chapter 6 Practising Purity: How Single Evangelical Women Negotiate Sexuality Katie Gaddini 1 Introduction One spring afternoon, whilst conducting ethnographic fieldwork with evangelical Christian women, I found myself talking at length about sex. More precisely, I found myself listening to the participants in my study, single women in their late 20s, discuss sex. I had joined a women-only Bible study group with four other women, most of whom attended a large, charismatic Anglican church in central London that I call Crossroads Church.1 We met once a month on a Sunday at someone’s home and began our session with brunch before moving onto an in-depth discussion, always organised around a topic or theme, and ended by praying for one another. On this particular afternoon, we concluded our prayers, and chatted casually before parting ways. The topic of proselytising, or ‘witnessing’ as participants called it, arose and the women agreed that their views on sexual purity were a useful entry-point into sharing their faith with colleagues at work. One participant, Fiona, aged 28, admitted that when asked about sex, she openly told her colleagues that she was a virgin, and was waiting for marriage to have sex. The others said that it was much easier to talk about their purity choices with friends, and in some instances, their non-Christian friends even respected this choice. Later, during our interview, Fiona told me: ‘[Non-Christians] ask the question about sex a lot, that’s one of the first ones. […] And a lot of people at uni said: You’re the first proper Christian I ever met’. Having practised sexual purity for many years myself, I could relate to Fiona’s experience of conflating abstinence with a Christian identity. Growing up in American evangelicalism, my friends, cousins, sister and I all wore purity rings (Gardner, 2011), given to us by our fathers when we entered puberty. We read books on how to guard our sexual purity, attended church events where 1 Crossroads is a pseudonym, as are all the names and identifying characteristics of participants mentioned in this chapter. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004390713_007 104 Gaddini we pledged to remain abstinent, and confessed our sexual missteps to one another in Bible study groups. Many of my friends continued this path right up until they got married in their early to mid-twenties. Despite leaving Christianity several years prior to beginning this research, the similarities between Crossroads and my own experiences in evangelicalism led me to believe that I would find a comparable approach to sexuality amongst evangelical women in London. Halfway through my research, however, I was surprised (if not frustrated) to learn that the story was not so straightforward. Out of 33 participants, 23 reported that they planned to abstain from sexual behaviour until marriage (what constituted ‘sexual behaviour’ varied widely), and 10 were sexually active or thought they would be prior to marriage. After completing fieldwork and reviewing my data, I realised that differences in women’s responses revolved around the complex interactions of five social identity categories: gender, religion, sexuality, age, and race. I approach identity as the temporary attachment of the subject to a socially-recognised category created through discourse (Hall, 2000; Riley, 2000). These identity categories are not fixed or stable; instead they are mutable, slippery and dependent on social context to take their meaning. Similarly, the relationship between these categories is unfixed. In this analysis, I am ‘rejecting the separability of identity categories’, and instead examining how these categories collide, overlap, and blur together, affecting women’s sexual beliefs and practices (McCall, 2005: 1771). Constantly in motion, identities collide at specific junctures, or what Jasbir Puar (2012) calls ‘events’. From this theoretical location, I interrogate how certain social identities dynamically intersect and the sexual choices that spring from these meeting points. This chapter builds on Puar’s (2012) and Crenshaw’s (1989) distinctive yet related theoretical contributions to intersectionality and analyses how women respond to the church’s imperative to remain sexually pure before marriage. Firstly, I will examine how femininity is constructed within evangelicalism, through analysing the ideal, normative Christian woman (Aune, 2002, 2008; Beaman, 1999; Brickell, 2006; Budgeon, 2013). Participants in my study describe her in formulaic precision: ‘wholesome yet hot; strong yet submissive’, as one woman told me. By staking out the normative woman, I analyse how other bodies are situated in relation to the raced and classed contours of this wholesome figure. Next, I will interrogate how two particular social categories – race and age – cut across gender, sexuality and religion to alter evangelical women’s sexual purity practices. More specifically, I noted particular differences with how my older black British participants responded to sexual purity norms in relation to their Asian and white counterparts. I conclude by arguing that women who are already positioned outside the norm by their race and age Practising Purity 105 craft alternative responses to abstinence teachings. To not inhabit the norm – whether due to race, singleness, or age – is to not fit, and to reside in the periphery (Ahmed, 2017). Women inhabiting this space often transgressed sexual purity norms. My analysis reveals the multiple layers of marginality that some women experienced, and I highlight Crenshaw’s (1989) analogy of intersectionality as a traffic accident to denote the harm experienced in this location. What are the conditions that must be present for the collision to occur, I ask? And what are the sexual choices that arise from the scene of the accident? 