Brad speaks with Dr. Sara Moslener, author of Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence from Oxford University Press. Dr. Moslener outlines the history of purity culture from the 19th century to the present, highlighting the eugenicist and racist ideologies that fueled it. One of the often overlooked tropes is how sexual purity was enforced through appeals to patriotism--as if keeping the borders of the body secure would help keep the nation's borders impenetrable. They also discuss contemporary purity movements, such as Silver Ring Thing, that convince young people that living their best life is a matter of sexual chastity and giving away one's virginity will ruin their life irrevocably.
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Axis Mundi Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor, Religious Studies, Skidmore College, and I have an incredible guest today.
I'm very excited about our conversation.
I'm going to be speaking with Dr. Sarah Mosliner.
Dr. Mosliner is a lecturer in religion at Central Michigan University and the author of an incredible book, Virgin Nation, Sexual Purity and American Adolescence from Oxford University Press.
Dr. Mosliner's work has been featured in places like Salon, Cosmo, Jezebel.
And Dr. Mosliner has written for Sojourners, Religious Dispatches, Religion and Politics, among other places.
So, we're going to be talking about purity culture, we're going to be talking about sex, and American national security.
So, Sarah, thanks for joining me.
Thank you for being here.
It's my pleasure, Brad.
Happy to be here and have this conversation.
And before we started recording, we were just having a very important discussion about Teenage Bounty Hunters, the new series from Netflix, which has some purity culture in it.
Two thumbs up, I gotta say.
I need to know who the writers are on that show because they are just nailing it.
So, yeah.
My only question is, how come neither of us got a phone call to be in that writing room?
Well, I'm so looking forward to... I mean, there's so much for religion scholars to be writing about now, but I look forward to people who do popular culture to hear the analysis of it, because it's really remarkable.
Well, let me jump in and ask you about some of the main through lines of your book.
You're really dealing in Virgin Nation with what we know as purity culture, and purity culture in very simple terms is the idea that you don't have sex until you're married.
You're pure, quote unquote, until you're married.
Now, recent scholarship, memoir, documentaries, we've had so many great things come out that have shown us that purity culture and its effects are much more than just this simple idea of waiting to have sex until you're married.
It rests on oppressive visions of female sexuality.
It's, of course, very sex negative.
It rests on assumptions of heteronormativity and patriarchy.
You have really provided an essential voice to this conversation.
You've added to it.
You've contributed in a major way.
And one of the things you bring to the forefront in Virgin Nation is that sexual purity has also been, for evangelicals going back all the way to the 19th century, a matter of national security.
So that's not something we think about.
How does sexual purity link up with national security?
How does that work?
Right, right.
So this was something I learned in the course of my dissertation research, and my first inkling of it was when I was interviewing Denny Patton, who is the founder and director of Silver Ring Thing, which is one of the purity organizations I was studying.
And what he said to me was, and of course he gave this caveat that, oh, this has nothing to do with purity, but I find it really interesting.
And he goes on to talk about a theory of why civilizations rise and why they decline.
And I said, huh.
That didn't come from nowhere.
And so I started digging into that.
Now, the other thing that was happening is that Silver Ring Thing had a video that they showed at their events that had these lyrics that basically said, if you use a condom, all these terrible things are going to happen.
And it's just like a child who asks his mother, for all these dangerous things like a chainsaw to make a shelter for illegal immigrants.
or to build a fire to to appease the gods or to to build a nuclear bomb and of course the mother is like sure just wear protection and of course by the end of this video a nuclear bomb is exploding so i have these two pieces of information just from looking at the How?
How?
What?
How?
Like, how is it that they're able to make this connection between nuclear destruction and Wearing a condom, right?
So safe sex.
So I had to take a deep, deep dive and it took me through several people whom evangelicals over the course of the 20th century have found authoritative.
So someone like Arnold Toynbee, who was an English historian whom evangelicals, especially at mid-century, just loved because they saw him making the argument that connecting evangelical teachings with possibilities for the end of the world, and especially through theories of rise and decline.
And of course he's building on Edward Gibbons and his famous rise and decline of the Roman Empire, right?
So people like Billy Graham, Carl F.H.
Henry, James Dobson, right?
These are all the key people who are building this wall of purity, right, as a form of national protection, are able to use his intellectual work to make these faith-based arguments. are able to use his intellectual work to make these
And so once I got that into place and said, oh, look, and I could see in all these different places, and even going back to the 19th century, the connection between national security and sexual purity, For the 19th century folks, it was about civilizational advancement.
What is best for the civilization?
And it's sexual purity.
It's sexually pure women and pure races that will move us forward.
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