Episode 82: Linda Kay Klein - Breaking Free From Purity Culture

You're listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. Serious talk about the sacred book, I'm Pete Ends. And I'm Jared Bias. Everybody, welcome to this episode of the Bible for Normal People. And our topic today is "Breaking Free from the Purely Culture and Our Guest" is Linda Kay Klein. Yes, she is the founder of Break Free Together, which is an organization she started out of her own experience. And out of a book she's written called "Pure" inside the evangelical movement that shamed a generation of young women and how I broke free. And this was a really fun conversation. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know if funds are the right word actually. It was, it was very informative and enjoyable to talk with Linda. I would put it that way. It wasn't enjoyable. However, there were times when I was cringed. Probably the most, more than I think I was the most enraged. You look very upset to me, actually. I was most enraged at this episode than anyone we've done for some reason. Probably because her story resonates so much with me and where the time and place I grew up culturally. And me, all the more so, being a bit older. But yeah, she's talking about a topic and she's doing something about a movement that has not been healthy. For men and women and churches and the conversation went in so many interesting different directions that I did not anticipate. And it was just, it was a good satisfying time to talk with Linda about something she knows an awful lot about. One thing we didn't go into too much on the podcast, but I think it's helpful, is coming back to tying in the Bible understanding to how often it is that we come to use this shorthand, like these conclusions we've already come to about what the Bible says and doesn't say. And over time that can grow into this whole other religion or whole other understanding of things. And we don't really ever go back to the text. And that can be just really dangerous. And I think we can all fall prey to that. Where we sort of, we get our ethics, we get all of our understandings, and then we kind of can become unmoored and then say, well, the Bible says, and over time, our little subculture, we realize actually the Bible doesn't say, we've just kind of drifted in our own direction. And what came through with Linda is that, no, we didn't address the topic specifically, but you can hear where she's broken free of that too. She's investigated the Bible more deeply and said, oh, wait a minute. It doesn't say anything like what they said it says. Right. Yeah. And that can be a really, that can be a freeing and fun conversation. All right. So why don't we have this conversation with Linda K. Klein on the purity culture. Let's do it. I was constantly being pulled aside and referred to as a stumbling block, so literally a thing over which men and boys trip on their pathway to God. And I remember it really bothering me growing up, this idea that I was being objectified in this way that felt deeply problematic even then. But my shirt went up high enough and my skirt went low enough. Like there would always be something else. There would be too much arm was showing or it was too low in the back. I just felt like I could never get it right. But welcome to the podcast, Linda. Thank you so much for having me. So we always try to start with getting to know our guests a little bit. So if you could just share a little of your story, a little of your background, maybe and how it interacts with faith. Sure. So in 1991, I was going in a seventh grade and that is actually when I transitioned from being in Episcopalian, my family had been Sunday church going kind of family. And when I was going to seventh grade, I was born again and joined the Evangelical Church. And a couple of other members of my family had also been born again. And so I kind of tipped the familial scale and we all became evangelical at that point, not my brother and sister because they were much older and had moved out. But my mom and dad and I started attending an Evangelical Church. And that was a completely different faith experience for me than the faith experience that I'd had as a child. Because the Episcopalian Church, you know, the way that I learned about religion there, it was a part of my life. But when I became an Evangelical, it was my life. It was my absolute complete and total identity, life purpose. It was how I looked at every single aspect of the world. And so that was a completely different way of engaging with faith and engaging with God and I had had experience before. But another thing that was funny that was going on within the community at the time was, you know, 1991 when I joined the community was also the beginning of the Evangelical purity movement, which very quickly became the purity industry. So you might think of all the purity rings and the purity balls and the purity pledges and the purity themed bibles and the purity themed curriculum. And oh gosh, I could go on and on. You know, you name it. London, did it, was 1991 like a magical year? Did something precipitate that or is that more when you noticed it or? 1991 was only magical for me because that's the year that I became an Evangelical. But it was really 1994 that true love waits, silver ring thing, a lot of those major organizations formed. But those major organizations, you know, they didn't come out of nowhere. So it really was the late 80s and the early 90s that this started to really become more and more prominent in large part because of federal funding actually because we had federal money for abstinence only before marriage messaging that Evangelicals had been, you know, lobbying for essentially and eventually that money that came from the federal government which often required state matches made its way back into the Evangelical community for the purity products that they had been creating which now, you know, in a more diluted form spread across the country and to public schools and so on. But in a more intense form really saturated the young Evangelical experience. And so you came to a new Christian experience that was really positive, but then you got hit with this thing pretty quickly. Yeah, absolutely. And I