Purity Culture and the Therapeutic Turn in American Evangelicalism with Dr. Lauren Sawyer

The purity movement of the 1990s is usually seen as a grassroots pushback against the sexual revolution—a return to “biblical values” in a more permissive culture. But that view misses something important: purity culture actually grew out of a much longer effort by evangelicals, spanning about a century, to figure out how to respond to the challenges of modern society.

This webinar traces how American neo-evangelicalism eventually coopted the therapeutic language it once rejected—and how purity culture emerged as a product of that accommodation. Drawing on research from her book Growing Up Pure: White Girls, Queer Teens, and the Racial Foundations of Purity Culture (NYU Press) alongside the work of scholars Heather Hendershot, Heather R. White, and Sara Moslener, this session examines how mid-century evangelicals adopted the psychological and therapeutic language from their liberal Protestant counterparts and repackaged secular knowledge as “biblical truth.”

By the 1970s, leaders like James Dobson had fully embraced the language of therapeutic Christianity. These leaders taught that the nuclear family was the foundation of a strong country—and that adolescents were both its most vulnerable members and its greatest threat. In this period, “family values” rhetoric—evident in anti-abortion activism, welfare reform debates, and early purity discourse—consistently positioned young people at the center of a perceived moral crisis. Within this framework, sexual purity was framed as a corrective intervention, promising to heal adolescents, restore families, and ultimately safeguard the nation.

Join this webinar to consider how understanding purity culture and its appropriation of therapeutic language shapes ongoing conversations in Christian communities about sexuality, faith, and personal growth.