Debut book examines complicity in purity culture
January 2026 – Drew Theological School PhD alum Lauren D. Sawyer T’22 has recently published her debut book, Growing Up Pure: White Girls, Queer Teens, & the Racial Foundations of Purity Culture, a push against the prevailing narrative that white youth—especially girls and queer youth—are always only victims within evangelical purity culture.
Sawyer, who earned her PhD in Religion & Society, is an ethicist and educator living in Seattle, Washington. She is affiliate faculty at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology where she teaches graduate courses in theology and develops trauma-informed curriculum for the Allender Center. She serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.
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 U.S. social history, seeing white youth as in need of protection, usually from a racialized, sexualized other.
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 vulnerable to its harmful teachings.
