The language of “purity” looms large within certain Christian discourses in the US. But what is “purity”? What are the religious, cultural, and religious implications of employing the metaphor of purity? Why might be a considered a problematic, or even dangerous, metaphor? Dan explores these and other issues in this week’s episode.
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Hello and welcome to the series It's in the Code, part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
As always, a pleasure to be in touch with you.
And as always, this series cannot work without you.
Keep the ideas coming, comments, feedback, love to hear from you.
Daniel Miller Swag, Daniel Miller S-W-A-J is the best way to reach me.
So I always say, I honestly reply to as many people as I can, and I know that I miss some and just run out of time, but please keep them coming.
Really value that.
Value the support, emotional and otherwise.
Value all of you listening.
You are what keep us going at Straight White American Jesus.
So diving into today's topic, I wanted to hit on a theme today that people, like, basically when they hear about this series or I get a lot of emails and they're like, I can't believe you haven't done this one yet.
And I think they're right.
And what I want to talk about is the idea of purity.
Now.
The trick is, if you are at all familiar with the discourses of socially conservative Christianity in this country, you'll be familiar with appeals to quote-unquote purity.
If you're not familiar with those discourses but have people in your life who are shaped by them, you've probably heard appeals to purity and you've been really mystified by them, right?
It's just not a way that people talk outside of a certain kind of religious context.
Now, here's the trick, okay?
If that word purity, as soon as you hear it, it kind of gets your hackles up, it's probably because of its link to what is known as sexual purity culture, right?
Which is basically the idea that observant Christians should remain sexually pure, which means virgins, until marriage in a straight, cis, lifelong, monogamous marriage, and so forth, okay?
That is definitely one place where the concept and discourse of purity figures prominently, probably the most prominent place where it figures and comes up.
But it's not the only place, and my focus here is not purity culture, right?
And...
Now, by all means, if people want to email me and push back on that and be like, you absolutely should talk more about purity culture or something like that, or expand on what you say today on purity, I'm open to hearing that, okay?
But here are my reasons why I don't want to focus specifically on purity culture in this.
The first thing is that it's a whole big issue in its own right.
People who listen to the podcast, people who have taken Sarah Mosliner's seminar with Straight White American Jesus, people who are familiar with her work, people who are familiar with the discussions Brad and I have had on and on and on and on, you know that this is a topic we talk about a lot.
You know that it's a really big topic.
It sort of requires its own space and a lot of oxygen to talk about, and that's just not something we're going to tackle in, you know, an episode on this podcast series.
Like I say, if it's something that you're really pushing for, let me know.
Let me hear it, and we'll think about that.
Okay?
But the second reason is also that I think I want to point to some general points about the broader idea of purity as such.
The Shed Light on Purity Culture, certainly, but aren't limited to it, right?
This series is called In the Code, but what I want to do is crack the code on the very concept of purity itself, which would help us to understand how does it operate, yes, within purity culture, but how does it operate in understandings of spirituality?
How does it operate when it comes into political forms, like the purity of the people, or the purity of the nation, or the purity of the body politic?
That's what I want to dive into and look at for just a little while today.
So let's dive in and let's pick up on that last point, okay?
Conservative Christians talk about purity a lot.
And yes, I'm talking about conservative Christians again.
No, they're not the only ones who talk this way.
People who talk about not only sexual purity, but having a pure heart, practicing a pure religion.
If you're within that conservative Christian context, that's usually couched in terms of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, etc.
Having pure motives and intentions and so forth, right?
And it's probably clear to anyone who hears this language that the language of purity is essentially the language of morality, right?
To be pure in whatever way is to be morally upright or appropriate in whatever domains is in question.
And within Christianity, right, the Christian imagery and questions of morality and right and wrong and whatever they have to do with this category of sin, right?
So to be impure or to be immoral is to be governed by sin, which means that only those who are pure are acceptable to God.
And on one hand, it makes sense that Christians talk this way because this is really common imagery in the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible.
So it's a ready-made image for Christians to pick up and run with.
And I would say that for Christians who speak this way, it feels completely natural.
Perhaps even so natural that other ways of thinking or feeling seem to be impossible, right?
It feels completely natural.
But I want to point out, again, that not all Christians tend to talk this way.
Once again, we're in a discourse in a kind of language that is more prominent within theologically conservative Christianity, and I find that significant.
