Purity Culture and Therapeutic Turn in American Evangelicalism – Dr. Lauren Sawyer

We are so glad that you’re here today. This is our third in our faculty webinar series. We’ve been doing monthly online gatherings at the Seattle School. Last month, we had three faculty speak on, exploring collective care outside of traditional models, and the month before that, we had Dr. Gatson, one of our psychology faculty, speaking on what it means to listen well. So if you missed either of those, you can check those out on our YouTube channel. And today, I am super excited to welcome Dr. Lauren Sawyer.

She’s here today with us, speaking on purity Culture, and she is affiliate faculty at the Seattle School and Curriculum and Instructional Manager at the Allender Center. I will get into more of her topic in just a minute and introduce her fully, but before we start that, I am going to share a little bit more about our webinar series and why we are doing this at the Seattle School.

So, my name is Lauren Peiser, and I am the Director of Partnerships here at the Seattle School, and we offer graduate programs and certificates studying the intersection of theology, psychology, and culture. And in my work, I get to meet with current and future counselors and ministers, but I also get to meet with educators, spiritual directors, chaplains, coaches, nonprofit leaders, caregivers, and so many who are passionate about tending to our world with attention and care. And across these vocations, I hear so many stories of people exploring new ways of knowing themselves, knowing God, their neighbors, and the world.

And people are often asking, how do we discover a way of being beyond what we’ve been traditionally taught and programmed to think in a hurried world? And I continually hear collective longing to know how to show up and how to tend to what is really needed in our modern times. The urgency and steady pressure to have quick answers often steals our attention, and we’re asked to fix, to scapegoat, to find uncomplicated answers, and to keep moving.

And yet, for many of us, that pace and posture isn’t working, and we want to live in relationships differently. We often don’t know how to do that exactly, though. How often are we unaware of the larger stories playing out? And how often do we move towards control and purity without even realizing it? And working at the Seattle School, I get to listen to our students and I hear what our faculty are bringing into the classroom, and I believe it helps us nudge towards something different. And I’m neither a psychologist or a minister, but I find that integrating learning from soulful theologians and psychologists into my own life has nudged me towards seeing and being in the world differently.

So this conversation series is designed for those who have shared longing to slow down, to ask bigger questions, and to attune to the world around us. So here, we are trying to listen for God, moving and at work beyond our certainty and stability. In these short conversations, we aim to hint at new possibilities that tend to the pains of our world that values formation without fixing, curiosity over control, and being with rather than solving uncertainty.

So, in these short conversations, we’ll slow down and ask questions rather than move towards quick fixes. And this is meant to be scholarship for all disciplines. At the Seattle School, our learning values are aimed to help, form people into becoming embodied listeners, meaning makers, and community healers. And we believe that embodied listeners, meaning makers, and community healers are in all disciplines, vocations, and perspectives, and we’re needed in so many different fields.

And that’s why I’m excited to welcome Dr. Lauren Sawyer today to help us understand the bigger picture and the bigger story we’re stepping into when we critique purity culture. So before I get started, I’m going to just go over a few pieces of Zoom etiquette. So, use the chat, for responses during the time. If you have something that comes up that’s stirring in you, you’re welcome to use the chat. If Lauren has a prompt, for you, you are welcome to use the chat, at any point. And then if you have a question that you’d like to be answered at the end, you can use the Q&A feature, and we’ll try and respond to your questions throughout, but we’ll have a Q&A time at the end.

And then please do not share any links in the chat, just for security purposes. And if the chat is overwhelming at all, you are welcome to close out at any time. I know some people just want to sit and listen and not see all the words popping up, so you are welcome to do that. I also have a co-worker, Krista Law, on today, so if you see Krista in the chat, she is with the Seattle School and helping us, manage that and answer any questions that you have.

Okay, so before we get started, I would love to introduce Dr. Sawyer. So, Lauren Sawyer, graduated from the Seattle School with her MA in Theology and Culture in 2014. After graduating, Lauren went to earn her PhD in Religion and Society from Drew University. As an affiliate faculty, Lauren teaches around 12 credits a year, primarily in the theology program. Her favorite class has been God, Gender, and Sexuality, where she gets to use her training as a sexual ethicist while playing with theological categories of the doctrine of God and theological anthropology. As curriculum manager and instruction manager at the Allender Center, she creates and manages systems that help make sure narrative-focused trauma care teachings are cohesive, coherent, and accessible to all learning styles. Lauren is a part of the Purity Culture Research Collective and serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Feminist Studies and Religion. She published her debut book, which I have read and love, Growing Up Pure, White Girls, Queer Teens, and the Racial Foundations of Purity Culture with New York University Press in Fall 2025. So, Lauren, I will hand it over to you now. Welcome, we’re so glad you’re here.

Lauren D. Sawyer: Thanks, Lauren. Let me get my screen set up. Alright. I wanna see the chat, too. Maybe. Alright, hi everyone. I’m Dr. Sawyer. It’s so good to be with you today. This presentation today really comes from a few rabbit trails that I stumbled upon during my doctoral research, but I decided not to pursue, not to, kind of fall down until, much more recently, in the past year or so. So, in some ways, what I’m sharing today is part of my longer, more developed work on evangelical purity culture, but some of it is really new, and still in process. That newness is what is really exciting and fun for me today, but it’s also a little risky, as I am still working out the theory and implications of this work. So I’m glad that you are willing to come for the ride.

