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The sex/gender ideology structuring high-control American Christianity often has devastating effects on those who come out of it. This is true for those who accept theses teachings and carry them out in their own lives, and also for those who come to reject these teachings and attempt to leave them behind. For many of these people, theses teachings lead to lasting sexual dysfunction and frustration, undermining attempts to enter into meaningful sexual relationships with others. Why is this? How do we explain it? And why do these effects persist both for people who accept this ideology and for those who reject it? Listen to this week’s episode as Dan explains.
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A series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am, of course, Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College and your host.
Pleased to be with you.
Thank you, as always, for listening.
As always, welcome your insights, input, comments.
Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
I'm just continuing to throw out.
I've been throwing this out for a while, but if you've got thoughts, some upcoming series that I'm thinking about.
One of which is questions, you know, questions I couldn't ask in church.
And so if you've got topics, right, the kinds of things that, questions that used to keep you up at night, or maybe it's the kind of question you asked in Sunday school when you were a kid, or that you always wanted to ask your pastor, but you knew you couldn't, or maybe you did, and you got the really negative response to that, let me know.
Reach out, send that, you can post it in the Discord, or you can put it in an email, but if you just put the header in, questions I couldn't ask in church, As well as still toying around with some kind of apologetic stuff, the people in your life, again, maybe a pastor, maybe Uncle Ron, maybe you used to be super into Christian apologetics, whatever, something that the arguments for, like, you know, why it just has to be that God exists and that those of us who think that maybe God doesn't exist are wrong or irrational.
Let me know that as well.
So keep those ideas coming.
Those are, again, episodes, series that I've got thinking about for the future.
Probably later in the spring and even into the summer.
Would love to hear from you.
And as always, any insights on this series, the series that we've been in, anything else, standalone topics, value you all so much, and your insights, and you are what keep this series going.
So, I want to dive in here.
We are coming into, this is the last episode in the series that we've been in.
We've got to talk about the sex stuff.
This is a series that's been looking at the dimensions of different dimensions of the sort of sex-gender ideology within conservative, high-control American Christianity.
And in a lot of ways, this is an episode that I think, you know, brings together a lot of the things we've been talking about.
And for me, it's kind of a, I don't know, kind of a culminating episode, a sort of the big so-what episode.
About all of this, though I understand, obviously, there are elements of that in every episode that we've been looking at.
But what I want to look at today really are the concrete effects that this ideology has on people.
And I'm calling it, why can't I just...
And then you could fill that in.
Why can't I just turn it off?
Why can't I just enjoy sex?
Why can't I just...
And what we're looking at are the lingering effects that this ideology can have on the minds and bodies of those within it, and why those effects can persist so long after someone abandons or even after someone fulfills the tenets of this ideology.
And this is something that really ties together with the coaching work that I do.
Again, I'm a coach working with people dealing with religious trauma, the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
And I want to throw that out there because if you're listening and this resonates with you, I would invite you to just consider that something like trauma coaching or counseling is something that could be useful for you.
And I want to throw that out for reasons that I think will become clear as we go along here.
And a warning with this, this is an episode about the traumatic effects of this ideology, so if that's something that could be troubling for you, if it's something that you're way too familiar with and you don't need to sit through an episode hearing more about that, just fair warning.
Feel free to maybe move on to the next episode or something like that if that's going to be too significant.
My aim is not to sort of activate anybody or re-traumatize anybody talking about this, but that's where we're headed today, okay?
So, kind of a recap again.
We haven't used the term a lot in this series, but the whole system we've been discussing is what falls under the nomenclature of purity culture.
I've done stuff on purity culture before.
I've done stuff on the concept of purity.
Many of you are familiar with this.
It is something that has come up in straight white American Jesus in various contexts in lots of ways.
But purity culture is essentially structured around, this whole sex-gender ideology is structured around a set of promises.
And the promises work like this.
If people are faithful to God and live out the dictates of this sex and gender ideology, and if you're just tuning in or something, I invite you, go back, listen to the other episodes, everything that we've been talking about for weeks and weeks now.
If you are faithful and you live all of that out, if you express your gender properly...
If you sanctify your fallen, unredeemed sexuality, if you refrain from having sex until you're married, if you remain quote-unquote pure, which is to say virgins, if you do all of that, then God promises a whole series of rewards, some of which we've talked about in prior episodes.
Basically, that's the payoff.
If you do this, God will reward you.
And some of those rewards are pretty basic.
