#ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing

In this powerful debut, poet Allison, who coined the title hashtag in 2017 to add to the #MeToo movement, argues that evangelical theologies “enable [sexual] abusers.” Allison starts with her own adolescent experience of being groomed by a youth pastor and draws on a conservative Christian education—as well as numerous interviews with abuse survivors and academics—to identify a toxic, theology-driven “purity culture.” Teaching that sexual contact is solely for monogamous marriage between a cisgender heterosexual man and a cisgender heterosexual woman, purity culture, in Allison’s estimation, creates a perfect environment for would-be predators due to adherents’ shame and fear over lost status combined with a belief in forgiveness as a virtue. Other key features of the culture include alienation from one’s body, homophobia, hypersexualization of Black people, and calls for self-sacrifice by less powerful people in a relationship or community. For Allison, rejecting “this black-and-white thinking that evangelicalism handed down as gospel truth” in favor of a “sex-positive Christian theology” that allows members control of their sexual values is the only way forward. Part memoir, part sociological exploration, and part support kit for survivors of abuse, this is a jarring and persuasive exploration of the mechanisms that make abuse possible. Allison’s persuasive testament will resonate with readers of a Christian background in ways that both comfort and disturb. (May)