Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free by Linda Kay Klein

Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free

by Linda Kay Klein

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Memoir & BiographyPsychology & MindTheology & Faith

Twelve years of research, hundreds of interviews, and a teenager who broke up with her boyfriend because she believed God required it. Klein was that teenager, raised in 1990s white evangelicalism, and her case is that the purity movement's shame-based teaching about sex left lasting, trauma-like harm, hardest on girls.

Core ideas
  • Worth as purity: Rings, pledges, purity balls and object lessons likening non-virgins to used items tied a girl's value and spiritual standing to her sexual purity.
  • Shame as control: The movement cast girls as stumbling blocks for men, so the burden of purity landed on them.
  • What it left: Women in their twenties to forties describe anxiety, panic and PTSD-like symptoms, and the book faults the movement's handling of sexual abuse.
Published2018
Pages341
ISBN9781501124815
ReadFeb 2023

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