The Right's Purity Culture Moment

Circa 2018, the “purity culture” discourse within evangelical spaces reached its peak. Christian magazines and media outlets devoted a large chunk of attention to the testimonies of people, mostly women, who felt victimized by the sexually conservative teaching they had sat under in evangelical churches. This coincided with the peak of the mainstream #MeToo movement, but it actually predated it. Authors like Jen Hatmaker, Rachel Held Evans, and others made evangelical purity culture a key target in their wholesale indictment of conservative evangelicalism. One particular climax of the whole theological moment was when Joshua Harris, who had written the bestseller I Kissed Dating Goodbye in the late 90s at the wizened age of 17, went on an apology tour for the book.

One very clear memory I have of this discourse is how impressively its basic arguments penetrated the assumptions of a lot of Christian writers and pastors. Though anti-purity culture writers often didn’t specify exactly which churches or what books they were harmed by, there was frequently a silent agreement that we all knew what was being talked about anyway. The “harm” of purity culture was taken for granted. People might have disagreed about the remedies—some said more compassion from pastors, some said to stop teaching sexual abstinence until marriage—but what seemed beyond debate was the premise itself.

That purity culture discourse moment is gone now. Many of the most prominent critics of evangelical purity culture eventually left evangelical Christianity altogether. The very thing that created a moment for purity culture discourse, the shared insights of evangelical insiders, evaporated. Thus, by the time she passed away, Rachel Held Evans had clearly identified herself with the mainline Protestant tradition. The last book she published in her lifetime ridiculed inerrancy and heaped scorn on basic evangelical theology. Jen Hatmaker’s “sexual renaissance” fulfills most of what her naysayers suggested about the motivation behind her criticisms of purity culture. And figures like Josh Harris have since deconstructed.

In the end, evangelical purity culture’s biggest critics ended up becoming the very thing they said they were trying to prevent. When their articles were being published in Christianity Today and their books were still available at Lifeway, the argument was that conservative Christians have to preserve their tradition by siphoning the toxicity out of their teachings. “Unless we fix this purity culture problem,” they said, “we will lose the next generation, as their trauma pushes them out of faith.” But the center didn’t hold. Many who warned this left evangelical conviction behind. Whether it was out of changing theology, or the outsourcing of theology to experience, the result was the same. What presented as conviction for the sake of moral legitimacy was eventually revealed as pretense.

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There is a growing number on the Right who see current political orthodoxy the way those erstwhile evangelicals saw purity culture. I think that’s the best way to understand why someone like Nicholas Fuentes can become relevant within a conservative movement that has spent the last eight years positioning itself as an explicitly Christian thing. Fuentes bears no resemblance to anyone who would be welcomed into membership or served communion at an evangelical church. There is not a shred of reason why any Christian tradition would see him as credibly regenerate. He is an unembarrassed and unrepentant antisemite, an unapologetic hater of women, and an unashamed purveyor of various levels of sexual degradation.

So why does someone as influential as Tucker Carlson feel some kind of solidarity with a person like Fuentes? Why would someone like Carlson give him a softball interview, growing his platform with no meaningful resistance? More to the point: Why would self-described conservative Christians be interested in someone like him?

To be clear, Fuentes is still a fringe figure when it comes to Christian political culture. Nobody in a position of influence within evangelical institutions (at least, nobody I know of) is championing him. But of course, nobody who becomes influential started out that way. The way influential people become influential tends to be very slowly, then very quickly. With Fuentes, the “very slowly” appears to have already happened. Tucker Carlson’s show seems like it could be the “very quickly.”

There are a lot of different directions to go here. We could talk about the young Right’s antisemitism problem. We could talk about the young Right’s women problem. We could talk about the young Right’s epistemology problem. All of these are real and legitimate. But they are symptoms. If you listen carefully to people who like Fuentes or Andrew Tate, you can pick up on what the illness is. In fact, you can even recognize it.

It’s purity culture.

Fans of these men see them as critics of political purity culture. Whereas the evangelical purity culture mentioned earlier was mostly about abstinence and modesty of body, the political purity culture is, to them, about abstinence and modesty of mind. Fuentes fans believe, genuinely believe, that the gatekeepers of respectable political discourse are thumbing them down, denying their questions and felt experiences, trying to control their behavior through threats and ostracism. They think of alternative histories and suppressed truth the way the exvangelical purity culture critics think of sex. If people see it, telling them not to reach out and grab it is a form of abuse. Making them feel ashamed for indulging in it is traumatic. And when you cause trauma for people in this way, eventually they’re going to start noticing.

Now it’s well beyond my ability or bandwidth to go into why these young men think that Holocaust denial and the impersonhood of women are pearls of great price in the cause of truth. A lot of what we’re dealing with is the migration of learning away from institutions toward online spaces, as well as the same kind of cultural Marxist narratives that energized the left’s Great Awokening (if you take some of the books and essays published by The Atlantic’s contributing writers from 2014-2021, and you change the word “black” to “white” and “white” to “Jew,” you’ll basically get the Fuentes experience). But my point is this. These young men think something valuable has been withheld from them. They think the powers that be have cajoled, gatekept, and stigmatized their intellectual awakening. They’re done with political purity culture. They’re ready to embrace their political renaissance.

