Nothing Says Stupidity Like Christian Purity
Sexy Drunk Christians: Chapter 1 Polluted Thinking Part 3
Christian purity, like most things Christian, purports to be a beneficial ideology but instead affirms misogyny and inequality. The same Christians, Focus on The Family, lobbying against LGBTQ adoption, parenting, marriage, and other rights, explain purity’s importance: “through faith, our bodies are no longer our own,” having become “part of Christ’s body,” which now means sex requires obtaining permission (marriage) from “Christ through the Church,” since you will “join His body to another body.”1
Do Christians even think about what they say?
Obviously not. Before you twist your chastity belts in screams about purity being an evangelical issue and accuse me of painting all Christians with the same brush, keep in mind Catholics refer to purity as “modesty” and profess the same bullshit, evidenced by Monsignor Charles M. Mangan in “The Forgotten Virtue: Modesty In Dress,” defining modesty as
…the virtue that regulates one’s actions and exterior customs concerning sexual matters. It controls one’s behavior so as to avoid unlawful sexual arousal in oneself or others.2
And Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints echoes the same nonsense,
Central to the command to be modest is an understanding of the sacred power of procreation, the ability to bring children into the world. This power is to be used only between husband and wife. Revealing and sexually suggestive clothing, which includes short shorts and skirts, tight clothing, and shirts that do not cover the stomach, can stimulate desires and actions that violate the Lord’s law of chastity.3
You might ask, “So what’s the harm in Christians wanting to keep their bodies pure for Christ?”
Unsurprisingly, Christian modesty beliefs (purity) resound across the Christian and unChristian world. You don’t have to be a Christian to buy into the purity values that elevate men by turning women and girls into sexual objects, such as the blatant sexual harassment of Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez on the steps of the Capital by a man describing her as a “big booty Latina.”4
Even more shocking is this behavior’s acceptance by many Christians, such as Marjorie Taylor Green who claimed Cortez should be honored by the catcalling.
The more fundamentalist, the more orthodox the purity culture.
This thinking perfectly explains the high risk of sexual assault for children in religious settings, especially in insular religious communities. The Truth Project Thematic Report on Child Sexual Abuse In The Context Of Religious Institutions reported, “The most common age range for participants to first experience abuse in a religious context was 8–11 years old (41 percent).”5
What could be purer than a child?
As I said before, Christians have such a bad problem with child sexual abuse that entire studies commit to researching the issue. Not only do Christians have this abundance of child sexual abuse, but the religion worsens the problem by hiding it for long periods.6
Amazingly, or perhaps not so amazingly, Christians and others in the Christian-dominated United States buy this purity mumbo jumbo, or at least the part that elevates men while reducing women to their sexuality’s worth. Like most religious beliefs, most Christians cannot obey purity, but lack of adherence doesn’t stop hypocritical Christians from pretending to be pure, couching this belief in ideas like saving the family from the evil LGBTQ whose improper vagina and penis use makes them impure: a judgment completely non sequitur to good parenting or qualifying people to have families. Worse yet, Christian men, empowered by purity beliefs, feel entitled to enforce Christian purity in their families, but all women. Seen on social media like TikTok, men on beaches and other places harass girls about their clothing.
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Such examples, easily ignored by believers distorting the occurrences as outliers, reflect the real aim of Christian purity, chastity, or modesty culture as a means to control women.
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Funny how you never see Christian women or men holding signs telling men to don shirts on the beach.
When purity culture rose to a fad level in the nineties, the trend’s ugliness quickly revealed a culture less about keeping women pure for biblical reasons and more about making women obedient and subservient to men. Joshua Harris, author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, during a speaking engagement, blared girls’ burden to protect men’s purity as well as their own, stating,
Well, ladies, I believe you also have a unique opportunity to protect the purity of your brothers in the Lord. What I think you probably are not aware of is how difficult it is for a guy to look at a girl with purity in his heart when she is dressed immodestly.
This thinking, the fundamental basis for shaming and harassing women, creates a culture that says…
Winner, L. (2005). PURITY. Retrieved from https://www.focusonthefamily.com/get-help/purity/
Monsignor Charles M. Mangan n.d. The Forgotten Virtue: Modesty In Dress Retrieved from https://www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=647
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. (2023). Modesty. Church of Latter-Day Saints https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/modesty?lang=eng
Vincent Triola (2022). Here’s the Real Christian Hero Sexually Harassing AOC Retrieved from https://christianpollution.com/blogs/no-to-christianity/here-s-the-real-christian-hero-sexually-harassing-aoc
Hurcombe, R., Darling, A DR., Mooney, B., Ablett, G., Soares, C., King, S. DR., Brähler, V. DR. (2019). Truth Project Thematic Report Child sexual abuse in the context of religious institutions https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20221215045348/https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/11687/view/truth-project-thematic-report-child-sexual-abuse-context-religious-institutions.pdf
Triola, V. (2022). Judge Christianity by Christians https://christianpollution.com/blogs/no-to-christianity/judge-christianity-by-christians