#ChurchToo

How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing

De: Emily Joy Allison, Lyz Lenz - foreword

Narrado por: Emily Ellet

When Emily Joy Allison outed her abuser on Twitter, she launched #ChurchToo, a movement to expose the culture of sexual abuse and assault utterly rampant in Christian churches in America. Not a single denomination is unaffected. And the reasons are somewhat different than those you might find in the #MeToo stories coming out of Hollywood or Washington. While patriarchy and misogyny are problems everywhere, they take on a particularly pernicious form in Christian churches, where those with power have been insisting, since many decades before #MeToo, that this sexually dysfunctional environment is, in fact, exactly how God wants it to be.

#ChurchToo turns over the rocks of the church's sexual dysfunction, revealing just what makes sexualized violence in religious contexts both ubiquitous and uniquely traumatizing. It also lays the groundwork for not one but many paths of healing from a religious culture of sexual shame, secrecy, and control, and for victims of assault to live full, free, healthy lives.

©2021 Broadleaf Books, an imprint of 1517 Media (P)2021 Tantor

Good listen

It is an eye opener that people raised this way are not alone. The book list hashtags, resources, and other books to help in ones recovery and enlightenmentvjourney.

The purity teachings in many churches is damaging to young people. I hope people will read this and get help.

I was raised in an evangelical family who didn’t really didn’t talk about sex. This book shows how many churches have really damaged people about sex and I was very impressed with the author.

Good baseline info, but the author is paranoid

Although not very helpful to a male suffering sexual trauma, the book does have good baseline information for trauma recovery etc.

I am not religious at all, by the way so here is my honest opinion. Fueled by conspiracy theories, the author seems like she has an ax to grind against anyone or any authority that does not support alternative sexual preferences. Yes, there has been a failure to truly relay god's intentions to our youth in the past regarding sex, but you may consider ignoring the hate and just listen to the surface message, if you at all possible.

Less convincing than I expected

The author builds straw men and jumps in logic. I was actually sympathetic but this book pushed me in the opposite direction. I’ll keep reading about the dangers of purity culture, but this book didn’t help.

Alarming!

Abuse in the church is awful and needs to be rooted out. The author claims to be Christian and I have no doubt she at one time thought she was. Later in the book she claims to not claim that title and spends half of Sunday's at the lesbian bar. The purity movement may have had good intentions but it clearly has done harm and that is a shame! However... a Christian based belief system in sex, LGBTQIA+(and whatever else you want to add) IS NOT VIOLENCE. This is a fools opinion. Violence is violence. Words are not, a contrary opinion is not. In the author's mind everyone has their own sexual ethic. You need to figure our your ethic on your own by trial and error and practice. This is an anti biblical worldview. There is one source of truth but many want to define morality and truth on their own. The author is heretical in this belief alone but this is not the only one.
There are various instances of abuse recounted in the book. These are terrible but are not rooted in patriarchy, purity teaching, or any church teaching. Any abuse is perpetrated by abusive, evil people that may contort church teachings but the churches teachings are not the cause. That is ridiculous.