Pure: I Grew Up in an Evangelical Home. I Still Struggle with Purity Culture.

The effects of purity culture two decades later

As a child in an Evangelical home, when a plane flew overhead, I thought the noise was God opening the sky. When my brother's friend left clothes on the floor with the remote haphazardly balanced near a long-sleeved striped shirt, I thought the Rapture had occurred and I was, like the controversial best-selling Christian series, left behind. If a bird pooped on me, I tried to recall my failings to understand why I was being punished. I cried when told to forgive the unforgivable, most scared that I, ultimately, couldn't be forgiven.

By the time I entered middle school, my family had stopped going to the church I had grown up in, which didn’t allow dancing, playing cards, or the consumption of any alcohol. It also heavily discouraged movies, which still can make me feel somewhat ostracized from pop culture to this day.

The shift in my life happened when my mother had finally divorced my father after twenty tumultuous years of marriage. Though she still wanted us to attend church regularly in theory, we bounced around, visiting different churches but never really stuck anywhere for long. In the midst of everything, I was also changing. Aside from having my bangs trimmed, I had never had a haircut. Right before middle school, I finally had one. But even though life changed drastically and things looked more normal on the outside, I wasn’t able to escape the guilt and anxiety that came from the understanding that I could never be truly pure.

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One interesting aspect of the religion I experienced is the steadfast adherence to arbitrary man-made rules, especially contradictory ones.

While some churches encourage women to present themselves in a specific way—a full-face of make-up and fancy skirts or dresses—and connected that look to modesty, I struggled with adhering to a different definition of modesty. In my childhood church, looking too “worldly” was often associated with vanity. I remember being around four years old and getting shamed for staring at myself in a mirror. I was a teenager when I learned that “secular” was not a bad word.

Though dresses weren’t mandated in my household outside of church, they were still a barrier for me. My mother said that as a baby, I would scream when I wore them, my knees red and raw from crawling and climbing. At home, I liked dressing like a tomboy as much as I could.

We didn’t have a washer or dryer so we made weekly trips to the laundromat. My brothers helped carry the baskets in and then played outside for hours in the woods behind the building while my sister, mother, and I sorted, washed, and then folded the hot towels and clothing. There were a few times I snuck into the woods with my brothers to play and we built forts made out of sticks until they got older and they worked their own long hours after being granted work permits in their early teenage years and then stopped coming altogether.

Sunday was supposed to be the day of rest but that was the only period, between morning and evening services, that we had time to do laundry. If it was Sunday afternoon, we were there. Once at the laundromat, my mom got a call at the front desk that my friend had died. Everyone knew to reach us there.

At the laundromat, my favorite job was getting change. I had to straighten the crinkled and worn bills until I could get the coin machines to accept them, holding my breath until the quarters finally fell. I hated the truly weathered bills that were soft to the touch, knowing those had almost no chance of being accepted no matter what I did. I’d pray there’d be a few quarters left over for a game of pinball or a snack from the vending machine. There usually were.

The laundromat was patroned by mostly women. Even the attendants were women. Once, after I was in and out of the bathroom multiple times, an attendant asked if I was on my period, and she was right, a knowing glint in her eye that I refused to confirm. I continued to hide my period from my family for years, stealing pads and tampons from my older sister when I could, ashamed at how early I developed, womanhood feeling like another sin.

Periods felt particularly shameful for me because of the connotations. It was a marker of womanhood that meant I was officially in control of my life. I grew up believing that children were guaranteed heaven. My mother told me this was because children didn’t fully understand salvation. As a girl, I used to look around the cemetery at the chipped lamb grave markers for infants and cry, feeling sorry for myself that I—alive and though young, under the impression it was already too late to die innocent—couldn’t be guaranteed heaven like them.

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Churches, like anywhere, have politics. Beauty could be shamed but also rewarded. There were so many spoken expectations about being a girl and then a woman, but there were also many unspoken expectations, too, particularly around appearance.

As a very young girl, I remember hiding from one of the pastor’s daughters when she called me cute. I crawled under the pew, thinking, mistakenly, that she couldn’t see me if I couldn’t see her.

“I’m cool, not cute,” I screamed at her.

I desperately wanted to feel comfortable in my own skin. I wanted to have the ease I thought boys felt as they played outside in the church parking lot before and after services, making jokes and climbing the snow mounds created from plows. Their lives just seemed so much less complicated. They had freedom.

Boys’ bodies also seemed less tied to their worth. Their appearance was secondary. People at church only seemed to care if they were strong enough to rearrange the tables and chairs before a potluck. Girls had to live up to so many patriarchal ideas about appearance that were falsely connected to faith, and it never seemed to get easier.

