“Growing Up Pure” with Lauren D. Sawyer, PhD

by on March 6, 2026

What if healing from purity culture requires more than naming how you were hurt? What if it also means asking how you participated?

In this episode, Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen sit down with their colleague Dr. Lauren Sawyer, to explore her new book, Growing Up Pure.

Lauren names something many haven’t had language for: as teens, we weren’t only victims of purity culture; we were also moral agents within it. We made choices. We found belonging. We sometimes resisted in small ways. And at times, we participated in systems that harmed others and ourselves.

That tension between vulnerability and agency, harm and complicity can feel destabilizing. Yet Lauren invites us to see accountability not as punishment, but as a sacred, even hopeful, practice. 

What if repentance wasn’t shame-driven, but a pathway toward integration? What if healing meant not only tending to the wounds purity culture caused, but also examining how we were formed by—and sometimes upheld—it?

This episode is honest, nuanced, and tender. It creates space to grieve the damage of purity culture while also imagining a different story. One rooted in the belief that we are made in the image of God as embodied, relational, sexual beings… and that restoration is possible.

About Our Guest:

Dr. Lauren D. Sawyer graduated from The Seattle School with her MA in Theology and Culture in 2014. She then became an Assistant Instructor before taking on the role of Notetaker for the Allender Center, focusing on Dan Allender’s teachings. In 2020, she returned to Seattle and began teaching as an Adjunct Instructor, and a year later, she expanded her role with the Allender Center as a Curriculum Specialist. In July 2022, her roles were combined: Adjunct Instructor at The Seattle School and Curriculum Coordinator at the Allender Center. She has since been promoted to Affiliate Faculty and Curriculum and Instruction Manager.

As Curriculum and Instruction Manager at the Allender Center, she creates and manages systems to help make sure Narrative Focused Trauma Care teachings are cohesive, coherent, and accessible to all learning styles.

As Affiliate Faculty, Lauren teaches about 12 credits a year primarily in the theology program. Her favorite class has been TCE 543: God, Gender, and Sexuality, where she gets to use her training as a sexual ethicist while playing with theological categories of the doctrine of God and theological anthropology.

She appreciates how The Seattle School has always been a space for her to share her expertise and passion as well as a space for her to learn and grow from her colleagues, some of the most thoughtful and creative people she knows.

Lauren received her PhD in Religion and Society (with a concentration in Christian Social Ethics and a certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies) from Drew University in 2022. Lauren is part of the Purity Culture Research Collective, an interdisciplinary research cohort “created to foster interdisciplinary dialogue between academics and researchers interrogating evangelical purity culture.” Lauren’s debut book, Growing Up Pure: White Girls, Queer Teens, and the Racial Foundations of Purity Culture (New York University Press, 2025), considers white adolescents’ moral agency and complicity within the structures of purity culture.

Lauren lives in North Beacon Hill with her spouse Joel and kiddo Davy. Born and raised in Indiana, she escaped to the Pacific Northwest as soon as she could.

For fun every week, Lauren open water swims in Puget Sound (even through the winter). She has swum among seals and jellyfish and has spied sea stars, moon snails, and brightly colored anemones on the ocean floor.

Recommended Resources:

About the Allender Center Podcast:

For over a decade, the Allender Center Podcast has offered honest, thoughtful conversations about the deep work of healing and transformation. Hosted by Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen, MDiv, this weekly podcast explores the complexities of trauma, abuse recovery, story, relationships, and spiritual formation. Through questions submitted by listeners, stories, interviews, and conversations, we engage the deep places of heartache and hope that are rarely addressed so candidly in our culture today. Join the Allender Center Podcast to uncover meaningful perspectives and support for your path to healing and growth.

At the Allender Center, we value thoughtful dialogue across a wide range of voices, stories, and lived experiences. In that spirit, our podcast features guests and hosts who may hold differing perspectives. The perspectives shared on this podcast by guests and hosts reflect their own experiences and viewpoints and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, or endorsements of the Allender Center and/or The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.