I have a few important notes to start with. Today we are talking about the therapeutic turn in evangelism and so I want to locate myself in that conversation. I was evangelical for a very formative period of my life. This is a picture of me from my church camp. I’m wearing my, like, cool Reliant K trucker hat. It was very 2005, got my puka shell necklace. I, you know, attended an evangelical church, was a part of church camps, eventually went to an evangelical college. I now identify as post-evangelical, and I’ve spent more of my adulthood in progressive mainline spaces.

But I still feel as though evangelicals are my people. My… my friends, especially my friends in the mainline tradition, poke fun at me when I… when I show my evangelical side. So, it’s still there. And so, I, you’ll hear me be critical of a lot of evangelical ideologies but I still think of evangelicals as my people. This is where I come from. This is the Christianity that formed me, more so, than the mainline churches that I’m now a part of.

The second thing is, you might hear in this presentation, the sense of being maybe, like, overly critical of therapy. One, I hope you don’t hear that. I’m somebody who’s greatly benefited from therapy, as I’m sure many people here have. I cannot… I cannot express, just the… the benefits of multiple therapists in my life, including my current therapist. Shout out to Erica. I also work at this intersection of theology and psychology at The Seattle School, at the Allender Center, and so my questions and my criticisms come from spending time in those worlds. Again, I feel very much like an insider here, not somebody critiquing from the outside.

I also want you to hear that I’m not here to take away therapy or therapeutic language. Certainly, if the sort of blending of Christian theology and therapy has been really helpful for you, and has been liberating for you, I’m not here to take that away. But I do have specific questions, and they’re, they’re very much rooted in the historical foundations of evangelicalism, Christianity in the U.S, in the past century or so.

So my two questions for today are…How have evangelical responses to sex and sexuality come to rely so heavily on secular therapeutic language? And, How does understanding purity culture as a therapeutic project shape ongoing conversations about sexuality, faith, and formation in Christian communities today? In other words, like, what is the impact of this? And how can it change? Should it change?

We will spend like the majority of our time with that first question. I am an interdisciplinary scholar. The field of ethics is, you know, by nature, very interdisciplinary, and I love history. I’m a history nerd, so we are going to spend a lot of time in history. History’s full of stories, and so if you’re somebody who likes stories, I hope, that you’ll…you’ll enjoy, sort of, getting into some of the story of where we came from in the past 100 years around evangelicalism, around this, you know, the use of, of therapy to… to understand faith.

We’ll pause, we’ll have a pause just a little bit past the halfway point. We’ll pause for reflection, and it’ll give you a chance to move your bodies. I am sure I will want to take a big gulp of water by that point. As you listen, I also invite you to put questions in the chat. I know that I am painting history, especially with very broad brushstrokes, brushstrokes and I’m prepared to direct you to more resources. There’s some embedded within the slides, and you’re going to have access to those, or to the bibliography after the fact. But feel free to submit any questions as I go. So let’s… let’s get into it.

Part 1. How did we get here and what do I mean by “here”? So I want to start with this quote from media scholar Heather Hendershot. She is writing… I just… I find this so amusing, she is writing this longer book on Christian media – on evangelical media –and this particular chapter is on purity culture, and she’s writing about this right around the time of that picture that you saw of me, right when I was buying myself a purity ring in 2005. She’s been in this work for a long time. But she writes, “Evangelical media may promote conservative ideas, but as in the wider secular culture, they discuss sex and gender using therapeutic language. Secular therapeutic discourse provides a ready-made and family narrative trajectory. The eruption of a problem leads to confession and diagnosis, and then to a solution or cure. Evangelical therapeutic discourse likewise involves a problem, involves a problem resolution, but because of the nature of sin, cures are always precarious. Cures are always precarious.”

So here, Hendershot is introducing a problem. She’s showing us the limitations of using therapeutic language to do robust theological work. In this case, talk about the nature of sin, or what to do with sin. This is the sort of like, the scholarly conversation; but I’m also asking, How did we get here in our broader public discourse around theology, around theological categories, around thinking about sin in therapeutic terms? These are from blogs, these are from websites, TikToks – they’re actually quite easy to find as these, these excerpts, these little clips on the screen show us we have come to understand the Christian faith – especially Christian sexual ethics – through therapeutic discourse. It’s everywhere. We talk about being addicted to sin, or addicted to lust. We talk about healthy or unhealthy sexualities, like, in light of God. We talk about healing, and cures, or remedies to sin. 

So, I wanna pause here and just say, and I want you to hear me well, that, like, I’m not a purist here. Theology has always been in conversation with its cultural context; Always. From the beginning. But, it’s important that we do not assume that this, all of this on the slide, is always how we’ve talked about sexuality from a Christian framework, be it conservative or progressive, evangelical or mainline. Nor that this is the best way to talk about sexuality from a Christian framework. So what I want to do is start a few years back. And by a few years, I mean the 1800s. This is really where I think our story begins, with some changing views on sexuality and shifting cultural realities that, you know, played into those changes. And I’m going to focus on the U.S. This is my area of study. Similar things were happening, certainly in what we call the Anglophone West, so in the UK, in Australia, but my focus is on… on U.S. history. Okay, so some of the views that were changing around this time, one of the major shifts is a shift to what we call the binary-to-sex system and the binary-to-gender system.