2 Intersectionality Revisited Theorists have put intersectionality to myriad uses since Crenshaw’s legal conception broke into third wave feminism in 1989. Despite the multitude of applications, and criticisms, over the years, Crenshaw’s evocative analogy of intersectionality as a collision is often forgotten. In her original theorisation, she wrote: Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. (1989: 149) In deconstructing Crenshaw’s (1989) analogy, Puar (2012) moves the focus away from the accident itself, emphasising instead the ‘affective conditions necessary for the event-space to unfold’. The two theories are not disconnected, of course; affective conditions shape the form and severity of the collision and direct the potentiality of future collisions. In marrying these two approaches to intersectionality, I interrogate how the collision of certain social identities bears on women’s sexual purity practices. Traffic accidents are unique events, however, and the interactions of race, age, and gender were experienced differently by women, as my analysis will show. Rather than drawing a causal link between axes of oppression and purity adherence/ transgression, I provide instead a roadmap to understand how women develop their responses to normativity (Puar, 2012). 3 Methodological Approach This chapter is based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork with unmarried evangelical women in London. All of the 33 women who participated in my 106 Gaddini study attended or had previously attended Crossroads Church, a predominately white, middle-class, Anglican parish. Since I was interested in evangelical women’s experiences of marginality, I purposively recruited for racial diversity by using snowball sampling with non-white participants. Of the women I interviewed, two participants are Asian, six are black or mixed-race, and 25 are white. In terms of social class, three women self-identified as ‘working class’, and the rest either did not mention social class, or indicated a middle to upper-class status according to their biographical data (e.g., by referring to what boarding school they attended). Crossroads is located in an affluent neighbourhood in London and the church population reflects the race and class dimensions of evangelical Anglicans in the UK (Brierley, 2016; Strhan, 2015). Evangelical churches in the UK remain racially divided between white majority Anglican evangelicals, and black majority churches, both of which comprise their own statistical categories in reports on evangelical church attendance. Black majority churches in the UK are typically characterised by greater adherence to proselytising and fasting, and conservative moral beliefs (Osgood, 2012). Crossroads Church promotes a supernatural spiritual experience by way of healings and speaking in tongues. In addition, the women in my study also report dramatic conversions and full life transformations – which other scholars have identified as typical elements of charismatic evangelicalism (Guest, 2007; Warner, 2007). My ethnography consisted of participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 33 unmarried women aged between 22- 38. Although interviews explored all the ways women practise their faith through their bodies, sexuality featured as a prominent theme. Ethnography, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews, allowed me to understand the complexity of evangelical women’s negotiation of sexual purity teachings. As part of my ethnography, I was invited to join a Feminist Network (fn) group at Crossroads Church, and a women-only Bible study group with several participants. Furthermore, I regularly met with evangelical women casually – over coffee and tea, exercise classes, and dinner parties. My decision to research evangelical Christianity and female sexuality in the UK derives from my personal experiences as an American woman growing up in evangelicalism. Despite leaving Christianity myself several years prior to starting this study, I still occupied an insider position, which afforded me many advantages; not only was I granted access more easily, but my familiarity with evangelical Christianity generated a socially embedded knowledge which eased both my interactions with participants and also with the material I analysed (Brannick and Coghlan, 2007). In taking an intersectional approach, I acknowledge the axes