2025 Disaster Preparedness Plan

Acknowledge your wealth and cultivate joy.

Dear friends and readers,

I hope your first days of 2025 are already fortifying you for the year ahead. I myself have been developing a 2025 disaster preparedness plan which is neither very original, nor high commitment. Nothing that would indicate we are in deeply conflictual times, which, of course, we are.

Many of us have been working toward a better, more true Democracy regardless of national leadership for decades. We have been contending with an oligarchy that prioritizes the needs and well-being of a select few. We have endured the takeover of our beloved institutions by capitalistic demands (ask anyone working in higher education today). As I prepare for the next disaster, I find myself needing to make few changes to my habits, commitments, and path forward.

2025 Disaster Preparedness Plan

+Invest more deeply in the friendships that give you life.

+Deploy healthy boundaries in relationships that do not give you life.

+Stay with your work: creating, healing, teaching, nurturing, building, collaborating. Whatever you do to become more fully human and allows others to do the same: stay the course.

+Pay attention.

+ Do not be distracted by petty drama.

+Celebrate accomplishments big and small. Joy is a bulwark against dehumanization.

I’m beginning 2025 at the bottom of my list. My forthcoming book After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America (Beacon Press, 2025) is heading to the presses this week. The manuscript below is soon to be on its way to Linda Kay Klein who offered me a hearty “yes” when I asked if she would write the foreward.

One of my favorite parts of the publishing process is selecting a cover. I always have ideas (sometimes good, sometimes not). I am transfixed by book covers and I am not ashamed to admit that I can and do judge a book by its cover. An image that will come to represent years of research, writing, and editing is meant to be taken seriously and should communicate to the viewer the emotional stakes within the pages.

If anything this book has taught me to take the prompts of my body, including my intuition, seriously. Beacon sent me four options to review. The muted colors of the first two felt uninspiring, but as soon as I opened the third I felt my bones settle and my lungs exhale. Plain, stark, gravitational in color, style, and font.

Yesterday I sat down to write the acknowledgements, worried I wouldn’t have the words, nor the proper sentiment for the people who have participated in and supported my work since I started the After Purity Project in 2019. Celebrating accomplishments is always about turning toward the communities that made the achievement possible. Even if you’ve never written a book, I encourage you to sit down to write acknowledgements for your life, to those who have kept you and continue to keep you close. All the people who keep you human and whose humanity gives you life. Another bulwark against fascism and dehumanization: building community. As someone who struggles with depression I far too often feel separation, rather than togetherness. It is one of the many lies depression has convinced me of. Writing these acknowledgements was a lighting bolt of truth. I ended up feeling embarrased by the riches I so often take for granted.

Below are the acknowledgements for After Purity. Use them as a model for your own. Remind yourself who holds you close, who challenges you, who makes you brave.

Acknowledgements

When my first book, Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence was published in 2015 I was unprepared for the response from readers outside of my academic circles. The interest from journalists, bloggers, podcasters, and mental health professionals challenged my assumptions about who I was writing for and soon I began to shift my academic work toward more public-facing projects. If (and it was a big if) I was to write a second book on evangelical purity culture, I needed to listen to the stories of those impacted by purity culture. And I needed money in order to secure time away from my teaching responsibilities.

I am first and foremost most grateful for two generous grants from the Louisville Institute and the Luce Foundations Project on Religion and Sexual Abuse, especially for the cohorts of scholars I was able to join and individuals whose work and lives continue to inspire and console me, especially Kent Brintnall, Mark Clatterbuck, Ann Gleig, Amanda Lucia, Jorge Rodríguez, and Nicole Symmonds.

As a non-tenure track lecturer at my institution, I am not eligible for a research sabbatical, but these grants allowed me to buy my own sabbatical in the 2019-2020 school year and launch The After Purity Project, an interview study focused on people who had grown up and out of evangelical purity culture. I was deeply uncertain if people would want to talk to me about their experiences in purity culture during a global pandemic, but I was very wrong. Over 160 people signed up for participate in the After Purity Project, 65 agreeing to sit for an interview. To those individuals who shared their stories so openly with me, I have the deepest gratitude. Many had told their stories before, working through religious trauma, sexual and other anxieties with mental health professionals, friends, partners, and other compassionate listeners. Others were very much in the thick of their anger and confusion. While these were the most difficult interviews to conduct, they taught me to recognize and understand the debilitating effects of religious and family-based trauma. Each interviewee taught me how to listen and how to build community around shared desires for new ways of being.