The binary to sex system is just this idea that men and women were not viewed, were beginning to not be viewed as variations of the same sex, but were wholly opposite creatures. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Prior to this, women were understood as being deformed men. That in the womb, all humans start as men, and then, and either they become sort of deformed and are born women, or, remain… are born girls, and then, or sort of fully develop into boys. This is an idea from way back to Aristotle, but was kind of the primary view for a long time, and there’s some really, really fascinating histories on this. Following this model was the binary two-gender system. So if you have the sexes being, like, totally different creatures, what follows is this idea that there are only two ways to express those sexes. There are two genders, so, if you were a woman, you were to act and dress feminine, according to the norms of the time. If you were a man, you were to act and dress masculine. Again, according to the norms at the time. And then, anybody who did not conform to these ideas, these systems, were deemed, at first, the language was sexual inverts. And then later, by the end of the 19th century, you get this language of homosexual. So anybody who did not conform was considered a homosexual.

Very much connected to this was a shift away from act-based understandings of sex. So, prior to this time, a sex act was considered either licit or illicit, so like, sinful or proper, due to the act itself, not the people involved. So one very common example is, whether an act was procreative or not. So just as sex between people of the same sex could not be procreative and would be deemed illicit, so would something like oral sex. It’d be considered just as sinful because it was non-procreative – it did not create children. And all of this is kind of, connecting to, or leading into, the medicalization, or the first time we get these medical terms, homosexuality and heterosexuality. I just read the number, I think it was 1868 was the first time we get this, in text, and of course, it takes some time before these terms are known a little bit more broadly.

Also, in the late 1800s, you have a lot of just cultural and economic upheaval. There are shifts in understanding of work, and what work looks like – which was very much tied to gender. Men going from, like, work in the fields to, starting – this is the beginning of corporate capitalism – so, starting to work in like, offices, or having more leisure time than they’ve ever had before. And so there’s, you have some anxieties and some like crises around what it means to be a man.

You had recessions, you had increased immigration from parts of the world that had not previously come to the U.S, so, China and Eastern Europe, which led to questions about identity and race. You had the beginning of women’s suffrage and this, and changing views about what it means to be a woman – especially middle-class women, no longer understanding themselves as being tied to the home in a particular way. But through some of these reform movements that they were part of, like abolition in the mid-19th century, started getting this taste of freedom and wanting that, wanting more of a voice in politics and wanting a chance to kind of leave the home in a way that they maybe hadn’t as a collective, previously.

The main thing I want you to hear here is that these were unsettling times. There was a lot of cultural change happening, and Christians in particular were responding to those changes. So this is the world that we’re putting ourselves into: a world of social change, technological change, different views on gender and sexuality, and a growing emphasis on science and reason. This is left over from the Enlightenment and was still very much in the air.

At this time, American Protestantism could be divided into three major streams. Other people argue for more streams or fewer streams, but I find these categories helpful. This comes from the scholar Hilda Lovdell Stevens. These streams were divided over some key issues. She writes that the Protestant establishment fractured in the late 1800s over issues such as theology, biology—so science—and immigration.

By the early 20th century, American Protestantism had splintered between those who approved of progressive causes and German higher criticism. These were the modernists, and I’ll also use the language of liberal. And then there were those who rejected the new causes and new theology. These were the fundamentalists, and we’ll talk about their legacy.

So we’re going to spend some time in this fracture, often described as the fundamentalist and modernist controversy. We’ll talk about the holiness and Pentecostal folks in a bit, but we’re going to focus primarily on these two camps. Alright. For the next few slides, we’re going to tell these stories in parallel: Who are the fundamentalists? Who are the modernists? And then eventually we’ll get to who their modern equivalents are.

Fundamentalists—here’s my spoiler—are the group that would eventually become contemporary evangelicals.

Their origin story begins with turn-of-the-century conservative Protestants who wanted to defend traditional doctrines against what they perceived as modernism’s dangerous accommodation to secular scholarship and science. They saw other Christians being really eager to integrate science—including psychology and sexology—into their understanding of theology. Fundamentalists were worried about that, and they wanted to defend what they understood as traditional doctrines. This came out through a publication called The Fundamentals, which was a series of theological essays. They were quite academic, though probably not super fun and sexy to read.

The five fundamentals they emphasized were biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, Jesus’ atoning death—specifically through penal substitutionary atonement—the bodily resurrection, and the historical reality of miracles. These are actually very similar to some of the tenets of evangelical belief today, if you happen to know those. These are what the fundamentalists were defending.

And they were defending them against the modernists. The modernists were also called liberal Christians, but not necessarily in the same way we would use the word liberal today, as in social liberals. Their roots are in German idealism, and there is a whole tradition of liberal theology that has developed and changed over time.

So you might hear me, or some of the scholars I use, use modernist and liberal somewhat interchangeably. We’re talking about the same people. I’m going to continue using the word modernist. Their origin story is a Protestant theological movement seeking to reconcile Christian faith with modern science. Again, this included psychology, sexology, and these newer fields emerging in the late 1800s.

Part of that was applying scientific methods to religion. This was the explosion of the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation and the quest for the historical Jesus—the work of asking, “Can we understand who Jesus was as a person in historical Palestine?” Part of this was also the demythologizing of Scripture. Can we understand what was happening in Scripture if the divine wasn’t part of it in the same ways?

How do we understand miracles? How do we understand stories like the plagues without needing magic or a divine explanation? And so this is what the fundamentalists were pushing back against. Fundamentalists also saw the Bible as containing a gospel primarily for saving individuals, not one for redeeming social order. They believed society’s problems could be solved one soul at a time.

