The Line from #MeToo to #ChurchToo
I grew up in Colorado Springs, CO, which is home to evangelical churches and organizations like New Life Church and Focus on the Family. Although I grew up in a Korean Presbyterian (PCUSA) church, my adolescence was shaped by evangelical theologies, megachurch culture, and Hillsong worship music. Like many who grew up in these cultures, I’m still working through the stories that white Christianity tried to instill in me in terms of my value and worth as a human being. These stories were not just told from church pulpits or the platforms of global Christian ministries, but permeated the air all around us.
It’s unsurprising, but nonetheless disturbing that another allegation has come out against Hillsong NYC mega church former pastor Carl Lentz. Leona Kimes, 37, told Religion News Service via email about her experience working as a nanny for Lentz’s family for seven years. During this time, Kimes says that Lentz subjected her to “bullying, abuse of power and sexual abuse.” Kimes said she began working as the Lentzes’ nanny and housekeeper in 2011, spending as many as 19 hours a day at their home. Requests for foot rubs and massages escalated to Lentz sexually touching Kimes. Multiple times in her statement, Kimes said she blamed herself for the alleged sexual activity. “I would leave church on Sunday full of shame after hearing his sermon. I would think it was all my fault, only to get a flood of messages from him that afternoon.”
There is no line between #MeToo, the movement that shed light on workplace harassment and abuse and #ChurchToo, a critique of abuse within the church. Rather, there is an explicit throughline, and it is purity culture.
As a scholar of religion and race and an ordained Presbyterian minister, I research these throughlines: how purity is co-constructed through virginity and marriage, how purity instantiates a particular kind of morality, how purity requires the category of gender mediated and constituted by the Other, often the female body, and how all of this a thread through to the establishment of the white, nuclear family.
Purity culture undergirds systems of oppression and violence legitimized by theological ideologies that say women and young women, in particular — their bodies, their lives, their emotions — are subject to men. In her book #ChurchToo poet and writer Emily Joy Allison shares her own personal story of abuse, and a sharp critique on how "patriarchy and misogyny are problems everywhere, but take on a particularly pernicious form in Christian churches."
But it’s not just a white church phenomenon. It happens in communities of color all around the country. There is an Instagram account dedicated to making space for former members of Covenant Fellowship Church to share their experiences of abuse, gaslighting, rejection and exclusion by the Church, its former pastor, Min Chung, and its leaders who sought to cover up his sexual abuse of a minor. Purity culture is about assimilation – into the subculture of a community like Covenant Fellowship Church, and into the dominant culture of whiteness and Americanness. It provides the tools necessary for those in power to remain in power.
After the Atlanta spa shootings, Angie Hong wrote about her own experience in The Atlantic as a Korean American woman contending with purity culture within broader Christian church culture and the Korean church in which she experienced her conversion. The rules of purity created a double-edged sword for her as she had to contend with not only the conflation between virginity and purity within her Korean church but the continuous hypersexualization Asian women experience in the U.S. What I've observed over and over in the literature and lives of women of color is that we are often used to delineate what is pure, and specifically uphold a certain kind of (white) womanhood.
I write this towards the end of June, a month in which we celebrate PRIDE, immigrant heritages, Juneteenth, and more. As a queer person and an Asian American woman who immigrated to the U.S. with my parents in the late 70s, I know the histories of the violence of purity culture within all sorts of communities, including, if not, especially churches. Purity culture may continue to be in the air all around us, but it doesn’t have to be the only story.