actually, you know, as I mentioned, some of my family members have already been born again before me and one of them was my mom. So my mom had been born again essentially around the same time as my birth. And so she had raised me Evangelical though the family wasn't Evangelical because she was, you know, she was a part of the subculture in a significant way growing up. You know, it was not, she didn't go to an Evangelical church but she listened to the Evangelical radio station. She had Evangelical friends. She read Evangelical books. And so she and I had this kind of Evangelical community of two I like to say sometimes. So when I joined Evangelicalism, you know, that part of the faith that I had learned from her felt so, so familiar and so home like and so life giving. It was about a personal relationship with Jesus. It was about feeling seen in a personal way and feeling worthy and feeling loved. And alongside that came this purity movement and this purity industry that my, the Evangelicalism my mom had raised me in, you know, it hadn't been present in that by any means. And that offered a very different message, you know, whereas I had learned about a personal relationship with Jesus that made me feel worthy. I was now part of a movement that made me feel deeply unworthy. You know, whereas I had joined Evangelicalism because I felt loved. I now was part of a movement that told me that there were very strict rules for how I could maintain this love. And some of those rules felt impossible to keep because I was a human being with a body and a young girl, no less, with a developing body. And the mere existence of my growing hips and my growing chest was making some people very, very nervous. It was problematic. Yeah, absolutely. So, so even so really it was an impossibility to be able to maintain this love that I had been told was unconditional but that very quickly I was learning was conditional and that the conditions were perhaps impossible for me to meet. So to maybe set the table more fully here, you transitioned from a different tradition, a faith tradition into Evangelicalism. How did you or if maybe if you remember this, just how did you or if you remember this, how did your views of the Bible and what it was and how were you supposed to use it? How did you remember that shifting as well as you made your way more and more into Evangelicalism? Hmm. Absolutely. You know, growing up in the Episcopalian Church, the Bible felt very mysterious and like this beautiful text that we would go to for insight that was sort of ununderstandable in some ways, right? There were parts of it that felt as mysterious as God felt, right? And as unknowable as God felt to me within that tradition. I'm not saying that everyone who grows up at Episcopalian has that experience but that was really what I remember. You know, when I was at Episcopalian, we, you know, my strongest memories are things like the priest walking down the aisle, the center aisle with the sort of smoke filled, the incense, yeah, the incense, right? And it was, and it was hanging on this long, long chain, right? And he would walk down the center aisle and he would sometimes be very fancy and he would swing it in a full circle. (laughing) There was just something incredible about that and everything really-- - Oh, those crazy episcopal issues. - I know, right? It was just wild, like doing tricks. - Party-hardy. - Doing tricks as he went down the aisle. So everything about faith took on that tenor to me of mystery and something that we weren't supposed to be, we weren't supposed to fully understand. And when I entered into the evangelical world, all of a sudden we were taught about a Bible and a God and a faith that was very intimate and very close, but with that came all of these ideas about everything that we did know and should know all of a sudden. There were very clear interpretations of the text. There were very clear answers. There were very clear things that we were-- I remember I had a book when I was in junior high that was something like a hundred questions that people might ask you about the faith and all of the answers, right? And I would just study this book and be like, "All right, so when somebody at school asks me about the problem of how can God be a loving God when there is suffering in the world? Here's the answer, right?" And the way in which I didn't raise-- - Forget that people have been struggling with that for about a thousand years, but-- - Right, and the way in which I was raised until I became an evangelical was very different. I had been raised to struggle with questions like that. And to make peace with the fact that faith was about entering into the unknown and to take those steps forward without knowing where the next step would be, right? And yeah, so it was a very different picture that I got. And of course, the purity movement and the purity industry inserted all of these ideas within that larger rubric of right and wrong and good and bad and worthy and unworthy. - Yeah, same more about that because I-- How did the Bible get used or not used in this purity culture that you found yourself in? Was the Bible used a lot and kind of you were beating over the head with it or it wasn't used a lot? I'm just curious how that played out for you. - It's interesting because I had been thinking a little bit about it and I think that the Bible certainly was referenced a lot, but in many ways, the references to the Bible were very brief and then were sifted through a subculture interpretation that took the biblical material and made it something entirely different. But because you used a single biblical word or a biblical phrase or biblical concept, this new subculture interpretation had the tone of being of the Bible, though in fact it wasn't. So I'll give you a couple of examples. So one is this concept of the stumbling block. This is something that I was called many times growing up. I regularly remember being pulled aside. - Those hips? - Yeah, those hips, right? Like, you know, what can I do, right? Those hips and the talking to the boys and you know, wearing, if my shirt went up high enough and my skirt went low enough, like there would always be something else. There would be, you know, too much arm was showing or it was