The goal was individual piety: save souls, and saved souls help people live rightly. This contrasted with the modernists, who embraced the social gospel—the idea that Jesus called Christians to care for the tangible needs of people, not just their souls. So modernists addressed issues like poverty, labor practices, and social reform.

Fundamentalists held a premillennial eschatology. Very simply: things get bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, and then Jesus returns. Modernists held a postmillennial eschatology: things get better, better, better, better, better, and then Jesus returns.

We could spend a lot of time just on the eschatologies of these groups, but we won’t get there today. Up until about 1920, fundamentalists defended their beliefs primarily through academic means, through things like The Fundamentals pamphlets. That began to change in the early 1920s when fundamentalists became the fiery rhetoricians we often associate with them today.

We don’t necessarily think of fundamentalists as calmly writing academic texts. We think of them as debating and defending their beliefs publicly. This shift really culminated with the 1925 Scopes Trial.

Many of you have probably heard of the Scopes Trial before. It was a pivotal moment in evangelical history, and really in Christian history in the United States. The Scopes Trial was set up as a debate between fundamentalists and modernists.

John Scopes was on trial for teaching evolution in his Tennessee high school classroom, which was against the law at the time.

On one side, you had the fundamentalists, represented by William Jennings Bryan, arguing that creation should be taught in classrooms and defending a fundamentalist view of Scripture. On the other side, you had the modernist lawyer Clarence Darrow arguing that science should be taught to children. What is fascinating about the Scopes Trial is that it was essentially staged. This wasn’t a random teacher pulled out of nowhere and charged. The ACLU used him as a symbol to challenge the law.

The fundamentalists won the trial. They made the better legal argument. But the public ultimately sided with the modernists. There is almost a sense of embarrassment among fundamentalists afterward—that they may have won the battle, but they lost the war.

There is a narrative that says this is when fundamentalists hid underground until the 1940s and the revival of evangelicalism. But that’s not fully true. Really, fundamentalists began to change their approach. They had been very anti-science and very separatist, wanting to separate from broader culture. They began to realize that might not be the best strategy. Instead, they started engaging broader culture through its own tools: radio and science.

You have people like Aimee Semple McPherson in the 1920s using radio to broadcast sermons. This becomes a huge part of Billy Graham’s ministry as well. And then there was science—beginning to think about how scientific ideas and methods could actually be useful to the fundamentalist cause. In the 1940s, fundamentalism was revived as what was called new evangelicalism, through people like Billy Graham.

Fundamentalists began calling themselves neo-evangelicals. They also eventually brought in holiness and Pentecostal communities, and these groups became known together as neo-evangelicals. Later, they dropped the “neo” and simply became evangelicals, which is the group many of us recognize today. So that’s what was happening with the fundamentalists.

Now, we have the modernists. While the fundamentalist agenda culminated with the Scopes Trial, for modernists, it really culminated with the translation of the Revised Standard Version—the first major modern translation of the Bible. It included notable new terms, like “homosexuality.” If you remember from earlier, homosexuality and heterosexuality were new terms that emerged in the late 19th century. This was the first time those words began appearing in a Bible translation in 1946. This was a big deal.

Not only did this modernist worldview, shaped by science, affect how modernists read the Bible through historical-critical methods, and not only did it affect how they taught science in classrooms—it also influenced the translation of Scripture itself. This has had a lasting impact. Many of us know the word “homosexual” as being in the Bible in the same way that words like “sin” or “forgiveness” are in the Bible.

But soon after this translation came out, many liberal Christian leaders and modernists realized that they had made a mistake—a big oopsie. And they actually began to turn their attention toward serving gay folks in ministry.

This is kind of a not-super-well-known history, but it’s really important. Starting in the late 1940s and continuing into the 1950s and 60s, liberal Christians were, I would say, making amends. They were repenting of this translation choice that they had made. I see this as a story of repentance from a branch of Protestant Christianity realizing that it had maybe gone too far in accommodating secular understandings of humanity, and sexuality in particular.

Later RSV translations—and now the NRSV, which is a much more recent translation—stopped translating Greek and Hebrew words as “homosexual” and tried to get closer to the original meaning of the text, if we can find it. But the fundamentalists, now neo-evangelicals, had a different trajectory.

In 1973, you have the New International Version New Testament, and then the full Bible in 1978, I believe. The NIV is considered the evangelical translation of the Bible, and with it came key Hebrew and Greek terms translated as “homosexual” or “homosexuality.” So their trajectory is different. The modernists used this translation early on and, in my view, sort of repented of that. But that is not true of neo-evangelicals.

Okay, so to summarize—and I’m going to unpack this because she doesn’t necessarily say this in the easiest way to understand—this comes from a scholar of religion and sexuality, Heather White, who has written extensively on Protestant reactions to homosexuality in the 20th century.

She writes:

“Evangelical and conservative Protestants worked to adopt and adapt the therapeutic views of sexuality first circulated by their liberal counterparts into a framework that eschewed their liberal counterparts’ deliberate adaptations of secular forms of knowledge. What conservatives embraced as biblical rather than secular truth, however, had been effectively christened by a previous generation of Protestant liberals. The Bible’s plain word on homosexuality proceeded from a newly implanted therapeutic tongue.”

In other words, what White is suggesting here is that what was once considered secular truth about sexuality by fundamentalists—anything that relied on science, psychology, or sexology—was now being understood as biblical truth. Homosexuality is in the Bible, right?