You get the line about how abstinence is the only fully effective form of birth control or STI prevention.
So you get a sort of a health piece to this.
If you want the assurance that you're not going to have a child out of wedlock, that you're not going to contract an STI and so forth, this is the way to do it.
And I remember this was the line of the pastor of the church that I went to in Arkansas when I was in high school.
He used to say, there's no such thing as safe sex, only safe sin.
So you want to live a...
A godly lifestyle and know the assurance that you're going to remain healthy and pure and so forth.
You do this.
But others of these promises are more substantive.
We talked about this.
For men, if you curb your dangerous, consuming sexuality, if you save yourself for marriage, you will be rewarded with a virginal, pure wife.
This is what you are sort of promised within this.
And she will be someone that God has designed for you from the beginning of time.
Her role will be to meet your sexual needs and to help you curb and properly shape your inherent fallen sexuality.
And most of the Christian sex guides that you look at get pretty misogynistic when it comes to articulating this set of promises.
They're very explicit and very clear.
Like, if you're a guy...
That's the benefit of reining in that sexuality, is you're going to get this lifelong sex partner who's basically, she's there to satisfy your sexual needs and wants and so forth.
Okay?
For women, and there's a lot that's been written about this.
There's a lot of really great work out there on the effects of purity culture on women in particular.
For women, it's the Prince Charming promise.
God is going to bring her a man who has saved himself for her, who will...
Defend her, who will care for her, who will provide her with a family.
And remember, the centrality of family, especially for women within this subculture, right?
Family is really like the goal, the endpoint for women's sexuality is the production of children and becoming a mother and all that sort of stuff.
And it's worth noting that meeting sexual needs is typically not included in the Prince Charming myth.
It's not usually the Prince Charming is going to make sure that you have like...
An awesome sex life, and that your sexual encounters are great, and so forth.
All that devaluing of women's sexuality, all of that is there.
But the Prince Charming myth?
And then more broadly, and this really comes through in a lot of sort of contemporary articulations of the purity stuff, the promise of great sex.
Okay, again, this tends to be everything we've talked about, decidedly male-focused.
All of this, of course, is cis-heteronormative.
Again, there's no space for queer folk here, right?
But one of the promises is that saving oneself for marriage means that one will have fulfilling, lifelong sex with the partner that God has picked out without all the negative things that supposedly accompany not waiting until marriage to have sex.
And I invite you, if you're interested in this, there's a documentary, it's several years old now, but it's still, I think, really telling on this point.
It's called Give Me Sex, Jesus.
And if you Google around, you should be able to find it online.
It should be freely accessible.
I've taught this documentary a number of times in different classes.
But they have evangelical advocates of purity culture, and this is their kind of thing, you know, that like...
You know, once you've saved yourself from marriage, I mean, the rest of your life is this sexual rollercoaster ride.
It's amazing.
It's like you've got this person whose body is an amusement park for you to play in for the rest of your life.
The promise of great sex.
The promise of a partner.
The promise of great sex.
And so forth.
Now, there are all kinds of problems with this.
Lots of people hold the dictates of this sex-gender ideology, and they don't experience the promised reward.
They do everything they're supposed to do and they never meet a partner who's going to become a spouse.
Or they do and the sex isn't great or it doesn't work or it turns out that there's a lot more to marriage than just having sex.
Or that, I don't know, the sexual drive of the first couple years fades over time and the idea of being in that for 50, 60 years is not enticing or just on and on and on.
Those who fail to uphold the standards of purity...
Live in fear of having failed God and forfeited these promises.
So when they don't meet somebody to marry, you've got this added layer that it's because you didn't please God.
Or when your sex life isn't fulfilling, it's because you weren't pure and virginal when you got married or what have you.
And again, there's also no place here for queer folk.
So all kinds of problems with the promises of purity culture.
And we could talk about that, but that's not actually what I want to focus on.
We could go more deeply into that.
I want to acknowledge that, that these promises just can't be borne out.
But what I want to think about are the legacies of this ideology beyond the failed promises of the purity myth.
There's some overlap here, but I want to think about these.
And what I have in mind is the common, not universal.
I want to be very clear.
This is not universal.
It may not even be a majority of people.
But it is common.
The common sexual difficulties and dysfunction that are experienced.
By people coming out of this religious sex and gender ideology.
The way that it just messes up or inhibits their ability to have meaningful, pleasurable sexual relationships with others.
