Category: complementarian | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

Purity Culture isn’t just a Christian thing

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on October 26, 2015.

I spent my teenage years immersed in purity culture, in both evangelical and fundamentalist Christian circles.

If you were homeschooled, went to youth group, or wore a purity ring, you probably know what I’m talking about.

Purity culture was an ideology, a movement complete with books like Dannah Gresh’s Secret Keeper, promoted in concerts by Christian artists like Rebecca St. James and single women’s retreats, like the one I went to that was organized by Biblical Discipleship Ministries and hosted at Bill Gothard’s ALERT Academy in Big Sandy, Texas. (Note: Bill Gothard has been accused by at least 10 women of sexual abuse and the court case was featured in Amazon Prime’s docuseries Shiny Happy People in June 2023.)

A conservative Muslim man who added me on Facebook several months ago often posts religious memes or quotes from the Quran. This week, he shared a few memes that seemed oddly familiar, because they echoed many things that purity culture taught me.

Here they are, along with their Christian counterparts.

1. You will only find a partner as you grow closer to God.

Purity culture seemed to almost guarantee that we’d find The One (TM), if we obeyed all the rules. Following the formula would supposedly bring you closer to God and, by default, closer to that one person chosen to be your life partner from the beginning of time.

Eric and Leslie Ludy, authors of When God Writes your Love Story, said, “Girls, if you will learn to wait patiently and confidently for God to bring a Christlike man into your life, you will not be disappointed. And guys, learn to treat women like the Perfect Gentleman, Jesus Christ, If you do, you will not only be promoted out of ‘jerkhood,’ but you will then be worthy of a beautiful princess of purity who is saving herself just for you.”

Islamic teachings seem to be nearly identical, except you might be waiting for The One[s], depending on which sect you belong to.

2. Wives should obey and submit to their husbands.

This is basically complementarian theology, based on how evangelical and fundamentalist Christian churches interpret Ephesians 5:22-33.

According to this view, men and women are said to be equally valuable, but serve in different roles. Men are the leaders and women are their helpmeets. Those who believe in this claim that any attempt to live outside of these scripted gender roles will result in a failed marriage.

The most spiritual women, according to this teaching, submit to their husbands and obey them even when they disagree or even when their husbands are wrong or abusive.

3. Casual dating is bad because your goal should be to find someone to marry.

Purity culture teaches that kissing, holding hands, and sex outside of marriage is disrespectful to your future spouse and stealing intimacy from any potential relationships in the future.

A sexually active woman is used and no longer desirable, like damaged merchandise or a wilted rose.

Again, this idea isn’t unique to evangelical Christianity. It’s part of other high-control religions as well.

4. Specific instructions on what clothing is modest and pleasing / displeasing to God.

Basically the more covered your body is, the better, according to people who believe this.

Wear long sleeves and long skirts to demonstrate that we’re women, but you better not show your midriff or have a neckline. In fact, it’s better if you avoid any clothing even suggesting that you have curves. Shirts with V-necks are sketchy even if it doesn’t show cleavage, turtlenecks are your safest bet.

The goal is to become the least likely woman to “make your brother in Christ stumble,” which often ends up putting a lot of pressure on women in these religious communities, because it makes women responsible for men’s feelings and attraction to them.

Purity culture’s teachings have been used to blame women for their sexual assault or harassment when people ask “well, what were you wearing?”

These ideas aren’t unique or special.

Conservative Muslims say the exact same thing. Purity culture isn’t exclusive to Christianity. But in reality, we don’t have the inside track to something fabulous if we follow these teachings, and it’s not a magical life hack formula that will fix everything broken in our lives.

It’s more likely that we’re supporting an oppressive patriarchal system through these restrictive religious beliefs.

Most of this isn’t even in the Bible. Jesus doesn’t love you more if you wear the right clothing. I believe he lets you make your own adult choices.

Purity culture won’t make you a better person. It might just give you a superiority complex.

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A Meeting with a Pastor – Christian Women

When I met with the pastor tonight, some of the conversation revolved around his concept of complementarianism. He is a strange complementarian, I think. He believes that women and men are equal in Christ, but different in role, BUT at the same time, he believes that women should state their opinions in marriage and the church, should be heard (even in church), and should be respected and honored. He believes that women who are abused or neglected in marriage are NOT loving and submissive to their husbands UNLESS they attempt to stop the abuse or neglect. So he believes that the submissive, loving wife will not allow her husband to continue to harm himself, her, or their children.

