Event Details

The purity movement of the 1990s is often remembered as a grassroots response to the sexual revolution—a return to "biblical values" in the face of cultural permissiveness. Yet this framing obscures purity culture's deeper roots in a century-long evangelical negotiation with modernism. This webinar traces how American neo-evangelicalism, born from the fundamentalist-modernist conflicts of the early twentieth century, ultimately capitulated to the very therapeutic frameworks 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 psychological and therapeutic language from their liberal Protestant counterparts, repackaging secular knowledge as "biblical truth." By the 1970s, figures like James Dobson had fully embraced this therapeutic Christianity, positioning the nuclear family as the fundamental unit of national strength—and adolescents as both its most vulnerable members and its greatest threat. The family values rhetoric of this era, visible in anti-abortion campaigns, welfare reform debates, and proto-purity culture language, consistently placed young people at the center of a moral panic. Within this framework, sexual purity emerged as a cure—a therapeutic intervention promising to heal adolescents, restore families, and ultimately safeguard the nation.

This webinar invites participants to consider how understanding purity culture as a therapeutic project shapes ongoing conversations about sexuality, faith, and formation in Christian communities today.