“Purity” Is A Dirty Word

Today we are going to talk about purity.

American evangelicalism is rife with sermons about sexual purity. I remember one such sermon from way back when I was still a young hot-blooded evangelical, entitled “Purity Is Not A Dirty Word”.

In reality, “purity” is a dirty word.

But we are not going to talk about sexual purity today. When you say the word “purity”, evangelical purity culture is the first thing that comes to mind for many people. Purity culture originated in fundamentalist Christian circles and then blew up in mainstream evangelicalism during the 90s and 00s. Purity culture takes the demand to not have sex before marriage (which has been a key discipline in Christian spirituality for a very long time) and goes way beyond that with its own additional demands, which include such things as: Do not kiss, hold hands, or engage in any other physical contact/intimacy before marriage. Do not date anyone unless you seriously see them as a potential future spouse. There is at least some space for dating in the world of purity culture but the ideal method of romantic connection between the two sexes is a courtship process with heavy parental involvement/supervision.

Purity culture is its own thing. We have discussed it before around here, and we will do so again when I feel the time is right. Better yet, read Virgin Nation by Sara Moslener. This book says everything I could ever have wanted to say about purity culture, and it even discusses things that I have never mentioned around here, such as the (very real) connections between purity culture and a white supremacist vision for America.

But enough about sexual purity. Instead, we are going to zoom out and address the notion of purity itself as seen through a much wider lens.

Conservative Christians talk a lot about purity. In this world, to be pure is to be morally upright, and to be impure is to be the opposite of morally upright – corrupt, governed by sin, or whatever you choose to call it – and therefore unacceptable in the sight of God. This imagery is all over the place in the Bible, and so it makes sense that they would talk like this.

“Purity” is a metaphor. When we talk about sin as impurity, we are not saying that there is some actual, literal thing that is actually, literally contaminating us and making us impure. It is a metaphorical sense of pollution or contamination.

And it is a very dangerous metaphor. The danger is built into the metaphor.

You see, when something is impure, it must be purified. Meaning: Whatever stain/blemish/etc. is contaminating the thing – must be removed.

Why is this dangerous? Because the language of purity is all over the place in contexts where the demand for purification involves the worst kind of horrors and atrocities carried out against other human beings – very often in the name of religion, and specifically in the name of Christianity. These include such things as: Ethnic cleansing in the name of a “pure” people. Xenophobia and anti-immigrant policies in the name of a “pure” nation with firm borders that keep the national body pure and contaminants out. Efforts toward criminalizing LGBT identity because it is an “impure” expression of gender. Nationalisms around the world that target and oppress certain people and groups in their midst because they render “the people” impure.

The metaphor of purity takes us to those awful places whether we want it to or not. All through history, Christians have used the language of purity to marginalize and exclude. From the Crusades, all the way down to the Nashville Statement of 2017. And it continues to this very day. Millions of Christians, steeped in the language of purity, have long been primed for the logics of populism and nationalism that are driving the present historical/cultural moment.

But the language of purity isn’t just a large-scale thing that affects societies at the macro level. It affects real people, individual people whom Christians find impure. It lives in the bodies of sexually active teens who are marginalized by their faith communities, in the LGBT community, in black and brown people who do not have a place in majority-white Christian spaces – and many more.

This all comes down to a desire to purify. And purification can only be achieved those individuals and/or groups who “pollute” the Christian body, the national body, the white race, etc. Whether this removal is literal and final (as in Hitler’s euphemistically called “final solution”) or “merely” metaphorical – the underlying logic is the same. It is built into the language of purity and its inherent demand for purification. The realization of what is required by this demand for purification is built in as well.

It’s the “principle of the path”, which my church’s pastor routinely mentions. In short, every path has a destination. If you don’t like the destination, then find a different path. The language and metaphor of purity is a path, and the demand for purification with all its horrific consequences is the destination.

If this is not what you really believe or want, then find another metaphor. If you do, your theology will change. But if you cannot articulate your theology without the language of purity – if your theology demands the language of purity – then the demand for purification, and all of the horrific consequences that follow, is built in.

And that’s why “purity” is a dirty word.