Rape Culture, Purity Culture, and Coercive Control in Teen Girl Bibles

Caroline Blyth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000353846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Sexualidad humana en psicología

In this fascinating book, Caroline Blyth takes a close look at Bibles marketed to teen girls and asks how these might perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes that lie at the heart of rape culture.

The author considers the devotionals, commentaries, and advice sections placed throughout these Bibles, which offer teen girl readers life advice on topics such as friendships, body image, and how to navigate romantic relationships. Within these discussions, there is a strong emphasis on modesty, purity, and sexual passivity as markers of young women's 'godliness'. Yet, as the author argues, these gendered ideals are prescribed to readers using rape-supportive discourses and the tactics of coercive control. Moreover, the placement of these various editorial inserts within the pages of sacred scripture gives them considerable power to reinforce deeply harmful ideologies about gender, sexuality, and sexual violence. Given the seeming popularity of these Bibles among Christian teen girls, the need to dismantle their damaging rhetoric is especially urgent.

This book will be of particular interest to those studying the Bible, religion, gender, and theology, as well as the general reader.

1 Purity, modesty, and rape culture in teen girl Bibles

In this chapter, I consider the ways that evangelical teen girl Bibles reinforce a discourse of purity, which in turn sustains traditional gender stereotypes and rape-supportive ideologies. The purity discourse is centred on the belief that girls’ and women’s social “value” is contingent on their virginity/chastity and their ability to remain sexually “pure.” Rooted in patriarchal gender ideals, it fetishizes virginity (Valenti 2009, 14) and carries the expectation that “girls and women, in particular, will be utterly and absolutely nonsexual until the day they marry a man” (Klein 2018, ch. 3, Kindle; also Klement and Sagarin 2017, 208). This purity discourse is not only found in religious ideology, but reflects wider socio-cultural beliefs about gender, female sexuality, and women’s moral currency. As Jessica Valenti argues, “Idolizing virginity as a stand-in for women’s morality means that nothing else matters—not what we accomplish, not what we think, not what we care about and work for. Just if/how/whom we have sex with. That’s all” (2009, 24). Moreover, the purity discourse tightly connects women’s ethical identity to their body in a way that celebrates their passivity, suggesting that “women can’t be moral actors. Instead, we’re defined by what we don’t do—our ethics are the ethics of passivity” (Valenti 2009, 25).

Despite being endorsed by both religious and secular communities, the sexual purity discourse has been the “most stubborn message” of evangelical church teachings for decades, rising to especial prominence since the late 1980s and 1990s (Stanley 2020, 119).¹ Following wider evangelical trends of using certain popular culture formats to disseminate their doctrines, teachings on sexual purity are sold to evangelical Christian tweens, teens, and young adults (as well as their parents) through purity industry products, including highly editorialized Bibles, popular books, magazines, and devotionals,² DVDs, blogs, vlogs, Bible study programmes, seminars, purity balls,³ abstinence-only sex education programmes,⁴ and a plethora of other commodities including purity rings,⁵ bracelets, necklaces, mugs, and T-shirts (Klein 2018, Introduction, Kindle). Evangelical groups such as Silver Ring Thing and True Love Waits run events and offer products that continually stress the connection between purity and faith, making the latter unequivocally contingent on the former. In the United States alone, these groups have reached millions of young people (Moslener 2017, 609). Their events and products essentially sell sexual purity to young evangelicals as the sole option available to them: they reinforce the evangelical belief that sexual abstinence before marriage is the only way to live as a Christian and that any form of premarital sexual activity is a threat to one’s physical, emotional, and spiritual health (Moslener 2015, Introduction, Kindle). The only “safe sex” before marriage is no sex at all.