Womanhood meant not being a burden. You couldn’t take up too much space, figuratively and literally. My mom was always dieting. She spoke openly about the dangers of gluttony, usually connecting it to weight, though she wasn’t using it to shame others, only herself. She once did a 40-day liquid diet where she drank mostly tomato juice. She said that if Jesus could go without food and water in a desert, she could at least do a juice cleanse. I, too, struggled with my weight. I never wanted to be seen as greedy, despite growing up in a home that often had a bare fridge in my early childhood. Many times, my siblings and I had to eat condiments since that was all that was left on the long stretches between payday. Grape jelly, syrup, and butter were our staples.

My mother subscribed to the Quiverfull movement, which discourages birth control and encourages having as many children as God allows. (It is a term that has become more mainstream with the infamous rise of the Duggar family.) However, four children were all my mother was able to have.

My mother, despite being the main caretaker, had to work out of necessity almost immediately after she started having children because my father struggled with many issues. He was unable to hold a job for virtually all of my life. It goes without saying we never had enough money.  

My mom has worked a variety of jobs. Ultimately, for most of my memories, she worked in fast food. I, too, went to work in fast food, as did all of my siblings. It’s not lost on me that working at these establishments meant always being in the proximity of food.

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Growing up the way I did, I was subject to purity culture, and most of the examples that were used weren't biblical. Even after we left my church, shame-inducing metaphors were used in later youth groups I attended, where boys and girls were separated and girls were asked if we wanted to be Styrofoam cups, coffee mugs, or fine china. Worth, we were told, was based on value through its limitations, not access. Chewed bubble gum analogies used to describe sex were often employed, too.

Though women often lacked power, they were usually saddled with blame. In the absence of true authority, we were told that women held all of the power because we had the ability to stop temptations. We could stop it through dressing a specific way. We could stop it through not engaging. We were told over and over that men were visual creatures and women were not, therefore women had the onus placed on them to do the right thing. (In my small town, this teaching was not limited to the church. A teacher in seventh grade also stated this principle as fact.)

In Christianity, the origins of sin and temptation are often symbolized through the apple. But Eve has become the scapegoat, entirely blamed for all downfalls. Even as a kid, it wasn’t lost on me that it seemed like it was mostly men who relished in blaming her. Like everything, there was a delicate balance that felt impossible. There was a constant pressure of looking presentable but not tempting.

Since women were always painted as tempestuous, a man giving into an impure thought or acting on it meant that, ultimately, women or girls were often blamed.

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There was a church in my hometown that attracted a lot of doctors, nurses, and working professionals. It embraced science instead of battling it. Dinosaur fossils were acknowledged, not tip-toed around, which meant children raised in that church didn’t have to leave it later to accept science.

My childhood church never mentioned science. But I know it believed in sanctification, which means rising above sin. That pressure to be perfect, almost un-human, created an enormous amount of stress.

There can be an expectation, especially for girls, to feel the need to be perfect. For me, this led to a life that felt inauthentic. I still struggle with my decisions to this day and overthink things. Is make-up displaying vanity? Or is failing to get ready slovenly? Obsessive thoughts over piousness can still paralyze for me.

I’ve lived in New York for more than a decade but I still sometimes struggle with the guilt and fear that came from some of my earliest memories.

I didn’t know until we left our church, before I entered my teenage years, that we were never official members. Though we attended dutifully, there were certain beliefs that my mom never could agree to fully embrace. (To this day, she loves playing cards and watching movies. One of my favorite Christmas memories is when we went to the casino with my aunt.) Perhaps that explains some of the church’s distance. I remember when my mom went to the pastor before divorcing, looking for guidance, wanting people to care that our father had been arrested on domestic violence charges. I remember the palpable vacantness when it felt like leadership didn’t care. She wanted to be told violence was worse than divorce. I don’t believe she ever received that validation.

But while it wasn’t perfect and I’m glad that by middle and high school, I was able to have a more conventional life with secular moments with friends, I do still miss certain aspects and can’t fathom my childhood another way. Strangers who wouldn’t have interacted in other ways became family. I lovingly called a woman Grandma for years, and still can remember the way her kitchen looked and the steam that rose from her mashed potatoes.

Though I felt so much fear and pressure from some teachings in that church, there were also moments of comfort that I can’t deny. Even now, where else can you sing with so many others, that wondrous melding of family and strangers?

The true backbone of the church was the humble ladies who cared about everyone all along. The ladies who ran the nursery. The ladies who made baby blankets, including one for me. The ladies who wrote painstakingly neat on posterboards, making charts to let everyone know who should bring what to the next potluck. The ladies who wore stunning hats and their Sunday best, who gave me something beautiful and interesting to look at when the sun came in perfectly through the stained-glass windows.

My baby blanket, which was revamped by a woman who salvaged a piece of it and attached it to a new blanket, sits in a plastic bin in my brother’s basement, waiting to be unearthed one day if I ever have a daughter, who I hope is raised without fear.

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Check out my recent essays in Business Insider and Compound Butter, and my poems in Allium, a Journal of Poetry and Prose and I-70 Review. ICYMI, I also had a humor piece, “The Wedding Countdown for the Couple You Vaguely Knew in College Starts Now” in Points In Case.

As always, you can check out more of my work on my website.