After Purity: A book of revelations
An excerpt from After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America
After Purity is a book about the history of a myth. About unwinding the knotted mass of narratives, stereotypes, harm, and terror management that wrap around our imaginations in order to make the unthinkable palatable. Myths conceal as much as they reveal about our ability to make meaning and make it make sense. They allow us to gain, edit, and forget knowledge, constructing a reality that either confronts or acquiesces to the status quo. They allow us to hide from ourselves, our collective histories boxed into curriculum and museums cordoning off our memory into bite-size chunks that chew easily. But they also reveal and stand ready to transform into a blaze of revelation when truth shoots from the sky like your neighbors fireworks two weeks after the Fourth of July. It is neither convenient, nor appreciated. And it will wake you up at 1am.
After Purity is a call to observe the revealing of what we have been so desperately trying to hide. Our bodies, our fears, our desires. To see clearly what sins require forgiveness and which are human experiences willfully misunderstood as dangerous. It is not about divining the innocent from the guilty, nor the sinner from the saved. But about seeing these all mixed up together, an archive of miscegenation.
Sex, religion, and race, a combination so fraught many insist they have nothing to do with one another. So we have learned to keep them nestled neatly, separate and not equal. Mix them together for a blazing display of national shame.
After Purity is a project in learning to see how our habits of knowledge are formed by equal parts curiosity and control. We like to imagine what we can control, who we can control. How we can make ourselves invisible when we need to feel safe, even if, especially if, we have ignored the safety of others.
The stories, stereotypes, fears, and harm that comprise this book are meant to “open your eyes” as my students like to say when they are trying to tell me they want to see and knows things differently. Even, I suspect, if they are not actually doing so.
After Purity is a book about innocence gained and lost and finally discarded in favor of truth and clarity. We must know and understand even if it means evacuating the higher ground and increasing our anxiety meds. What we don’t know is causing harm. It’s time to listen to the past so we can speak clearly in the present. It’s time to understand that your safe neighborhood, your parent approved school textbook, your church filled with Jesus-followers are harboring myths about purity and danger, giving you tools for constructing the boundaries that keep out what needs keeping out.
After Purity is about living in uncertainty and being unwilling to let the status quo be enough. Because the way we have been has become untenable. Our bodies are not meant to be ignored. Soon enough, they will show up to demand our attention and will do so for our own good. We cannot know our past if we do not know how a body has moved us from one moment to the next.
After Purity is a book about the history of a myth that allows us to dismember the past and view the parts like debris floating through the rivers of a nation that does not know itself. Like strange fruit hanging from the trees. Or the young wishing on their youth.
We are not innocent. We are not pure. We are flesh and blood ready to break the sound barrier with shrieks of unbridled rage. And live into a body re-membered by the truth of our collective past.
In 2023 we are in a moment of mythical realism, when the truth and its variations sit side by side for us to consume according to our prejudices and/or willful ignorance. The stories we’ve been telling ourselves about who we are in the United States have completed their ascension into a chaos demon of misinformation and stubborn pride. Because we cannot face the truth that we have been lying to ourselves about who we are, about what we are, the United States of America.
Some will say “we” are Christian. They will say we are American. They will not say “we are white” because we don’t talk about that. It’s the polite way to be. But that’s the genius of whiteness. Its silence is its power. Unless of course our whiteness is being interrogated and then we are one racial group among many. E Plurbis Unum.
Our desire for equality is leveled by the status quo. We have already become what we were always meant to be. A couple of tweaks, a new President, and we’ll be just fine. But the absence of a pussy grabber in the Oval Office amounts to little when pussies are still being grabbed non-consensually and without consequence.
#MeToo, #ChurchToo, and a racial reckoning are echoes of the past we claim is no longer relevant. And when that past tries to take its seat at the table, it gets accused of threatening our children’s innocence or being a demonic force dividing the body of Christ, as if dismemberment wasn’t already a national past-time. We must always protect the innocent. How else can we remind ourselves that we have good intentions? They are the raw materials for myths that reinvigorate our collective innocence. We are good. We are blessed by a God who reigns over our past, transforming exploitation, torture, and greed into sacred acts of nation-building. Our mascots lead us in cheers for justice and freedom. While their flag-bearing hubbies build a gallows on the national mall. The same piece of land where the young displayed cards pledging purity to god, family, spouse, and children. America will not be undone by horny teenagers or stubborn constitutional protocol.
It can be hard to know the difference between ignorance and innocence. One comes with culpability, the other a free soft drink at Chik-fil-a. A culture defined by purity relies on both. Disembodiment is useful mechanism for learning to ignore desire, identity, and a violent past present. Stretching gaps in memory to fill empty library shelves and the pages of sex ed curricula. Revelations of self-discovery sequestered in the white, gilded room of an exceptional nation.