Although these purity industry products are marketed to both male and female evangelicals, their messaging and modes of delivery are highly encoded for gender—fetishizing and commodifying female chastity as part of the natural, divinely created order. As I discuss in this chapter, the contemporary evangelical purity industry repackages traditional gender norms that frame male sexuality as actively aggressive and female sexuality as passive and shameful, and naturally so. God, it appears, designed men to be “hardwired” to search out sex; women are therefore tasked with protecting their purity from male sexual advances, all the while suppressing or denying their own (sinful and dangerous) sexuality and sexual desires. Female tweens, teens, and young women are taught that their “sexual thoughts, feelings, and choices determine [their] spiritual standing” (Klein 2018, Introduction, Kindle), and therefore have the potential to be a source of sin and defilement, not only for themselves but also for the men they encounter. Men, meanwhile, can be secretly proud of their own voracious sexual appetites, safe in the knowledge that these are natural and God-given.

To be honest, the contemporary evangelical purity movement of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is not saying anything terribly new; sexual chastity is a mainstay of most conservative religious communities. What is new, however, is the way that it has framed sexual chastity as a public and political form of religious testimony, rather than a private and personal choice (Moslener 2015, Introduction, Kindle). Drawing on the rhetoric of moral panic and apocalyptic anxiety, the evangelical purity discourse pushes back against what evangelicals perceive to be the widespread cultural degeneration of sexual morality, which began during the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and has led to our current “sex-saturated” culture (Moslener 2015, Introduction, Kindle). Young people’s ability to preserve their sexual integrity is viewed as an almost impossible task, “given the temptations of internal sexual urges and an external culture that teases young people with the titillations of sexual experimentation” (Moslener 2015, Introduction, Kindle). Appealing to discourses of public health and therapeutic spirituality, evangelical sexual purity rhetoric is therefore presented as a vital part of adolescents’ spiritual, mental, and physical wellbeing (Moslener 2015, Introduction, Kindle; Williams 2011, 430–34). And even when scientific studies demonstrate that abstinence-only sex education programmes are ineffective and may compromise adolescent wellbeing,⁶ proponents of the evangelical purity discourse draw instead on theological and biblical rationales to justify their teachings. Outward, embodied choices (such as abstinence) become evidence of one’s godly soul—an external marker of one’s spiritual health and commitment to the evangelical God.

As I noted at the start of this chapter, the evangelical Christian church is not the only voice perpetuating this highly gendered purity discourse; many of the same ideologies underpinning it—“natural” female sexual passivity and male sexual aggression, the shaming of female sexuality, and the sexualized woman as morally “damaged goods”—are equally dominant in wider contemporary culture. But the evangelical community does have a particularly prominent and powerful voice in this discussion, especially given the community’s global reach and the way that its teachings embed purity messaging within religious dogma and biblical authority. It’s so much harder to debate these ideations of purity when your salvation is on the line.

Yet it is a debate worth fighting over. The purity rhetoric expressed in the teen girl Bibles I examine prioritizes young women’s purity and modesty as markers of their “godly” character. At the heart of this rhetoric, however, is a desire to control girls’ and women’s bodies and to erase sexual violence as a serious social concern (Klement and Sagarin 2017). Purity products aimed at evangelical teen girls reinforce discourses of sexuality and gender that lie at the heart of rape culture: discourses that measure a woman’s social and spiritual worth according to her sexual status, particularly her chastity, and that put the onus of responsibility onto women for guarding their chastity and negotiating consent (or more importantly, withholding consent). These discourses help to perpetuate the myths that a rape victim is “damaged goods” as the result of losing her chastity or “purity,” and that she was likely to blame for her assault because she “tempted” her attacker with her immodest appearance or behaviour (her “lack” of purity, as it were). They also re-inscribe the misperception, so common in rape cultures, that women must take responsibility for safeguarding their sexual chastity because men “just can’t help themselves” when it comes to matters of sex. This, once again, effectively shifts the culpability for rape from perpetrator to victim, while problematizing understandings of sexual violence and consent (Kramer and Sagarin 2017). As Olivia Stanley observes, “The rhetoric of man’s uncontrollable lust seems an odd bedfellow for purity discourses, yet they lie hand in hand” (2020, 119). Or, in the words of Valenti, “So long as women are supposed to be ‘pure’, and so long as our morality is defined by our sexuality, sexualized violence against us will continue to be both accepted and expected” (2009, 147; see also Anne 2012).

