White Christian Supremacy: The Teen Years
An excerpt from After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America (Forthcoming from Beacon Press.)
I grew up an evangelical Christian. Attending a parent-run Christian school grades K-12, I learned that public schools were inferior and dangerous learning environments. During high school we attended the national anti-abortion protest, driving 9 hours in one day to stand and march alongside posters of dead fetuses.And yes, I understood even before watching those Josh McDowell VHS tapes in Sunday School exactly why I should wait. As an older teenager I challenged myself to be bold in my faith. At church camp I wanted to share the love of Jesus as we paddled our way through the rapids of the Youghiogheny River. I worried that because I was raised Christian and didn’t have a dramatic conversion story or difficulty following the rules of my faith that I wasn’t able to offer the story of my life as a testimony.
It was the early 1990s, before True Love Waits and Joshua Harris and purity rings would become ubiquitous in the lives of Christian teenagers. But I understood that not having sex was an essential part of demonstrating my commitment to being better than other people being a Christian. When an article advocating for comprehensive sex education appeared in my local newspaper, I felt the need to be seen and heard. So I crafted a response:
A March 22 article reported on the classroom tactics of Cindy Forshee at Ambridge Area High School concerning AIDS, sex, and the whole deal. What really disturbs me about what is being taught in the public schools is that abstinence, the only safe sex, in high school is unrealistic. I attend a Christian high school at which we deal with all of the through programs such as Josh McDowell’s “Why Wait?” This series portrays sex as a sacred act which is to be saved for marriage. But, of course, this belief is old-fashioned and unrealistic. However, if this is old-fashioned, why are there high school students who believe in it today? Any why, if it is unrealistic, are high school students living it? Maybe if abstinence were presented as a real option, students would consider it more. What’s more important supporting the condom industry or our safety? Think about it!
Setting aside the fact that my memory of this letter did not re-emerge until after I published my first book on purity culture at the age of 41, this relic of my past offers a portrait of a Christian teen on fire for Jesus or at least certain that she was right about everything. The difference was never clear to me.
Despite the incontrovertible evidence of my evangelical bona fides, I never used the word that word to identify myself. We simply called ourselves Christian with the certainly that we knew who was not. We mocked the Baptists and their hyper-fixations on hem lines and prohibitions against dancing. I squirmed in the presence Pentecostals and other holiness folks whose churches attracted people who spoke in tongues. And though my mom, sister, and I devoured those Frank Perretti books about spiritual warfare that portrayed the United Nations as a front for demonic activity, I scoffed at anyone who focused their energies preparing for the end times. My sister and I were kicked out of the Christian homeschool theatre group because our parents “limited the work of the holy spirit” by asking that their teenager daughters not spend several days a week rehearsing and performing. This decision came to us because of a “spiritual director” who according to rumors walked backwards around the barn-converted-theatre in a suspicious cloud of something my Calvinist-soaked mind could not comprehend.
But we never called ourselves evangelicals.
As a US religious historian who has made some contribution to the academic study of evangelicalism in the United States, I have yet to understand this discrepancy, much less this category we call evangelical. Beginning in the 1980s scholars defined it based on a set of theological beliefs and practices: Jesus-focused, Bible-focused, conversion experience, and spreading the good news. But by that point white evangelicals in the US were already a political force, aligning themselves with the Republican party, prompting a teenager in W. Pennsylvania to conclude that in order to be a good Christian, or a Christian at all, one must vote Republican. In retrospect it almost feels like a ruse to identify evangelicalism as a unique set of theological beliefs which are, in fact, shared by many other Christian traditions. Even more, a concerted study of the history of evangelicalism demonstrates a diversity of thought around what constitutes “good news.”
For me, what is most fascinating about evangelicals and their stern brethren, fundamentalists, is how they define themselves in relationship to what they claim to not be part of: the world. Since the 19th century the butterfly dance between the holy and the profane has allowed evangelicals to maneuver themselves into prominent positions of power and influence. Within the fold, distinctions between the theological, cultural, and political are parsed with the fine-toothed comb of orthodoxy in order to maintain the illusion of a pure faith undiluted by cultural norms and political ideology.