Purity Culture, Bodies, and Beliefs

Purity Culture, Bodies, and Beliefs confronts the enduring effects of religious trauma by centering the body as both a site of harm and a source of healing. This collection offers a necessary space for truth telling, grief, and renewal.

Bringing together critical autoethnographies and theoretical reflection, this volume examines how purity culture intersects with sexuality, gender, race, ability, class, neurodiversity, and spirituality. Contesting evangelicalism’s focus on bodily autonomy and sexual politics, contributors explore how embodied storytelling becomes a means of resistance and transformation. Addressing topics such as reproductive rights in fundamentalist contexts, eugenics-inspired rhetoric linking queerness and disability, and ritual practices like tattooing, each chapter testifies to the ways individuals remember, resist, and reclaim wholeness after harm. By foregrounding lived experience, the book shifts the study of religious rhetoric from theology and persuasion toward embodiment and trauma, illuminating not only what religious discourse does but what it costs. Scholars and students of religion, feminist and queer studies, and rhetoric—as well as activists engaged in justice and healing work—will find in this volume both critical insight and a call to action.

In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Hannah Benefiel, Mathew Boedy, Carrie Drake, Susan Garza, Amanda K. Gross, Ada Hubrig, Deborah Leiter, Camille Kaminski Lewis, Chaim McNamee, Haleh Mir Miri, Tessi Muskrat, Christopher Peace, Mary Pitts, Joseph Richards, Elaine Schnabel, Julie J. Sisler, and Kylie Sommer.

“Purity Culture, Bodies, and Beliefs is a brave collection. I applaud this assembly of contributors who name traumas and explore ways they have pursued healing. The project is timely and its approach original. With the turn to critical auto ethnography, contributors mine and frame lived experience in order to confront trauma-inducing discourses within religious environments. This turn is a most compelling and welcome one.”—T J Geiger II, author of Faithful Deliberation Rhetorical Invention, Evangelicalism, and #MeToo Reckonings

Victoria Houser is Assistant Teaching Professor in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Mari Ramler is Associate Professor of English at Tennessee Technological University.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Bodies and Beliefs in Religious Rhetoric

Victoria Houser and Mari Ramler

Part 1 Rhetorical Bodies

1 Repainting God’s Temple: Tattoo as Post-Traumatic

Rhetoric

and Healing Practice

Chaim McNamee

2 A Working Brain, Womb, and Mouth: The Female Body

in Bob Jones University’s Purity Culture

Camille Kaminski Lewis

3 On Rhetoric, Religious Trauma, Disability, and Queerness: A Love

Letter from a Disabled, Nonbinary Queer

Ada Hubrig

Part 2 Body Language

4 Confession as Apology and Testimony: Disordered Eating

and Compulsive Truth-Telling

Hannah Benefiel

5 Orange-Flower

Water and Olive Oil: Rhetorical Autonomy

in Stories of Spiritual Deconstruction

Kylie Sommer

6 Reworking Religious Trauma Through Ritual

Joseph Richards and Elaine Schnabel

7 When Purity Culture Provides Cover for Sexual Trauma

You Later Remember: An Autorhetorical Reflection

DS Leiter

8 It’s Never Enough: Purity Culture and Surveillance

Tessi Muskrat

Part 3 Bodies and Harm

9 Blood and Shame

Susan Garza

10 Intervening in Purity Culture: A Social Responsibility

Julie Sisler and Mary Pitts

11 The Body of Trauma and the Body of Christ

Matthew Boedy

Part 4 Healing Bodies

12 Becoming Multiplicitous: An Autoethnography of Religious

Rigidity and Queer Identity

Christopher Peace

13 Why Mennonites Can’t Dance and Other Tales of

White Settlers: Moving Toward Embodied Healing

for Collective Liberation

Amanda K Gross

14 When the Body Remembers: The Body as a Site of Trauma

and Memory

Carrie Drake

15 Theologizing Violence: Diasporic Bodily Toromas and the

Sediments of Iranian Islamic Interrogative Culture

Haleh Mir Miri

List of Contributors

Index

Communication Studies

           Rhetorical Studies

Gender Studies

History

           U.S.

Religious Studies & Religion

           Sociology of Religion

Sociology

           Sociology of Religion

Rhetoric

           LGBTQ studies