Moreover, purity culture messaging also has the potential to undermine the mental health and wellbeing of evangelical women and girls who remain its chief targets. According to Linda Kay Klein (a former member of an evangelical community which endorsed purity culture teachings):

Evangelical Christianity’s sexual purity movement is traumatizing many girls and maturing women haunted by sexual and gender-based anxiety, fear, and physical experiences that sometimes mimic the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Based on our nightmares, panic attacks, and paranoia, one might think that my childhood friends and I had been to war. And in fact, we had. We went to war with ourselves, our own bodies, and our own sexual natures, all under the strict commandment of the church.

(2018, Introduction, Kindle)

Klein describes feeling a sense of shame about her own sexualized body as she grew up, which manifested later in her adult relationships.⁷ Her teenage encounter with evangelical purity culture left her carrying the shame, fear, and anxiety of being “impure”—a “stumbling block” and source of temptation for men (2018, Introduction, Kindle). She was taught that sexual purity was an external marker of a person’s worthiness to belong to the evangelical community; sex was a measure of how close a person was to God, how “true” a Christian they were. But as Klein notes, “The [evangelical] purity message is not about sex. Rather, it is about us: who we are, who we are expected to be, and who it is said we will become if we fail to meet those expectations. This is the language of shame” (2018, Introduction, Kindle; emphasis original). The evangelical purity movement thus embeds shame in girls and young women about who they are as social, spiritual, and sexual subjects. This shame is “coiled around core beliefs, laced through theology, and twisted into doctrine, making it nearly impossible to see” or to challenge (Klein 2018, Introduction, Kindle). Moreover, such shame can lead girls and women who are victims of sexual violence to feel powerless, worthless, stigmatized, and blamed. As Valenti argues, the myth of sexual purity does far more harm to women than our “sex-saturated” culture ever could (2009, 9).

Just as the evangelical purity discourse is heavily encoded for gender, it also draws on malignant ideologies of race, class, and sexuality. In a church predominated by whiteness, and founded on white privilege (Moslener 2015, Introduction, Kindle), notions of female “purity” have always served to uphold the feminine “ideal” as white, middle-class, and heterosexual. Failing to fit into this ideal, women of colour, working-class women, and queer women therefore fail the purity test from the outset and are elided from most conversations about desirable femininity and sexuality (Collins 2000, 123–48). As Valenti observes, “How can you be ‘pure’ if you are seen as dirty to begin with? … Women of color, low-income women, immigrant women—these are the women who are not seen as worthy of being placed on a pedestal. It’s only our perfect virgins who are valuable, worthy of discourse and worship” (2009, 45).

For the remainder of this chapter, I explore the ways that the three Bibles under discussion (True Images, Revolve, and the Bible for Teen Girls) target their “perfect virgin” teen girl audience with purity messaging. Drawing on examples from these Bibles, I contend that the purity discourse articulated therein serves to control and erase teen girls’ sexuality, all the while reinforcing and perpetuating various rape myths and rape-supportive ideologies that scaffold rape cultures.

