When Russell Rowland asked me to be on his State of Montana podcast, he had no idea what a neurotic weirdo he was letting on his show.
Buckle up, you are about to go deep into the recesses of my childhood trauma.
These days, I spend most of my work life helping get Democrats elected and most of my personal life talking about the dangers of Project 2025. I spend very little of it talking about myself. But Russell is such an excellent conversationalist and asked just the right questions to get me to open up about why I work so hard at this. What is at stake for me? And now I’m prepared to share that story.
I grew up in the Bible Belt in Texas in the mid-80s to early 2000s. This was a time when Christian publishing houses were really taking off, earning multimillions of dollars selling a Christian iteration of everything in pop culture. Instead of slap bracelets, we had What Would Jesus Do bracelets. Instead of Britney Spears, we had Rebecca St. James. Instead of Backstreet Boys, we listened to Newsboys. Instead of Seventeen magazine, we read Brio. Instead of Bugs Bunny, we had Veggie Tales. Instead of raves, we went to youth group.
Growing up, my mom worked in marketing for a Christian publishing company called Word, Inc. so whatever you’re already envisioning, kick it up a notch. Because of my mom’s job, I had access to the Christian creators I idolized, which meant church culture was truly my only social life and my only influence. I got to read all my favorite Christian authors before my peers and had front-row tickets to Christian concerts and plays. My family bookshelves were covered in signed books by Christian authors like Max Lucado (and later I went to college with his daughters). I was ‘in the world but not of the world.’
I was fully ensconced in the Christian bubble.
How could an environment that was so sanitized be harmful? No one explains what happens when the bubble pops.
Purity Culture
My mom sold the books and workbooks that filled church libraries. During the mid-90s those books popularized an idea called purity culture, or the evangelical expectation that a young, unmarried person’s value was determined by their sexual purity. It was about virginity, but it was about so much more. Purity culture enforced strict gender norms, and for girls especially, it determined everything from what we wore, who we spoke to, and what we wanted for our futures.
Purity culture taught me that if I wore a tank top with thin straps or if my shorts weren’t long enough, I could cause the men around me to lust. It taught boys and men that they couldn’t control their desires, so girls and women needed to keep them from “stumbling” by policing ourselves. We were instructed not to flirt until we were ready to get married, and we weren’t supposed to date at all. Instead, we were told to court (yep, like the 1800s). The book I Kissing Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris became the beacon of purity culture’s teaching. Everyone I knew read that book. Some day I will tell you the story about how I ran into Joshua Harris in the sex section of a popular book store.
I need you to understand that these weren’t just rules our parents or pastors were giving us, but a set of social standards that caught fire among Christian teens when I was growing up.
From the outside, I can see how purity culture was damaging — it used shame and fear to try to control young people. But from the inside it seemed cool and edgy like we were being counter-cultural to a society obsessed with sex. That’s because purity culture was cleverly marketed specifically to Christian teens — not their parents. Like any society, we had our own specific language, our own hierarchies, our own celebrities, and our own artifacts. We had purity pledges, purity rings, and purity balls. We had speakers and experts and idols. We had books and retreats and Bibles specifically about teen purity.
I bought into this world hook, line, and sinker.
And it almost sunk me. The older we got — and the closer we got to marriage — the more dogmatic purity culture became. One guy broke up with me in chapel at my Christian college because he didn’t believe I was doing enough to keep our relationship sexually pure. Later, I was put on conduct probation for staying in a different boyfriend’s apartment after 1 a.m. This demerit went on my permanent record.
Picture me explaining my behavior to anyone with access to my transcript: “No, no I didn’t get caught drinking underage or possessing fistfuls of adderall I didn’t have a prescription for. I was put on conduct probation for ‘cohabitating with a member of the opposite sex’ because I was in my boyfriend’s apartment at night. Yes, I know that’s ridiculous.”
Please come to me for all of the hilarious stories about what it’s like to be a Christian college hussy.
The truth is, as harsh as that world was to me, others had it so much worse. I have friends who couldn’t have sex for years after marriage. Others who quickly divorced shortly after marriage. Others who started families together but have had dysfunctional sex lives their entire marriage. Others who said, “SCREW IT” and started polyamorous relationships, giving up on the notion that sex will ever be normal with their spouse.
Turns out you can’t teach an entire generation of young people that sex is dirty and sinful and expect their mindset to change simply because they signed a marriage certificate. There’s too much there: too much baggage, too much shame, too much pain.
