Event Details

Join us as we celebrate the launch of Dr. Lauren D. Sawyer's debut book, Growing Up Pure: White Girls, Queer Teens, and the Racial Foundations of Purity Culture.

Lauren, an affiliate faculty member at The Seattle School, curriculum and instruction manager at the Allender Center, and a graduate of our Theology and Culture program, will discuss her writing process and share why she chose to study purity culture—and for whom this research matters.

Come prepared for an honest conversation about youth agency, complicity, and the uncomfortable truths that emerge when we stop viewing white adolescents solely as victims and start examining their role as participants in systems of harm.

Lauren will discuss her journey of closely reading the voices of those who grew up pledging their commitment to sexual purity and what she discovered about the centuries-old patterns of protection, privilege, and power that shaped their experiences.

The conversation will be followed by a reception with small bites and refreshments, with the opportunity to purchase a signed copy of Growing Up Pure. 

The event is free to attend, but seating is limited – please register for your spot.

More about the book:

Gaining mass popularity in the mid-1990s with the True Love Waits rally on the Washington Mall, purity culture began as an urge from evangelical conservatives for Christian adolescents to publicly commit to practicing abstinence until marriage. Throughout this decade and the next, millions of evangelical teenagers performed their commitment to sexual purity by signing pledges and wearing purity rings.

This book examines the shaping of purity culture in the United States, looking specifically at the experiences of white youth. It shows that white girls and white queer youth were vulnerable to the purity movement, but that they were also complicit in its white supremacist oppressive structure. It makes the case that purity culture follows in the footsteps of other purity movements in the United States, and is very much tied to centuries of anti-Black racism and xenophobia in US social history, seeing white youth as in need of protection, usually from a racialized, sexualized other.

While other works have focused on the ways in which purity culture has victimized young people, Sawyer argues that their perceived status as victims lets them too easily off the hook. White youth have been afforded the privilege of participating in purity culture’s harmful behaviors without being called to account. Closely reading adolescents’ stories of growing up in purity culture, she uncovers youth as agents, participants, and beneficiaries of its white supremacist framing, even as they were still vulnerable to its harmful teachings.

Praise for Growing Up Pure:

"Sawyer’s analysis helps to fill a significant gap in purity culture research that avoids the questions of white women’s racial embodiment. Her contribution moves the conversation into the complexity that emerges when we understand that evangelical purity culture is as much a project of white supremacy as it is misogyny and anti-queerness." ~Sara Moslener, author of After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America

"Growing up Pure makes a novel intervention in popular culture, gender studies, and religious studies, centering youth agency as participants in purity culture and adolescent sexuality. If in fact, teens have broadened their definition of sex and sexuality, Sawyer’s well-crafted assessment urges those of us writing about sexuality, gender, and race to think about the ramifications to this self-selection." ~Monique Moultrie, author of Passionate and Pious: Religious Media and Black Women's Sexuality

This event is in-person only. The recording will be available at a later date.