Keeping vertical on the slippery slope: the evangelical purity discourse

When virginity is fetishized, sex becomes taboo and shameful— something that should remain hidden and unspoken. Evangelical girls and women are thus taught that talking or thinking about sex, let alone enacting it, is a source of shame and sin (Klein 2018, ch. 3, Kindle). And through this miasma of silence around sex, teen girls must learn to navigate multiple prescriptions and proscriptions intended to keep them “pure.” Definitions of “sex” and “sexual activity” are not typically restricted to penetrative sexual intercourse, but may include oral sex and masturbation (either mutual or solo).⁸ Some evangelical teen Bibles and literature also urge caution with premarital kissing, petting, touching, sexting, lying down,⁹ and even thinking about sex or having a crush, as well as watching sexual scenes or imagery in mainstream cinema, music videos, and any form of pornography.¹⁰ As one True Images “In Focus” profile insists, “Any activity that arouses sexual feelings is off-limits” to a girl until she is married (TIB 377). For these activities may lead her onto the slippery slope of sexual desire, and before you know it, she’ll be sliding and slipping towards all manner of sexual impurity. The only sexual status that teen girls must hold onto is an asexual status—they must remain virgins until they marry their first and only husband. Nothing else will do.

This emphasis on virginity is reinforced time and again throughout the teen girl Bibles I looked at, both explicitly in the didactic editorial notes and more implicitly too. For example, some of the “Mirror Images” profiles in True Images feature godly biblical women who are praised (among other things) for their chastity: the virgin-until-marriage Rebekah, who had a “servant’s heart” (TIB 88), and (of course) the Virgin Mary, who is lauded particularly for “[keeping] herself pure in anticipation of her wedding night … Mary knew she was on track with God and her man” (TIB 903). True Images readers are invited to emulate these biblical role-models, whose sexual purity has never been in doubt.

Yet, within the teen girl Bibles, one can detect a palpable fear that girls are always an inch away from losing their purity, often because they live in a “sex-saturated” culture. Editorial notes regularly warn readers against the dangers of various fleshly temptations wrought by a culture that does not take sex seriously enough. Girls must therefore be prepared to resist all the temptations that are thrown their way, from watching steamy love scenes in movies to having crushes on guys. In one Bible for Teen Girls devotional (an excerpt from Bekah Hamrick Martin’s book, The Bare Naked Truth, published in 2013), readers are warned that “we’re so saturated in our sex-crazed culture that our senses are numbed. Things we might have questioned before now don’t even register. And if we’re not prepared—if we haven’t decided what to do in a tempting situation beforehand—we might as well just kiss our ideals good-bye” (BTG 1506). Sexual abstinence is heavily promoted, and a few pages later, another excerpt from Martin’s (2013) book tells girls to “Run. Get away. Don’t put yourself in a position to decide whether you need to use a condom. Don’t get alone with a guy you find attractive” (BTG 1519). This, Martin insists, is “really the best form of birth control.” Similarly, a Revolve “Daily Devos” note reminds girls that “God created sex for marriage alone. If you’re in a relationship where you’re having sex or toying with the idea, get out! Even if you’re not in a relationship that has progressed to this point, be careful. Guard your thoughts and impulses … Sexual sin is powerful and tricky” (RB 1387).

Evangelical teen girls must therefore police their own behaviour carefully, because if they don’t, the repercussions are inevitably dire. “Sex is never casual,” they are advised (TIB 883), nor should it ever be shared with anyone other than the man they marry for life. Premarital sex is likened to “spilling your most valuable possession in the streets. It’s like letting strangers splash in your most priceless fountain … It isn’t a recreational activity with someone who wanders into your life and tries to lead you astray. It isn’t a gulp of water you grab wherever you can” (BTG 785). Sexual behaviour is never, ever “a fun activity for friends” (TIB 123) or “harmless fun” (TIB 543)—it is always dangerous and always damaging. “Love is like fire,” True Images readers are warned, “once it’s started, it’s hard to put out. If you don’t feel ready for a lifelong commitment, why play with fire? You will get badly burned” (TIB 1430). Yikes.

Time and again, then, these teen girl Bibles use editorial notes to persuade readers that God calls them to purity in order to “protect [them] from the dangers of misusing [their] sexuality” (TIB 233). Premarital sex and danger are frequently placed hand in hand, with girls receiving regular warnings that outside of marriage, sexual activity leads to a lifetime of misery, disease, shame, and sin. Horror stories of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections abound in teen girl purity literature, and thes...