 

Episode Transcript

​​Dan: Rachael, one of the things I think we get to do a lot is to talk with fascinating people. But sadly, I don’t think we get to talk enough with kind of our family. And we get to talk with someone in our family, Dr. Lauren Sawyer, welcome.

Lauren: Thank you.

Dan: I’m going to introduce you, but it’s so nice to have you here. We’re going to talk about your new book, but just a little background. You have a Master of Arts in Theology and Culture from the lovely Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, but you also have a PhD in Religion and Society from the excellent university, Drew University. And you are an affiliate faculty, but you’re my boss. As the Manager of Curriculum and Instruction

Rachael: My boss too.

Dan: Hey, I’ll let you say that. I just know she’s my boss because every time we do Narrative Focused Trauma Care workshop, I have to send a large amount of data to my boss to prove that I’m still worthy to be involved. Lauren, you have a new book. Let me give the title Growing Up Pure: White Girls, Queer Teens, and the Racial Foundations of Purity Culture. It is a stunning book. Let’s just say right from the beginning, this will be at some level, a difficult conversation because this book is rich, its depth, its breadth from both a historical standpoint, sociological standpoint, theological standpoint, and certainly from a psychological standpoint. It engages a very significant issue. So as we jump in, I just want to name, it’s going to be nearly impossible to help people get into the richness of the book in its fullness, but at least we can begin. So where will be helpful, first and foremost, to talk about how you got into the topic of the purity culture?

Lauren: Let me start by saying I was very resistant to it. I was thinking back. And this is a story I tell all the time. By the time I started writing about purity culture, it was already too trendy. And I was like, “Ugh, I can’t be just a part of a trend, so I don’t want to do it.” But I was thinking back even before then, that was the very beginning of my doctoral work. Even as I was applying to do my PhD and my personal statement, I was describing the work I wanted to do and I was all but circling purity culture. The questions were there, just the context of purity culture wasn’t named. And so it was probably pretty obvious to everyone but me that this is the work that I was meant to be doing, but I was really resistant to it at first. Not because I didn’t think it was worthy work, but I thought that my questions weren’t unique enough, that I wasn’t asking anything different from what a lot of brilliant scholars of purity culture have already been asking. And then I found my question. 

Dan: What was the question? 

Rachael: What was the question?

Lauren: So what really got me … So I started writing about purity culture. My first term of my PhD when I was still in coursework as part of the long journey of a PhD, a couple years of coursework. During my second term, I was in a women’s and gender studies class that was within our theological school. And I don’t even remember how we got here, but we were having a conversation about children and their capacity to do both good and harm. And the article that we were reading talked about how historically we’ve thought about children in really two camps, maybe three. One, children are fundamentally evil, they’re little devils, and it is adults’ responsibility to raise them, to discipline them into being good Christians, good adults, good citizens. And then maybe you have the other side of that where children are viewed as purely good. They’re born perfect. They maybe get corrupt over time, but within that, they don’t really need adults. Adults need them more. In that we kind of ignore their vulnerability. And then there is sort of a third track of that where we just think of children as undeveloped adults. They’re just on their way to becoming adults. So I became privy to this conversation within, this is really in the field of childhood studies. It shows up in my field of Christian ethics, and I started thinking about it in terms of purity culture and what it meant for me to make choices, me myself, to make choices within purity culture and my peers to make choices within purity culture, which felt like a very different question than what others were asking around what it meant to be hurt by purity culture only, which is true. There’s so much harm in purity culture that was done to people, done to young people, but also I did make choices. For one, I chose purity culture. It was not something that was demanded of me by my parents. I chose to go to the church I went to that had some purity culture teaching sort of built in, but I sought it out. I was buying the purity ring. I was buying the books. I was singing the purity anthems. And so I needed a way to make sense of my choices within purity culture. And I was finally getting at least some theoretical frameworks to start to think about that, thinking about youth, children, young people as moral agents, capable of making choices, good and bad.

