Growing Up Pure: White Girls, Queer Teens, and the Racial Foundations of Purity Culture

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Lauren D. Sawyer

Growing Up Pure

White Girls, Queer Teens, and the Racial Foundations of Purity Culture

Lauren D. Sawyer

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Hardback

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English

New York University Press
09 December 2025

Christian life & practice; Christian instruction; Christian aspects of sexuality, gender & relationships; Gender studies: women; Age groups: adolescents

Takes seriously youths' ownership of their sexual choices within purity culture

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.

By: Lauren D. Sawyer
Imprint: New York University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781479838448
ISBN 10: 1479838446
Pages: 208
Publication Date: 09 December 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Further / Higher Education , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Lauren D. Sawyer is Affiliate Faculty at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology.

Reviews for Growing Up Pure: White Girls, Queer Teens, and the Racial Foundations of Purity Culture

""Through the lens of white Evangelical purity culture, Lauren Sawyer's Growing Up Pure showcases teens and even children as full, accountable moral and sexual agents in a sexist, heterosexist, cisgender, racist culture. Like all of us, children and teens are victims of ideals from which they also actively benefit, from which they can never fully escape (and so end up recapitulating), and against which they also push back in creative and resistant ways. Focused on white Evangelical ethics yet widely applicable, meticulously argued and footnoted yet highly accessible, Growing Up Pure invites readers not just to rethink Christian ethics of sexuality in light of children's dignity as moral agents, but also to ponder what Christian ethics would look like if it renounced moral purity as an aim and rejected perfect adherence to moral norms as a human possibility."" - Cristina L.H. Traina, Fordham University