One of the most telling signs that this is a parallel dynamic with the evangelical anti-purity culture discourse is the almost identical language about how earnestly people must take the interest of frustrated young men in these ideologies. In particular, onlookers are given the exact same responsibility toward disaffected young men that they were given with traumatized young women. They must “listen.” They must “take seriously.” They must “understand.” Fuentes’ hatred of Jews reflects, they say, the real frustration of young men, and even if we’re not ready to go full LGBT antisemitic, we must affirm that this frustration is valid, and cook up better answers.

Note: I’m not denying there is some truth here. A lot of young men are adrift, and this is something a healthy society really would take seriously as a cultural responsibility. But the resemblance to the evangelical purity culture critics, the ones who said that before we do anything else we must listen to the stories of women whose youth pastors used modesty and chastity as a shame bludgeon, is striking. There was some truth there, too. And it was functioning much the same way the truth here is.

Like I said, back during the evangelical purity culture moment, everyone seemed to silently agree that, no matter what “solutions” you did or did not agree with, the problems were absolutely real and beyond reasonable dispute. Questioning or even qualifying the premise that “purity culture is harmful” was unacceptable. Granting the premise was the cost of admission. Once you were there, you could argue for a variety of fixes. But the one thing you had to do was grant the legitimacy of the premise.

The problem was that the premise really was broken. Too many evangelical critics of purity culture failed to specify their targets, refused to ground their points in Scripture, and prioritized testimonials at the expense of both doctrine and reason. Asking for careful definitions was too often considered an attack. Insisting on not lumping issues was called gatekeeping. From the very beginning, the anti-purity culture discourse suffered from a systematic lack of honesty. Whatever genuine problems were raised were frequently lost in a mudslide of bad logic and motivated reasoning. And the motivations themselves became clear over time.

Same thing is happening now between the “angry young men” and the political purity culture they are protesting. Here, again, one is not supposed to question the premise: “The establishment has failed young men, and their anger and disillusionment must be addressed.” I do question this, though. I question whether the young men of Reddit and 4Chan are purely victims of the system, or whether they are also victims of their own vice and resentment. I question whether the fans of Nick Fuentes are eager to find truth or merely to unlock a video game-tier sense of purpose by causing offense and shock. I question whether real truth has been viciously withheld from them, or whether they are too protective of their self-indulgent habits of body and soul to actually do the reading. I question whether these men want meaningful relationships with women that aren’t happening because of feminism or the economy, or if they merely want to masturbate as much as possible, even if only to the fantasy of a robotically obedient female.

Fuentes is not a courageous truth teller. The offense that people take at him is not a sign that he’s right. It’s not a sign at all. People get offended at truth, but they also get offended at birds that poop in their eye. Fuentes wants Tucker Carlson and the heirs of Charlie Kirk to believe there is an oppressive purity culture that must be toppled if young men are to flourish. He’s wrong. Simple as. And it’s OK to not take his premise seriously, because it’s wrong, and wrong premises can be labeled such with no offense to freedom of speech.

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Many of evangelical purity culture’s biggest critics revealed they were on their way out the whole time. Their pushback against evangelical purity culture ended up being a wholesale disowning of Christian sexual ethics. Their premise was faulty because it came from a faulty starting place, which is why it ended up in a faulty finishing place. But what became of their warning? Did traditional evangelicals pay the price through generational irrelevance? Did they lose the next generation?

I don’t think so. Notice how the very prediction became a confession of what the critics themselves were going to do. “People will leave Christianity” was a way of saying “I will leave Christianity.” It was not a prophetic warning for the church. It was a threat.

I’m calling the same thing here.

I think the language about reaching disaffected young men can be genuine. I’ve written about it. But in the service of people like Nick Fuentes, it’s not a prophetic warning. It’s a threat. “I’ll pick up my ball and go home.” Because I think within the Right at this moment is a contingent of people who desperately want to baptize their hatreds, their cynicism, their craving for a culture that doesn’t redeem its people’s desires, but just satiates them in a different order.

That’s why it would be a mistake for Christians to take the bait that the antisemitic young right-wingers are dangling in front of them. This isn’t the logical continuation of Christian conservatism. This isn’t about legitimizing the plights of young men. This is a battle over sin, and sin’s quest for self-justification. Picking up the ball and going home is exactly what these young men need to do. They need to go home and see their dad or their pastor.

Where Christian churches have harmed people, those harms must be named, because they’re sins. Legalism is a sin. Bitterness is a sin. Contempt is a sin. All of these things can happen in churches that have conservative views on sex. Those are sins worth talking about and repenting from. But where sin isn’t named, it tends to evade capture. The more abstract our language, the more slippery our repentance. This was the achilles heel of the purity culture critics. And it’s the achilles heel of the new, young, and not yet wise Christian right.