Emily Joy Allison

Summary: An argument connecting sexual abuse and other sexually dysfunctional teaching to the purity teaching upholding an ideal of abstinence until marriage between a man and a woman.

Emily Joy Allison went to a non-denominational evangelical church. Her father gave he a purity ring and was told she shouldn’t even kiss a boy until marriage. She eventually went to Moody Bible Institute. But before that, she was a survivor of sexual abuse from a youth leader in her church who “groomed” her and then came on to her. She’d never been taught about her body or about consent or what constituted abuse. Her father figured out what was going on, the leader was removed from the youth group, and the church swept the incident under the carpet. Emily’s last contact was a forced call him to apologize for her role. He never apologized. In her parents’ eyes, she was just as much to blame as he was. The day would come year later when she was no longer welcome home. At this writing, she still is not.

She buried this incident for many years. Only when the #MeToo movement arose did she summon the courage to create a new hashtag, #ChurchToo, and told her story and outed her abuser. Her story serves both as prologue and example of her thesis: that purity culture emphasizing abstinence, or else, creates the environment for abuse to thrive in church contexts. Women bear a disproportionate responsibility to dress and live “modestly” so as not to cause men to be aroused. It creates a rape culture, where the assumption that the abused bears as much responsibility as the abuser. Sexual shame is used to create social control at the cost of both women and men hating their bodies and their sexuality–even while many are sexually active, up to 80 percent in a statistic cited in the book. Allison uses her stories, those of others, and research to deconstruct purity culture and its underlying theology.

Allison, a self-professed lesbian, goes further. She argues that the abstinence ideal underlying purity culture is homophobic, doing violence to LGBTQ persons. She advocates for a fully affirming position as the only alternative to abusive purity culture, with no middle ground.

In response, first of all, I’m convinced that her account of purity culture and its use of shame and social control to try to enforce an ideal of abstinence until marriage between a man and a woman is both credible and chilling. Her own story of her church’s inadequate and manipulative instruction about sexuality and coverup of her abuse is heartbreaking. I believe her. Her account, sometimes laced with profanity and justifiably angry is one I’m sure many churches will shun, likely the very churches that need to hear her.

What I miss in her attack on abstinence and advocacy for a fully affirming stance is a theology of human sexuality, particularly of the meaning of our sexuality. She rejects the “clobber verses” of scripture without addressing either the underlying theology that is part of the fabric in which these verses have been understood nor the theological premises, if such exist, for her own alternative of “ethical nonmonogamy.”

Likewise, while exposing the scandalous character of abuse in the church, which needs to be brought to the light of day, she offers no discussion of the rape culture I’ve witnessed as a collegiate minister in public universities where student have no lack of sexual education and instruction on consent. Donna Freitas, in Consent on Campus, notes what a complicated idea “consent” is and the reality that at least one in four report sexual abuse. Students nod knowingly when they hear the phrase, “the walk of shame.” This is not a purity culture context.

So, while I disagree with her broad brush indictment of abstinence and am committed to a different sexual ethic, her challenge to the patriarchal structures of the church, and her analysis of the purity culture a generation of youth were raised on, is deserving of attention. The dysfunctional sexuality of these churches is matched by the dysfunctional sexuality of the wider culture. There is a trail of abuse arising from both. Allison challenges us to something better than #MeToo and #ChurchToo.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.… (meer)

In 2017 Emily Joy Allison finally came out as a sexual abuse victim and created the #ChurchToo hashtag to create a platform to expose the culture of sexual abuse and assault embedded in the purity culture prominent in American churches, regardless of denominations, size, and geography. The author's claim is that funding of schools, politics, ingrained patriarchy, homophobia, and the stressed abstinence of sexual activity before legally married are a poisonous mix that upholds abuse, blames female victims for soliciting, and keeps people from developing healthy relationships in which sexuality plays a natural role.