of difference separating me from research participants, Practising Purity 107 and the ways that I occupied an outsider position at times, as a white, middleclass woman. It is through critically reflecting upon my own exit from Christianity that I have come to understand what it means to be religious in the first place. I have ceded my similarities with my research participants and made peace with the fact that their Christian experiences may (and do) look different from my own. Based on the data I collected around women’s sexuality, I focus on the intersection of two particular social categories: age and race, as that is where the most diversity around sexual choices arose. Whilst the broader study includes women of various ages and ethnicities, in this chapter, I will mainly focus on the narratives of black women over the age of 30, in order to give specific attention to one specific interaction of race and age. Analysing workingclass participants’ pressure to be ‘respectable’ and the colonial histories that precede Asian participants’ sexuality, whilst important, is outside the scope of this paper (Skeggs, 1997). One final note: I purposely refrained from using gendered pronouns when asking about dating and sex, yet all of the women in this ethnography used ‘he’ and mentioned dating ‘guys’. Although the research was open to women of diverse sexual identities, all of the participants in this study identified themselves as heterosexual. 4 Evangelicalism and Sexual Purity: A Brief History 4.1 The US Influence Discourses on female sexual purity within American evangelicalism have had an influence on British evangelical Christianity. Within the American context, sexual abstinence has proliferated in ‘secular’ settings for non-religious young people though the largest proponents have been white evangelical Christians (Patterson, 2008). Evangelicals are not a uniform group, however, and, as Moultrie (2017) points out, ‘black evangelical sexuality’ differs from white or Hispanic Protestant sexuality. In her study on black evangelical women’s sexuality within black-majority churches, Moultrie notes how historical constructions of black women as hypersexual, as well as depictions of a Jezebel or Mammy figure, impact women’s sexual ethics (2017: 7). She writes: ‘Sexual purity is generally defined as avoiding sexual intimacy outside of heterosexual marriage, but the meaning behind sexual purity varies based on race’ (2017: 27). Although the context of black women’s experience in the US as depicted in Moultrie’s study is different, I locate parallels in my study, where historically, black women’s bodies have also been made marginal in Britain (Benard, 2016; McClintock, 1995). In this chapter, I position my analysis of 108 Gaddini black British women’s sexuality within the historical context of imperial Britain, where African women’s sexuality was represented as “cannibalistic” and excessive (McClintock, 1995: 27; Yegenoglu, 1998). Thus, the black British women I describe in this chapter developed their sexuality within the ideological continuation of these historical depictions, and in relation to the dominant hierarchy of white, middle-class, youthful female bodies within their whitemajority evangelical congregation. Rather than just abstaining from sex, purity entails both behavioural and mental sexual conduct, keeping in line with what evangelicals believe is God’s plan for marriage. As author and purity campaigner Dannah Gresh stated: ‘Well, you can abstain from sex and not be pure, I think. Purity is more all-encompassing. It’s about your thought life. It’s about your emotional life. It’s about everything’ (as cited in Gardner, 2011: 30). Therefore, in this chapter, I refer to evangelical norms around sexual purity, rather than abstinence, to accentuate the emphasis on holistic purity, which is also how many of my participants speak about this norm in their lives. Freitas’s (2008) study of American evangelical and Catholic university-aged adults finds that evangelicals observed sexual purity more than their religious counterparts. Sociologists Bearman and Bruckner (2001) undertook the largest quantitative project on American evangelical sexual purity. They found that amongst adolescents, when abstinence pledges became normative in a social setting (above a threshold of 40%) the number of ‘pledgers’ actually decreased, and thus the success of recruiting new purity ‘pledgers’ was dependent on a perceived minority status. They also found that adolescents participating in purity pledges ‘take on a pledge identity’, which is sustained by their participation in abstinence and manifested through external markers such as purity rings (Bearman and Bruckner, 2001: 900). These existing analyses provide a useful background for understanding how single evangelical women in Britain contend with sexual purity. My analysis builds on this scholarship, yet by using an intersectional lens, I investigate how identities are embodied, and how women live out sexual purity teachings (Mirza, 2012). 