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Purity Culture: seeking not only religious purity, but also racial and…

- - - - Purity culture reaffirms gender roles/stereotypes in this nation. Women are expected to take care of those who cannot effectively take care of their own minds and bodies: men and children.
        
        Simultaneously, purity culture tells women that men hold power over them due to it s great promotion of masculinity
        
        "But as time went on, it became clear that the type of man who we looked up to at church was the same kind of man who was looked up to in my local community. The world and the church were pretty much the same when it came to manhood" (Onishi).
        
        Purity culture & the evangelical church's role models tend to be masculine, strong, tough, all-American men, like John Wayne
- - - - New layer of purity culture: intersectionality between the female & the Asian body
        
        "The rules didn’t seem to apply equally to everyone, however, which I noticed as I began working at and attending primarily white or multicultural churches in college and as I grew older. For all this talk about transcending your body to be pure, I sure was being evaluated on mine" (Hong).
        
        Hong describes her experiences as an Asian woman in the evangelical church
        
        As an Asian woman, she was over-sexualized and fetishized
        
        "I realized that I was sometimes perceived as an exotic temptress rather than a China doll. And although I didn’t quite understand why this happened, I felt ashamed of what I assumed was a character flaw" (Hong)
        
        Additionally, she was made to feel like it was her own fault
  - - - "Church leaders told us that no man is perfect, and that they’d grow out of their southern 'drinkin’ and carousin.' If they were called by God, we had to show them grace and forgiveness" (Hong).
        
        This quote describes how for men, their "imperfections" are not necessarily their fault, so women should forgive them
        
        Ironically, women are viewed as sinners for simply existing/"tempting" men
        
        "We are either temptresses or radiant queens. In my case, as an Asian American woman, this binary exists on several levels beyond the Christian one. Asian bodies are, as the writer Anne Anlin Cheng has noted, ornamental because they’re oriental. Exotic and mysterious. Small and submissive. China dolls or dragon ladies. Lotus flowers or tiger moms" (Hong)
        
        Asian women are subject to additional discrimination, sexualization, and fetishization in purity culture
      - "In purity culture, gender expectations are based on a strict, stereotype-based binary. Men are expected to be strong, 'masculine' leaders of the household, church, and (to a lesser extent) society. Women are expected to support them—to be pretty, 'feminine,' sweet, supportive wives and mothers" (Klein)
        
        Ironically, this masculinity ties into the sins of purity culture. It is the aspect that belittles and sexualizes women. "Femininity," which is expected of women, can be simultaneously shamed for tempting men.
      - "Purity culture also teaches that women are responsible for the sexual thoughts, feelings and choices men make, and so must dress, walk and talk in just the right way so as not to “inspire” sexual thoughts, feelings, and actions in them. If they do “inspire” such thoughts, they are said to be a “stumbling block” – literally a thing over which men trip on their pathway to God" (Klein).
        
        Ironically, in this culture men typically hold most of the power. However, women are somehow the ones responsible for men's thoughts and actions
- - - - This could be not only viewed as an attempt to maintain his own religious, sexual purity of the body and mind, but also purity of race in the United States
        
        “There has been a long and expansive attempt to use sexual purity as a way to maintain ethnic purity, racial purity, to not mix the races, to construct what is, in essence, a straight, white, purely American, Christian national body. That is Christian nationalism. So purity culture is a way to do this in the name of faith, do this in the way of Christian sexual ethics, without having to be accused of xenophobia or racism” (Anti-Asian Hate, Purity Culture, & Christian Nationalism 19:45).
        
        Purity culture in this sense, seeks racial and national purity through a guise of religion, promoting purity of the body and the mind.
- - - - Women are expected to carry the burden maintaining their own purity while controlling men's purity through their own actions
        
        Women of color have even greater burdens: they have to prove, "attain," their purity before they can maintain it while still appealing to the correct, "pure," behaviors/actions/looks