Statistics can lie, but regarding the age, the average American has sexual intercourse for the first time, eighteen years, there is no exception for Christians despite chastity pledges, purity rings, books, videos, sermons, and condemnations. Allison provides strong arguments why white men, especially those in power are the winners, and women are the losers in this. The author refuses to examine bible verses herself, despite her theological education, mingles her message with a personal coming out as a lesbian, a bumpy ride with a kind of forced marriage, divorce, and no longer calling herself a Christian.

That leaves the reader with lots of food for thought, yet no clear answers and possibly a bridge too far when it comes to endorsing all the practices and beliefs promoted in #ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing.… (meer)

The difference between #metoo and #churchtoo is that the latter tackles a whole litany of abuses, mostly centered on sexual purity. In the evangelical world, purity means no talk, knowledge or experience with sex before marriage. It only applies to women, of course, and marriage can only be to a Christian man. Also of course. The result is a whole tribe of damaged women who have been blamed and punished for men breaking the purity code. Emily Joy Allison has collected a lot of their stories in a remarkably cogent, straightforward and intelligent book simply called #churchtoo, the hashtag she invented precisely to bring them together.

She describes her own case, which is sadly typical. A church leader twice her age “groomed” her, gaining her trust and control over her. Eventually, he took it to the sexual stage. In her 15-year old state of naiveté, she told her parents, who not only blamed her, but made her call him in their presence and apologize to him, which he did not reciprocate. They kept barraging her with humiliating critism until she left home altogether, never to return. It shattered her and changed her life, forcing her to abandon her home and family and start over, this time as a human being.

She has clearly dwelt on it, thought it through from every angle and every outcome, and has helped numerous others through it. She expresses her points directly, succinctly and clearly. The book is a pleasure of unchallengeable thoughts, deeds and analysis, well organized and thorough.

She says “Purity culture is the spiritual corollary of rape culture created in Christian environments by theologies that teach complete sexual abstinence until legal, monogamous marriage between a cisgender, heterosexual man and a cisgender, heterosexual woman for life—or else.”(Cisgender means the gender decided at birth, before any changes, desires or transformations are accounted for.) By keeping their daughters totally ignorant of their own bodies, they also maintain total control over their person, leading to numerous psychological traumas as these girls deal with their total ignorance versus the real world and biology. It is to be a life of obedience, subservience, lack of development and unfulfilled potential. Women are not permitted to be higher ranked or profiled than their husbands. Not in careers, not in finance, not professionally or socially. The bible says so.

Or does it? The purity movement is only decades old. As with so many religious theories, people with no authority write books that propose these things, based on little or nothing. The Christian publishing industry in the USA is gigantic, with hundreds of new titles coming out every month. If you think everything that could possibly be said about Christianity has already been said better and more succinctly in the bible, you would be sadly mistaken. Christian bookstores have an endless supply of new titles, and the barriers to entry are none. The theories come from all angles, and sometimes, they stick. Such is the genesis of purity culture for evangelicals. Unfortunately, people now run their lives and families by it.

The state of sexual ignorance leads directly to unfathomable shame at the slightest transgression. Girls are made to feel they have failed, early and often. No man will want damaged goods, and that’s all that women are in the evangelical context. Allison says “Shame turns the lights off in the room.” As she later learned, or had confirmed by therapists, sexual shame is the same as sexual abuse. It ruins whole lives early. And if it doesn’t remain totally secret, the woman will be punished.

Aggression by boys, on the other hand, are applauded. She cites several cases where pastors have been applauded by their congregations for publicly admitting their abuse of underage girls, as well as boys. In evangelical circles, men rule, and nothing, but nothing must stand in the way of them realizing their potential. No matter how many lives they ruin, they can continue their journey, shall we say, unmolested.

It continues at Christian schools, where the internet is blocked for any search or site involving bodies. (Allison’s mother freaked out when she caught her children watching yoga on TV.) It put the women in the absurd position of having to do all their research for termpapers on smartphones outside of school. Allison says she learned all of what she little she knew about her own body from the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine.