too low in the back. And I was kind of constantly being pulled aside and referred to as a stumbling block. So literally a thing over which men and boys trip on their pathway to God. And I remember really bothering me growing up, this idea that I was being objectified in this way that felt deeply problematic even then. But you know, stumbling block was a religious term. And I felt at once annoyed and offended. And at the same time, you know, I went home and I changed clothes and I tried to, you know, not call the boys who were my friends anymore or whatever it was that had elicited the latest warning. - Unstumbling block, because you said before about sort of filtering the Bible through a culture. And I mean, stumbling block, it's a biblical term, but it's got nothing to do with any of this. It's, you know, it's about the cross as a stumbling block, Paul says. That's not not what-- - Exactly, exactly. - Hey, amen sister, okay. - Amen brother, right. So I went back exactly. So I went back as an adult and I looked at this term that I had heard used to refer to me and to my friends so many times to the point where, you know, though we know that a stumbling block is something, you know, anything that a Christian can trip on on their pathway to God, it was used so commonly to refer to girls and women that it became kind of a shorthand for girls and women and are being too sexual. But you know, you look in the Bible and there's actually no reference whatsoever to it being used in that way. In fact, it's used in reference to sexuality, you know, really only one time in the Bible and it is, you know, the verse talks about not committing adultery, but everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. And if your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. But you know, this verse refers to the lust, the onlooker's eye, not to the woman, right? And that is the only reference that actually refers to women and girls. You know, and actually, you know, when that term was used, when it was cited through the Bible, the biblical reference was actually the reference that Paul makes where he tells his readers and Romans that, you know, you sure you can eat anything you want but don't eat something that's going to disturb someone else's spiritual walk, right? And so this was often used as a metaphor. We were told, yeah, sure you can wear whatever you want, you can call the boys, you can do whatever you want, but you're going to be a stumbling block to boys and men and that's the verse it was used. But if you actually look at the larger context of the chapter, you see that Paul is actually referring to the problem of judgmentalism and referring to the idea that actually, you know, many choices can please God and therefore stop judging people for their choices, do what you do, do it onto the Lord. - Amen, sister. - All right, so in that very moment where we are being, and we're referring to a stumbling blocks, you know, I would argue that it was the accuser who was being a stumbling block, right? Who was judging us and who was shaming us. So there were a lot of concepts like that that were taken out of biblical context and used so regularly that they just became, you know, so well-worn, that I think we started to think that they were biblical. - Yeah, was there ever anything set about the responsibility of the boy/man and all of this? Or is it always, are the women always a stumbling blocks here? - Hmm, I have never heard personally a boy or a man ever heard of her do as a stumbling block. - Yeah. - Or just grow up. You know, they don't have to take responsibility. Is that what you were, is that the message you got? - Listen, you know, you all tell me what you were raised with as boys and men, but I'll tell you what I was raised with and I'll tell you what the gentleman that I spoke and with have told me. And generally, I would say that we both learned that men and boys were sexually weak and that they were susceptible to the weakness of the human, of the female flesh in particular. And it actually, that actually proved their masculinity in some ways, which is a very important part of gender expectations built into purity culture and built into the community within which I was raised. So they are expected to battle that weakness and to become stronger than the weakness, but it's girls and women's responsibility to protect the boys and men because we are believed to be, to have no sexual desire, really, or to have such minimal sexual desire that it's not worth speaking about. So really, you know, what I learned was that it became our responsibility at the end of the day to ensure the sexlessness of the entire community of ourselves and of our brothers in Christ by doing absolutely everything perfectly. (laughs) To make sure that men and boys would not fall victim to the threat that we were to them. - 'Cause God expects perfection, doesn't it? - Absolutely. That is the kind of one thing for my deep relationship with God. It's that perfection is a high demand. No, I mean, of course not, right? I mean, you know, we are complex creatures that were created in all of our complexity and I think loved for our complexity in the same way that I love people when they show me their worst selves, right? (laughs) I feel like God, I feel like God appreciates that appreciates the full complexity of the human. - Well, I think, you know, that's an important thing, just even the cultural moment 'cause I would have probably grown up around the same time and the same environment and the conceptual world was not conducive to complexity. It was what like the early 90s, when you talk about concepts, it was sort of about pithy sayings and I can't help but kind of bring in some of this kind of capitalistic merchandising part because that became a big part of what you do. And basically if it doesn't fit on a mug or a t-shirt or a key chain or a bookmark, it's probably not gonna sell well. And so there, just I just remember that like when you talk about using the Bible, there wasn't room for that. So we had to like summarize it into pithy sayings and really the Bible was just there to stamp it. And so you would have a pithy phrase and then you'd have like one or two, maybe three Bible verses. It was more important that you just put the reference there, not the text of the Bible because we already got that covered in this pithy saying. And that lack of complexity or nuance plus a lot of these other things, it just sort of was ripe for a lot of misunderstanding around probably a lot of concepts honestly. - Yeah. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I feel like in many ways, if you look at the history, it was very purposeful at the beginning of the evangelicalism to essentially create marketing and talking points, much like I worked in communications and nonprofits for a long time. I understand the need to bring things down to their essential points, something that can fit into a tweet or fit into a website. That really happened with the faith where it was brought down very purposefully into pamphlet size back in the days when we had pamphlets. The pamphlet size, the t-shirt size, and keychain-sized phrases. What I feel like ended up happening is that we created a religion based on marketing. We stripped a religion to marketing and then we built a religion upon marketing. For example, to go back to stumbling block, that was this new interpretation of girls and women as stumbling block because of their skirts being too short or whatever it was, became religion to us. I think you're absolutely right. I think the result is that we have created this alternate Christianity. I don't know what you would say to this, but I feel like the challenge with that isn't necessarily that we summarize and bring it down to such a point. I think a lot of us do that and I think there's sometimes a worthwhile endeavor. It's when that, what you said, then when we rebuild, it's things out of that without any questioning that maybe there are other alternatives to this. When we equate our summary of the Bible with the Bible itself, and we equate the Bible itself with the Word of God and it keeps going down that way, then that becomes a problem because then we're insulating ourselves from any other ideas that does that make sense? Yeah, and then throw in the whole, like you've been describing so well into the whole economic dimension. I mean, this is a mess. We can get all high about this, but it's sort of a dollar tree, I think. You know, you're putting something up in the place of God and when you create a religion, you're really creating a God to go along with it. And who of us is really introspective enough to realize when we're doing that? But in your case, it hurts a lot of people. Yeah. It's impressive. Yeah, and maybe say, I'd be interested in hearing a little more of your story on when was the moment that you, or maybe it wasn't a moment but a process for you, when you realize that this maybe isn't the healthiest of perspectives on the Bible on God or just for yourself of yourself. Yeah. I would love to answer that question. I want to say something else that occurred to me while we were having this discussion first, if you don't mind, before we move too far away from this. As another example of something that I was thinking about that I think illustrates purity culture well, while also sort of building on what we were talking about, is this idea, one of the things that I learned growing up, another kind of biblical phrase that religion was built around that was, you know, very deeply impacted by culture and by cultural teachings, was I grew up learning that you could either be a Proverbs 31 woman or a Proverbs 7 woman. Yeah. Those are your choices, pretty much. Those are your options, right? Those are your only two options. Either you are the perfect woman, right? Or you are the woman who is the highway to the grave, leading down to the chambers of death. The harlot. The process. Yeah. The process too. The adulterous woman. Yeah, you're either the perfect wife or an adulterous woman. Yeah, exactly. These people too deaf. Yeah, exactly. And the Bible doesn't tell us those are only two options. But that has been something that has been consistently presented to us, this idea that you have one of two options, right? So that is a cultural binary, the kind of virgin and the whore, the good girl or the bad girl, by which of course we don't mean how often she volunteers. All of these, the pure or the impure, right? These were concepts that were deeply embedded into a larger cultural, patriarchal culture that controls sexuality and that are also that used the Bible to support these ideas, right? By telling people you have two options, the Proverbs 7 or the Proverbs 31 or whatever it is, right? And so, you know, in terms of your question about how I realized that this wasn't working, I mean, the reality was is that I was just very bad at being perfect. I was surprised. I know I was really working at it. Despite all that encouragement you were getting. Yeah, and I reached this moment where I remember feeling that I had a choice and that choice was between my authentic self, you know, messy and imperfect as it was and a false self trying to continue to hold on to being a false self, trying to be quieter than I actually was, trying to be less noticed than I was. You know, it wasn't just about sex and sexuality, right? All of these other ideas about what it is to be a good woman got embedded into this larger picture, right? So I would actually have to be something different than I was. Hey everyone, Mike here with the Bible for Normal People. I'm part of the producers group and one thing I really appreciate about this podcast is the diversity of topics. These are topics that I might not have otherwise thought about or even known existed. If you've gotten something from this podcast, I want to take a moment to mention how you can support Pete and Jared in their work. The podcast is brought to you by supporters on the Patreon platform. For as little as $1 per month, you can be part of the group that brings this podcast to normal people everywhere. As a gift for your support, we have book studies, chat groups, and lots of videos from Pete and Jared. So check it out at patreon.com/thebiblefornormalpeople. If you aren't able to support the show financially, make sure you rate and review the podcast on iTunes. That helps other normal people find it. One group in particular we want to thank is our producers group. We work hard to keep Pete and