Rachael: To me, this has been a really powerful part of your research that I’ve encountered and I think is really important for just a larger framework of how we understand healing in general, right? Thinking about, well, it’s something I’ve always said, because growing up in the Southern Baptist Church, in the ’90s, during the True Love Waits movement, which you place in a larger conversation about what is purity culture and what are its roots… people always told me with my giftings, which were very ministry oriented, “You should be a children’s pastor.” I remember being like, “I do not have those giftings.” Their spiritual formation, I think, is actually some of the most challenging spiritual formation, not because they’re like a fresh palette that you’re developing, but because they have such a robust imagination and a deep sense of the world and really good, sometimes terrifying questions that push us into nuance and push us into complexity. And it’s a place that I can say I’ve also had to wrestle with that sense of like, what does it mean as a teenager who was deeply formed in purity culture to own that I had a lot of vulnerability for sure in my social locatedness as a young woman in a very patriarchal, very fundamentalist part of that movement. And I did have agency. And I remember watching the True Love Waits ceremony at the White House and feeling so proud. And I remember having moments of a lot of fragmentation about what was happening. An example I could think about is being on a mission trip in the US, like a short-term mission trip somewhere and having to wear a t-shirt over my swimsuit, but none of my other female cohorts having to wear t-shirts over theirs because somehow they were deemed not lustable by … And it’s like that these moments of just being like, “This is really F’ed up. What are we doing here? What’s happening right now?” So lots of moments where there was, and I think you talk about this really well for yourself, there start to be fragmentations and feeling an invitation to push back and bringing my voice to pushback. And in the midst of that also being set up in a very abusive, very entrenched and trapped, what at the time I would’ve called a dating relationship because of the sense of complicity, I felt like I had a crush on my youth leader, I wanted this, I chose this, but also a pretty profound sexual and spiritual abuse that played out in a clergy youth leader, teenage relationship. And so I think sometimes that sense of like, what does it mean to have agency? What does it mean to have vulnerability? What’s the line between complicity and powerlessness? And I think, yeah, so I would love to hear more from you. As you leaned into your research, obviously you’re locating a larger cultural movement, not just around children, but around queer identity and white supremacy structures. And it’s easier for me to go to places of complicity there because it’s been so much a part of my healing journey of a repair and accountability and realizing I am a social being that’s a part of a larger community and collective easier for me there than in the places where it was much more of a relationship playing out in a larger cultural reality.

Lauren: Yeah. The first thing I’ll say is one thing that has been really healing for me and to friends and colleagues and students who I’ve talked to who have read my book is the invitation to see where you as a young person exhibited agency resisted and to kind of even to start to shift that narrative of, I was only compliant. I was only this. And it could be really subtle. It could be, I write a lot about unwittingly, unwittingly rebelling, these little subtle ways to even start to get a bigger picture or a clearer picture of who you were as a teenager. There are often these subtle moments of saying no, or to feeling like this was not the right decision. In a really kind of silly example, in my life, I really got into purity culture in the mid 2000s, and this is when Joshua Harris’s book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, had its 10-year anniversary, and so new cover, new sticker, and I had read so many books on purity, on dating, and so I read this one that was popular among a lot of people I knew. And I read it and I was just like, “I don’t know, man. This says I can’t date and I can’t kiss until my wedding night. I don’t know. ” And I just was like, no, I found a way to have a sense of purity and feel grounded in it, but it didn’t require me to move in this what to me was an extreme direction. I found a way to kind of negotiate the rules and not have to commit to something that didn’t feel true to me while still complying and still believing so much of what I was taught, but that was the line I drew. And in the middle part of my book, I just spent time reading purity culture memoirs; folks as an adult writing their story of growing up in purity culture and just locating, naming this is where they said no, this is where they pushed back, this is where they negotiated the rules to still maintain a sense of purity. And even that, even me observing other people’s behaviors was really helpful for me to see like, oh yeah, these are not just little marionettes of adults who’ve built this system, but they are building the system and they are pushing up against it.

