Axis Mundi Media is proud to introduce Pure White - A history podcast series that traces the relationships among sexual purity, White supremacy, and Christian nationalism from the 19th century to the present.
What happens when you link national renewal to the sexual lives of teenagers? This is exactly what evangelical purity culture did in the 1990s. In this first episode, host Dr. Sara Moslener recounts the history and details of purity culture's advent, leaving us with an important question: If sexual purity is the way to restore the nation - what does "purity" mean when we go beyond individual sexual decisions to a vision for our nation? In the case of the United States, the answer is surprising: the national vision cultivated in purity culture has historical roots in White supremacy.
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So I want to play you a sound from my podcast, and you have to guess what it is.
And I'll give you a hint.
White Christian nationalism.
Ooh, I like this game.
Okay, go for it.
I think that's the sound in my brain whenever Ron DeSantis says the word "woke." Is that correct?
No.
Okay.
Is that the sound of Doug Wilson and other people from his Christian supremacist community building a survival bunker in Idaho?
Nope.
Brad, that is the sound of sexual purity.
Hmm.
I'm a little scared now, but all right.
Tell me more.
That is the sound of dozens of teenagers from the Southern Baptist Convention hammering over 200,000 purity pledge cards attached to tiny wooden stakes into a lawn.
Wow.
Okay.
Still not seeing the Christian nationalism.
Ah, well, that has everything to do with where this is happening.
It was 1994, and these kids were participating in an event sponsored by Youth for Christ and True Love Weights.
The Southern Baptist Convention had recruited them to create a display of purity pledge cards in Washington, D.C., directly in front of the U.S.
Capitol building.
There it is.
White Christian nationalism.
Yep.
Welcome to Pure White, a podcast about sexual purity and white supremacy, a co-production of Access Moody Media and the After a co-production of Access Moody Media and the After a Purity Project.
I'm your host, Sarah Moss Lerner.
Welcome to our first episode, Prelude to a Reckoning.
For 15 years, I've studied this thing we now call Evangelical Purity Culture.
I started doing so long before anyone was really speaking publicly about it and their experiences, good or bad, before we even knew what to call it.
In my earliest research, I referred to it as the faith-based abstinence movement.
It did not catch on.
My only regret with that is the loss of an amazing acronym.
For those of you who are new to evangelical purity culture, never heard of True Love Waits or a purity pledge, here's my friend from seminary, Laura, reciting the pledge she took at the age of 17.
Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate, and my future children to be sexually abstinent from this day until the day I enter a biblical marriage relationship.
How do you feel reading those words now?
At 46, almost 47 years, I'm like, hey, no one needs to make this commitment to all of these people.
If you're going to make the commitment, it can be between God and yourself.
And if it's something that, yeah, you want to do for your future mate, great.
My future children, My family, my friends, I mean, there's a lot of dynamics in all of those relationships.
When it comes to your physical body, they're not the ones determining the care of your physical body unless you're incapacitated, which if I'm reading this, is not the case!
It is, in some ways, a form of incapacitation, I think many people have found.
- Yes, yes, yeah.
And I'm just sitting here going, oh wow, that was a whole lot for, I don't remember if I was 17 or 18 year old to be committing to. - Laura didn't just sign a pledge card.
She was recruited to join a leadership team of mostly adults to organize a True Love Weights event at her public school.
The event included music from a popular Christian band, inspirational speakers, an old-fashioned altar call, and an opportunity for teens like Laura to sign their True Love Weights pledge card.
I remember that in the meetings preparing for the rally, it was like, oh, we want to see how many cards we can send, and wouldn't it just be amazing to have all these cards there, and for the government to see.
What does the government care if we decide to be abstinent or not?
But there was this sense that, like, you're sending a message to Washington.
Yes, yes, yes.
And maybe it wasn't just to Washington, but to the country as a whole, that there are young people so convicted that are willing to sign this pledge.
And I'm like, look at this pledge.
And I'm like, dear God.
Did it make you feel like you were part of something bigger?
Oh, I definitely felt like I was part of something bigger and being a part of this group of people planning and being like one of very few youth involved in the planning process gave me a sense of self-confidence in the leadership aspect that I could lead in other ways.
Thank God My horizons expanded and I've discovered being called to lead people in ministries of love and grace and connection and not just, hey, protect your twat.
Laura's response is not at all unique.
Over the last 10 years, opposition to purity culture teachings have grown from modest objection to shrill outcry.
The fallout has been astonishing to watch, especially in the last few years.
People who grew up and out of purity culture are now part of a mass exodus from American evangelicalism.
And yes, there are many reasons why people are leaving white evangelicalism.
But in most studies so far, purity culture is at the top of the list.
Hi, I'm Kurt Loder with MTV News.
Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain, an extraordinarily gifted singer, songwriter, and guitarist, was found dead in Seattle on Friday morning.
Apparently a suicide.
I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
Miss Lewinsky.
I never told anybody it's alive.
Not a single time.
Never.
