork are no help. “Evangelism” is encouraged, but only the forms of no-contact, boy-in-a-bubble evangelism that just alienate the “unsaved” that such approaches treat as aliens. Those kinds of evangelism thus wind up heightening the sense of meaninglessness and frustration.

And then there’s Bible-reading — the daily devotions or “quiet time” one is mandated to feel guilty about not doing. But reading the Bible through the lens of purity ideology — through a lens that filters out anything that seems to suggest actually doing something in and with “the world” — winds up just as frustrating. Read that way, the Bible is dull and confusing. (Thus prompting the double-whammy of feeling guilty about finding it dull and confusing.) Ditto for the other big permissible/mandated activities of prayer and worship.

Go ahead and try to write a story in which the only activities characters engage in are: 1) Bible-reading and prayer; 2) evangelism; and 3) Not Having Sex. Those characters will never choose, grow or develop. When the story arrives, they’ll be unable to get on board, and thus it will have to go on without them.

And just as it is impossible to write a story with characters as flat and stunted as that, so too it is impossible to live a life keeping one’s own character as flat and stunted as that. The stasis of the perpetually pure, white, blank page is impossible. You’ll still change, but you won’t grow. You’ll ossify — shrinking and getting harder, but more brittle.

So what’s the alternative?

Let’s go back to that verse from James, which I described as only an almost perfect distillation of purity ideology, because there’s actually a bit there where I put that ellipsis. And when you include that bit, it utterly ruins the whole attempt to interpret this verse as an endorsement of white evangelical purity ideology.

What James actually says is this:

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

That “look after orphans and widows in their distress” bit gets mentally erased because it can’t be made to fit with what white evangelicals are seeking to confirm for themselves with this verse. Messing about with orphans and widows — who are, by definition, unmarried women, and thus, by definition, dangerous — is imprudent for those whose priority is trying to remain pure and faultless and to avoid becoming polluted. Poor people are notoriously dirty and unruly. That can rub off, you know. Messing about with anyone is, well, messy.

So, since this orphans and widows bit can’t be made to fit in with what they imagine the rest of the verse is saying, it fades into invisibility. That doesn’t only leave the remainder of James’ statement incomplete, it mutates the meaning of the rest of the verse.

“Look after orphans and widows in their distress and keep yourself from being polluted by the world,” James says. That’s how you keep yourself from being polluted by the world — by looking after the powerless, the disenfranchised, the poor, the outcast. And this is what “being polluted by the world” means: It means joining in the world-system’s neglect of people like them. It means participating in and supporting their neglect and oppression.

For James here, “the world” doesn’t refer to infidels or to “secular” culture or to everyone who isn’t a pure and undefiled member of our exclusively pure and true sect. Here, as in much of the New Testament,** “the world” means something more like “The Powers That Be.”

That is “the world” that James was talking about. And that is “the world” that James’ brother was talking about when he told his disciples, “If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.”

To understand that, translate “the world” as TPTB, or, if you like, as “The Empire,” or even “Wall Street”:

If The Powers That Be hate you, keep in mind that they hated me first. If you belonged to The Powers That Be, they would love you as their own. As it is, you do not belong to The Powers That Be, but I have chosen you out of their clutches. That is why The Powers That Be hate you.

It’s still possible to do that while maintaining something like white evangelical purity ideology. You can interpret “keep yourself from being polluted by the world” as “keep yourself from being polluted by The Powers That Be,” and still come away thinking that your whole job is to avoid, escape and safeguard the unblemished purity you were granted at the moment of conversion. You can thus retain the same egocentric elevation of your personal purity as your sole concern.

But that, again, requires you to change the meaning of what James said by mentally erasing the essential bit of that verse — the bit about orphans and widows and those in distress. That, again, is the key to what James is saying. It’s not about you. It’s about them. Put your self-centered concern for personal purity above your regard for them and you have, by definition, become polluted by The Powers That Be.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* The spark for this little journey through the psychology of white evangelical purity ideology was David Badash’s recent post discussing the lawless Kentucky clerk insisting on a religious exemption from doing her job, “Kim Davis Has Been a Practicing Christian for Only Four Years.”

Badash there makes the mistake of thinking of evangelical Christianity as a practice, a craft, a journey of discipleship. It’s not that. It’s the opposite of that. Thanks to purity ideology, white evangelical Christianity gives us only one thing to do: Get saved. After that, it’s just a matter of retaining as much of the initial purity that establishes until, eventually, you die and/or get Raptured.

If Kim Davis got saved only four years ago, that means she probably has more of her initial purity still intact than some lifelong Christian who got saved 40 years ago.

** Context matters, of course, and context is the best way to make sense of what purity ideology can’t understand as an apparent contradiction in what the Bible has to say about “the world.” Sometimes the Bible speaks of “the world” as this thing that hates and defiles us, this thing we’ve been called out of and away from. But other times it speaks of “the world” as this thing that God loves, and that God commands us to love and sends us into in order to share, and express, and embody that love.

So use the brain God gave you and read that phrase — “the world” — in context. When the world is discussed as an evil, powerful system of injustice, then treat that phrase as “The Powers That Be.” When the world is, instead, a reference to just, you know, the whole planet and such, then read it that way. It would be illiterate nonsense to read John 3:16 as meaning, “For God so loved The Powers That Be,” just as it would be illiterate nonsense to read James 1:27 as saying, “keep oneself from being polluted by the entire planet.”

Previous Post

September 3, 2015

Everyone says love is a labor

Next Post

September 4, 2015 Left Behind Classic Fridays, No. 49: 'Explicit content'

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

In which city did David reign seven years before becoming king over all Israel?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Jerusalem Shechem Bethlehem Hebron