Dan: What’s your sense, Lauren, for you and for the people that you have been in conversation with, let alone the reading you’ve done, what are some of the core shadows that you know have to be dispelled to at least address something of the impact of the purity movement?

Lauren: Oh, boy. Where to begin? I think one of the big pieces for a lot of people is that the purity movement sort of just came out of nowhere. It was a phenomenon that just existed from the ’90s into 2000s. It’s sort of gone away, maybe there are blips of it now. And part of my research, and I think this will be helpful for folks too, to even hear a little bit more about what is purity culture, how do I understand what purity culture is? So maybe starting there, and then I’m sure I can think of a few more shadows. So we generally think about purity culture as movement that took shape in the early 1990s when youth leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention came together, developed abstinence education for their children. It started out of a small youth group, kind of blew up into this huge movement. From there came curricula, books, music, clothing that promoted abstinence, particularly abstinence only until marriage or only until heterosexual marriage, for teens and for single people. But what has been very clear in my research, and this is drawing heavily on the work of Sarah Moslener, who is another scholar purity culture, particularly of American religion or history of American religion; purity culture is part of so many more purity movements, especially women in the United States and really the English speaking world. So purity culture has its roots in particularly Protestant movements toward purity, promoted purity, but not just sexual purity, but racial purity. And this line can be drawn, and I’ll give my caveat in a bit, so just get a little deeper. There were movements, especially around the turn of the 20th century, like social Darwinism, the social purity movement, eugenics, these movements that on the surface argued that we need to protect particularly white women. We need to protect white women from men, particularly racialized men, men of color, Jewish men. And how we do that, depending on the era, it was like fear tactics, ads warning women not to go into ice cream parlors alone because that’s where these men sort of entrapped them. We know about just the rise in terror lynching of Black men in the late 1800s into really the 1930s for the sort of supposed rape of white women. Again, sort of this fear of tainting white women’s purity. And some of this was more blatant than others, but ultimately white women and white girls were at the center of these movements. And so scholars like Moslener and myself have made this argument that purity culture as we know it, contemporary Evangelical purity culture has threads back to these earlier movements. And I know that that is not a comfortable reality talk about a shadow, right? And some of it is you can look at the actual architects of contemporary purity culture, and as they’re modeling some of the language and some of the ideals of purity culture, they are actually looking at Victorian era, U.S. culture, and some of that, the promotion of the white middle class family in particular. So you have those, you have literal direct lines, and you have purity culture embedded within the United States, and we can’t fully separate purity culture from its context, from its location, so there’s that. But the caveat I want to give that I know that, especially talking with parents, parents who had kids in purity culture who encouraged their kids to read these books or go to these events, that does not mean that people, certainly parents, knew this connection, that they were intentionally involving themselves in something that is so heinous. And even without these roots, and I’ll say the roots in white supremacy, even all of the other harms of purity culture that we can name around sexism and heterosexism and just the fear tactics of purity culture, a lot of parents didn’t know or didn’t know what else to do. There’s some legitimate fear of what could happen to their daughters and to their sons who were incredibly vulnerable. So that’s kind of the main piece that I think is hard to come to terms with. And that’s kind of the first part of my book is really establishing that history and showing those lines and showing the themes that emerge among some earlier purity movements. I look at the social purity movements, I look at a purity movement around family values in the 1970s, and then going into contemporary evangelical purity culture. I also think another kind of hurdle for folks is to focus primarily on young people’s vulnerability exclusively. And the language that I hear a lot from folks who are critical of purity culture is indoctrination, is sort of a helplessness or learned helplessness describing themselves as young people or other young people who are growing up in purity culture. And I don’t want to say that that’s not true or to say that the mechanism, the power of purity culture is super strong and controlling and abusive, and that does not fully take away the choice of young people. And so can we start to look at their choices? And so some of it is looking at the place, as I was saying to Rachael, looking for the places where you did say no, where you did rebel, and kind of this next step is to see where you were complicit in the harm of yourself and other people. And that’s really hard. That’s really hard.

