I have accompanied an Evangelical publicist to Victoria’s Secret for naughty underwear because that night she and her husband were “planning to make a baby,” but I have never seen anywhere a more intimate and heart-rending description of what it’s like to be 14 or 15 or 20 years old living under the expectations Evangelicals have about “purity” - sexlessness, including virginity before marriage - and its antithesis. I have been covering American religion as a journalist for decades now, and have spent a lot of time in the subcultures that Klein describes. Then, the stronger Klein grew in her conviction that her generation’s whole mind-set around sex and self was twisted and damaging, the more her curiosity grew into a drive - or as she puts it, religiously, a “calling.” Pure is the result of that awakening. She asked her questions first out of curiosity and a need for solidarity. Once she saw how her demented thinking nearly killed her, she started to ask questions of other girls and women who were raised as she was. She was ill, it turned out, with Crohn’s disease. Klein began to see how her Christian upbringing messed her up in college, when she failed to visit a doctor after years of severe stomach pain and bleeding, believing that it was her Christian job to endure suffering. She is not a secular outsider, calling out the sexual abuse and subordination of women in the Evangelical world with the condescension and shock of one who “knows better.” She is an insider who has, through much anguish, shed the damaging constraints of her upbringing.
Popular writing about conservative religion, especially by secular authors, is often cliché: it either discounts the complex experiences of the real people living within religious bounds or naïvely seems to “discover” religious subcultures that have existed for years. and pastors - from the youngest age that one’s sexuality (including organs, physical body, and sexual impulses) is disgusting, a mind-set that can lead to only one place: that deep inside, the girl is disgusting, too. Part memoir and part journalism, Pure is a horrendous, granular, relentless, emotionally true account of how it feels to be taught - by parents, neighbors, teachers. And apart from its obscure, ominous-romantic cover design (a faceless woman with blowing hair standing in what might be a desert: what?), Linda Kay Klein’s book about the devastating effects of Christianity’s obsession with purity culture is a revelation. Into the midst of this national conversation on women’s truth, women’s stories, and the epochs-long, socially accepted, widely condoned subordination of women, comes Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Women and How I Broke Free, out today from Touchstone Books. Photo: Science & Society Picture Librar/SSPL via Getty Images
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