Emily Joy Allison - #ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing

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#ChurchToo

#ChurchToo

How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing

Emily Joy Allison

Broadleaf Books

Minneapolis

#CHURCHTOO

How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing

Copyright 2021 Broadleaf Books, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email or write to Permissions, Broadleaf Books, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Cover image: Cafe Racer/shutterstock

Cover design: Laura Drew

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-6481-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-6482-4

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor 1517 Media is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For everyone who has come forward with the truth, and everyone within whom the truth still burns. Me too.

Contents

On November 21, 2017, I was finishing a residency at St. Johns University in Minnesota. I had gone there to finish my first book.

By the time I left, Id had my last Thanksgiving with my in-laws, then I moved out of my home and ended my twelve-year marriage.

But before all of that, I spent time going to Mass, writing, and walking through the snowy woods, trying not to pray to a God I wasnt sure I believed in anymore. During the evenings, Id go into vespers and sit alone in the church, watching the monks, the men, go through their rituals, which seemed both so new and ancient to me, since Id been raised evangelical. I thought, These men cannot get me here. I am safe here.

My marriage was ending and the world was falling down around me. The #MeToo movement had begun that October and was picking up steam. Every morning, Id read the news: another bad man outed, another womans shame on display, another womans strength asserted.

I, too, carried stories in my body. A boss whod harassed me at a literary conference. My sisters abuser, who was a relative. And for me, a dorm room, two men, beer, and a memory that haunted me for years until 2017, when while watching Brett Kavanaghs confirmation hearing, I understood that it hadnt been my fault.

But on November 21, 2017, all of that was swirling through the air like the snow at St. Johns, both making it so hard to breathe.

That day, checking Twitter after a day of writing, I saw the hashtag #ChurchToo. I clicked immediately and read and read. Each story pulled me down and down until I was submerged in a world of stories that were both foreign and familiar. They werent my stories, but they were my stories.

I had been raised evangelical and homeschooled in Texas in the 1990s. There I was raised with the doctrine of baptism by full immersion. Only then would we be fully purified.

Reading the #ChurchToo thread was an immersion of another kind, a baptism in a world of truth.

Months before in couples therapy, where I was frantically trying to hold together the fraying ends of my marriage, the therapist had told my husband and me that Id been spiritually abused.

Spiritual abuse is when the Bible is used to control and restrain a person, shed explained. My husband was confused.

Isnt that what religion is? hed asked.

She tried to explain. He didnt understand.

Wed gotten married at twenty-two, both of us pure until marriage. Well, pure-ish for me. There was still that night in the dorm room, which had happened when I was dating him, and Id convinced myself it never happened. Id pushed it from my mind, and it would only return when Id smell Bud Light or the Clearasil face wash Id used to clean my whole body in the shower the morning after.

Years later, Id read about a 2013 study where 0.5 percent of women surveyed reported getting pregnant before theyd had sex. These women were more likely to have signed a chastity pledge and more likely to have had parents whod had trouble discussing sex and birth control.

The studys authors were confused and thought that it was a statistical anomaly, that maybe the women had forgotten. But to me, it made perfect sense. Id been raised in the purity culture of the 1990s. Id been given a ring at sixteen. Id been told that no man would want me if I was ruined, usedlike a dirty tissue, as one Sunday school teacher had demonstrated: You are the tissue. No one wants a used tissue.

Raised to believe my body was my primary value in a marriage, Id done everything I could to stay pure. Except one night, where there was drinking and Id said no, but it happened anyway, and now everything Id tried to be was lost.

I refused to let that happen. It was a conscious decision to try to forget. I could only live through denial.

If I would have been able to talk about what happened, if I would have had the language of consent, the language of boundaries and healthy sexuality, I would have been able to forge for myself a path of autonomy, one where my value wasnt my body.

When I had that language, when I finally was able to say, I am worth more, it ended my marriage. And during that divorce, my ex tried to argue that I owed him $10,000 for his investment in my brain. Thats all I wasa body. My lawyer and I laughed at that line item, which we fought against and won. But it still stands there in the spreadsheet, an accounting of my worth as a human. Brain: $10,000. Vagina?

When I left my marriage, I found a new therapist and told her about spiritual abuse, and she said, Oh, thats just abuse abuse.

And that therapist was right.

And that therapist was also wrong.

The intersection of religion and sexual abuse is pervasive and insidious. As Emily Joy Allison lays out in this book, even for those not raised in conservative evangelical faith traditions, the myths of purity culture are steeped into American society.

Allison lays it out with the precision of a doctor cutting out a cancerthanks to Bush-era policies, abstinence-only education is pervasive in schools across America. The narrative that pits fetus against human mother is one that our culture buys writ large, when in reality its as ridiculous a premise as debating flat earth versus round.

Sexual abuse, when wrapped in the sugarcoating of religion, is a particularly toxic and American poison. It infects our society, from our state-level policies on Planned Parenthood funding, to Medicaid dollars, to school sex ed, to the availability of birth control and Supreme Court decisions on whether birth control should be covered by employers.

And in this country are powerful pockets of controlchurchesunscrutinized locales of religious and patriarchal law.

If religious myths about purity and bodies are the toxins that float through our culture, poisoning our air, Emily Joy Allisons book is the antidote.

A graduate of Moody Bible Institute, Allison is a Samson breaking down the walls of an unholy temple from the inside. She writes with the understanding of someone who was raised in the prison of purity culture but from the perspective of someone who is freed.

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