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    Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free
    Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free
    Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free
    Audiobook8 hours

    Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free

    Written by Linda Kay Klein

    Narrated by Linda Kay Klein

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    In Pure, Linda Kay Klein uses a potent combination of journalism, cultural commentary, and memoir to take us “inside religious purity culture as only one who grew up in it can” (Gloria Steinem) and reveals the devastating effects evangelical Christianity’s views on female sexuality has had on a generation of young women.

    In the 1990s, a “purity industry” emerged out of the white evangelical Christian culture. Purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls came with a dangerous message: girls are potential sexual “stumbling blocks” for boys and men, and any expression of a girl’s sexuality could reflect the corruption of her character. This message traumatized many girls—resulting in anxiety, fear, and experiences that mimicked the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—and trapped them in a cycle of shame.

    This is the sex education Linda Kay Klein grew up with.

    Fearing being marked a Jezebel, Klein broke up with her high school boyfriend because she thought God told her to and took pregnancy tests despite being a virgin, terrified that any sexual activity would be punished with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. When the youth pastor of her church was convicted of sexual enticement of a twelve-year-old girl, Klein began to question purity-based sexual ethics. She contacted young women she knew, asking if they were coping with the same shame-induced issues she was. These intimate conversations developed into a twelve-year quest that took her across the country and into the lives of women raised in similar religious communities—a journey that facilitated her own healing and led her to churches that are seeking a new way to reconcile sexuality and spirituality.

    Pure is “a revelation... Part memoir and part journalism, Pure is a horrendous, granular, relentless, emotionally true account" (The Cut) of society’s larger subjugation of women and the role the purity industry played in maintaining it. Offering a prevailing message of resounding hope and encouragement, “Pure emboldens us to escape toxic misogyny and experience a fresh breath of freedom” (Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior and founder of Together Rising).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateSep 4, 2018
    ISBN9781508265726
    Author

    Linda Kay Klein

    Linda Kay Klein has spent her career working at the cross section of faith, gender, sexuality, and social change. She is the founder of Break Free Together. A Midwesterner at heart, she now lives in New York City with her family.

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    Reviews for Pure

    4.5/5

    163 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Highly recommended. Both to promote healing in shamed me and women and understanding in the (mostly men) who developed, enforced and reinforced their perverted interpretation of Christ and damaged all of these children and in the men who still believe in that message.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This was so engaging and SO REAL. As a woman that grew up deeply rooted in the evangelical purity culture and stayed there until my mid 20s I felt so incredibly seen by this book. Klein does an amazing job and describing the strangeness and subtleties of what that experience is like and portrays others’ stories in an extremely honest, authentic, & compassionate way. A must read for anyone interested in the deep-seated effects on shame in young women, gender dynamics, evangelical culture, purity culture, or anyone who has spent any portion of their life in the church.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A well researched and well written look at the damage caused by patriarchal oppression, purity culture, and the shaming of women in conservative churches. It also offered some direction as to how to move forward in a relationship with God and church while standing in opposition to that oppression. This is a book that every Christian needs to read or listen too.
    • 5/5
      Anyone who grew up in the church should read this!
    • 5/5
      Wow. It was like listening to my life’s story.
    • 5/5
      Enlightening, powerful, provocative, refreshing, insightful. As a male who grew up within this movement, I experienced but never fully realized the impact of purity culture. Listening to the stories of the women in this book allowed me to gain a new perspective, and I’m better because of it. Grateful for this book as I wrestle with how to be the best father, youth pastor, and husband that I can be.
    • 5/5
      Very insightful. Very well written and engaging. Makes you wonder, consider, ask questions, ponder, ruminate, and sympathize.
      It’s so important to hear the stories of one another, it helps us to be more compassionate to what others has gone through.
      This book carefully handles each story with kindness and love. As the author reflects towards the end of the book, this was not easy to write, but it was important. I’m glad to have read it and I completely recommend it. Whether you are a believer or agrees with what’s being presented, it’s important these stories are told and heard.
    • 5/5
      "Purity culture" -- the brand of evangelical Christianity that includes a huge emphasis on abstinence before marriage -- has long-lasting negative effects for many women and some men. That is the thesis of Klein's book and she sets about explaining it through exploring her own past, interviewing other evangelical and ex-evangelical women, and providing statistics and figures.This book was more than I was expecting it to be. For whatever reason, I expected it to be mostly a memoir, but Klein's own story is actually a relatively small part of this. While I agree with her general thesis, I was wondering how she was going to make a whole book out of 'abstinence education only isn't enough or particularly helpful.' But the stories she dived into also touched on additional topics like the church's teachings of women needing to be submissive to men and how things like this lead to a culture in which rape is excused or refused to be acknowledged. The victim-blaming episodes are the most upsetting but sadly not surprising. Other interviewees discuss coming out as LGBT in a setting that isn't welcoming, getting married too young because of the 'sex-is-only-for-marriage' mantra, and just generally dealing with not being allowed to have a voice as a woman. Shockingly a great number of the interviewees still believe in God and/or some other form of religion that isn't fundamental Christianity; I give them credit for being more forgiving than I could be. The audiobook is read by the author and she is surprisingly adept at making the whole book seem conversational and engaging. (I was burned by my most recent 'read by the author' audiobook and wasn't expecting much here.) She acknowledges that the book is specifically about white women on the whole because she didn't want to complicate the issue by adding in other factors like racial injustice; however, she does briefly touch on one group that is primarily Black women raised as evangelicals who are now pushing back on the purity myth due to the shaming effect it had. So it is not a super intersectional book, but at least this is explained rather than pretending like other races/ethnicities don't exist.
    • 3/5
      If it wasn't for the fact that I live in the Buckle of the Bible Belt and know some of these people, I would have said that this book was not non-fiction, but delusional fantasy. However, I have heard way too many people espouse the tenets of the so-called Purity Movement, to dismiss it as a joke.Unfortunately, the power of the author's message gets mired in her writing style and her decision to tell this story as a series of anecdotal interviews instead of a straight forward narrative.