And in some cases, these are the true believers who play by all the rules.
These aren't just people who left this.
These are the true believers who played by all the rules, and they still live within that religious subculture.
And they experience these issues.
In other cases, and these are the people that I work with as a coach and have read about and encountered in other contexts as well, these are people who left the subculture and its teachings behind, but they still experience these issues.
They no longer accept the sex, gender, ideology they grew up with, but they still wrestle with these issues.
And again, this is one of the common experiences that a lot of my clients...
And that's where the title for this week's episode comes from.
Basically, I played by all the rules.
I obeyed all the teachings, so now that I'm married and now that I'm with my partner, why can't I just enjoy sex or reach orgasm or feel comfortable with my body or not feel guilty about having sex?
And it's similar, and this is what I think is surprising for a lot of people.
For those who have rejected this ideology, they have set it behind, but they still deal with it.
And this is the person who says, you know what, like, I don't even believe any of this stuff anymore, so why can't I just enjoy my partner or feel secure in my sexual identity or my queer identity?
Why can't I just not feel guilt and shame?
All of those things are still there for them, even though they don't believe this anymore, even though they left this subculture behind.
And if you read the literature on the effects of purity culture, you can find discussions and accounts of these issues.
And this is true especially for female-identified people.
I think that there has been.
I think that this is something that is maybe slowly changing, but I think it's still underrepresented.
There's been less attention given to the effects of purity culture and this sex-gender ideology on men, on male-identified people.
Dinner has on female-identified people.
I think that that's something that continues to develop, and it's something that I run up against.
It's something that I know others run up against.
It's sort of a gap, as it were, as people begin looking at this.
But you'll run across accounts of these effects.
And for all of these people, the issues they encounter are even more distressing because they don't seem to make sense.
What do I mean by that?
What I mean is, cognitively, On a conscious level, things should be fine.
For the true believers, the people who still are immersed within this subculture, this sex-gender ideology, they still take on board and believe and buy into all the things we've been talking about, they're now married.
They're with a partner.
They should be able to enter into fulfilling sex, and all those strictures and concerns and so forth are now gone, and yet they still run into problems.
And for the people who've left it behind, it can be even more distressing.
It's like, I don't even believe this, and yet I feel guilty when I have sex, or I can't perform sexually because of these hang-ups I have, or what have you.
Right?
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That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash RC. And so I said I want to look at concrete effects.
Here are some of the ways this can look for people in real life, and we could expand this list exponentially.
And if you're listening, And you're familiar with this.
I think this will resonate with you.
If you have people in your life that you've talked to, I think that this will sound familiar.
If you've researched this at all, you will see this, and you no doubt would have other examples, okay?
One it can look like is the committed married Christian couple who followed all those dictates of the sex-gender ideology, but they've never actually fully consummated their marriage, sometimes after years, because they just couldn't get sex to work.
Maybe the guy just couldn't perform sexually because of the legacies of coming out of this sex-gender ideology.
Or maybe for her, she could never get her body to relax, and so sex is painful, and they just couldn't get it to work, and they just gave up.
Or it's the married couple, Christian or not, who are too shamed and embarrassed about their own bodies to be able to connect sexually.
They've spent decades policing and reining in their thoughts about their own bodies and their own desires, and now it's all tied in with shame.
It's the woman who's never been able to reach or possibly doesn't even know about reaching orgasm, just doesn't know how to connect with her body in that way, either alone or with a partner.
It's the guy...
Who has so internalized the predatory understanding of his own sexuality, that notion that male sexuality is predatory and ravenous and so forth, that he feels guilty having sex with his wife or his consenting partner because he feels that he's violating her in some way.
He feels that every time, any time he has sex with even his wife or consenting partner, that he is somehow doing harm to her because of his inherent male sexuality.
It's the queer-identified individual who no longer even believes in God, but is crippled by fears of eternal punishment every time they engage in sex with a partner.
It's individuals who feel so disconnected from their own bodies that they just can't access them sexually.
It's like a whole dimension of themselves that simply isn't there.
Okay?
Again, we could multiply these examples.
But what links them is, in my mind, the radical disconnect between what the individuals consciously believe and think and feel.
Either, again, those who accept that sex gender ideology and those who rejected it.
The gap between what they consciously believe and think and feel and the embodied response they experience when it comes to sex.
And the question is, how do we explain this?
When somebody says, why can't I just?
Why can't I just get over this?
Why can't I just make this go away?