4.2 The UK Context Despite differences in size and political clout, both British and American evangelical Christianity focus on regulating sex and sexuality through an emphasis on sexual purity. Woodhead (2008) attests to the enduring prominence of sex and gender issues within Christianity. British organisations such as Romance Academy, based on Christian principles, are committed to educating youth on sexuality and ‘the sanctity of marriage’ (Romance Academy website, 2016). Purity is written and spoken about as protective, a safeguarding from Practising Purity 109 emotional pain and physical diseases. In her book Prude, British author Carrie Lloyd writes: ‘I’m too free, too aware of what is good for me, too in touch with God’s heart to want to purposefully hurt it’ (2016: 183). Although sexual purity purportedly applies to both single men and women, as I experienced first-hand, ‘the burden of purity falls heaviest on women’ (Freitas, 2008: 85; Sharma, 2008, 2012). My research does not investigate how purity norms are taken up by unmarried evangelical men, however, several of my participants reported feeling that purity norms were very different for men and women, a finding I examine below. Indeed, during this research, the majority of the available purity books and resources I found were geared toward women, suggesting that sexual purity is deemed more relevant for women. The single Christian women I met faced a conflict between the Christian imperative to remain pure until marriage and the trend toward marrying later in urban centres. Christian leaders have utilised this tension to position Christians as ‘counter-cultural’. Another challenge facing women is the lack of available men to marry (Aune, 2003). There are approximately 1.7 single women for every single man in British evangelicalism, according to the Evangelical Alliance (2011: 7). In the words of a participant: ‘It feels like there’s a sense of hopelessness with women because they feel outnumbered’. Thus, it is not surprising that evangelical women who do not conform to either marriage or celibate singleness face challenges, as Sharma (2008) found. Her research on unmarried Protestant women’s ‘sexual selves’ found that ‘the embodiment of shame and guilt that is a result of the inscribed Christian femininity on young women’s sexual identities can result in young women experiencing disembodied sexuality while involved in church’ (Sharma, 2008: 79). The women in Sharma’s study often disaffiliated from the church as a result of their non-normative status (see also Aune, 2008). This chapter tells the stories of non-normative women who stay, yet the dissatisfaction facing them hovers throughout. 5 The Ideal Christian Woman The clearest descriptions of an ideal Christian woman came when I asked my participants what she was like. They defined her in formulaic precision. Patient, like very mature attitude I think which was good. [There is] just no one like me. I think calm is a word that I would not associate with myself and I would associate with people I look at that are quite good examples of a good Christian woman. And they dress very formally, not too AQ1: The crossreference “Aune, (2003)” is not been provided in the reference list. Please check and provide the same. 110 Gaddini revealing, don’t draw attention to themselves. They put everyone apart from themselves first. The above quote is from Brittany, a black, middle-class British woman in her early thirties who worked for a charity. Brittany interpreted normativity through bodily comportment: the still body that expressed an internal calmness; the body modestly adorned; the selfless woman, who conveyed her humility through her bodily conduct. Jacqui, another middle-class black woman in aged 32, described the normative figure as ‘blond, thin, a little artsy on the side, something with kids, very Christian, not strong, ambitious, or career oriented’. Other participants reported that she ‘works at a charity’, ‘only has one or two glasses of wine when she goes out’, and ‘is powerful but not too powerful’. In addition to explicit racial references (‘blonde’), the ideal Christian woman is also positioned as comfortably middle-class through characteristics such as ‘artsy’. When I collated the descriptors together, the figure of the normative subject appeared so circumscribed that I wondered who could possibly inhabit her. In this context, intelligibility was often conferred via recognition from men. Women in the church gained myriad benefits from male recognition including the possibility of marriage, and access to leadership roles. A white, middleclass participant, Barbara Ann, scoffed at the ‘young Scandinavian Barbie’ that men in the church preferred, and noted her inability to live up to these external standards. Her critique of the ideal Christian woman’s appearance revealed that age and beauty also establish the bounds of normativity. Jeanette, a mixed-race, working-class woman in her late 30s, also described feeling invisible to men in Christian circles. Through relational encounters with men, Jeanette’s body was racially marked, and read as undesirable (Ahmed, 1998). This meant that men in the church never asked her out