Video: A Catholic Feminist Perspective on Purity Culture
From Our Free Video Program: Cultivating Catholic Feminism
About the Presenter: Abigail Favale is Dean of Humanities at George Fox University, and the author of Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion. Her latest book, The Genesis of Gender, will be published by Ignatius Press in early 2022. In addition to writing and presenting the educational material of this program, Abigail also wrote our program prayer Heroines of the Faith.
This lesson with Dr. Abigail Favale is a part of our free video program Cultivating Catholic Feminism. Sign up for the program at the link below.
Video Transcript
Secular feminists have critiqued Christianity for perpetuating “purity culture” – a social context that defines women’s worth by their sexual histories, by whether they have remained sexually “pure” or not. These critiques have some merit. I certainly grew up in a Christian context that placed an inordinate amount of emphasis on sexual purity and used shaming tactics to keep young people from having sex. While on the surface, purity culture might seem to be in line with a Christian worldview, it is actually a harmful distortion.
Let’s look at the conflation of “purity” with “virginity.” In the culture I was raised in, these terms were used synonymously, which creates a reductive and often destructive understanding of “purity.” If “purity” is simply shorthand for whether or not one has had sex, then our default state is purity, which can be corrupted or lost through sexual activity. The trajectory is from purity into corruption, and then you are more or less marooned there. Virginity, once lost, can never truly be regained.
There are two major problems with this. First, this understanding of purity inverts the arc of the Christian life, in which we move from original sin into sanctification by grace. This movement is from corruption toward purity. Purity, rightly and holistically understood, is the conversion of the whole self, which is a gradual and lifelong process, only possible through divine grace. This process of purification includes how we steward our sexuality, but it is not reducible to it.
An inverted understanding of sin and purity leads to the second major problem: seeing women and girls who’ve lost their virginity as “damaged goods.” That’s the logic here: if purity is synonymous with virginity, it’s something that you either have or you don’t; it can be “lost” and never regained. Having sex outside of marriage is not just a lapse in behavior that can be repented and repaired—it reflects a change of status, a shift in one’s being, that is permanent. While Christian purity culture might be a reaction against the hyper-sexualization of our culture—in a great twist of irony, it actually leads to the sexualization of girls by rooting their identity and value in sexuality and creating a sub-class of women who have lost their value.
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