A Steady Diet of Patriarchy: Purity Culture and Disordered Eating

An excerpt from After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America forthcoming from Beacon Press

“How would you describe evangelical purity culture to someone unfamiliar with it?”  I asked dozens of my interviewees. In 2019 I launched the After Purity Project in order to collect stories from people who had grown up and out of evangelical purity culture. Though I’ve spent over 15 years studying evangelicalism and sexuality in the United States, I wanted to understand how other people at various degrees of separation from the faith of their youth made sense of if for themselves. The answers to this question followed an unsurprisingly formula, reflecting the hard-lined, straight-forward messaging of purity teachings.  Overwhelming, these (mostly white, mostly women) spoke about learning that a lack of interest in sex and/or active resistance to their own sexual curiosities was essential to maintaining their Christian piety. Their adolescent religious life was dominated by lessons on how to control their bodies. 

Interviewees told me about how the intense pressures to control their bodies resulted in a is a disordered relationship with food. Only by controlling their physical appetites could they achieve the mandate to suppress their sexuality yet maintain a degree of sexual availability for attracting a husband. Cynda explained that her evangelical up-bringing emphasized that her value was inherently tied to her ability to attract and marry a man. But at the same time, she had to control her behavior and appearance so as not to be perceived as sexy. Cynda navigated this tension in her body by developing an eating disorder. As she explained to me, “(E)ating disorders are sort of a way out of that double-bind because you’re able to be feminine and prototypically attractive while also desexualize your body.”

Cynda wasn’t my only respondent who discussed her eating disorder.  Anna explained how purity culture allowed her to fully detach from all bodily needs, including food and questions about her sexuality. Because of its promotion of mandatory heterosexuality, purity culture provides no room for young people experiencing same sex attraction to attend to those desires. The only option is to shut down those feelings. Anna became accustomed to this habit, one that eventually translated into her relationship with food. She controlled the discomfort she felt in her body that resulted from denying her sexuality by controlling the food she ate and didn’t eat.  In treatment for an eating disorder, Anna was able to heal her relationship with food and with her sexual desire.  Shortly after, she came out as gay, something her counselor told her was quite common. Anna’s story allows us to understand how embodied desires are a communication system that need attention to function in our best interest. Efforts to control bodies and their natural urges super-charges the process of disembodiment. Desiring the wrong kind of body is equally indicative of moral failure as desiring the wrong kind of food.

In her book, Seeking the Straight and Narrow, religion scholar Lynne Gerber explains how evangelical weight loss programs and ex-gay ministries understand bodies as easily disordered by desires for food and sex. They affirm a set of theological claims that situate bodies as untrustworthy guides toward wholeness that require regular course correction. As such, bodies must be disciplined both physically and spiritually in order to remain under the control of a human will, presumably under the control of God’s will. Purity culture, Christian dieting, and ex-gay ministries see the human body as suspect, a guide easily disrupted by desires and appetites. Each of these campaigns creates a scenario that presses believers into bodily disciplines that assumes animosity between the body and the self.  Each demonstrates how evangelicals rely upon a theology of disembodiment that reflects Christianity’s historical discomfort with the body as a location of knowledge about the divine. Centuries after classical philosophers and early church fathers battled to control sexuality in the early church, evangelical Christians remain compelled by the belief that bodies have no inherent value beyond their ability to perform holiness. If bodies fail in their expression of religious piety, they become impediments to the same.

In her book See Me Naked: Stories of Sexual Exile in American Christianity, Amy Frykholm introduces us to young evangelical she calls Ashley.  A very serious Christian starting in her teen years, Ashley’s investment in purity culture demonstrates how the denial of bodily appetites connects food and sex for young women seeking holiness.  Before she developed Anorexia Nervosa in college, Ashley was a high school student bent on perfecting the modesty standards set by organizations like True Love Waits and Josh Harris’ purity manual, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye.  She explained to her mother that she needed to get rid of all the tank tops in her wardrobe because “From now on I am going to dress modestly.  I don’t want guys looking at me and thinking impure thoughts.”  Purity culture compelled her to navigate adolescent sexuality by creating the circumstances that would allow her to ignore sexual desire altogether.  She learned to discipline herself around appetites, believing that concealing her body with over-sized clothes, denying needs for physical touch, and training herself to ignore her body’s communication system would help her achieve spiritual perfection. 

When she began replicating this strategy in order to control her food intake, Ashley was well-practiced at avoiding the prompts of her body.  Purity culture had given her a road-map for achieving disembodiment as it taught her to dismiss and fear natural and necessary appetites. Once in recovery, she had to re-learn how to communicate with her body.  She had lost the ability to acknowledge physical hunger—to be able to say “I am hungry.”  She resisted the diagnosis as she couldn’t understand how she could be sick when she had been obediently denying her body—as instructed by her religious community—for so long. 

Ashley’s, Cynda’s and Anna’s eating disorders point to a patriarchal system of authority that demands individuals, especially young people, learn to control their bodily appetites. It is an effective way to instill the practice of self-policing among teenagers who already face overwhelming pressures around their bodies. Years ago I asked a 14-year old what she thought was the most pressing issue for people her age. Her mother had footed the entire bill in order to bringing Silver Ring Thing to her church so her daughter could have the experience of attending the event and committing herself to sexual purity before she began high school. So I expected her to respond to my question with something related to teen sex or peer-pressure. Instead, she simply said, “appearance.”

The pressures of bodily perfection are everywhere for teenagers, especially girls who are socialized to believe their most important quality is their ability to attract a man. Some may argue that purity culture challenges the pop-culture obsession with perfect bodies. But in fact it reinforces the belief that in order for our bodies to be acknowledged as good, they must be molded according by strict discipline to our appetites.