This very thing that fundamentalists were fighting against, they eventually made their own. Evangelicals have modernists—these liberal theologians—to thank for some of that framework. This is where I would include the exploding-head brain emoji, which I almost put on the slide, because I think this is fascinating. There is a sort of switch happening.

In my experience, without knowing this history, it seems like evangelicals are the ones who have really clung to therapeutic language more than liberal Protestants or those in mainline traditions. But they actually have a shared history. So, one more slide, and then we’ll do a little pause. A little stretch break.

This is the legacy. Some reminders: before 1920, you had The Fundamentals essays, which were this very academic defense of the fundamentals of the faith.

From the 1920s through the 1940s, you had fiery fundamentalists who mounted numerous direct attacks against modern psychology. Then, in the 1940s and 50s, they started to change their approach. Neo-evangelicals, the Billy Graham generation, began to think: “We may get farther with people if we start accommodating culture rather than remaining separate from it.”

So they learned from their mistakes and began to accommodate secular culture through its media—radio, television, and eventually politics. In the 1960s and 70s, you get the birth of what James Davison Hunter calls psychological Christocentrism. I love that.

And Christianized psychology. There is a very clear interest in psychology specifically, which had previously been more associated with modernists, now becoming part of evangelical frameworks. In the late 1970s, you get Focus on the Family, which was founded by child psychologist Dr. James Dobson.

Dobson had some of his undergraduate work at a Christian university—I think Point Loma, though I’m not quite sure—but he did his doctoral work at the University of Southern California, a secular institution. He then applied his psychological knowledge to evangelical understandings of sexuality and the family in particular.

He’s really a precursor. His early teachings are a precursor to purity culture, which we’ll get into soon. And then 20 years later, Dan B. Allender founded Mars Hill Graduate School, later the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, where I speak from today. Long journey.

So I want to invite you to pause and reflect. Take two minutes. Stretch your bodies. Move around as you think about this. What questions does this history stir up in you? What questions does it raise? And what might be the implications of this shift in evangelicalism—from attacking modern psychology to accommodating it?

What are the implications you’ve seen? What are the effects you’ve seen? And what might be the ongoing implications? So we’ll take two minutes from now until about 20 after, and then we’ll get back to it with a little bit more history.

I love what’s going on in the chat. I had a chance to read it. A few more seconds. Alright.

So we looked at the world of the late 1800s. Now we are going to look at the world of the late 1900s. Similarly, we’re looking at views of sexuality and then the cultural realities that shaped what I will say really shaped purity culture. Alright.

A major thing: abstinence-only-until-marriage education became the norm, despite its inefficacies. This was partly in response to a rise in teen pregnancy in the 1980s and 90s.

There had been debates about how to teach sex education in schools for a long time—I believe beginning in the 1920s and 30s—but we’re jumping ahead to the 1990s. This became part of welfare reform, believe it or not. This push for abstinence-only-until-marriage education became tied into legislation. There is some theory that Bill Clinton pushed this through partly to appeal to conservatives, knowing that maybe another major scandal was about to come out.

But it was certainly pushed and lobbied by Christian groups, including some of the architects of purity culture. Organizations like True Love Waits and Silver Ring Thing were actually pushing for abstinence-only-until-marriage education in public schools. I’m an ethicist, so let me just say, for the record: study after study shows that abstinence-only-until-marriage education does not effectively deter young people from having sex before marriage.

It just means that they may do so without knowledge about protection from STDs and pregnancy. Off the soapbox. You also had the Clarence Thomas hearings and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, which put sex on the front page of the news. You had conversations happening about sexual harassment in the workplace and what was appropriate in professional settings because of the Clarence Thomas hearings.

And then questions about what counts as sex because of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Lots of conversations about oral sex started happening because of that scandal. I came into purity culture in what I would call the second wave, in the mid-2000s, but these conversations were still very much happening. So, cultural realities. The AIDS epidemic—these are numbers for today—has claimed the lives of 39 million people worldwide since the early 1980s, when it was discovered.

Again, purity culture became part of the response to AIDS panic. Not necessarily the most effective response—comprehensive sex education would handle this differently—but it became part of that cultural moment. You also had greater restrictions placed on welfare assistance in the United States.

This is a whole other talk, but I wanted to include it because of its ties to abstinence-only-until-marriage education and its longer impact on understanding purity culture. The welfare reform package under Clinton included abstinence-only-until-marriage education and stricter rules about who had access to food assistance. It was all under the guise of protecting the family. This was the height of family values rhetoric.

But it also made it harder for some parents to feed their children. The act was called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The phrase “personal responsibility” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Okay. So all of this is the foreground for what became the rise of purity culture. And purity culture is imbued with therapeutic language.

The very first quote I read from Heather Hendershot about therapeutic language is actually a critique of purity culture before we even had the term purity culture, saying that this movement was using therapeutic language.So let’s get into it.

This is my bread and butter, which makes it harder in some ways to summarize, right? I spent a whole book on this, so trying to spend just a couple slides is a little crazy-making. But I want to start with a definition of purity culture that I really like, especially when looking through a historical lens and a therapeutic lens. This is from a 2023 text by my colleagues Catherine House and Sarah Mulsinger.

