After Purity Now Available for Pre-Order!
Delighted to formally announce that After Purity: Race, Sex and Religion in White Christian America (Beacon Press, 2025) is now available for pre-order. I am so excited to be working with the publicity and marketing teams at Beacon to bring the results of the After Purity Project to your bookshelf, community, and local bookstore. Pre-orders for After Purity help publishers anticipate interest and identify where people are ready to have these important conversations. We will be working to connect with bookstores, college campuses, and other community organizations to hold conversations about purity culture, religious trauma, and White Christian nationalism. If you are interested in hosting a conversation, please be in touch.
From Beacon Press
An intersectional analysis of evangelical purity culture’s influence on gender, sexuality, race, and national identity in the United States
With a foreword by Linda Kay Klein, author of Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free
In After Purity, purity scholar Sara Moslener conducts a nuanced investigation of purity culture in white evangelical Christianity, revealing its profound impact on gender, sexuality, race, and national identity in the United States. Moslener shares exclusive stories of participants from her research on the After Purity Project to discuss how purity culture affected women—and particularly white women—who grew up in the evangelical church. These stories depict how white supremacy has a hand in constructing idealized “traditional” or “biblical” views of family, white racial identity, sexuality, gender expression, and religion, and how our physical bodies are situated within systems of power and oppression.
With a blend of history, current research, and sustained analysis, Moslener explores how white evangelicalism has become so politically powerful, why gender and sexuality are positioned at the center of debate, and how those debates aim to obscure deeper histories of white evangelical racism. She describes the full disturbing effect of the “True Love Waits” movement and how purity teachings displaced all other forms of religious education in evangelicalism. From her interviewees in the After Purity Project, she shares stories of oppressive personal piety, sexual repression, disembodiment, self-hatred, mandatory hetero-normativity, and the many layers of obligation and shame in sexuality before reaching adulthood and navigating their way out of the church. Moslener also describes her own story of being a teen advocate for purity culture to becoming a researcher, scholar, and advocate for people harmed by purity.
After Purity provides a window into the world of white evangelicalism and how its leaders and political allies have manufactured socio-sexual panic to justify the elimination of sexual and religious diversity that thrive in a flourishing democracy.
Pre-order now
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