Review: Recovering from Purity Culture

April 23, 2025April 22, 2025 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

Cover image of "Recovering from purity Culture" by Camden Morgante

Recovering from Purity Culture, Camden Morgante. Baker Books (ISBN: 9781540904263) 2024.

Summary: Exposes the myths and harms of purity culture and how to reclaim both healthy sexuality and faith.

We got married in the 1970’s, long before Purity Culture was a thing. On our own, we chose to abstain from sex before marriage. We did not want to say something with our bodies that we were unwilling to commit to before a community of family, friends, and God.

As a campus minister, I began hearing about things like Worth Waiting For, purity rings, and father-daughter dances. I affirmed the wisdom of refraining from sex before marriage. But it felt kind of cringey and cultish, and I wondered how kids would come out of it. For some, it worked out. These folks seemed to have internalized the positive values of Purity Culture without the harmful side effects. But others struggled mightily with shame, including body shaming. Some had distorted views of sexuality that made sex undesirable, even after marriage. Others failed, and believed they were damaged goods. When virginity is the most important thing, even an idol, and you fail to live up to the ideal, you think you have lost everything.

I later learned how purity culture links with patriarchy. Girls were the keepers of boys’ virtue. Boys couldn’t help themselves. And in marriage, instead of loving mutuality, women were expected to to provide sex as often as their husbands wanted it. It became part of an apparatus to control the lives of girls and women.

Often, purity culture has been one of the factors in the lives of those “deconstructing” their faith. If one’s sexuality is only a source of shame, guilt, and pain, and this arises from Christian teaching, then it makes sense to question the faith.

Camden Morgante is a licensed clinical psychologist who grew up in Purity Culture. Much of her healing came both from her own study of scripture and from her clinical training. Much of her work is treating those who have come out of this culture and experienced its harmful effects. Her book draws from her experience, research and clinical experience to help people deconstruct the myths, recover from the shame and other effects, and move forward to live healthy sexual lives and as it is possible “reconstruct” a healthy faith.

The book begins by describing the toxic character of much of purity Culture, as discussed above. She goes on to deconstruct five myths of purity culture, including the fairy-tale marriage, the flipped switch, and the girls as gatekeepers role.

Then the last part of the book turns to “reconstruction.” She discusses faith and doubt and doing one’s own work in reconstruction. She explores developing one’s own sexual ethics, with one’s own reasons. While preferring a traditional Christian ethic, she does not impose this. She deals with singleness, particularly later in life, sexuality in marriage and the difficulties that can arise, overcoming shame, and parenting after purity culture.

There is so much I appreciate about this book. Morgante offers “tools for the journey” from her clinical practice and encourages people to reach their own conclusions. Meanwhile, she quietly holds out a model of a redeemed sexuality for Christ-followers that offers joy, pleasure, and loving mutuality. She’s candid about problems. She names the falsehoods of Purity Culture in ways that help those who struggle to know that it is not them and they are not alone. Instead of myths of “great sex in marriage” Morgante helps us understand the goodness of our bodies and our sexuality. She moves the conversation about Purity Culture, #MeTwo, and #ChurchToo from grievance and pain to the possibility of healing and wholeness.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program.

Review: The Face of Forgiveness

May 22, 2017May 21, 2017 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

The Face of Forgiveness, Philip D. Jamieson. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2016.

Summary: Explores the struggle of many in experiencing and granting forgiveness and what the author believes are inadequate understandings of the atonement that fail to deal with our shame as well as our guilt, and how in fact the work of Christ addresses both.

Philip Jamieson begins this book with a pastoral situation many of us have faced–someone sits across from us and confesses that they find themselves unable to forgive another person, because of the awful ways that person has offended. They want to observe Jesus words about “forgiving the trespasses of others” but they simply cannot.

What follows is an extended discussion of the nature of forgiveness. Jamieson considers the recent renewal of interest in forgiveness in modern psychology. There is much that is helpful, and even biblical, yet he believes, particularly in the separation of forgiveness from reconciliation, and the detachment of forgiveness from the work of Christ, these models of forgiveness fall short.