This is how they define purity culture:

“Though the ideology of sexual purity has a long and fraught history within North America, purity culture is a concept that refers specifically to a movement that began in the early 1990s by white evangelical organizations and leaders who developed entire youth ministries around the goal of encouraging adolescents to pledge themselves to sexual abstinence until entering what they called a biblical marriage relationship.

A term first introduced by scholar Don Freitas, purity culture describes a set of norms, practices, and beliefs that became imbued with gospel-like significance for young evangelicals. Sexual purity, we learned, was an instruction book for how to achieve relational and personal salvation.” So here again, we are locating ourselves in the late 20th century with these neo-evangelicals, now simply called evangelicals. However—and this is hinted at in the beginning—scholars like Mossner and myself argue that purity ideology predates the 1900s by about 100 years, at least.

And in earlier purity movements, these were causes that were taken up not just by evangelicals, but by liberals and secular folks as well. Again, that’s another talk. There’s a lot that we could talk about when it comes to purity culture and its use of therapeutic language, especially how it has been weaponized. But I want to focus on just one piece: the use of family.

This idea of the biblical marriage relationship and family as a therapeutic category. Purity culture and the family. One of the primary messages of purity culture is that a young person’s purity is the foundation for a healthy future family. And this, too, has a longer history than the 1990s.

You have this idea of the family as the primary building block of a nation: as the family goes, so goes the nation. So if the family is weak, then the nation is weak. This idea really gained traction in the 1970s. Some early speeches by Jerry Falwell explicitly evoke this idea. But it also had foundations in the Progressive Era, when family values were really a bipartisan concern. Conservatives and liberals approached that concern differently. Some focused more on strengthening the family unit itself through individual personal piety, while others focused more on policy.

By the 1970s, you had family values becoming tied to partisan politics. For conservative evangelicals in particular, strengthening the family—and therefore strengthening the nation—meant addressing cultural permissiveness. So, for example, feminists were seen as rejecting their responsibilities as wives and mothers. Gay men were seen as not fulfilling their roles as husbands and fathers. That’s where their focus went, and again, you can see the connection to purity culture in the 1990s.

And just to bring us back to the 1990s, this is a True Love Waits abstinence pledge. Maybe you signed one. I signed so many abstinence pledges as a teenager, just to make sure it stuck. Listen to the family-oriented language here. This is just an excerpt:

“I make a commitment, not just to God, but to my family, to my future mate, and my future children.”

You are mostly making a promise to family, more so than God. So girls especially, but boys too, had to remain pure not just for their own sake, not just for their own salvation. It was often framed as being for their own wholeness, but also for the sake of the family—and therefore, for the sake of the nation. But there are some problems here.

Scholars argue that the blueprint for the biblical or traditional family being promoted by purity culture teachers did not actually represent the diversity of American families that we saw in the 20th century. Instead, the biblical or traditional family was often based on the late Victorian bourgeois family. Again, we’re back in the late 1800s.

A man—the father—works outside the home, and the woman stays home and raises the children. But this family structure was not accessible to most people. It was really only available to middle- and upper-class white families. You had to be wealthy enough for only one person to work outside the home. So here’s the point.

If, as the family goes, so goes the nation; if a weak family creates a weak nation-state and a strong family creates a strong nation-state; and if maintaining traditional family values is what strengthens and protects the family, then we can see why evangelicals would attach themselves to this therapeutic language—especially the language of marriage and family therapy.

For one, it’s effective. It locates the political in the everyday experiences of evangelicals: their family life. And it was, and is, a very powerful uniting force. Who doesn’t want to strengthen the family?

So we have finally reached Part 2: What are the implications of this accommodation to the therapeutic within evangelicalism in particular? As a reminder, Christianity has always been in relationship with culture, and this is true from the very beginning. Read the Gospels. Read how Jesus engages the cultural context that he is in.

We’ve always had those who have retreated from culture—those who have been very ascetic, like the desert mothers and fathers who withdrew from society. We’ve had those who have accommodated parts of culture. And then we have those who have reinterpreted culture for their own causes. It’s a spectrum, right? And you might fall somewhere on that spectrum as well.

It’s important that we remember this, even if we cannot resolve it. I’m not here to say which part of that spectrum is the right way to go. But I can name some problems.

One problem is that it is dangerous when what is cultural is presented as biblical. When we talk about the biblical family, right? If the biblical family is the white, middle-class, heterosexual family—the Victorian bourgeois family—then it becomes assumed to be sinful to be part of a queer family structure, multiracial family, Black or Brown family, multi-generational home, home with two working parents, single-parent home, and so on.

You don’t fit the rubric. And it’s also a problem when our only lens for sexuality is health or unhealth. If sexuality is primarily understood in therapeutic terms, then we are tempted to think the problem is simply one’s individual sexuality—whether someone is homosexual or heterosexual—not structures that are just or unjust. We’re tempted to think there are personal solutions to systemic problems. Or that we aren’t getting to the roots of the issues and the things that I would argue Scripture invites us toward: understandings of justice and the way of God.

So I do have a humble suggestion. This is my solution, and I know it will probably be disappointing to some people. Let theology and psychology speak to each other—but do not confuse them with each other. In other words, let’s be interdisciplinary.

Interdisciplinarity does not mean that our disciplines— theology and psychology—become so entangled that they lose what makes them distinct. Interdisciplinarity allows the disciplines to retain their distinctiveness while also offering something new.