Christian schools have put themselves in a particularly strenuous bind. On the one hand, 80% of their students engage in sexual activities. On the other hand, since sexual activities are prohibited, the schools feel no obligation to even discuss the concept of consent. School handbooks don’t even bring it up. The result is that consent has the moral equivalence of harassment, abuse and assault. Consent is not even a fictional concept to believers in purity. So rape is in.

Christian schools also perpetuate the impossible rules whereby women, finally at least tolerated in these institutions, must contort themselves to avoid any signs of normal growing up and life events. ”Usually if you get divorced in the middle of a program, you are required to drop out, take at least a year off, and then reapply, hoping you’ll be let back in if it is determined that the reason for your divorce was ‘biblical’ and you are sufficiently repentant.” Because divorce is also not easily allowed, and is pretty much always the woman’s fault. It delays the development of the man, professionally, in family and in self esteem. She cites one absurd example where the church told an abused wife to go back to her husband. She showed up at church with him on Sunday, with two black eyes from her latest beating. She asked the pastor if he was satisfied now and was told he was delighted, because she got her husband to come to Sunday service at long last.

Above all, happiness in women is forbidden as dangerous. In the evangelical world, “Happiness is a gateway drug in purity culture. They’re afraid that before they know it, you’ll think you’re worth something. You’ll realize you’re not fundamentally broken and you don’t need a cure for a disease you don’t have. And if you can figure that out on your own, then what do you need them for?”

What Allison describes is garden variety white supremacy. It is worrisome that it seems to continue and flourish in the USA. The hierarchy, the patriarchy, the ignorance and blind devotion all reek of white supremacy, American style.

Allison has collected a list of standard answers (she calls them myths) that are worth reprinting:
“Well, she provoked him.”
“What happens in their marriage is between the two of them. It’s nobody else’s business.”
“He just punched a hole in the wall. It wasn’t that serious.”
“Why doesn’t she just leave? I would.”
“That would never happen to a man. He must be lying.”
“She’s probably just making it all up to get revenge.”
“They only did that because they were drunk.”
“A real Christian man would never abuse his wife.”
“You can’t rape someone you’re married to.”
“If he really assaulted her, she would have told someone right away.”

This is a set of moral values absolutely abhorrent to non-believers. And the survivors bear its scars for life. Allison herself is clearly not over it, and none of the participants in the #churchtoo conversation seem to have been able to get past it either.

Unexpectedly, at least for me, Allison has remained religious. She attends services and even works at the church. Despite all the pain, psychological issues and waste, she says “If there is one thing I have less tolerance for than purity culture, it’s the perspective that all religion is inherently evil and everyone who participates in it is either intellectually inferior or morally broken. “ She is no longer an evangelical. She has no connection with her family whatsoever. And as a gay woman, she is doubly damned. And yet, there she is. It is puzzling.

She is out there working with women and men who have suffered the effects of the total control demanded of young evangelicals at the sexual level. She criticizes the church for its hypocrisy, its absurdity and its insufferable hierarchy, in which women are at the bottom. And yet, she is a believer still.

What struck me most is how many perfectly good lives have been ruined by this distraction from their own potential. Sexual abuse leads to endless therapy and often chronic conditions and meds. Rather than exploring their potential, these victims spend their lives looking for normalcy, for support and community, all of which have been denied to them by their church. You might think the insanity of it all would lead them to hate the church and work for its dismantling. But that’s not the outcome at all.

Allison asked each interviewee the same question: what do you want to say to other victims? And every one independently said something about love. How victims should know they are loved, that there is more love out there than they could possibly imagine, and that they appreciated these victims for their strength and love. It was not the conclusion I expected, but Allison had built so much credibility by this point that I had no choice but to respect this as the outcome of #churchtoo.

Powerful book.

David Wineberg… (meer)