The Greatest Lie of Purity Culture

Bodies and Gods

We were sitting in a crowded coffee shop, with everyone around us going about their mornings rushing to and from the counter when her eyes filled with tears and time began to stand still. The background noise to our conversation went muffled and all I could see was her as she told me her story. She was assaulted. Amy had just started coming to our church. New to town, she had “walked away from her faith” years ago and now she was “back,” she told me, on her first Sunday at church. Now, weeks later, we sat at a coffee shop to get to know each other. You can’t pastor someone that you don’t know. That is a lot of what I do as a pastor. Get to know people and hear their stories. Amy went on, “I was drunk, at a party, and he assaulted me. As I became conscious after the victimizing events, I blubbered out loud to myself, ‘God will hate me. God and Jesus will hate me for what I’ve done.’ For years she blamed herself for that night. Even after all the therapy from the assault she still carried with her this deeply embedded belief: God hates me. God hates me because of what happened to my body.

The greatest lie of purity culture is that our bodies are barriers between us and God instead of resources for knowing God. This lie has plagued women and men for decades. It has impacted victims of assault as well as victims of empty promises about virginity, wedding nights, and married sex. This woman, an innocent victim, believed that God hated her because of what happened to her body.

When we believe the lie that our bodies are barriers between us and God then the goal is to do whatever we can to hide our bodies, to cover them, oppress them, subdue them, and keep them tame. If we can “master” the desires of the body then we can achieve holiness. Purity culture didn’t make this up. The ancient world had a similar belief system called Gnosticism. This was the goal, to subdue and surpass the body to attain true spirituality. Gnosticism is one of the birthplaces for the separation between sexuality and spirituality that we see today.

Many Christians today are not Christians. They are Gnostics. This is what I told Amy.

I asked Amy to tell me about the God (and Jesus) who hated her because she was victimized. She told me about a cruel tyrant whose love depended on the degree of sexual chasteness she had. I told her that wasn’t the God of the Bible. I told Amy that the God of the Bible is one who loved bodies so much that God became a body. I told Amy that the God of the Bible loved victims so much that God became a victim. I told Amy that the God of the Bible loved her with a love so intense that it had nothing to do with her sexual chasteness. I told Amy that the God of the Bible wanted to heal her very real broken heart and broken body and that we could all heal together. That is what the church is after all I told her, a healing place for hurting people.

I have sat for nearly two decades listening to stories like Amy’s. Both men and women. Young and old. Whether it is a young girl being assaulted and then believing that God hates her for it or a married woman who has only had one sexual partner and never had an orgasm, the lie is the same. My body is a barrier between me and God. I am on a mission to tell the Amy’s of the world about a God who became a body, a God who became a victim, a God who loves them deeply, a God who heals bodies, and a God who speaks, counsels, and reveals God’s self to humans through their bodies. What if you saw your body as a resource for knowing God instead of a barrier between you and God?