After Abstinence: Gender Essentialism and New Campaigns for Purity

In the past twenty years, scholars and former adherents of White evangelical purity culture that originated in the 1990s have offered numerous engagements of the culture’s originating political contexts, theological scaffolding, and wounding legacies. This paper draws from those efforts to posit that a new and dangerous purity culture is emerging in this contemporary moment with gender essentialism as its organizing principle. It articulates significant characteristics of this campaign, investigates the role of movements for freedom that catalyze constricting frameworks, and, informed by historical precedents, names potential strategies for critiquing and curtailing this emerging purity culture.