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Theologizing the Evangelical Purity Dialectic

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Theologizing the Evangelical Purity Dialectic The Princess and the Styrofoam Cup: Theologizing the Evangelical Purity Dialectic Vanessa Reimer A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Graduate Program in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies York University Toronto, Ontario February 2016 © Vanessa Reimer, 2016 ii The Princess and the Styrofoam Cup: Theologizing the Evangelical Purity Dialectic Abstract This doctoral dissertation employs critical discourse analysis and feminist life writing to contextualize and critique North America’s “purity culture,” therein arguing that the contemporary popularization and commodification of girls’ “purity” are influenced by evangelicalism’s burgeoning subcultural influence. This project accordingly explores how “purity” as discourse is constructed in a selection of evangelical guidance literature that is written for girls and young women, and it further draws from the author’s lived experience as an evangelical subcultural “insider” to elucidate how girls and women may interpret and negotiate these ideologies. Beyond premarital sexual abstinence, this project reveals how evangelical- Complementarian theological frameworks demand that girls and women embrace their inferior status in the divine patriarchal gender hierarchy in order to achieve “true” purity and become Christ’s “princess-brides.” Such frameworks also address girls as evangelicalism’s “mothers of tomorrow” who must physically and pedagogically reproduce the next generation of “true believers” for their religious subculture. The project concludes by proposing alternative feminist theologies that girls and women may utilize in challenging oppressive purity discourses, cultivating empowered spiritualities, and engaging in restorative social justice work. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my Ph.D. supervisor, Dr. Becky Lee, as well as my committee members, Dr. Peter Cumming and Dr. Andrea O’Reilly, for providing their valuable mentorship and feedback throughout the writing process. I would also like to thank my oral defense examiners, Dr. Melinda Denton and Dr. Paul Moore, as well as my defense chair, Dr. Cheryl van Daalen-Smith, for contributing their time and expertise to helping me improve and complete this dissertation. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends for their ongoing love and support. iv Table of Contents Abstract……….…………………………………………………………………………….……..ii Acknowledgements……………………………...……………………………………………….iii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………iv Chapter 1: Introduction: Contextualizing Purity Culture………………………………………….1 Chapter 2: Guiding the Girls: A Discursive History of Sexual Purity…………………………...29 Chapter 3: Becoming the Princess: Unpacking the Evangelical Purity Dialectic……………….82 Chapter 4: Guardians of Virtue: The Politics of Submission and the Evangelical Maternal Ethos ……..……………………………………………………………………………………………142 Chapter 5: Conclusion: Renouncing Purity and Re-Claiming Righteous Femininity………….190 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….225 Appendices……………………………………………………………………………………...241 1 Chapter 1 Introduction: Contextualizing Purity Culture The state of girls’ and young women’s premarital sexual activities—at least, those of white, middle-class, heterosexual, able-bodied girls and young women—has garnered much attention in North American popular, political, and academic discourse throughout the past decade. Such discussions have been propagated in texts like Laura Sessions Stepp's Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both (2008), which warn young women about the dangers of casual sex and “hookup culture” and trumpet the virtues of sexual monogamy and traditional marriage. Other texts, such as Leonard Sax's Girls on the Edge: The Four Factors Driving the New Crisis for Girls (2011), focus on the “hypersexualization” of young girls specifically and argue that children's access to the adult realms of popular media and mass consumerism has caused a collective generational loss of sexual “innocence.” Despite the proliferation of these alarmist discourses, other texts have managed to address the cultural obsession with girlhood sexuality from a critical perspective, such as Jessica Valenti's The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women (2009). When taken together, the prevalence and popularity of these writings attest to the larger cultural preoccupation with girls' and young women's “sexual purity.” While “purity” as discourse has a prolonged and contentious history, it continues to be adopted and employed in contemporary secular and religious contexts. This project accordingly addresses female “purity” as a product of North American1 evangelical Christian theology. Indeed, evangelical Christians in 1 Throughout this project I address evangelicalism within a North American cultural and geographic context. While evangelicals are more numerous and visibly active in the U.S., and while popular artifacts of evangelical culture are often produced in U.S. contexts (such as the purity literature examined here), such goods and practices are also pervasive in shaping Canadian evangelical religious subcultures. For further reading on the significant impact that U.S. evangelicalism has in influencing dominant Canadian evangelical theologies and subcultural practices, see Marci McDonald’s 2010 text The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in 2 the United States and Canada have been at the epicentre of the larger “purity culture” that celebrates—and, as we shall see, resolutely necessitates—girls' and young women's premarital sexual abstinence. At the same time, they have spearheaded the popularization and commodification of “purity” through numerous cultural goods and practices, such as purity rings and father-daughter purity balls,2 and they have also wielded considerable political and economic influence in advocating for abstinence-only sex education programs.3 These examples collectively illustrate how purity is constructed as an all-encompassing identity and lifestyle choice for girls, and maintaining one's “technical virginity” is only one of many preconditions which they must satisfy in order to be truly “pure.” This project accordingly addresses “purity” as a fluid, multifaceted, and occasionally contradictory set of discursive practices which mediates how North American society understands and communicates about girlhood sexuality. However, it also contends that this pervasive “purity culture” cannot be thoroughly understood—nor can it be thoroughly problematized—until it is duly addressed as a complex dialectic whose historical, material, and theological facets are rooted in evangelical discursive practices specifically. I thus seek to unpack and contextualize this dialectic, both by analyzing how “purity” is constructed in a selection of evangelical purity literature, as well by drawing from my lived experience as an evangelical subcultural “insider” to elucidate how girls and women may interpret and negotiate these ideologies. Canada and Sam Reimer’s 2003 text Evangelicals and the Continental Divide. Furthermore, the dominant values and ideologies espoused by U.S. evangelicalism are thriving across the globe due to the colonizing effects of missions work, as well as U.S. and Canadian foreign policies. As such, it is pertinent for future research to investigate the pervasiveness of evangelical purity doctrines in international cultural contexts. 2 These “purity” goods and practices have been investigated in non-religious critical scholarship by Bearman and Brückner (2005); Bersamin et al. (2005); Browning (2010); Doan and Williams (2008); Gardner (2011); Manning (2015); Regnerus (2007); and Rosenbaum (2009). 3 For further reading see Williams (2011). 3 Mapping the Parameters of this Project I approach this analysis with a very particular set of theoretical parameters and research goals in mind. The purpose of this project is to address and problematize a set of discursive practices that is specific to North American evangelical Christianity. In this sense, I aim to elucidate the extensive and multi-faceted roots of the evangelical purity dialectic, as well as draw attention to its pervasiveness in shaping dominant evangelical beliefs about sex and gender roles. I contend that it is necessary to unpack the purity dialectic from “within” evangelical Christianity so that the perspectives and lived experiences of evangelical girls and young women—who are arguably most numerously and directly affected by its proliferation in a contemporary North American context—can be duly considered by feminist researchers who wish to deconstruct it. This project accordingly aims to fill a gap in North American feminist scholarship by theologizing4 “purity,” therein addressing it as religious epistemology. While popular texts such as Valenti’s The Purity Myth rightfully critique various elements of contemporary purity culture, such texts are largely written within a non-religious theoretical framework, and thereby overlook the theological and epistemological complexities that evangelical girls and women navigate in their sexual and spiritual lives. This is principally because evangelical theology stipulates that girls and women who stray from “Biblical” purity precepts will not only compromise their sexual reputations, their desirability to potential spouses, and their sexual health; rather, they will also compromise their very salvation and status as “true” Christians.
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