I wasn’t raised in a purity culture context. My parents were more natural and intentional than that, communicating values over rules; relationships over promises. In other words, I had a normal childhood.
A foundational principle of purity culture is the rejection of a normal childhood—because it wants a Christian* childhood.
*[NOTE—here, we must consider Christian, not as an adjective, but a proper noun, as synonymous with evangelicalism, or some other related means of ordering a sub-group of Christians that somehow also speak for all Christians. We might choose to call it Christian Childhood™ because it says less about something common to all Christians as it does what some Christians claim as necessarily common to all Christians—without the rest of us having a say in that.]
Which is, to say, an alternative structure that runs parallel with culture and stands against it. A concept that is pretty consistent with Christian tradition—in theory.
Hallmarks of such a childhood may include, but are not limited to the wearing and giving of purity rings, the restriction of popular music to only Contemporary Christian Music (CCM)—meaning no Top 40 radio—and limitations on what ideas children are exposed to in schools, libraries, and other public places.
In many evangelical and charismatic spaces, there is a particular obsession with purity and maintaining it—particularly for women and children. And almost exclusively around matters of sex. While there certainly are other areas of focus, such as language and violence, one need look at which books they attempt to ban from libraries to get a sense of the particular interest of the purity police.
Purity culture then, is fundamentally an expression of common devotion; in seeking to follow Jesus more fully. Which makes Jesus’s response to a similar vision of purity in Mark 7 so strange. Because he seems to be teaching the exact opposite.
I don’t mean to ridicule other traditions or interpretations. But it is Jesus himself who invites us to focus away from bodily concepts of purity retention and toward the ways we defile other people with our words and actions.
He rejects the idea of being defiled by consuming something you’re not supposed to. But he rails against the notion that people would do things to hurt other people. In other words, as everyone else is focusing on physical intimacy, Jesus is teaching about not being a jerk.
Let’s connect this with his teaching about the ten commandments: that we aren’t to abuse and exploit other people for selfish reasons. This is the foundation of the love command, Sabbath, Jubilee, and all of the Hebrew Scriptures. This is our work! This is what those rules are supposed to offer us: liberation.
Jesus reorients our sense of purity from laws, rules, and codes that protect abuse and exploitation and toward an ethic of “do no harm.” His focus is not purely on individuals and their behaviors, but on protecting the powerless and keeping the community responsible for the health of its people.