Jared normal by letting them know about each and every mistake they make. Of course, we also provide good feedback if it's up or applicable. In particular, we'd like to thank David Crober, Michelle Casey, Marilyn Johnson, Shea Box, and Lauren O'Connell. The Bible for Normal People Could Not Happen Without You. Now back to the podcast. You know, I had a moment that was really meaningful for me where I actually got very, very sick when I was in my freshman year or my first year of college. I have Crohn's disease. So I got quite sick and I was not taken seriously for a long time. So by the time I ultimately got taken seriously, I was rushed in for major surgery within a couple of weeks of first having a doctor say, "Oh, you're actually quite sick because they were afraid I wouldn't make it otherwise." And you're not supposed to have a major surgery in the midst of tremendous turmoil in your body. So one surgery quickly became two, became three. And I ultimately had about a year and a half where I was recovering at my parents' house and had to leave school for a period of time before my fourth surgery, which was the surgery that was sort of the final healing surgery. And the period between my third and my fourth surgery, which is about a year, where they were really hoping that my body would heal enough to do the fourth surgery, the fourth surgery being the surgery that could wait the elective surgery, that would allow me to go back to school and to function again. That year where they were hoping that I would become well enough for that fourth surgery, I was very, very sick. And I went back to church, you know, as I, you know, I was not leaving the house more than a couple of times a week at that time, but one of the only places that I would go was to church on Sunday. And I actually became a youth group leader at that time too and started leading a girls group. So really the only activities that I was doing were church related. And something really interesting happened, and that is that all of a sudden the church's perspective on me changed abruptly. I went from being pulled aside and told that I was a stumbling lock and told that I was a threat and told that I was a problem to all of a sudden being pulled aside and told, you know, you look beautiful when I was wearing the same little dress that I had learned, you know, a year earlier and been told, you know, made me a terrible person. I was being pulled aside and told that I was a good enough person in their eyes that they wanted me to do things like read scripture in church or they wanted me to tell my testimony in the youth group. When the real kicker was the moment that I got pulled aside or actually my mom came and told me while I was, you know, lying in bed, you know, very sick, that I had been asked to play the Virgin Mary in the church live nativity scene. And I remember in that moment thinking to myself, oh my gosh, like I'm finally who they want me to be. You know, I've lost 40 pounds. I was so sick that my energy was really, really low. Those hips that we were joking about before, you know, they were no longer a problem. That being too noticeable and being too gregarious and being too, you know, too joky or, you know, calling the boys and all that, I wasn't doing any of those things, right? And I was good. You know, I had been stripped of my vitality and I had been stripped of my strength and I had been stripped of my sexuality and I would have given anything to have those things back again. And that was the moment that I said, you know, enough. I'm done trying to be who they want me to be because here I finally am her and I want to be well. You got insight through suffering in a way. That's really what drove you to sort of just come to terms with, wait a minute, this picture is all wrong. Right. But now finally, you're what God wants you to be. Right? That's the message you got. Right. You have to be sick. Right. I have to be too sick to be a threat. Yes. Wow. Well, I wanted to because one thing that I think is important, at least kind of my, in my experience of purity culture is, you know, you talked about the, the binaries of, and I thought of it too when you're kind of like this sick and well. There was a transformation there and I made me think of the binary of good and bad, but I know at least I don't know if this was true early on, but definitely later kind of in the Mark Driscoll era where it was like, women had this impossible task to be both. It wasn't actually that you had to be good or bad. It was a, you had to be both good and bad. You had to be really, really good before you got married. And then you had to be like really, really bad whenever after you got married. Right. Like you were supposed to just like flip this sexual switch and become this like, you know, crazy, you know, sexually driven person after you got married, but you were supposed to have none of that before. And I could just like biologically and culturally that just seems like a really harmful message. So I don't know if that's something that you would have experienced too because I know there's probably a lot of shame and a lot of embarrassment around not being able to do that right and maybe feeling broken because like whatever mechanism God intended that you could go from pure to like being really sexually driven. If you can't do that, it just seems like you'd feel broken or something. Yeah. The phrase that I remember hearing growing up and that has been repeated to me by many of my interviewees. I should mention, I guess I haven't mentioned this yet, that I spent 12 years interviewing others who were raised in churches like mine, white American evangelical churches as girls around the country. So the phrase that I grew up with and that I've heard, you know, echoed from interviewee after interviewee after interviewee is this term, "A lamb in the day and a tiger at night." That's the expectation for the wife, right? And the idea of what that we were taught is that if you are utterly pure and that means completely non-sexual. So we're not just talking about not having sex, we're talking about, you know, not quote-unquote "illiciting" sexual thoughts or feelings in others as we were talking about before, not being a stumbling block because being a stumbling