on dates, and she remained unseen as a sexual subject or marriageable option. I asked her to expand on this point. Um, definitely being mixed-race, but that’s been a struggle for most of my whole life, and a lot of it will be in my head of what I’m thinking. And nobody helps them [single women in the church]. That’s the thing, nobody knows what to do and nobody helps them, nobody encourages them to stay because it’s that thing of, it’s like the church gave up on them as well. So, nobody chases them … I have a mirror, I know what I look like, I go out and literally would be hit on by hundreds of guys, and I don’t mean in one night. But even my friends are like, “This is ridiculous.” But being in church and never even Practising Purity 111 been asked for a coffee. That for me was a big eye opener. Just like, there’s something not right. I remember saying to the pastors: people are quite racist, like they will be your friend, and they will talk about how beautiful you are, but they wouldn’t take you home to mum and dad. It’s that kind of thing, that is something I struggled with quite a lot for a long time. But then I just got to a point, I was like, but actually I don’t want any of these people, so why does it bother me? Jeanette made clear that the church did not explicitly bar people of colour, but nevertheless the abundance of ‘white, middle-class, double barrel [sic] name’ congregants populating Crossroads meant that ‘for black people, when they go into the church, unless they are in good jogs2 and stuff they just feel they don’t fit because all they are seeing is a lot of white middle-class’. In Jeanette’s case, the intersection of race, class, gender and age positioned her as marginal which she responded to by disengaging from the church, dating non-Christian men, and rejecting sexual purity teachings. Alex, a black, middle-class woman aged 38, also raised the issue of racism and lack of diversity at Crossroads Church. It’s not a personal pressing issue because I’ve got good relationship now and I’ve got a good network of people I can go to. But for those people who feel the need to go to somebody in leadership to talk about their stuff it’s really disproportional not having any people of colour, of any colour and not having any women. And I know in particular Crossroads is trying like crazy to address it. But (pause) I was talking to a friend of mine having a coffee with her, and there was kind of a ripple feeling of is there a racism issue here? I personally don’t feel it or anything like that … Although Alex did not feel there was overt racism at her church, like Jeanette, she acknowledged that people of colour, especially women of colour, were poorly represented in church leadership. Thus, the ideal Christian woman is composed of both internal dispositions and external bodily markers, as this section has made clear. By describing her characteristics, and locating themselves in relation to her, my participants shed light on a figure crafted through exclusion. Power thus operates through a ‘matrix of intelligibility’, whereby certain subjects gain intelligibility at the same time that others are rendered marginal (Butler, 2011: 24). In this sense, exclusions are instrumental insofar 2 Tracksuits. 112 Gaddini that through their circumscription the periphery defines the centre (Hall, 2000; Mohanty, 1988). These examples highlight how whiteness and a middleclass social status converge and become normative in this evangelical setting. The next section will explore women’s compliance with purity. 6 Practising Purity Before describing non-normative responses to sexual purity, I will explain how compliance with purity constructed the bounds of normativity. Eliza, a white, middle-class woman aged 24, grew up in a devout evangelical Anglican family, and never strayed from the faith. She worked for the church when we met, and she reported she had not dated much or ever had sex. In many ways, Eliza inhabited the ideal Christian woman, including in her commitment to sexual purity. I – personally – I think you should wait to have sex until you are married … I do believe that, I kinda think that “the why” now is: God knows best for us, and he’s trying to protect us, and yes, this act [sex] is amazing, because it can be amazing, like the world shouts about it, and they’re not having it [only] in marriage, and I wouldn’t really say they’d shout about a big difference. But it’s to protect you. And you can only have that in a committed relationship, and that is when you’re married. So, like signing on in front of God, that’s your covenant made, that is the safest place to do it. Because He wants to protect you, and He wants the best for you, so you save it for a marriage. Eliza developed her beliefs around sexuality based on what she believed God desired of her, not church teachings (which she complained were lacking as they did not explain ‘the why’). Similarly, Andrea, another white, middle-class participant, aged 24, remained committed to sexual abstinence before marriage. Andrea told me that she had learnt a lot about ‘purity’ since becoming a Christian a few