purity culture survivor
When we’re reading the Bible, there is often a Big Hairy Word that sticks out. Like a flashing neon sign outside a cheap hotel window - you can’t look away from it, and it keeps you up at night.
That word for me in this gospel reading is: defiled.
Defiled hands, defiled hearts, defiled people.
I don’t like this word. I cringe from it, and would like to turn the page and move on.
So many people bristle when religion comes up in conversation because - while it’s not usually the stated topic - underneath so many faith conversations is the idea that people are bad, defiled, impure, sinful. No one wants to hear that about themselves, right?
And yet the idea that people are inherently bad - defiled from the moment we’re born - is the cornerstone of most pop Christian theology, or what most people in the public think Christians believe. Without the teaching that humans are inherently bad, what use is there for a perfect - undefiled - God/human savior whose death pays the price for the humans’ sinful ways?
Growing up as a teenager in the evangelical Christian world, I got this message loud and clear. Just last night, I went through some of my journals from that time of my life. It’s pretty remarkable, having these diaries, these time capsules that preserved what I was thinking and learning and worrying about at all these different moments of my life.
I felt like a forensic detective, with my post-it notes at the ready, marking passages that had to do with purity, with defilement.
And let me tell you, there were a lot of pages to mark.
As a teenage girl in this particular brand of Christianity, I got the message loud and clear that there were certain things I could do that would make me defiled. You see, it’s a Big Hairy word for me, because it pokes at this tender part of me that was told my own desires and wants made me defiled.
Unclean. Impure. Dirty.
I wonder if you have been taught something similar. I wonder if religion has been used at some point in your life to make you feel ashamed for who you are, or what you want, or who you love.
This idea of purity is a core issue that gets to something at the heart of religion. We see it in our gospel reading today: the Pharisees - members of a sect of Judaism - saw that Jesus’s followers - who were practicing a slightly different flavor of Judaism - had not performed the necessary ritual cleansings before eating.
How could this teacher, this rabbi, be a faithful leader if he didn’t maintain the purity codes? Isn’t religion about making ourselves clean, right, and good?
But is that what religion is for? At the beginning of the service today, in our opening prayer, we asked God to “increase in us true religion,” and I love the idea that there is such a thing. It implies that there is such a thing as false religion, too.
What is true religion? The word itself - religion - means to bring back together what has become separate, re - ligion, like re - ligament, knit back together.
And my experience of religion as a young adult, while it felt like true religion at the time, actually caused more separation than connection. Especially, a separation between my spirit and my body, through vilifying my body’s desires.
Is religion about policing our desires so that our lives - our behaviors, our thoughts, our impulses - are forced into a small box of what qualifies as good and pure?
It doesn’t seem like that’s what Jesus thinks true religion is about.
As he so often does, Jesus takes the nice neat categories of good and bad, right and wrong and blows our human-constructed understandings out of the water. Jesus calls the people back to the heart of the matter - that purity laws were meant to keep the community safe, meant to be guidelines for how to live together, meant to foster human flourishing. “In vain do they worship me,” Jesus quotes from Isaiah, “teaching human precepts as doctrines.”
Now it would be easy to take a story like this and say - Jesus came to throw out the old purity laws that the Jewish people had been following for generations. But it’s clear from scripture that Jesus did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.
Jesus continually pointed people back to the heart of the law, showing them the hypocrisy that comes when we worship rules instead of God. Jesus seems to say - even religious rules, rules that come from God or are designed to bring us closer to God - even those rules don’t take the place of true religion, of human connection, of freedom.
True religion has more to do with the state of our hearts, with the continual work of aligning our lives with our values, with our relationships with one another.
I remember one day at the Christian camp I attended as a high schooler, during one of the many “purity talks.” The camp director was telling a story about a young adult who applied to be a camp counselor. On the application form, you had to check that you followed all these rules - that you believed certain things, abstained from certain things.
And one of the boxes you had to check was that you did not engage in sex outside of marriage.
The camp director told us that he interviewed a young person who didn’t check that box - she said she was in a loving, committed relationship, and she pointed to a verse from the first letter to Peter: “love covers a multitude of sins.”
The camp director laughed, as if this young woman’s interpretation of that verse was insane. We all laughed, a bunch of teenagers brainwashed into thinking that the Bible has clear precepts about sex and sexuality (it doesn’t). In that moment, we were told specifically that love - respect - relationship - does not come before this supposedly clear list of rules.
I was taught that letting love be our guide would lead us to defilement; letting shame guide our choices would lead us to purity, to holiness.
I was taught that letting love be our guide would lead us to defilement; letting shame guide our choices would lead us to purity, to holiness.
And so here I am, two decades later, still pulling apart those threads of shame, still feeling tender when I read the word defiled in scripture.
That is evidence of false religion.
That’s what I’m doing as I read my old journals - I’m searching for evidence that I’m not crazy, people really did say that to me - and my continuing struggle to feel good enough for God is rooted in a theology that truly isn’t biblical.
Because - did you catch the first reading today, from the Song of Solomon? Do you know about this book of the Bible? Do you know that there is an erotic love poem right there, in the Hebrew Bible, a book that some rabbis have called the holiest book of scripture?
This spring, I read through this sacred text with a group of women, and we blushed as we read it.
The Song of Solomon - sometimes called the Song of Songs - reads like a dialogue between two lovers. Throughout the poem they describe each other using evocative imagery, and describe their intense desire for each other.
It is a celebration of sensuality, of desire, and even pleasure. Nowhere does it say: this poem describes the intimacy of two married people! The idea that the Bible is clear about purity, about sex, about relationships, is just not true.
Jesus brings the people back, over and over again, to the heart of the matter. He doesn’t let us off the hook - there is evil, he says, but its fruit can be seen in the ways we hurt one another: in violence in relationships, and dishonesty, and pride.
How much different would my own self worth be today if I had come of age in a Christian community that understood relationships as holy when they are respectful and consensual and loving, instead of the harsh teaching I received that my body's normal desires and impulses would lead me away from God and into eternal darkness?
Religion has been used to police bodies - particularly women’s bodies - for so long. And yet, I believe wholeheartedly that right there in our sacred texts there is an ethic of pleasure, a hallowing of the body that has the potential to set us free.
At this point in my life, it is in honoring my body's desires, and following what feels good, that I have found freedom from this harmful worldview. Coming of age in a culture that told me my own impulses were sinful left me unsure of what I really liked or who I was; left me unable to hear my own inner wisdom.
Now I know that my body carries wisdom beyond my imagination.
Now I know that pleasure is good (yes, that feels radical to say).
Now I look back on my teenage self, furiously writing page after page, wishing the shame would bring me freedom, and I love her. I see what she was taught, and how she was lied to, and I want to fight for her. I ask if she knows who I am. I tell her that we have made it through, that her desires are good and holy.
That she is good, and can never be defiled.