Has Christianity really messed you up too?
Along Came Donald Trump
I was 32 when Donald Trump first came on the political scene in 2015. Fully immersed in the throes of career and parenthood, I was way too busy to pay close attention to politics. Besides, I didn’t need to worry. I knew there was no way the same parents and pastors that checked the length of my shorts before sending me off to church camp could support a serial womanizer and adulterer for president.
With every scandal that came to light, I was sure he was done. And there were so. many. scandals. The reporter who said he assaulted her in the changing room of a department store. The Vanity Fair reporter who said he tried to kiss her when a pregnant Melania left the room. The footage from Miss Teen Universe where Trump described wanting to go in to 15-year-old girls’ dressing rooms. The time he said he would try to date Ivanka if she weren’t his daughter. The marriages and divorces and children and illegitimate children. Trump was gross. There was no way he’d be president.
When the Access Hollywood tape aired, the world heard Trump say, “I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
I knew he was toast. I knew there was no way all these evangelicals would get behind him. Trump was so antithetical to the purity culture teachings of my youth.
But I was wrong. Evangelicals doubled down. They supported him more. They preached about him from the pulpit. They told their congregants to vote for him. When all was said and done, Trump took 80 percent of the white evangelical vote, one of the highest percentages in history.
Suddenly, evangelical young adults could see something we hadn’t seen before: We saw that purity culture was about controlling us, not encouraging a healthy sexual ethic and lifestyle. It pointed out the hypocrisy in big neon yellow lights. And we didn’t want any part of it.
We formed a movement called faith deconstruction, where we tear down and audit the Christian practices of our youth and decide what to keep and what to throw away. We put dysfunctional church leaders on blast — like Robert Morris, one of Trump’s evangelical advisors, who was just reported to have sexually assaulted a 12-year-old girl when he was a young minister. We ask hard questions that were forbidden in our churches, like whether or not the Bible is supposed to be read literally and whether it contains any flaws.
Most importantly, we are raising our kids with a different understanding about their bodies and sexuality than what we were taught.
And we are vocal about the cancer that Trumpism is to Christianity. There is no way that a man who thinks Second Corinthians is called “Two Corinthians” cares about the radical expansive love of Jesus. Evangelicals use the Bible as a bludgeon to control others. Trump is simply their executor; a useful idiot for their dangerous agenda.
Today
Purity culture undeniably harmed the way I see myself as a sexual being. It robbed so many of us of the experiences most people experience in their formative years: Flirting, dating, sex, feeling like our bodies are treasures, trusting ourselves instead of believing we are dirty and shameful.
But I’m not letting that be the end of my story. I’m fighting back.
I started Project 2025 Takedown because I lived under the dangerous, suffocating authoritarianism of white Christian nationalism, and I broke free. I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want my children to go back there. I don’t want YOU to go back there.
People who have deconstructed their faith are telling our stories, but we need you to amplify them. Please buy our books and albums, follow our social media channels, share our words. We know this world better than anyone. Let us tell you about it.
I want to take a moment to point out that heteronormative Christians had it even easier than LGBTQ+ Christians. Imagine being queer in this environment. I’m grateful to my friend Brent Love for writing his memoir Leap about growing up in the church and fully embracing his queerness and finding himself as a Peace Corps volunteer in Armenia. Buy Brent’s book!
If you want to learn more about deconstructing the lies we were told about our bodies as young Christians, subscribe to the Sexvangelicals and listen to their podcast. Jeremiah was a church camp friend from my childhood, and I’m so encouraged to see him helping people heal from this toxic theology.
And as always, if you want to support me and my work (or just help pay my therapy bills!) please consider upgrading to a paid subscriber.
I want to commend you for the courage to tell your story and the strength to get through what must have been very confusing a lot of the time. Great story!
Great takedown on Christian Nationalism and religious zealotry. It is a fraud and a cover for their obsession with greed, power and sexual hypocrisy. The last 9 to 10 years of the political situation in our country is almost incomprehensible, like a horrible never ending nightmare. That's the way fascists function, with chaos, conflict and confusion, pounded into your psyche with incessant repetition until you end up with the bottom feeders that support Trump in his effort to take control and destroy our democracy. Our judicial system has been so corrupted by Trump that it has failed in it's ability to prosecute and convict this dangerous dictator. So now we've got until Nov. 5th to hopefully see this thug self implode and be stomped into political oblivion. VOTE!