The answer is trauma.
These are some of the traumatic effects of this religious ideology.
And they're not something that most people are aware of or understand, and they may well not be something that people can solve on their own.
And the first thing to recognize here is we've got to talk about this for a minute, like what trauma is and what trauma isn't.
Trauma is a word that's used a lot in popular culture at this point and probably overused in some ways.
The first thing to recognize is that negative or painful or neglectful or abusive experiences are not inherently traumatizing in a technical sense.
Why do I say that?
I'm not saying that they're not painful.
Trauma names a condition in which our physiological systems for managing stresses or threats are overwhelmed.
It's basically our nervous system is like sort of activated in particular ways and is overwhelmed.
It's when those systems in our body that kick in in times of stress or threat are sort of stuck in the on position, even after those threats have passed.
Okay?
For a lot of people, when they experience negative or painful or neglectful or abusive experiences, once those threats have passed, once they're gone, their nervous systems return to their normal state.
That's what I mean when I say that they're not experiencing trauma.
They don't have lingering negative effects from those experiences.
Okay?
For traumatized people, that doesn't happen.
Their systems remain in this kind of heightened state, and they can be thrown into overdrive long after or in the absence of real stressors or threats.
And that's what we call triggering.
When something just ordinary in the world, quote-unquote, triggers...
Your nervous system to go into that kind of stress response, kind of out of context and out of proportion.
That's what we're talking about when we talk about trauma, okay?
And here I'm drawing on the pioneering work that's taking place on religious trauma, and I talk about Dr. Laura Anderson.
She's the founder of the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
I've been on her podcast.
She has been on our podcast.
I invite you to check out her book, When Religion Hurts You, if you want to take a deeper dive into this.
Really good stuff.
But what she highlights is that within high-control religion, what it does is it develops complex trauma within people.
And what is complex trauma?
Complex trauma is trauma that isn't the result of a singular or one-off traumatic event.
Like, I don't know, you get in a serious car accident.
That's a one-off event.
Or somebody is sexually assaulted in sort of a single time.
That's a kind of traumatic event, obviously.
Complex trauma is trauma that comes from prolonged and repeated experiences of our nervous system being overwhelmed.
Those responses that we have, those nervous system responses we have for dealing with stress and threat and so forth.
It's when they're sort of turned on and left on over long periods of time because of prolonged and repeated experiences.
Okay?
What does all that have to do with anything?
The sex-gender ideology we're talking about is a part of high-control religion.
It is a part of the traumatizing effects of high-control religion.
It is part of what causes complex religious trauma for people coming out of these subcultures.
The teachings and practices around Sex and gender that we've been talking about are toxic.
And over time, they rewire and overwhelm individuals' nervous systems in such a way that they are triggered by attempts to be sexual, even when those attempts occur within affirming appropriate contexts.
And this is where it starts to make sense.
So when someone spends decades of their life training their nervous system to feel shame every time they experience sexual arousal.
Every time they recognize that they are feeling desire or arousal, they rein that in, and they feel shame, and they feel guilt because they are told that they are being impure.
They are training their nervous system.
And sexual arousal becomes hardwired to a shame response.
And guess what?
That doesn't turn off on your wedding night.
And now all of a sudden, they're in a context where sexual arousal is supposed to be okay.
It's supposed to be affirmed.
It's supposed to be something that they can lean into.
The shame responses are still there.
The neurological wiring is still there, even if they get married, even if they abandon their purity beliefs and so forth.
And we can multiply this out.
The queer-identified person who accepts their own queer identity, who feels like they're ready to enter into sexual relations with a partner, and feels the guilt and feels the shame.
The people who can't view their own bodies.
Without shame, because they grew up in this viewpoint where, like, you know, every time you're paying attention to bodies, you're being sinful, you're being lustful, you're being impure.
None of that turns off.
And over time, that's how complex trauma works.
Through repeated encounters with this ideology, being immersed in it, growing up within it, hearing it preached to them, being judged for it.
Their nervous systems get hardwired, and that's what causes the sexual dysfunction that they experience.
If they leave this ideology, or if they stay within it.
Another example, there's a Bible passage that says you're supposed to bring every thought into captivity for Christ, and there are people who become so hypervigilant about every thought they might have that's quote-unquote impure or lustful or whatever, that they're always sort of cutting it off.
One of the things that can happen is people can just train their bodies to actually ignore desire.
And these are the people who become so...