He admitted that he couldn’t understand some things that were discussed in discussions such as the Truth’s Table podcast on Gender Apartheid he’d mentioned on Sunday because he has never experienced it and, though he can hear it and believe that the women speaking must have experienced something, he can’t imagine such things happening, himself.

I’m tempted to share a few things with him… some sermon clips, some discussions on Twitter, some articles that would expose him to the type of world some of us have been part of. It probably truly is a foreign concept to him. I met his teen daughter tonight, and it most definitely is a foreign concept to her. She was allowed to wander a busy Main Street with her friend. When he noticed picketers, he didn’t seem worried. He didn’t text her and ask where she was or tell her to be careful. When she walked into the coffee shop we were in, she didn’t hesitate to interrupt, though politely. She didn’t hesitate, either, to ask him for something, or to politely state again why it was reasonable when he said “probably not tonight.”

He seems to have a very different definition of submission and complementarianism than any I’ve found.

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Marriage Trouble Part 5

I forgot to list a couple of verses in my last post that were used in Michael Pearl’s “Moral Earnestness Test:”

And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. – 1 Timothy 2:14 (This is where I got the idea of not trusting my mind.)
Like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her lord. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear. – 1 Peter 3:6 (Not to fear consequences for submitting even while the husband is making foolish decisions.)

Writing these posts have been quite a bit triggering for me personally. Michael and Debi Pearl’s marriage teaching created a sort of abuse and Stockholm Syndrome situation disguised as Christianity. I will even go as far as saying it became tantamount to idolatry. It duped my husband to become entitled, narcissistic, and a tyrant. Needless to say, It didn’t make him a better, more mature spiritual leader. It hurt him. It hurt us. It hurt me. I was living a life of bondage which turned into another gospel, another message, a different spirit. It didn’t make sense with the rest of the Word of God.

A few years ago my husband scolded me for wanting to follow my gut to end a friendship with a woman I met on the internet. I don’t need to go into the story too detailed here but I believe she was a psychopath or at least a malignant narcissist. The way she idealized me, devalued and discarded me, after me giving her moral support for a year… It gave me PTSD.

Then I discovered this verse:

Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm. – Proverbs 13:20 (I can’t be keeping company with anyone who exhibits behavior of a fool as described in the Bible whether a friend or spouse, God warns His children. So boundaries are key!)

Around that time in the same year another blogging friend I knew for two years prior told me her husband was evil and had been abusing her and their many children and that he was leaving them. That gave me empathically induced PTSD too!

I think, at least in part, the PTSD caused me to start distrusting my own husband. I was no longer feeling safe with him as my umbrella of protection. I was sensing that something wasn’t right even more than ever. I was realizing I was in somewhat of an abusive marriage situation, both financially and emotionally. God didn’t seem to be paying too much attention to us either. One thing lead to another and our church paid for us to get counseling using a John Gottman Institute trained counselor. It helped us a lot!

Around that time, I got a big bruise that lasted a month and became a hematoma. This was caused by jumping out of bed and hitting my knee on the bed frame. I got a phone call thinking it was my husband and I wasn’t doing the housework. I had been relaxing instead so when I got the phone call I jumped out of bed and that’s how I hurt myself. I was contemplating about that hematoma on my leg realizing I was afraid because I feared telling my husband I was relaxing. You see, I had a ‘fake-it-’till-you-make-it’ system. A facade of being Super-wife that I was striving to keep up, while also thinking again God is not protecting me like I’m used to. Why? Then, a thought came to my mind:

God is a jealous God and He is jealous for me. Around that time I found this Bible verse:

Fear of man will prove to be a snare but whoever trusts in the Lord is kept safe. – Proverbs 29:25

Oh my gosh! You don’t know how relieved I was! God was revealing stuff I needed to realize! It then occurred to me something I knew and practiced before the Pearl teaching, was that scripture trumps my husband. Awesome! So since then it’s been a few years and I’ve been studying a bit of apologetics and egalitarian hermeneutics. It’s stuff I was interested in, but Debi Pearl made it seem like I wasn’t supposed to be interested in anything other than being an over-accommodating wife and mother. So that was the beginning of the end of my unnecessary marriage troubles. Now my husband says he likes me better with a backbone! 😜

That’s a glimpse of my personal story, but I want to refer everybody to a blog called: createdtobehelpmeet.blogspot.com. It’s an excellently done review of the book. I don’t have the book anymore, so I couldn’t really take it apart and give you a nice detailed review about it. All I did was share how it harmed, more than helped, our marriage and our spiritual well being.