years prior. Um … I think, be holy because God is holy. And, actually, it’s not that God wants to set rules, and make these rules just make your life trouble – like bad. But having sex with someone is gonna create, you know, soul ties, and also just this deep bond where you don’t actually know where it’s gonna go and just to kind of honour God … and honouring your body as well, and honouring that relationship … um, yeah, with your body. Practising Purity 113 [Katie: How have you learned about purity?] I would say friends, and … it’s a mixture. I wouldn’t say that necessarily a lot comes from the front [of the church]. I have heard sermons, but it’s not like, continuously. So, I think it’s (pause) It’s also like an innate thing in me, to be honest, as well. Like, I have (pause) kissed other boys since being a Christian and kind of got quite close to doing other things too, and there’s just something, there’s just something about it that doesn’t feel quite right. Like, you can … the Holy Spirit does convict3 you when something feels right and when something doesn’t feel right. When you have peace about it and you don’t have peace about it. These examples demonstrate how the interaction of race (white), age (young), and gender (female), which I have already described as normative, condition women’s compliance with sexual purity teachings. In other words, these women uphold the purity norm. Interestingly, even when age is removed from the intersection, white, middle-class participants practise purity. One Sunday, Leah, a white, middle-classed woman 30 bounded in and told the group she had been up late the night before chatting with a man on Tindr, a dating app popular at the time in London. The other women laughed and showed interest, especially Vicky, who had set up Leah’s profile on the site, and urged her to use it. Leah, visibly shocked, recounted how the man she had been chatting with had invited her to come over to his house to ‘hook up’. Committed to purity, Leah had quickly ended their chat after that. During our interview a month later, I asked Leah if she was still on Tindr. I’m not on Tindr. I got really convicted a couple of weeks ago. It’s just – for me – it’s not about the visual, it’s about heart-to-heart connection. Attraction can come after a while … I just got really convicted and was like, “Actually, God, this isn’t how I think I’m going to meet my husband or my partner or whomever”. I would want a marriage … but yeah; I just got rid of it. [Katie: What made you feel convicted?] I think because I was selling myself short. It was becoming … I diminished all of my faith, and my history with God to No ONS which is ‘No One 3 Within Evangelicalism, ‘conviction’ is a process whereby the Holy Spirit or God (and to a lesser extent, Jesus) provokes the feeling of guilt in a believer over a behaviour, practice, or thought that might be considered sinful. 114 Gaddini Night Stands’. That was the only thing. And the fact that it says Christian on my profile, that doesn’t mean much in the Christian dating world or the dating world [in general]. I was on [a Christian dating site] and the guy was like “When are we gonna sleep together?” It’s like: I thought you were a Christian! I was like, this is [a Christian site], which part of the Bible do you read? He was a Mormon, which makes it even worse. (Laughs). And I’m all about friendship. I believe a relationship should come from friendship, and I’m sure I could meet someone and go for a nice drink with them, but the ulterior motive would be there so … I’m gonna be patient. Even though she was an ‘older’ single woman in the church, Leah still embodied the ideal Christian woman in terms of race and class; from this position, she upheld the dominant norm around sexual purity, demonstrating how intimately sexual purity norms are tied to gender norms, and notions of what it meant to be an intelligible Christian woman (‘wholesome yet hot’) in this religious context. ‘A norm is something that can be inhabited’, writes Ahmed (2017: 115). In the following section, I will explore the experiences of women who transgressed the imaginary sexual purity line. These women did not inhabit the norm, and their decision to reject sexual purity served as an extension of the non-normativity they already experienced as older, non-white women. 7 Collision: The Intersection of Race, Age, and Gender Jacqui, mentioned earlier, was engaged to be married when I interviewed her. After a year of dating, she told me that she had decided to have sex with her fiancée and recounted her journey to that decision. Part of my grappling [with the decision to have sex] was again … um … I wanted to check: Am I not doing this just to be rebellious, or am I doing it because I really want to do it? I do have a relationship with God and I have a relationship with Jesus, so if this something that God really hates why am I doing it? How do I feel about it? I just wanted to answer a lot of my questions … And then after six months that was what I decided to do. Even after reaching a decision to have sex with her then-fiancée, she still sympathized with