After Purity: Race, Sex and Religion in White Christian America
Forthcoming from Beacon Press, 2025
In After Purity I investigate the myths that perpetuate illusions of innocence about bodies, White racial identity, and national greatness. Each of these necessitate the practice of disembodiment, a cognitive state that devalues or dismisses the lived experience of the body and how our bodies situate us within systems of privilege and oppression. For people who grew up and out of purity culture, this has meant struggling to accept and learn from sexual and other bodily desires. It has meant extended periods of recovery from gender-based and sexual violence. For White people it has meant being socialized into color-evasive ideologies about race and then struggling to understand or even disdaining claims about the systemic nature of racial inequality.[i] In both cases, ignoring the body is mistakenly lauded as a virtue. Denying the sexual prompts of one’s body has often been a sign of holiness in the Christian faith tradition. Likewise, claiming to “not see race” is presumed to be a virtuous stance regarding racial difference. In both cases these disembodied practices perform significant violence, as erasure of bodies and their needs means developing cognitive habits that refuse to see harm if it conflicts with our established innocence myths.
This volume is a collection of cutting- edge, interdisciplinary, and creative essays that establishes a new approach to the study of evangelical purity culture. It is a critical starting point for anyone seeking to understand this movement or begin their own research.
Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence
Oxford University Press, 2015
Historicizes the sexual purity movement beyond the Religious Right.
Shows how the purity and rapture cultures within U.S. evangelicalism create a seemingly inherent connection between sexual purity and personal salvation.
This shows how evangelicals attempt to maintain their political and cultural relevance by appealing to widespread cultural fears.
“Moslener emphasizes throughout her book that evangelical purity culture long has been permeated with nationalistic themes, national insecurity, and concerns about the threat of civilizational decline, race suicide, and Cold War. In this sensitive and enlightening book, she shows us that sexual purity has been an essential feature of evangelical culture in the United States over the past century, extending earlier than previous historical accounts, which typically begin with the sexual revolution.”
Jackie Blount, Reviews in American History
“Moslener counters the scholarly and purity advocates’ pervasive narrative that evangelical purity culture is a response to the sexual revolution of the 1950s and ’60s. Evangelical purity culture, she writes, dates back to the nineteenth century, and “connects] sexual immorality with national insecurity and impending apocalypse.” Purity culture among adolescents, evangelical proponents of purity believe, would save the US from disaster.”
Monique Moultrie, The Women’s Review of Books
“Before reading Virgin Nation, I didn’t see a link between nationalism and sexual purity in U.S. evangelicalism. As I have processed and unlearned what I learned about myself and my body from purity culture, I had not considered what I had internalized about national security and civilizational decline. What this creates in evangelical spaces is the notion that the sexual purity of adolescents determines the fate of the nation. As a young, closeted (including to myself) lesbian, this created an anxiety that I only found relief for when I abandoned this theology altogether.”
Hayley Brooks, Brethren Mennonite Council for LGBTQ Interests
“Virgin Nation, in its title and its content, does the important work of insisting that sexuality and nation are co-constituted and must always be thought together. The book takes us on a fascinating historical journey through the late 19th and 20th centuries to show us, by decades, how the notion of sexual purity has been deployed to reinforce Christian ideas and ideals about the American nation.”
Lynne Gerber, author of Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Restoration in Evangelial America