block makes you impure. So you're responsible for the thoughts and the feelings and the choices of others. But you're also can be made impure via your own sexual thoughts and feelings and choices well beyond those around sex per se. So we really learned that being pure, so completely non-sexual in every way, shape, or form was going to lead to this tiger at night, this like lamb in the day, tiger at night idea. And really those expectations were just as strong. I think that a lot of us grew up believing and understanding that we were walking on a kind of tightrope, that the expectation for purity before marriage was no stronger. And the expectation for being an ultimate sexual satisfy or in marriage. And that was, I don't know, I hear if I'm hearing you right, that was the equation to do it. That was the equation. Not only it was like if you do this, then you will be the tiger. Absolutely, absolutely. And to your point, it doesn't work. You know, if you, I mean for some people, you know, God bless, I hope that it works for them and that they are able to go from being completely non-sexual to being. I would just guess like if it does work, it would be like it would be in spite of that process not because of it. Right, yeah. So God bless the people who, you know, who didn't end up struggling tremendously. But I've heard story after story after story of people who did everything quote unquote right and who found that they had turned that sexuality switch off very successfully. And we're now incapable of turning that switch on. And I've heard that story from a lot of women. I've also heard that story from men. You know, it's not, you know, our bodies, when we train our bodies and when we actually paves neuro pathways to function in particular ways that doesn't magically change. We don't, our brains don't magically rewire, you know, when we sign a marital contract. So there's a tremendous amount of shame. And because of the equation element to it that you're referring to, a number of people that I've spoken with have talked about when they seek help being told by the Christian counselor or the pastor who they go to for help, well, the equation is be non-sexuality for marriage and you'll have a perfect sexual life after marriage. So let's talk about your sexual life before marriage. That's like in raging. Totally. And women in particular, you know, girls being 92% more likely to experience sexual guilt than boys, you know, and this, that was a study that was around sort of younger people. But I imagine, you know, though I know that there are plenty of problems that men are experiencing as well, you know, among women, I think the shame is even greater. So because it's often the woman who's holding the shame and because of how we're socialized talking about the shame when she has it, right? Because we are socialized to be a little bit better at talking about our shame, the men are. She's the one who's often in those counseling sessions talking about shame and of course, women are responsible for the sexual bliss of the marriage bed. So it's often she who the counselor of the pastor turns to and says, great, did you masturbate? Did you go further than you think you should have, you know, with this man who you eventually married? What did you do? What did you do wrong that you can now confess? Are you actually not holy enough and do you have a non-biblical reading of what God wants for you in marriage? Not did we teach you things? That's a particularly problematic. Yes, of course not. Did you, did you, you know, is there something wrong with your interpretation of the faith, right? That you are less holy and therefore you're holding onto shame, right? So there's this shaming of the shamed that sends people further and further and further down this shame spiral and takes those folks who, you know, are bold enough to come forward and say that this is a problem in their marriage bed and tells them it's better to be silent. It's better to hold your shame quietly where we know, of course, it festers and causes even more problems. What do you think? I mean, I can't imagine how I would answer this question, but what about a solution? I mean, like what can be done? Like for example, like on the more global scale of church structures, do you think that women in positions of church leadership would help or does it depend on the culture itself or like what, what can be done? Well, I do believe we need more, more women in church leadership. I do think that things change. We know from research that diversity is good for us in every way, shape, or form. You know, when we have a diverse group, we make better decisions. The group comes to better decisions, comes to better conclusions. So I think that we need diverse leadership in every sector of society and certainly in the church. And I think that when women are in leadership, you know, it's really important that they're in true leadership, not sort of a part B to someone else's part A. Like actual authority? Exactly. Exactly. Actual authority and not sort of a figurehead, right? Which unfortunately is what happens oftentimes when women are in leadership. So I do think that women in leadership would make a difference. I also, you know, there are certain things that we know changes. You know, for example, I had never in my church experience, you know, until I left evangelicalism in my early 20s and, you know, later rejoined Christianity in a different way as an adult. And, you know, then things were a little bit different. But, you know, for all the years that I was in the evangelical church, I never heard a single pastor even reference sexual violence, right? Even one time reference its existence, I certainly never heard a pastor's preacher sermon from the pulpit about sexual violence or a Bible study about it or anything. And we know, of course, that the numbers of people who have experienced sexual violence are remarkably high in our congregations, right? And you know, now that I've, you know, come back to Christianity another way, still to this day when I hear these sermons that do talk about sexual violence and I know there are men who give these sermons, but I have personally only ever heard them from women pastors. Still to this day, I cry when I hear them. I