And again, welcome feedback from people.
I'm happy to hear somebody who says, you know what, I think you're mistaken about that.
I think it's super, super common discourse in, I don't know, liberal Protestantism or something like that.
But I don't think that's the case, right?
And I think part of that is for some of the reasons that we'll get into here in a few minutes why I have reservations.
Really not just reservations, that's too soft.
Opposition to using the language of purity.
Okay, so given the common biblical use of the language of purity, it makes sense maybe that a lot of Christians talk or have talked this way.
But from another perspective, I think it's actually a really weird way for conservative Christians in particular to speak.
And the first thing I want to point out here is that the language of purity, it's a metaphor.
Okay?
Now this is interesting because I've had this conversation with so many people.
I've had the conversation with students.
I've had the conversation with others.
I'll say the metaphor of purity.
People are like, it's not a metaphor.
It's true.
This is what it is.
And it's really, really interesting because it is a metaphor.
Okay?
When we think of sinfulness or immoral behavior as impurity, we don't literally think that there is some part of us, some physical substance that has been stained or blemished, right?
We're speaking metaphorically.
It's not like if we take, I don't know, a drop, you know, a glass of distilled water and we put some drops of ink into it or something and say, oh, the water's no longer pure, right?
That's literal purity.
The language of purity reflects a metaphor of pollution or contamination, but it's, as a metaphor, it's not literally true, right?
And I think that that's really, really important.
Why do I think that that's really important?
Because I think that brings us to sort of decoding it a little bit and understanding the work that it does, right?
The first thing, maybe the most obvious to folks, is that certainly for conservative Christians who use this language, there is often such an insistence on literality and being literal, right?
They will say, we take the Bible literally, or this is the literal Word of God, or literal, literal, literal, literal.
I've got my issues, philosophical and otherwise, with the concept of literality.
I don't think it's coherent, but that's the claim that they'll make.
And so it's interesting that they place this metaphorical understanding of purity so much at the center of their thought and their self-understanding, right?
That's one thing that's worth noting.
The second one, though, is more significant and it's this.
And I don't want to delve too deep into this, but it's actually a metaphor that doesn't fit with key ideas in conservative Christian theology.
Why do I say that?
I say that because most theologically conservative Christians essentially have a legal understanding of sin and salvation.
What do I mean by that?
I mean that for them, when they say we are fallen and we are sinful, they mean we have violated God's commands or laws or will, and we therefore stand guilty of violating a law.
God's law, in this case.
When they say that we are condemned to eternal damnation, that's the sentence that comes from being found guilty, as it were, for violating the law.
It's a legal standing.
When they say that one is saved through faith in Christ because Christ, quote, paid the penalty that we owe, this is the model of what's called substitutionary atonement.
Christ was our substitute paying the penalty that we incurred.
Christ basically serves our sentence for us, right?
It's an essentially legal understanding.
And this is exactly why they'll argue, for example, that God had to have some sort of penalty, right?
His own justice, his own law requires that the law be fulfilled.
It's a legal kind of understanding.
Now, I have all kinds of problems with that theology, right?
But let's set that aside.
That's not what this podcast is, right?
What I'm getting at here is that with the idea of purity, as basic an issue as it might seem to many conservative Christians, It doesn't seem like a metaphor that fits with the theology of those most likely to appeal to it, right?
It's not typically how we talk about people who break the law as being sort of impure and so forth, right?
So those are some of the issues that I have with the language of purity.
I call them technical issues.
It's what a certain level of decoding reveals, right?
That it's a metaphorical way of speaking used predominantly by Christians who claim that they're being literal.
It's a metaphor that doesn't seem to fit with the actual theological tenets of conservative Christians, right?
But if those are my only issues with the language of purity, they wouldn't amount to much, right?
Here's my bigger concern.
It's not that it's not a metaphor that fits well with their theology.
I don't hold to their theology.
They can use whatever metaphors they want.
That's not really my issue.
My bigger issue is that it's a dangerous metaphor.
Why would I say this?
It's because of this, right?
And this is built into the metaphor.
It's in the code, right?
When something comes down to it, when it comes down to it, something is impure.
It ultimately has to be what?
Purified.
And this can only mean that whatever stain or blemish or pollution that is contaminating, it has to be removed.