Rachael: Again, because part of what is true for many young people is they are in more abusive family systems where the layers of what you would have to push against to rebel against something that is more of a complex trauma, so to speak, is really costly. But I love your sense of, but to take away that even the choice to kind of opt into that, like maybe your motivations were, I do want to be able to keep my primary care providers as something of a stable structure, even if I know it’s harmful. I do want to keep a sense of belonging in this faith community that has become my whole world. There’s also something about this draw to purity as a way to attain more holiness and more righteousness and to prove your faith before God. That was really compelling to me as a young person who was reading the Book of Martyrs and hearing in some ways that I would say more fundamentalist evangelical talking point of like, your faith is under attack, your nation’s faith is under attack and see you at the poll and you need to boldly profess your faith in Christ. And here’s this way you can do that. Now, full disclosure, because I had a history of sexual abuse, I was very split in this purity culture world because there was no language for abuse survivors of like, again, if someone’s harmed you and violated you in ways that you absolutely didn’t choose, there was no sense of like, could you be pure? Is purity a possibility for you? Now, a lens I didn’t have, and I think this is what’s really powerful about what you’re inviting… And I think you talk about, very early in the book, you talk about evangelicalism as a subculture that’s flourishing in the suburbs. And there was this phrase, I mean, I genuinely was like, oh my God, this is so capturing my experience. It’s like the suburbs had everything, malls, grocery stores, neighborhoods, and churches, Christian media through the proliferation of say, family Christian bookstores thrived in the suburbs, pedaling a homogenous and normative message about what it means to be an evangelical Christian. This is what scholar Heather Hendershot calls the Christian lifestyle market. That is, within the isolation of the suburbs, normative beliefs about family life as nuclear, heterosexual white and the Protestant work ethic thrived. And I think in some ways that Protestant work ethic of like, if I work hard enough, as there were no visible alternatives to challenge them. And oh my gosh, that to me, your work and other people’s work around the white supremacist roots of purity culture and flourishing there, that was a frame I didn’t have. And I think in some ways that sense of owning our complicity in something, even when it’s unwinning, is a part of any healing process of repair that’s very Biblical that we’re called to. And it doesn’t mean, again, it’s where we have to get out of kind of this good, bad, which is a purity structure, like very rigid sense of self and understanding that if I actually am a more complex human, that if I did benefit from something in ways that other people didn’t, if I participated, we talk a lot about this in spiritual abuse. It’s really hard to be a part of spiritually abusive cultures and not participate in the spiritual abuse of others, whether your motivation was, I just want to keep them safe. I don’t want them to be scapegoated like I’m seeing people be scapegoated, or I genuinely believe whatever I’ve been told is the right belief and I need to shun this person or reject this person or kind of get them back in line or be afraid of them or distance myself from them. Whatever those impulses are, a part of healing is not only getting our wounds and our vulnerabilities healed, but also getting to participate… Dan, you talk about this a lot. Look at the log in our own eye of being able to participate in these ways that we harmed wittingly or unwittingly and do that reparative work of accountability and continued repair. And that’s hard work of seeing yourself as more of a social being in community than just an individual with an individual story. And I’m just grateful for you, Lauren, and the ways that you’ve been so faithful to tend to that. And I’m curious just where you would go with that and what you want people to hear when you’re talking about that sense of what’s possible on the other side of coming to understand some of these truths.