still cry when I hear someone stand up in front of a church and take something that is so silenced and that is so shamed and speak the love of God. You know, and speak healing and speak hope. And I've talked with a lot of the pastors who I have heard give these sermons and they tell me that they are not. that after they preach about sexual violence, that they are approached by person after person, after person, after person, after person, disclosing. So that's just one example of something that I believe I don't have any statistical analysis for this, but I believe that if we had more women pastors, we would be hearing more about a whole lot of things, sexual violence and sexual shame among them. - And what about, I just would think that better sex ed, I guess, better open conversation about sexuality in general, would be helpful as well, have you-- - You mean in the church? - Just in general. - Okay. - But yeah, in the church for sure. And I guess that's a dicey thing, 'cause I think that's what the purity culture was trying to do. It was, that's actually what it was trying to address was sex edded in the church, but it was like that brand of it. - Well, let me tell you a story. - So in 1994, of course, that's when true love weights came out. So I think it started in 1993. And that's something else happened in 1993 as well. Now, true love weights was developed by, you know, a gentleman who talk about writing on the backs of napkins, as though they were doing a startup, right? Like it's all just, I don't want to put words into their mouths, but like, you know, the lore of it being so simple that you could do it on the back of a napkin as part of the, as part of the like story, right? - Right. - You know, meanwhile, there was another conversation started because a lot of people were worried about the AIDS crisis and, you know, another issue is, but particularly the AIDS crisis at that time and were thinking about sexuality education. And that was the conversation started between two other people that took 10 years of committees and research and so on and so forth to come out with a sexuality curriculum. And that was the our whole lives curriculum, the owl curriculum, which is sexuality education across the lifespan. Now, that was a partnership between the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association. Owl is, I think, a very strong, value-based sexuality education offering is a secular model that has a faith-based overlay. There's a unitarian overlay if you're teaching in unitarian churches and there's a unitarian church of Christ overlay if you're teaching it in Christian communities. You know, but it took them 10 years to come out with this, right? Whereas, "Jr. Love Wates" came out like that, like that. And by the way, you know, fact check me, I'll say to your listeners, you know, the 10 years part, that's from my having talked with the folks who work at Owl at the our whole lives at the Church of Christ office. So, you know, as I haven't seen that documented, I trusted they were pretty right on that. Well, and I think it, you know, it plays into that overall theme kind of of nuance. - Exactly. - Like, we need to do our homework and actually take time to understand the research. And, I mean, that goes for the Bible. It goes for science and research and psychology and biology and all of that. So, I think that's how I would think of that is it's part of the, we need to do our homework better. But we're in a crisis moment. You can't, you can't, crisis moment. And here's the Bible where God speaks plainly to us directly. So, just do what it says. - So, Wix to just get rid of that whole rhetoric. I think anytime someone says it's really plain and simple, we just need to yell at it. - Well, that's part of my question with this solution, you know, the solution to all this. And it sounds like, I mean, another way of asking the question Linda is, what do you wish you would have heard those first few years that you were in an evangelical environment? Like, what would you like for young women in that same setting to hear? But I'm gonna guess your answer is gonna be something like, well, they have to get out of it. (laughing) I mean, 'cause they're not gonna hear it there. - Yeah, well, I mean, I did a lot of research looking for churches, evangelical churches that were teaching healthy sexual ethics where I would consider healthy sexual ethics, which for me is a values based sexual ethic. When I say a values based sexual ethic, I'm referring to an ethic that is not rooted in rights and wrongs. This is right, this is wrong, kind of list of rules, but instead in values, like consent, responsibility, inclusivity, justice, you know, different things like that. Models that teach people how to make decisions using these values is a, I think, a much healthier and more nuanced way for us to approach sexuality and certainly a much, much harder, and it takes a lot more work and a lot more time and a lot more money and investment, which is one of the reasons that I think we instead go to lists of rules because it's simply easier. But, you know, so I did a lot of work looking for evangelical churches that were teaching values based models, and I did come across two in particular that I would like to talk about. So one is a church in Denver that is called Highlands Church, and they actually are teaching OWL. They're teaching the OWL lives model. And I went out there when they were teaching it to their young people, you know, the model, actually includes, you can get curriculum for young people to learn the young, young people, like, in, you know, children, to learn the values, though they're not going to be talking about sex at that age, or you can get right now, they're actually developing curriculum for people who are in what is traditionally called retirement age. So they really do think about as lifespan, but Highlands was focusing on that age that a lot of people focus on, which is the junior high phase. And so I went out there when they were doing this, and it was incredibly powerful, you know, and the young people that were taking part in it really blossomed over the course of the conversation and started out being very, very shy, and having a really hard time talking about sexuality, and having a really hard time not asking for answers, you know, not saying, is this right and is that wrong, but by the end of their time in the class, they were able to, they were able to, when somebody would come with a, is this right, is that wrong question, were able to as a group say, well, you know, through the lens of justice, this feels a little bit problematic in this particular way, in this particular scenario, but if this is part of it, then, you know, then I actually don't think it's a problem, right? So, you know, so you really have to be able to teach people how to think and how to make wise decisions. So that was one church, and then another church was Life Journey Church in Indiana. And in that church, the sexuality-- I didn't see that one coming. Oh, the Indiana? