Our discussion of purity culture, gender complementarianism, and our interview with the Revernd Sarah Buteux, Associate Pastor of First Churches in Northampton, which happens to be Jonathan Edwards' church.
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I am an Associate Professor of Religion, Skidmore College, and I'm here with my co-host.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm an Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
And today our focus, we're calling the episode Dating Jesus.
It's kind of a weird Weird title.
And I'm going to start with a story, a little embarrassing story, about once upon a time as an undergrad.
And as a reminder, as an undergrad, I was a dyed-in-the-wool, hardcore evangelical Christian.
I was at an evangelical undergraduate institution, and I was crushing pretty hard on this girl there.
And I asked her out one time, and she said, she shot me down.
And the reason she shot me down is that right now she said, I'm dating Jesus.
Now, That's going to sound weird, and you'll have stories like this too, but within the evangelical context, certainly at the time, that was not a weird notion.
And it was a euphemism for, in evangelical parlance, focusing on their relationship with God as opposed to dating.
But it was also a broader euphemism for the purity movement and culture within evangelicalism.
And what we want to talk about today is a little bit about that movement, but more importantly, what that movement has to tell us about evangelicals and politics and broader culture.
I mean, first of all, it's hard to be mad.
If someone's dating Jesus, OK, look, I mean, that's just like, OK, you I mean, you can't compete with that.
And you got to just say, well, you know, that's you got to leave it there.
I mean, anyone who's God and human simultaneously literally walks on water.
I mean, yeah, that's just sorry.
Just go.
Just walk away.
More seriously, though, Dan, I think some people have heard a lot about purity culture.
I think people are aware that evangelicals are very into the idea of sexual purity, right?
But it's kind of hard sometimes to understand what that means.
Why would someone in college say, I'm dating Jesus?
What kind of culture of mores does that come from?
Yeah, so the language of purity, right?
It's essentially a movement that says that one has to remain a virgin until marriage.
And we should be really clear here, marriage means heterosexual, monogamous marriage, right?
And we're interested today in some issues on gender roles as they're understood with evangelicalism.
We're going to get into some LGBTQ issues in subsequent episodes, but this would be relevant to that as well.
But the idea is that you are somehow defiled or sinful if you engage in inappropriate sexual contact, including sexual intercourse, before marriage.
And there's this whole booming industry within evangelicalism.
Movements like True Love Waits, The Silver Ring Thing, Pure Freedom.
There's a well-known book by a guy named Joshua Harris called I Kiss Dating Goodbye.
So there's this whole culture built up around this conception of sexual purity.
And one of the things that's interesting about it, and this is what interests us, and you're going to have a couple really useful anecdotes about this, I think, in a few minutes, is that on one hand, this is a movement that's supposed to be about all people.
All people, men and women, are called to be sexually pure until and unless they get married, right?
In which case, sex becomes okay.
But, these movements are also structured around really different conceptions of male sexuality and female sexuality.
And this is really crucial because men or boys are, on this discourse, by nature, they're sexually aggressive, they have a voracious sexual appetite, they are driven by physical desire rather than emotional connection.
They're essentially these sort of libidinous creatures that have to be controlled.
Women, by nature, are sexually vulnerable.
They're sort of naturally modest.
They're emotionally rather than physically oriented.
Chastity is kind of their essential state.
And so you get a double standard, right?
To be sexually quote-unquote pure, if you're a man, means that you're going against your nature.
You're fighting against your natural tendencies.
Whereas for women, their natural state is Purity and chastity and so forth and what results in this is that when somebody fails to maintain that purity if it's a man That's unfortunate and that's bad.
And yes, it's sin.
They shouldn't have done that.
But you know kind of what do you expect?
It's it's it's their nature.
They're gonna have shortcomings.
We need to be compassionate when women fail to maintain purity and so forth.
It means that they have violated their nature.
They've gone against what they most naturally are.
So there's a sense that to stick with this language of purity or defilement, their defilement or impurity is greater than that of men.
And you, you've, from your ministry days, have a great example of this, an illustration of this.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, I was, I was an evangelical youth minister for seven years.
And I remember so clearly this time that we were at summer camp and often at summer camp, students would sort of renew their faith in evangelical language.
They would say they would recommit themselves to Jesus. - Yes.
And oftentimes that meant that they would share things that were considered sinful, that they would sort of confess things to counselors or to other people.
I remember so clearly one counselor being so disturbed because she was a female counselor and she'd spoken with a young woman who was 14 or 15, and she was so disturbed because this young woman had confessed, and mind you this is in the late 90s, early aughts, There was really no internet then in the ways there are now.
She had confessed that she had found her way to reading, like, dirty stories at night, right?
That she had somehow gained access to, you know, what we consider X-rated... Erotica, kind of writing.
Totally, right?
And what resulted there was this, I remember this so vividly, this conversation about the psychological Stability of that woman.
Now, mind you, there were so many of our boys, teenage boys from those days in our ministry, who would confess, oh, I found my dad's Playboys or I, you know, went on this nascent internet thing and I found some dirty pictures or whatever.
We never blinked.
I mean, we said, hey, you know, it's great that you're confessing that.
Recommit your life to the Lord.
Repent from those sins.
But, you know, we're so proud of you for being, you know, coming clean from that.
When this young woman asserted, or let me say it this way, when she admitted that she had sort of asserted her sexuality in some way, it was like, not that we were questioning her commitment to Jesus.
It was like we were questioning her psychological stability.
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