Disassociated from their bodies when they experience arousal, that it's like just nothing can work.
Or it can mess up partners.
There's an account, I believe this is in Linda K. Klein's book, Pure, that looks at the effects of purity culture, where she talks with a male interlocutor, and he describes this experience of viewing women as like floating heads, like just like not even kind of recognizing their bodies or their full embodiment.
And the reason is, Growing up in purity culture, being so afraid of his own voracious sexuality, the kinds of things we're talking about, he trained himself to really just look at women's faces, to not notice their bodies, to not think of them as embodied beings, and this stuck with him and has hindered his ability to try to enter into any kind of a relationship with a woman.
Friendship, a sexual relationship, what have you.
Okay?
We could go on and on and on with this, but to the answer to the question of why can't I just, when somebody says, I don't believe this anymore, why can't I just do these things that I feel like everybody else can do?
Or when somebody has followed through on the dictates of purity culture, and they're like, why can't I just have a meaningful, pleasurable sexual experience with my husband?
The answer is trauma.
Their neurological system has been rewired through years of complex...
Traumatizing exposure to this ideology in such a way that it has fundamentally altered and disrupted their ability to have meaningful sexual relationships with others.
I say it all the time, bad theology hurts people.
The sex-gender ideology we're talking about is problematic for a lot of reasons, but it's bad theology.
And when I say it hurts people, I mean it literally hurts people.
It destroys lives.
These teachings traumatize individuals.
These teachings, which promise great, fulfilling sex, can in fact rob people of the ability to enter into fulfilling, meaningful sexual relationships.
Now, I said not everybody experiences traumatic effects.
They don't.
And if you try to talk about this, people, you will run into somebody who held to all the dictates of purity culture, and they got married, and it was great, and they do have meaningful, fulfilling sex, and they will want to be dismissive of this.
But that's the trick with trauma.
The fact that it doesn't traumatize everybody doesn't mean...
That it doesn't traumatize many people.
And the fact that it does traumatize people, that it can traumatize people, is what makes it a dangerous ideology.
So in my view, if all the other issues that we've looked at in this series weren't there, this alone would be reason enough to condemn these teachings.
These effects by themselves.
Why can't I just...
It's because you've been traumatized by these teachings.
That's why.
I want to, as we close this out here, I want to reiterate that I value individual sexual and bodily autonomy, and that includes the autonomy in embodying their gender in whatever way feels right for them.
And, again, I say this because you're going to run into somebody who's going to say, well, so what?
You want to just judge me because I didn't want to have sex before marriage?
Or, oh, so you're saying everybody just needs to go out and have sex all the time?
Nope, nope, nothing like that.
If somebody has an expression of their autonomy, they're an expression of their own sexual preferences, their own sexual desire, their own sexual safety, wants to wait until they're married to start having sex, more power to them.
More power to them.
Good for them.
But no one should have sexual norms forced upon them through shaming or through the imposition of guilt.
Or through the coercion of divine approval or eternal damnation, or because of the threat of the loss of community or a loss of family acceptance if they don't comply.
That's what the sex-gender ideology does.
This ideology that we've been exploring, it is common, it is deep-rooted within conservative, high-control American Christianity, and it has pernicious effects, even for many people who never question it, for the people who live it out.
And for me, the fact that it is literally traumatizing tells the story.
Again, bad theology and bad practices hurt people, and this theology is bad practice, and it should be contested at every opportunity.
I want to conclude this again by just reminding folks, if you're listening to this and you're like, oh my God, that's me.
I've had those experiences, and I don't know, I've never had a framework for thinking about this.
A couple things you can do.
I really, really, really recommend Laura Anderson's book, When Religion Hurt You.
It's a great primer on religion and trauma and what that might be like, and it has some great resources listed in it.
I would direct you to organizations like the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery or just, you know, a trauma-informed counselor, if that's something that could help you.
And if this is something you've dealt with and this is something, this is one of those things where often the shame or the embarrassment of experiencing sexual dysfunction keeps us from talking about it.
Keeps us from verbalizing it.
I would just encourage you, there are people who will hear you, there are people who can help you, and this is much more common than you think.
And so I just want you to know, if you're hearing this and this resonates, there are resources for you.
I want to thank everybody for listening, as always.
Keep the comments, feedback, thoughts coming.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Value your insights and comments so much.
Again, questions you couldn't ask in church.
Apologetics issues, feedback on these topics, feedback on anything else.