 

Lauren: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that. Kind of going back to something you said about your experience in purity culture and the sense of belonging and the sense of even for a lot of people, purity culture, youth group was a beautiful escape from the home and provided safety and provided attunement in a way that the home didn’t. And that’s somewhat my story. I just had a kind of lonely early adolescence and I had friends at youth group. I had friends and I had adults who saw me in ways that my parents didn’t. And that is good. That is such a good thing. And my book, my work is not to take that away from people. And it’s actually to be able to name that, which I think a lot of critiques of purity culture don’t let us do that. We have to say all bad. It is that binary again, right? It’s all bad. But that was so not true for a lot of people’s experience. I have friends who grew up in quite fundamentalist homes where gender segregation was reinforced, but in youth group, they could mingle with the opposite sex. And that was just like, that opened the door. It was still, it was even more rigid in some ways in my experience, these were maybe communities that held to courting as the only way to properly be with somebody of the opposite sex, but at least you could be with the opposite sex, with the chaperone, or sort of mingling in a big youth group space. So I want to be able to name that. And my intention is, of course, hopefully you hear this, is not to shame and not to take that away from anybody and to invite us to go a step further. And so I think about the invitation in the very conclusion of my book is toward accountability. And one thing that I was drawn to is there’s just this blog post by a writer named Mia Mingus, and she writes this post about what she calls a dreaming accountability. What if instead of accountability being something scary, accountability is hard. Taking account of the harms that you’ve caused is hard, but what if it was something that we held sacred and what if it were something that we actually desired and that our orientation toward accountability was more like a spiritual practice than a canceling or a punishment. And so my hope is that even that language kind of disarms accountability as something that’s demanded of us, but something that we are moved to practice. And of course, accountability looks different for different people depending on the circumstances. And so I can’t necessarily prescribe what that looks like, but what if our orientation to it were a little bit more open.

Dan: It’s such an important phrase. Toward the end of the book, it says, “What if accountability was normalized?” Instead of just going, well, I’m not responsible for capitalism. I’m not responsible for racism. I’m not responsible responsible. But to actually say, no, I am a participant wittingly and mostly at times unwittingly. But that sense of another word for that is, what if repentance? What if the ownership of, even without knowledge, I participated and can I own that with grief? But if, and again, if I can frame this well, my sense not having been in it is the frame when I heard the phrase that if you were immoral participating in sexual practices, you were ruined, you were damaged goods that implied there was no recourse. Yeah, there may be forgiveness, but it’s almost along the lines of this flower will be smashed and no longer ever bear beauty. This cake will be decimated and will never be able to be eaten. And so just for the two of you, having engaged that from my standpoint, absolute anti-gospel, absolute anti-Jesus understanding of the nature of human brokenness and sin, in whatever language and whatever issue, how did you all live in that? I don’t have a better word than madness.

Lauren: Not very well, Dan. Not very well.

Rachael: I think it brings a lot of splitting because we’re human. And Lauren, you put words this so well in your book and your teaching and your writing that even though you actually did for the most part embody the ideal of purity in your body and your gender and your orientation and even in your action, you still couldn’t live up to it. And so that sense of like, I will speak for myself, a lot of just like, I’m going to … I remember when the youth leader told me we were going to enter a courtship because this was God ordained. And at the time, I was both very confused and scared, but also like, Oh my God, God’s blessing me for my faithfulness of these two years of purity I have pursued as a teenager. I mean, I can laugh now with a lot of dear thoughts towards myself because I was single till I was 37 so if young teenage Rachael had known in that purity framework, how long of a journey she was going to have, she probably would have been vomiting. But I remember him saying, and I just feel so blessed that God gave me someone so pure that I’ll get to be your first kiss. And I had already kissed several boys. I loved kissing. Kissing even the games you play in eighth grade, like spin the bottle or something that actually on the surface are in my experience were pretty innocent, but it was like, I thought kissing was awesome. But I remember being like, I will never tell him that he’s not my first kiss because I don’t want to be perceived as less than. And I think, yeah, it was, but I also had a lot of self-righteousness about it because in fact, because of my trauma and purity culture offered a way for me to escape a lot of my trauma and to get to be good. And actually I was quite scared of boys and dating and very awkward. So it was kind of like, I’m going to rock, I’m going to be amazing at this. So it led to a lot of pride, but also again, a huge setup for me to be in an abusive relationship because at least I could maintain purity even if everything in my body was screaming, I don’t want to be in this relationship. This doesn’t actually feel good or safe or what I want, but I can maintain purity. And let’s be clear, the way it was being talked about even implicitly was my sexual purity, my virginity was the most clearest link of my salvation. So it wasn’t just, it’ll be damaged goods. It was, I will lose God. I will lose place and belonging in the kingdom of God. So I don’t know. I don’t know how I meant. I mean, I think in some ways I managed it by splitting and leaning into a kind of like, I can do this and this will give me a place of honor that it may be even in my awkwardness, but also my, I was just a normal 16-year-old with crushes and desires. I mean, Romeo and Juliet, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet came out when I was 16. Come on. I was a very normal human. So yeah, I don’t know what you would say, Lauren, but …