There is a reason those early modernists were compelled by the growing fields of sexology and psychology. They recognized something valuable there. And we know there are also limits to that lens. It led to cruel condemnation of people who began to identify as homosexual, especially as those ideas appeared in their Bibles. The goal is not to put theology and psychology back into separate silos where they never speak to each other again.

The goal is to pay attention to where psychology begins to overstep, and where we mistake the good news of the gospel for self-help, parenting advice, or sex education.So what does this look like? Perhaps it looks like teasing apart what belongs to the therapeutic realm and what belongs to theology. Words like health, cure, salvation, homosexuality, and justice—can we be clear about what we mean? And I mean that we ask ourselves this, and then ask our communities: What do we mean when we say sin is an addiction? Or that we’ve been healed from temptation? Do these ideas have theological or biblical roots, or are we beginning to pull from secular ideas? Again, I’m not saying that is necessarily bad. But it is worth asking. Especially when, point number three, those ideas are being weaponized. I invite us to question the origins of terms and ideas, especially when they are being weaponized. The term homosexuality has been weaponized. The biblical family has been weaponized.

We’re going to move into Q&A. I’m going to take longer sips of my coffee.

I do have a bibliography here. These were all of the embedded citations. If you follow the QR code—and I believe someone will put the link in the chat—you’ll have access to additional citations and resources. There are academic texts, but also resources for talking with young people about sexuality and other texts that engage this topic in different ways.

Lauren just put that in the chat. If more things come up during Q&A, I’ll add to it. It’s a live document, but you’re welcome to take it, save it, print it out, or do what you need to do.

I’m going to end my screen share and see what questions we have.

Lauren Peiser: Hey, thank you so much. This was great. Really provocative and thoughtful.

Okay, we have a few historical clarification questions. At that time, when you were saying that homosexuality, when it first became a term, was more about being non-procreative and not being with the same sex—is that how it was understood within science as well? Is that how the term was originally used?

Lauren D. Sawyer: Yeah, I’ll add a little bit of clarity to this. Prior to even having the term homosexuality, the ways that we distinguished good, proper sex from improper or sinful sex were primarily around whether something was procreative. Thomas Aquinas used categories like natural and reasonable. Those were the ways we organized sexual acts.

So, for example, sex before marriage might be considered natural, but not reasonable, because if you had a child outside of marriage, it wasn’t considered good for the child because they wouldn’t have the proper parental or familial structure. Oral sex was considered unnatural because it did not create children. Anal sex was treated similarly. Any sexual behavior that did not lead to reproduction fell into that category.

There was no category for homosexuality or heterosexuality until 1868.

Lauren Peiser: Okay, that’s super helpful.

And then, following the stream of modernist and fundamentalist thought, was there more differentiation between denominations? Or was it more that modernists became mainline and fundamentalists became evangelical? Or was it always kind of a messy in-between?

Lauren D. Sawyer: It’s a little messy. These categories are complicated.

There were many drafts of this where I had to clarify what I meant, because even the word evangelical has changed. Prior to the late 19th century, evangelical was more of an adjective. You had Evangelical Methodists, Evangelical Episcopalians. It was more of a description of your flavor of Christianity. Now, we use categories like evangelical, mainline, conservative, liberal, and progressive differently.

When we’re talking about fundamentalists and modernists, it’s closer to the divide we recognize today between conservative and liberal Christianity. But even that is not simple. You might have conservative Episcopalians, for example, who aligned more with fundamentalist perspectives.

It’s complicated, and the history is messy.

Lauren Peiser: Someone else asked in the chat: do you have a definition of evangelical?

Lauren D. Sawyer: That is one of the hardest things to define. This was one of the biggest challenges in my research because scholars debate this constantly.

A scholar named Isaac Sharp wrote a brilliant book called The Other Evangelicals, which looks at evangelicals who don’t fit the typical conservative white evangelical image—feminist evangelicals, Black evangelicals, gay evangelicals, who have always existed.

There is a playful argument that anyone who likes Billy Graham, or anyone who looks like Billy Graham, is an evangelical. That’s one way to define it.

I tend to hold both a historical perspective and a broader understanding. We can trace evangelicalism back to the Second Great Awakening in the 1830s, with its emphasis on revival, reform, and evangelical fervor. We can also talk about shared values and beliefs.

But I’m somewhat of the perspective that if someone calls themselves an evangelical or acts as an evangelical, then they are part of that tradition. It creates a very broad umbrella, but sometimes that broadness is helpful.

Lauren Peiser: This next question is about the end part, where you talked about family being the most important piece.

Someone asked how you would compare and contrast this with Adrienne Marie Brown’s fractal theory—the idea that to create social change, we start in small circles and grow a movement outward, from local communities to a global scale.

How would you say purity culture is similar or different?

Lauren D. Sawyer: That’s really fascinating.

In some ways, there are similarities. There is this idea of starting small and moving outward. There is a fair critique of the goal of changing the world—because that is part of what purity culture calls people toward. Change your families, and then if your families are changed, the world changes.

But ultimately, I think it comes down to ideology. What is the thing we are protecting? What is the thing we are trying to change? The architects of purity culture have made it clear that when they talk about protecting the nation, they often mean protecting white values—protecting white womanhood and preserving certain ideas of family and society. So the strategies may look similar in some ways, but the goals are very different.

We have to ask: What are we trying to protect? What are we trying to change? What do we understand as a weak family or a strong family? What do we understand as a weak nation or a strong nation? Those answers depend on our positionality, beliefs, and worldview.