the church’s mandate to remain sexually pure. Practising Purity 115 The sex before marriage thing I can understand, and I probably think they are right in some ways, (pause), but I’ve just chosen to do something different. The word ‘different’ came up again later in our interview, when discussing women in church leadership (‘the woman issue’). Jacqui felt strongly that women should hold at least an equal amount of leadership roles as men in the church, and although the church leaders theologically supported women’s ordination, she felt that they made it difficult for women to access leadership positions. She also positioned herself as non-normative (‘different’) according to her views on homosexuality and feminism. On her third mention of viewing herself as ‘different’, I asked Jacqui about her experience as a black woman in a church with predominantly white congregants. ‘Was it difficult?’ I asked. She paused before answering, then replied: No, because, weirdly, for me – I’m used to it, aren’t I, from school? I grew up in an environment where most people don’t look like me. So, in a weird sort of way that feels normal. Through later conversations I had with Jacqui about Crossroads, it became clear that she positioned herself as different and non-normative in this context because of her ‘liberal’ views on women in leadership and sex before marriage. Being positioned as different- whether as a black woman in a majority-white congregation or because of her views on sex – even began to feel normal. In this sense, non-normativity became normalised for Jacqui. As she was engaged to be married, however, Jacqui was spared an additional layer of marginality: being older and single. As other researchers have elucidated, Christian women feel an acute pressure to marry by a certain age (Aune, 2008; Sharma, 2008). One participant recalled being told by fellow evangelicals at Crossroads that she was ‘past her Christian sell-by date’, as she was over 25 and single. The majority of purity teachings, women told me, were directed toward younger women, leaving older, single women confused as to how, and indeed if, sexual purity applied to them. The silence around older women’s sexuality communicated that they are not a sexual subject and their purity was rendered irrelevant. The silence spoke. Kris Valloton, a Christian author several of my participants referenced, addresses the importance of purity for ‘older’ women in his book Purity: The New Moral Revolution (2008). He describes ‘Jill’, a woman he met at his 30year-old school reunion, and her return to purity. ‘[God] dusted her off, recovered her purity, and restored her trophy. She was older now, her beauty 116 Gaddini tempered by the sands of time. But her self-respect was back, her stately walk had returned, and nobility reigned in her eyes again’ (2008: 64). According to Valloton, purity enhances a woman’s value, and can compensate for her ‘advanced’ age, with this sense of ‘compensation’ indicating the assumptions that are being made, where normative femininity is associated with youthfulness. Age arose as a marginalising force for Vanessa, aged 38. She identified herself outside the norm in her evangelical community as an ‘older’, single, mixed-race woman. As with Jeanette, Vanessa’s body was positioned against the youthful, white, middle-class norm, and thus marked as undesirable by men. Vanessa, in turn, articulated this marginality by developing a sexual ethics outside the norm. She told me that in the past she had had sex and believed in sex between two consenting adults in a loving relationship. I asked her to explain more: But what is interesting as well is a lot of the people getting into their late 30’s are changing their views and they are very much like, “I’ve waited all this time, and I don’t know anymore. You know, maybe [I’ll do it] after engagement.” Things are getting shorter and shorter. Whereas before it was very much you don’t have sex, it’s like now [you wait for an] engagement, and then it’s like, “Oh well if I’m in a loving relationship.” […] Just people are changing quite a lot and I think a lot of people around me are the similar kind of age and going through the same thing. Whereas with 20-somethings, I would still never say, “Don’t have sex” because that’s not for me to say, and it would be very hypocritical. Vanessa clarified that as women aged in the church and continued to remain single, they began to question the validity of Christian norms around sex. In this example, Vanessa’s gender, singleness, race, and age collided to produce a marginality that impacted her sexual choices. Her experience of marginality was not reducible to singleness alone, and instead stemmed from a multivalent encounter of social identities. Yet even when the encounter is multivalent, the subject herself emphasises certain identities over others. Heidi, a black woman aged 36, for example, primarily attributed her marginality to her single status and age, rather than her race. She told me: ‘I like to kind of try and be on the periphery I think’. When I asked her why, she responded: ‘I feel like I shouldn’t really be there, or I should be there with a male figure and he should then be my husband because the first thing they’ll then ask you is so how’s your dating life going?’ This was a distinctly gendered phenomenon, she explained. Practising Purity 117 I think [men] have got more rope, they’ve got a longer time frame to kind of get to our point […] If a guy was sitting here at my age and he hadn’t met anyone girls would be like, “Oh, you know, why’s he still single?” But he can be like, “Well, I’m focusing on my career and all that kind of stuff.” Whereas girls don’t necessarily have that. When I asked Heidi about her views on sex before marriage, she wavered in her response, which was common in my interviews, because she doubted its relevance to her as a 36-year-old woman. In fact, not only was Heidi ambivalent in her views on sexual purity, she also admitted that it was not a major topic of conversation with her friends: And actually, now that I’m older it’s not even the same anymore because a lot of my friends are now married with kids and stuff. So, we don’t even have that [conversation], but I do remember before the church that was the big thing, to talk about boys and that kind of stuff, but it’s not anymore … Heidi shows that the way social identities entangle and the marginality they produce vary over time. Rather than rejecting purity norms outright as Jacqui and Vanessa did, Heidi responded to them with ambivalence. Similarly, Alex demonstrated ambivalence toward pre-marital sex. She explained that she had had sex in the past, and although she did not necessarily plan to have it again outside of marriage, she realistically knew that she probably would. When discussing sex with her friends, she reported they all did ‘a lot of toing and froing’ – going back and forth on whether or not they believed in pre-marital abstinence: So yes, when you’re with someone you really connect with, it’s difficult, it’s really difficult to stop and say: “Actually, I want to wait.” But then this is something that has been churning over my head recently: what is a committed relationship? And: what does marriage look like in the Bible? What is a marriage? … I’ve been chewing over this and I’m like: “God, is it really that bad [to have sex] if you’re committed and on your way to making a further commitment?” In this example, Alex’s ambivalence toward sexual purity mirrored her ambivalence toward the lack of diversity in leadership, which she mentioned earlier. Her response to the evangelical mandate to remain pure cannot be defined as either rejection of the norm or compliance with it, nevertheless it is still 118 Gaddini non-normative, and an extension of her non-normative positionality within the church. 8 Concluding Remarks This chapter contends that the way evangelical women’s race and age intersect impacts their response to sexual purity teachings. I have described how the figure of the ideal Christian woman draws the lines of normativity, and how women position themselves in relation to this norm. I argued that sexual purity norms are expected of and upheld by a particular type of woman: the youthful, white, and middle-class ideal. Building on Moultrie’s (2017) work, I contend that historical configurations of black women’s hypersexuality in Britain precede and impact black women’s responses to sexual ethics in the presentday evangelical context, as these bodies are already positioned as problematic (Benard, 2016). Assigned to non-normative subject positions by interlocking axes of identity, the women I described in this chapter fashioned their sexual ethics from the margins, where they have been cast due to overlapping markers of gender, age, and race. As Crenshaw’s traffic accident analogy implies, intersectionality involves harm. Indeed, my analysis reveals how the body serves as the site where social categories cross and criss-cross in patterns that render a subject vulnerable to marginality and social exclusion. In concluding, one question remains: What comes after the collision? Crenshaw asks this question, too. But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm. In these cases the tendency seems to be that no driver is held responsible, no treatment is administered, and the involved parties simply get back in their cars and zoom away. (1989: 149) In an effort to not ‘zoom away’, this chapter finishes by highlighting the pain inherent to marginality. Within evangelical Christianity, sexual purity norms are yet another arbiter of normativity, revealing who belongs, and who does not. As I have demonstrated, white, middle-class, younger women are expected to uphold the normative ideal, by which all other women’s bodies are judged. Whilst residing outside these normative boundaries might seem at first glance like a certain kind of freedom, it is a freedom that carries along with it the stymied desire for social recognition. Indeed, as Riley affirms, ‘Vicarious as these adopted categories are, that’s not remotely material to the force of the drive Practising Purity 119 to dwell in them’ (2000: 177). 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