During my research I was contacted by two young scholars working on their own projects investigating the impacts of purity culture. A few months later Liv Schultz and Tessi Muskrat started the Purity Culture Research Collective, creating a space and community for researchers, artists and mental health professionals to share their work with one another. Together with Katharine House (my intrepid co-editor) Lauren Sawyer, Victoria House, Mihee Kim-Cort, Rebecca Wolf, Rebekah Vickery, Melissa Payne, Jenny McGrath and Elizabeth Gish we have organized conference panels and published a special issue of the Journal of Theology and Sexuality that will soon be released as a book from Routledge Press entitled, Purity Culture and Its Discontents. The collective work of this group, one unaffiliated with any academic institution, has been nothing but astounding. When I made the decision midway through the writing of this book to move on from studying evangelical purity culture, I had no hesitations given the work and commitments of the members of the PCRC.

Shifting toward public-facing work can be risky in a field where status comes via our affiliations with academic institutions and only the rare few rise to prominence. Among those who have are Brad Onishi and Dan Miller, both former evangelical youth ministers turned Religion professors turned podcast hosts of Straight White American Jesus. When they contacted me about my work on purity culture, I only had one word for them: yes. Their generosity with their platform, their desire for collaboration, and ambition to educate everyone about White Christian nationalism was the shot of adrenalin I needed to recognize and move toward my own goals. With them I taught the seminar Sexual Purity and Dis/Embodiment that became a workshop of ideas with brilliant thinkers also seeking to understand the political and cultural significance of evangelical purity culture. After three years of Brad asking, “Sara, when are you going to make a podcast on purity culture?” I did the thing and I’m so glad I did. Working with Brad, Scott Okomoto, and Kari Onishi of Axis Mundi Media was the best crash course in podcast production one could ask for. Learning to write podcast scripts was the single most helpful process for learning how to translate my academic thoughts into accessible and compelling storytelling.

My week with the Religion and Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia was especially helpful for understanding how public-facing work, podcast production, and activist scholarship sit together quite comfortably. Seeing my academic colleagues expand into more creative ventures has been a great source of joy. When it came time for my own, it was like taking deep gulps of fresh clean air into my newly expanded lungs. My podcast (available wherever you get yours) Pure White: Sexual Purity and White Supremacy helped to shape the throughline of this book.

Early drafts of this book were read and heard by a group of people whose friendships have become a bulwark against the sharp edges of life. Dawn Burns, Sarah Carson, Audrey Clare Farley, Linda Kay Klein, Bex Miller, Sarah Stankorb, Glenn Taylor, and Cait West, are all writers of poetry, creative non-fiction, and fiction whose work holds me in awe. Early in my interviews, I noticed an overwhelming theme: disembodiment. Traditional academic writing requires the author to remain removed from the pages, as if the absence conveys some authority from on high. To maintain this voice felt like a betrayal of my integrity and so I began considering the ways I could show up in these pages. Learning to write creative non-fiction and then being asked to read that work in front of people was a seismic shift in my self-understanding as a writer. Together, Dawn, Cait, Sarah and I have become experts in trauma-informed, compassionate storytelling that provides people a soft place to sit and listen to one another. Writing and reading about religious and sexual trauma is a task I would never attempt with anyone else, but with them it has become as necessary as breathing.

It took me years to feel confident about myself as a non-academic writer, to be attuned to the places in my body (not my head) where truths that needed airing lay in wait. This past summer I applied for and attended my first non-fiction writing workshop organized by S.B. Plate-Rodriguez of the Association for Public Religion and Intellectual Life and run by Brooke Wilensky-Lanford. I am incredibly grateful for their ability to create a temporary community that affirmed my hopes that I could write from my whole self, not just a disembodied brain.

This book is the product of a lot of luck (as nothing happens in the academic world without it), learning to hold all things loosely, and seeking to speak a truth that resonates for the individual and the collective. An empathic massage therapist once told me that I have the support I need, even when I don’t feel it. That I am surrounded by colleagues, friends, and family who provide that support is a tangible fact. I have numerous concentric circles of support that I often fail to recognize. If I were to name them all here it would be an embarrassment of riches. But they are each present in this book, if not in name, in the spirit of growing together into something new.