Lauren: I mean, very similarly, purity culture worked for me until it didn’t. It’s usually what I say. I got through most of high school and some of college just like, I got this thing figured out. I’m pure. I’m not damaged goods. I’m not all these things. But then once I was in a relationship where we became sexual, immediately the shame just flooded me in a way that was … it was a very dark period for me. I fell into a deep, deep depression. I remember going to the school counselor and filling out one of those questionnaires for depression, and they’re like, you were severely depressed. I was like, Yeah, that checks out. And it was this long season and then splitting. And so it was depression and then being like, I don’t want to break up with him. All of these, trying to figure out even what I believed and it had already been sort of removing myself from a lot of purity ideas… had spent a lot of time sort of deconstructing those ideas for myself. But even once I was in it, all of them came back, all of these beliefs about being damaged goods came flooding back.

Dan: See if I’m in the ballpark, but even though the message was for both men and women, boys and girls, it really wasn’t. It was really for women. And so how did you, how do you understand, again, that gender divide, men are active, aggressive, sexual, girls are less or not. And I get that is such a dark illusion that then implies that for every girl and women who are aware of their own sexuality, that there then is another level of dark shadow over them because of that. But how did you, do you disrupt that kind of gender? I’ll go back to the word, not just gospel madness, but gender madness with regard to this division. And I think that’s where, as we, again, wish we had infinitely longer to engage this, but what’s your hope as you bring this kind of material into the Allender Center and certainly into the broader world? How are you engaging in some sense the hope that with this book and with your work and others’ work, that there can be a restoration?

 

Lauren: Yeah. I, in a lot of ways, come back to Genesis. We are all made in the image of God as sexual beings and our sexuality begins before we were born. And that’s no matter your gender or your sexuality. And that is the truth that I hold to, that I come back to. It’s also been very helpful for me, and I know that this is not everybody’s journey, but understanding the history of how we have come to understand the gender binary, especially tracing back to the Greeks and some of these ideas around male action and female passivity, these are ancient things, but they are not gospel truth. And so being able to even see where the origins are and how they got wrapped up in Christianity, that has been incredibly helpful for me because then I could start teasing it apart and say, okay, this came from a certain place. This does not read as consistent with what I know of the gospel and the gift of sexuality and for all people, not in a particularly gendered way.

Dan: Well, I think that was one of the effects for me, even though I think I have a fairly decent read of platonic structure, new platonic structures, but kind of even acquaintance with good old Emmanuel Kant was one of those where you just go, oh, so much labor you have put in to help us get the sense of what was the road well before we even got to this country, what was the road that brought us to where we are? And then so much rich reflection on, is this the road we want to be on? Is it consistent with what you put so simply and brilliantly? Is it consistent with what it means to be made in the image of God and how much culture, how much a kind of socialization that arises really out of misogyny, not just patriarchy, but misogyny is actually shaping this conversation. So the gift of this book and certainly your gift to us is this ongoing engagement with who do we want to be? Can we grieve for harm, but can we indeed engage our part in the nature of the heartache others have known? So thank you, dear friend and boss for this labor.

Lauren: It’s an honor to be with you both.