And this is a problem because we have encountered and continue to encounter the language of purity in lots of contexts where the demand for purification involves horrors carried out on other human beings, very often in the name of religion and very often historically, specifically in the name of Christianity.
Every instance of genocide or ethnic cleansing undertaken in the name of the pure people is an example of this.
They're not all Christian, they're not all religious, but they have been.
Xenophobia, an anti-immigrant sentiment in the name of a pure population protected by firm borders that keep the national body pure and so forth, that keep those quote-unquote contaminants out?
That's purification.
Efforts aimed at criminalizing trans or gender non-conforming identity because they are impure expressions of gender?
Nationalisms around the world that oppress populations because they render the people impure, and many of those nationalisms at present are Christian.
Many others are not Christian, but are religious.
Right?
Now, somebody will say, well, Dan, those are extreme examples.
Right?
Yes, the language of purity can go there, but those are extreme examples.
They're not what well-intentioned American Christians mean when they appeal to purity.
Okay, right.
Here's my response.
The metaphor takes us there whether we like it or not.
Again, history is full of examples of Christians actively opposing others in the name of purity.
If it wasn't, I might be more open to that idea that, well, that's not the Christian use of purity, except that I know my history and I know that it is.
From the Crusades, to the Inquisition, to American slavery, to Jim Crow, to the contemporary Nashville Statement by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood at present, at this moment, Christians use the language of purity to marginalize and exclude.
And we don't just have to look to the past, right?
Millions of American Christians steeped in the language of purity have long been primed for the logics of nationalism and populism that are expressed in contemporary Christian nationalism in this country.
Right?
That's what concerns me.
People often ask, how did Christian nationalism sort of gain the momentum that it's had in recent years?
How did probably millions of well-intentioned, well-meaning American Christians who, I don't know, a couple decades ago might have never, never looked at contemporary Christian nationalism, how did they fall into it?
I think the language of purity primes them for it.
I think the very idea of purity itself is part of what has facilitated that slide of so many American Christians into full-throated Christian nationalism.
And the effects of the language of period, they're not just felt in large scale context.
They live in the experience and the embodiment of individual people that Christians find impure in some way.
They live in the experience and the bodies of sexually active teens who are marginalized, the LGBTQ community, people of color who don't have don't have a place within majority white religious spaces and on and on and on.
What all of these examples express, for me, ultimately, is the desire to purify.
And this can only be brought about, purification can only be brought about, by eliminating those individuals and groups who pollute the Christian body, or the national body, or the white race, or whatever.
Whether this removal is literal and final, as in Hitler's final solution, or it's just merely, I got this in quotes, it's only a metaphor, it's merely a metaphor, the inner logic is the same.
It's in the code of purity, the demands of purification, and the realization of what that would actually require is written in.
It is built into the metaphor itself.
And to those who would say, well, that's not what I mean, or that's not what I believe, or that's not what I want, I would say this, then find another metaphor.
And this is an interesting conversation to have with people, folks, because number one, if somebody finds a different metaphor, what they're going to find is their theology is going to change with it.
And if they won't find another metaphor, if this is a metaphor they are unwilling to give up on, then my response is, don't tell me that these other theological outcomes of that metaphor, don't tell me that those are accidental, don't tell me that they're not what they mean, if you can't articulate the theology without them.
If your religious belief requires the category of purity, then the notion of purification is built into it.
And to return to the final point, this is why I don't think that all Christians, and not even all conservative Christians, I'm not painting with too broad a brush here, they don't all speak this way because I think there are lots of different kinds of Christians, Christian groups, Christian individuals who recognize the implications of this and, like me, are deeply uncomfortable with the notion of purity and are going to talk other ways.
And things follow from that.
All right, I gotta wrap this up.
There's more we could say about purity.
Let me know.
Let me know what you think.
Let me know if we need to talk about purity more.
Let me know, not just sexual purity, but if we need to elaborate on this more.
It's a big topic.
It's one of the, you know, if we talk about code words, it's one of the biggest ones that there is, and it's pervasive, and it's like a kudzu vine that just kind of goes through everything.
And so I'm happy to go there if people want to go there.
Daniel Miller Swedge, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Let me know what you think.
As always, thank you for listening.
Thank you for supporting us.
Thank you for everything that you do.
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As always, until we meet again in this strange virtual context and format, please be well.
