Abstract
Growing Up Pure: White Girls, Queer Teens, and the Racial Foundations of Purity Culture by Lauren D. Sawyer provides a voice to an oft-unheard perspective on purity culture. Discussions of purity culture—a sexual ethic composed of norms, practices, and institutions within Evangelical Christianity in the United States—and its harms have proliferated among blogs, memoirs, and podcasts. These stories justifiably and necessarily decry the detriments of purity culture, such as rigid gender roles, erasure of queer identities, and acceptance and at times promotion of sexual violence. However, the narrative shared in these spaces is predominantly anecdotal and monolithically focuses on victimization. Growing Up Pure offers a new and necessary viewpoint by providing a grounded theoretical analysis of purity culture that extends beyond personal experience and pushes past the common narrative.
The book situates purity culture as a heteronormative, sexist, and white supremacist framework that values white female purity above all. Sawyer suggests that this emphasis on white female purity made white girls purity culture’s primary audience and thus primary victims, but she rejects victimhood as the sole or most important story to be told about purity culture. Instead, Growing Up Pure proposes that purity culture’s advocates and critics reach the same outcome—children and adolescents as powerless, passive vessels—for different purposes. Purity culture supporters—such as the Evangelical Christian churches and schools that circulated purity culture materials (e.g., the Southern Baptist denomination)—crafted an image of youth who are unable to understand their own sexuality, much less act on it without adult protection. This framing served a dual purpose of justifying the policing of child/adolescent sexuality and soothing adults’ anxieties about changing social landscapes. Purity culture’s detractors, especially former evangelicals (“exvangelicals”) writing about their experiences within purity culture, frame youth solely as wounded victims in need of breaking free from purity culture’s sexual ethic and the religion in which it was found; in other words, it recreates the powerless youth, mainly a middle-class white girl, but this time as a victim rather than a damsel in need of protection.
By reviewing how purity culture exists within larger structures of race, sexual orientation, and class, Sawyer propels the reader to an understanding of how children and teens’ decisions within purity culture—like her own adolescent rejection of her childhood best friend’s coming out—are connected to larger agendas that both acted upon youth and that youth acted within. The goal of Growing Up Pure is not to merely offer a different perspective that is countercultural to current discourses, but to create a sexual ethic that is child centric and queer—growing sideways, deviating from a “norm” that never existed.
Where Growing Up Pure shines is in its intersectionality and refusal to accept easy binaries. Sawyer deftly connects purity culture to racist, sexist, heteronormative, and classist ideals that sought to maintain the white “status quo” in the United States. This intersectionality is pivotal to Sawyer’s call for accountability among white women who were both victimized by purity culture and victimized others in purity culture. Growing Up Pure weaves theoretical analysis through discussions of what purity culture is, how childhood and adolescence were traditionally defined, and new perspectives on youthful agency that inform a post-purity culture sexual ethic. Notably, Sawyer discusses the complexity of agency and vulnerability in youth, especially in survivors of sexual trauma, though these discussions leave room for deeper understanding.
Further theoretical and empirical engagement with the thorny questions raised by youth as fully agential sexual beings—how responsible a child is for repeating their parents’ beliefs or under what circumstances is agency compromised?—would aid Growing Up Pure’s important assertions while acknowledging the nuances of vulnerability and culpability, especially in light of the #ChurchToo movement. While Sawyer aptly challenges the “view from nowhere” pseudo-objectivity of research, empirical substantiation from fields such as developmental neuroscience or human sexuality would provide further support for this book’s deft theoretical analysis.
By restoring agency to youth, Growing Up Pure offers dignity to those raised in purity culture that enables them to acknowledge their own complicity in promoting purity culture’s ideals while respecting the pain purity culture caused them. Scholars in religious, gender, and human sexuality studies will appreciate Growing Up Pure’s strong emphasis on intersectionality and the questions it raises about responsibility and accountability among youth. Clinicians and therapists supporting patients working through religious or sexual trauma would benefit from the thorough analysis of purity culture as it moves beyond the common discourse and may better serve those wrestling with guilt or shame over childhood actions. Purity culture’s roots and its ramifications deserve further academic study, and Growing Up Pure is a critical overview that encompasses the complexities of both.