He also contends that part of our problem in people struggling both with being forgiven and extending forgiveness has to do with theories of the atonement that focus on sin’s guilt, to the exclusion of sin’s shame. Our downturned faces, and the inability to look into the faces of others contributes to this alienation both from God and others. Jamieson would not jettison the existing theories of the atonement but rather focuses on how it is that Christ both bears our shame and is victorious over it in the cross and the resurrection. This is the face of forgiveness, which he describes in this way:

“In his last act, high and lifted up, Jesus–the man who fully reveals God, now fully revealed–joins sinful humanity in our downward gaze. Jesus dies in the posture of shame, embracing the world’s shame. ‘It is finished.’ The face, once set like a flint (Isaiah 50:7) on his way to Jerusalem, to this very death (Lk 9:51), now stares, unblinkingly downcast, bearing humanity’s shame. He joins all of us: solidarity with the shamed. But again, this face is different. For this face in its downward gaze is not looking away from his neighbors; he is looking at them. The last act of the dying Savior is to fix his gaze upon those who are in need of salvation. Our forgiveness has already been pronounced (Lk 23:34) and now the dying God provides the means to accept it. Karl Barth notes there is no other face like Jesus. Jesus’ is the face that will not look away. Jesus is the face that sees all and still loves all. Jesus’ face alone is the one that has power to forgive and to give us the healing power to accept that forgiveness” (p. 114).

Jamieson then discusses three important practices, all communal, where we learn to live before Christ’s face, experiencing his forgiveness removing our shame and our guilt and enabling us to do this with those who have sinned against us. He calls for confession, for small groups where we talk honestly about issues of guilt and shame, and worship, where we confess together as a church in our worship of the Triune God.

Jamieson concludes the book with his answer to “Jane,” the parishioner asking about forgiveness, an answer rooted in the rich pastoral theology of this book. And that is what we are given in 157 pages of text. We are brought to reflect deeply on the consequences in the human psyche of the pretensions to god-hood of each of us, re-enacting the sin of the first couple. We explore the nature of shame, our penchant to run from God, and how this is addressed in the work of the cross. It isn’t just something we have to “get over” as people whose guilt is pardoned. Shame, too, has been borne.

What I most appreciate about this is that while it is a “pastoral theology of shame and redemption” it is rooted in good systematic and historical theology. I also appreciate how it is also rooted in the church and a theology of grace. Forgiveness is not presented as an individual effort to think better of ourselves and others but as a corporately supported reality that recognizes the continuing presence and power of Christ at work in his people gathered. While cognizant of psychology, this is the care of souls rooted in a fresh appreciation of the theology we preach, pray, and enact in worship each week. Refreshing!

Review: Daring Greatly

February 11, 2015 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

I can’t seem to get away from Teddy Roosevelt! Brene’ Brown begins this book with a quote from a speech of his at the Sorbonne in 1910 in which he talks about the man in the arena being the one who counts and not his critics, the man who strives for great things at great cost. Her title is drawn from these words:

“…who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly….”

Brown describes her research into vulnerability as one that led her to a personal breakdown, which her therapist described as a spiritual renewal. She traces her research course, which began by exploring human connection and discovered in her interviews that the fear and shame of disconnection is what came up over and over again. She says she was hijacked by her data into researching shame, and the flip side of this, a shame resilience that enables people to overcome shame and live “wholeheartedly.” Wholeheartedness comes from a sense of one’s basic worthiness, cultivated through a variety of practices such as letting go of perfectionism, of numbing and powerlessness, of scarcity fears, of the need for certainty and more.

A key to wholehearted living that “dares greatly” that is at the core of this book is the embrace of vulnerability. Vulnerability requires courage and a willingness to press against all the “vulnerability myths” shared by both women and men. But it leads to compassion and connection, nowhere illustrated more than in Brown’s concluding chapter having to do with vulnerability and parenting. I found myself saying “Amen” and “Amen” and wishing that my peers in parenting could have heard this sooner and not inflicted so much pain on each other around being the perfect parent. Her stories of being imperfectly vulnerable with her children and allowing them to dare greatly, even if this just meant showing up, were worth the price of admission.

I found her insightful in the ways we shield ourselves from vulnerability through foreboding joy, where we do not allow ourselves joy because we are waiting for the other shoe to drop, through perfectionism, where we think that by doing things right we will never know shame, and through numbing, by which we deaden ourselves from the painful things in life. Instead, she advocates practicing gratitude in the moments of joy, appreciating the “cracks” in our life that shed light on our humanness, and learning how to feel and lean into our hard feelings while setting proper boundaries.

She also challenges organizations to “mind the gap” and practice “disruptive engagement”–developing awareness of the gaps between strategy and culture and the ways we discourage engagement through corporate shaming practices. Bringing the best that we have often involves vulnerability and risk in disruptively engaging broken corporate culture.

I found this a helpful book that was immediately applicable for me in several situations in which I was mentoring young leaders facing the choices of “safe” disengagement or vulnerably stepping into their work as leaders. Vulnerability is scary for all of us and yet ultimately the only path to real connection and real greatness. Brene’ Brown helps us on that path through her stories and research, even while helping us to see that each of us makes that path our own by walking into vulnerability.