You've got mail.
Many of the stories begin in the 1990s, when True Love Weights began campaigning for the commitments and signatures of Christian teenagers.
These kids were being asked to make a statement of personal faith and morality, but it was much more than that.
They were being told that their commitment to sexual purity was an example for the entire nation, a nation plagued by sexual immorality.
Those of you who are 50 years old or younger will not remember what happened culturally in the 1960s, but the world literally turned upside down during the latter part of that decade.
That's when traditional values and biblical morality were ridiculed and tossed out like an old shoe.
In 1967, the cover of Time Magazine posed the question, Is God Dead?
And from that era forward, a sexual revolution swept the nation and it continues to this day.
Sexually pure adolescence, they were told, would lead the nation back to God.
Southern Baptist youth pastor and now seminary professor Richard Ross conceived of true love weights with his colleagues in the mid-1980s after Surgeon General C. Everett Koop urged Protestant church leaders to begin developing faith-based, abstinence-only sex education.
Moral panics around teen pregnancy and HIV AIDS easily convinced churches they needed to be proactive in this work, not just to protect the young people, but to restore the moral core of the nation.
When Ross reflects on the origins of True Love Weights, he talks about it as if it happened by magic.
That when he asked teenagers to commit to sexual purity in public, they flocked to do so.
So in that season of my life, I was a youth pastor, part-time, Nashville area.
And so the team said, hey, why don't you go to the youth group?
See what they think.
So that's exactly what I did.
I got with the teenagers.
Now, the context is, This was the day where AIDS was just mushrooming.
Everybody was scared out of their minds.
The government was responding with the whole condom thing in schools.
All the science teachers were doing banana demonstrations.
I mean, everybody was saturated with that.
And so I said to the young people, how does everything you're hearing feel to you right now?
And the teenagers said, it's depressing.
They said, all the adults think we can't control ourselves.
All the adults think we're just wild animals, crazy, and we're going to do despicable things.
And somehow they've got to protect our health.
And I said, okay, let me just ask you a question.
If everybody else is coming out of the closet right now, maybe you guys need to come out of the closet.
Maybe you just need to say, hey, we have found a way of living that we love.
It's positive, it's wonderful, makes human beings wonderful people, and we would be interested in being identified with this way of living.
And the teenager said, oh, that would be amazing.
So it's like we're not embarrassed about how we live.
We can talk about it out loud.
It's something we could even link arms and do together.
And I said, yeah, what do you think?
And actually, 53 young people said, you know, we would we would be willing to go public for a moment like that.
It's true that True Love Waits collected a lot of pledge cards in the first two years, over 200,000.
Over 200,000.
True Love waits gained a purchase with teenagers by framing their commitment to sexual purity as an act of rebellion toward a government that no longer believed in them.
And also toward a growing cultural embrace of LGBTQ people.
To make sure there was no mistake that making a purity pledge was essential to Christian piety, True Love waits created a special edition of the Bible, marketing it as part of their campaign.
New Bibles even included a pledge card for the reader to sign on their own.
In the foreword to the Bible, Richard Ross wrote this, Over the centuries, God has chosen to initiate sweeping revival and awakenings through youth and young adults.
In America, God has sparked revivals among those just completing their teenage years, frequently on college campuses.
Even now, signs of revival on numerous college campuses suggest a beginning.
I believe that it will be pure, courageous, True Love Weights teenagers and young adults whom God will be using to change the very fabric of our society.
God will receive even greater glory, and then we will know the rest of the True Love Waits story.
Ross's explanation of True Love Waits is just one of the many examples of the way that white Christian nationalism has been normalized within American evangelicalism.
This opens up a whole host of questions that we'll be exploring in this series.
For example, is a person's sexual decision-making relevant to achieving the well-being of the nation-state?
Ross says yes, but in doing so, he frames sex not as a natural human instinct, but as a threat to collective thriving.
So, for me, the real question is this.
Why is the fear of sex presumed to be a foundation of national thriving?
This question appears frequently in the history of LGBTQ life, most notably during the Cold War when queer people working in the federal government were viewed as a threat to national security.
But the history of sexual purity takes us back even further to a time when sexuality and sexual fear were defined first and foremost along the lines of racial identity.
So we're going back to the times and places where sexual purity was a prominent tool for maintaining a social order premised on racial inequality.
Because what many of our current conversations miss is that evangelical purity culture is not just a project about sexual restraint and conformity to so-called biblical sexual morality and gender roles.
It is also a story about racism in the United States.
One that begins with America's original sin, the institution of slavery.
Pure White is a podcast about sexual purity and white supremacy and has been made possible by generous grants from the Louisville Institute and the Loose Project on Religion and Sexual Abuse.
Special thanks to Brad Onishi and Laura Kirkpatrick for their conversations and contributions to this episode.
Next time on Pure White, we'll be investigating sexual purity within the institution of slavery in the American South.
If you've never read Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this is a great time to do so.
You can find a link to the entire open source publication in the show notes.