Marriage Trouble Part 1
Marriage Trouble Part 2
Marriage Trouble Part 3
Marriage Trouble Part 4

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A Conversation with a Pastor, Part 2

My last email to the pastor from part 1 was May 3. Four days later, I received a response at church. The pastor stopped me at church and said he would be getting with me about coffee.

Tonight I went to a business meeting, just to observe. Before the meeting, I ran into the pastor and told him I was invited by one of the other ministers. He visited with me for a bit about our emails, telling me that he did want to visit. He said he didn’t feel right about throwing certain words out but was concerned about their impact. I affirmed that I understood there were many understandings of some words, and that I wasn’t trying to throw anything out, but wanted his definitions of certain words because they are so often misused. I explained that there were some things that were so misused that I needed to redefine them, to study them out, and had come to a quite different understanding of them than this group might believe, but that it was for my own safety. I also explained that sometimes those words and the definitions by which they were misused had to be gotten away from, not only to maintain any understanding of them but to maintain a belief or faith in God at all, or that some verses had to be studied and new understandings developed in order to even read the Bible.

He talked about being a shepherd again tonight. I don’t see that in the Bible – the comparison of pastor to shepherd. And he mentioned “they that must give account” (Heb 13:17). He has no idea what that verse means to me or how triggering it is. I don’t think he understands it the way it was taught in my former church. I don’t think he has any idea.

So, somewhere in the near future, coffee is waiting, and maybe some explanations that I’m not sure I’m ready for.

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Marriage Trouble Part 4

I want to explain why I think the teachings in ‘Created to be His Help Meet’ book by Debi Pearl and the ‘Marriage God’s Way’ DVD by Michael Pearl are completely heretical at least in situations like mine was, and worse, dangerous for abusive marriages.

In ‘Marriage God’s Way’ Michael Pearl lists something he calls a “Moral Earnestness Test” on the screen showing all the difficult passages of scripture for women using the King James Version. He then does some commentary between verses and I’ll write whatever I can remember and/or what I understood his comments were. And then maybe I’ll add some personal comments underneath.

**Trigger Warning**

Michael Pearl’s “Moral Earnestness Test,” not necessarily in order:

Proverbs 31:11 – The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. {Michael Pearl taught that a woman should never spoil her husband’s reputation by saying anything negative about him to anybody.}
Ephesians 5:23 – For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
1 Timothy 2:11-15 – Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.
Ephesians 5:22 – Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. {Wives should submit to their husband just like they submit to God.}
1 Peter 3:1 – Likewise, ye wives, [be] in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives; {If they are not interested in Christianity, don’t try to evangelize them.}
Genesis 3:16 – Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire [shall be] to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
1 Timothy 2:12 – But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. (I understood that to mean it was sin to try to apply the great commission, to contend for the faith, to correct my husband in any way whether privately or anywhere.)
1 Corinthians 11:3-16 – But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman [is] the man; and the head of Christ [is] God. {Michael Pearl said that this means in the chain of command, my husband is god to me.}
1 Corinthians 14:34 – Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but [they are commanded] to be under obedience, as also saith the law. (So it was inappropriate for me to ask the pastor anything about the teaching. I had to ask my husband about it whether he heard the lesson or not.)
Colossians 3:18 – Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.

I just wanted to add some words and say that after seeing all those Bible verses scrunched together in that way, it is enough to keep a new young Christian wife very oppressed and confused, thinking I had to pick and choose whether to obey God’s Word or my husband. And to try to do both was really hard because I felt unequally yoked and in my zeal my husband would make fun of me. I hated being made fun of.

Don’t get me wrong. I was often rebellious to this system when I just had enough which was probably every day. Then I’d just keep trying to work the system. It felt like the rest of the Bible couldn’t possibly be for me. When I’d try to apply my personal studies I felt like it just didn’t work with my circumstances being married to a man who at the time seemed annoyed with my Christianity. This made me start feeling like I was losing my saltiness.

I couldn’t ask anybody for help because then that would require me to probably share something negative about my husband which would make me fall short of Proverbs 31 womanhood. I was stuck in bewilderment for many years just picking and choosing what seemed convenient at the time living with a confused conscience for a long time never trusting my head too much.

To be continued.

Marriage Trouble Part 1
Marriage Trouble Part 2
Marriage Trouble Part 3
Marriage Trouble Part 4
Marriage Trouble Part 5

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