Lauren Peiser: One thing I’m thinking about is the difference between a monoculture—where everyone has to be the same and everyone has to follow one model, making your family into one particular thing—versus someone like Adrienne Maree Brown, where it starts local and is really contextual and different depending on the community.

Lauren D. Sawyer: Yes, yes.

Lauren Peiser: I see another question here that I had a similar question to.

How much do you think the appropriation of this language was purely strategic—to gain ground and move this idea forward—but they weren’t actually interested in it or didn’t really believe in the science? Or do you think it was more of a slow process where this integration became more widespread and people truly came to believe in it? Like, how much of it was strategic versus a true conviction?

Lauren D. Sawyer: That’s a good question. That’s a hard question. I think both. And I don’t mean that as a cop-out. I mean that I think we can see both happening. We can see a very strategic use of language to unite a branch of Protestantism. I think about some of the other ways conservative evangelicals, particularly in the 1970s, united politically around single-issue concerns: abortion, gay rights, and fighting against the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have given women greater protections.

You can see evangelical leaders, people like Francis Schaeffer, looking for allies wherever they could find them—including Catholics, which is funny because there had been a lot of tension between those groups before. But the strategy became: let’s find allies for the cause. Not necessarily because we suddenly believe that all of these groups are exactly the same or share all the same convictions.

That’s sort of the more pessimistic view. But at the same time, you also had Christian institutions growing in the mid-20th century. You had institutions like Fuller, founded in 1947, which we now know has such a rich history in theology and psychology.

And our own institution also came out of this same wave. So I think it really is both.

I’m sure there were architects who thought, “We need to think strategically because we need to save souls.” But there were also people who genuinely felt that something new was happening—that psychology was speaking to them and to their faith in a way that felt hopeful and meaningful. And then we see institutions grow around that.

Lauren Peiser: Have you done any research on how this applies to Mormonism as well?

Lauren D. Sawyer: I have not personally, but there is certainly research there.

I’m remembering a colleague who studied purity culture and looked at both evangelicals and Mormons. I’m forgetting her exact focus, but she studied some of the ways purity culture ideals show up in both evangelicalism and Mormonism. I’ll make sure I add a link to her work. I think her dissertation is available online, and she recently published a piece as well. Her name is Amanda Gray, and she finished her doctorate about a year ago. So yes, there has been research done. It’s a little outside my specific area, but from what I understand there are certainly some parallels.

And we’re seeing a resurgence of purity culture ideas through things like the tradwife movement, which includes people from many different faith backgrounds.

Lauren Peiser: This is leaning into what you were just talking about, and this will be our last question because there are so many others we could get to. Someone asked about the overlap between cultural values within evangelicalism—including purity culture—and diet culture. Have you done research on the similarities between these two? Things like sinful behavior and overeating, or how those ideas come into conversation with each other?

Lauren D. Sawyer: I can definitely direct you all to some resources. I have colleagues who have done this work directly on purity culture and diet culture. There are some very recent publications that I can link to, but there are also scholars like Amory Griffith, who is a brilliant scholar of religion and sexuality in the U.S., who has written on this. Lynn Gerber, who is also a brilliant scholar of the history of religion, sexuality, and queerness, has work in this area as well.

There is a historical connection between purity culture and earlier movements at the turn of the 20th century—because everything seems to happen then—which included the hygiene movement. Part of that movement was about eating. The idea was that what you put into your body affected your purity and even your sexual purity. So, do a little research on the history of the graham cracker and you will discover some things you probably did not expect.

Graham crackers were created in part as a way to curb sexual desire. I think graham crackers are delicious. I don’t think they would be effective on me. But yes, there is this whole history.

And then there are contemporary versions of this as well. The Heather Hendershot piece I quoted earlier talks about body control as a significant part of purity culture. Girls were often taught to control their bodies through food, and boys were taught to channel sexuality through things like weightlifting and sports. Those connections have much richer and deeper histories.

Lauren Peiser: Well, I’ll give just a few updates to everyone, and then I’ll hand it over to you to close. Thank you all for being here. We will send out the list of resources afterward. We’ll also send the recording of the webinar when it’s ready. Next month, we have another webinar on Eucontamination. You’ll have to sign up to learn more about what that means with Paul and Billie Hoard.

Also be on the lookout for more courses coming out from The Seattle School—one on Christian nationalism, and another with Dr. Sawyer in the spring diving more deeply into purity culture and parenting. Thank you so much for being here today. Lauren, I’ll hand it over to you.

Lauren D. Sawyer: Yes.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for all the kind words in the chat. It’s fun recognizing many of your names. I’m going to end with an excerpt from a prayer that I’ll call a benediction. This is from the anti-purity culture prayer by Reverend Shana Green. I’ll make sure you get a link to the full prayer, but I’ll let her have the final word.

She prays:

“God of intimacy and delights, you have created us in splendor, clothed us in majesty, and knitted us with specks of glory and gold.

You have breathed life into our sacred bodies and invited us to commune with you, as we are, without shame.

God who delights in color and curve, who shaped hips and shoulders with intentional grace, help us to remember that we are works of art and worthy of celebration.

Unbind us from theology that shames.

Let our consent be sacred, our boundaries blessed, our joy unashamed, and our connections rooted in love.

In the name of the Holy Lover, Fierce Mother, breathing breath of becoming, we pray.”

Amen.

Lauren Peiser: Awesome. Thank you all for being here. Have a great rest of your day.