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, it's a church that started out MCC, and still is, but is evangelical as well, so really interesting combination. And they actually are doing sexuality education for adults, because we know that unfortunately, you know, many of us never got a healthy sexuality education. We had to create our own sexuality education, learn via trial and error, learn via friends, learn via the internet, which, you know, good luck, right? [LAUGHTER] So they really focused on this. That sounds like a really smart idea. Yeah, really. Just Google it. Just Google it. Just say it's right, right, right, right. With the very thing that we tell kids, like, please do not do, is what many adults actually end up having a turn to it, because we have no models either, right? So he created the head pastor of that church created a really interesting model based on how he sees Jesus making ethical decisions, and then teaches congregants how to make ethical decisions in the way that he sees Jesus doing it on a range of things, including sexuality. Well, that's a-- I think that's a wonderful way to come to a conclusion here, since we're coming to the end of our time. I really appreciate having those resources, and also just ending kind of on a hopeful note that there are things that have been developed will continue to be developed, even within evangelicalism. But where can people learn more about you, Linda, or where can they learn more about this conversation and keep it going? What would you suggest? Yeah, thank you so much. And also, thank you and to your listeners for bearing with me. I am a little jet lag, so I was trying to hide it. But I feel like there are moments where I was not at my whyses. I'm sure where I would get a little lost mid-sentence, and I have to bring myself back. So I thank you for any patience with me that you all had to bring. That's all right. We do that, too. And we aren't ever on point, too long to see my time. So that's the how I live, Linda. But yeah, so I would love for people to stay in touch with me. I have a website. It's linda-k-cline.com. And on the website, you can learn more about my book, which is Pure Inside the Evangelical Movement that shamed a generation of young women and how I broke free. And that is the story of not only my experience, but also the stories of many, many other people's experiences that I've been gathering over the past 12 years. And you can also read on the website about an organization that I have started, which is called Break Free Together, because one of the things that I learned via this process of what I started to refer to as Sacred Story Exchange, because the interviews that I did really weren't me just listening. It really was an opportunity for me to be able to tell people my own story as well when applicable and to be able to share the stories of others when applicable, helping many of my interviewees move from a place of, I'm the only one who's ever experienced to this, to the thing that's the most extraordinary about me is just how ordinary I am, right? You want to come to these things. So I'm a great believer that the only way that we really start to break free from shame and start to break free from sexual fear and anxiety that's rooted in the ideas and these teachings is to come together. So you can learn more about different ways and which people are coming together there. Alright excellent well thank you so much for coming on and sharing just so openly about something that again is hard for a lot of people to talk about. So appreciate that. Absolutely yeah thanks so much Linda. Thank you. Thanks everyone for listening to another episode of the Bible for normal people. Again, if you haven't already, which shame on you if you haven't already, go to Google and type in this title. Pure inside the evangelical movement that shamed the generation of young women and how I broke free by Linda K. Klein and pick up that book. I think it has a lot of really good information in there. A lot of stories. Yeah just the stories that she tells. I mean apart from she's really analyzed this statistically but just the stories are like whoa really. Yeah and and it's really it's an eye opener for anyone who's been a part of evangelicalism. I don't mean that negatively just as an observation. I think it's an education. And I would say too if you know of an organization or a church or a uropaster where this is a conversation that needs to happen, head to our website and maybe try to get in touch with her. We'll reach out to us and we can help you get in touch with her about how she might be able to speak at your church or organization or help you as you bring this conversation to your community. And folks if you want to continue conversations like this you can visit us at thebiblefornormalpeople.com where we have all sorts of stuff like I don't know blog posts and people commenting and conversing there. We have a link if you want to support us at Patreon and there's a good place to access our blogs as well and all sorts of merchandise. Yeah we have those mugs and t-shirts we were just lambassing in this episode. I know we've reduced Christianity to something that can fit on a mug or a t-shirt or a keychain. We should get keychains. Oh people use keychains too. I do. I do. I have one key on it too my blog. Anyway so all right folks well thanks for listening as always thanks for being part of what we do here and you're valued and thanks for listening. See ya.