One of the biggest criticisms of purity culture is the way it reduced sexuality to a list of do’s and don’ts, but there are lots of other reasons millennial men and women report feeling burned by it.
Dr. Camden Morgante, author of “Recovering from Purity Culture”, shared some of the harmful narratives that formed the movement, and provided some alternative approaches to discussing sexuality.
Prefer to listen? You can also listen to the full conversation here.
Juli (00:01.72)
Well, hey friend, welcome to Java with Juli. I’m Juli Slattery, the host of this listener-supported podcast. And what we’re doing here is an outreach of a larger ministry called Authentic Intimacy. Our mission is to help people make sense of God and sexuality. Well, there is a lot of conversation these days about what some people call purity culture. You might have some strong opinions about it, or you might be confused about why it’s created so much pushback.
Well that’s where I’m headed today. I’m joined by author and psychologist Dr. Camden Morgante, who wrote a book called “Recovering from Purity Culture”. Camden has devoted a lot of her clinical practice as well as her doctoral work on helping people understand and recover from the fallout of faith in purity culture. During this conversation we’re going to get into some detail about the main concepts and narratives of purity culture that ended up being so problematic for people, and then talk about how we can move forward. So I hope you enjoy my discussion with Dr. Camden Morgante.
Juli
Well, Camden, I feel like we have so much in common in terms of the things that God has called us to, the fact that we both are psychologists and have clinical training, and are trying to integrate biblical principles with the things that we’ve learned in the field of psychology. And your heart and really your life’s work now is focused on particularly helping people recover from what we might call ‘purity culture’. So this is some of your story. So I’d love to know a little bit about what brought you into this and how did you get to the place where you’re like, ‘This is what I want to do with my life’?
Camden
Yeah, well, it’s definitely been a journey. It’s evolved over time and has taken me places that I never expected, as God often does. But yes, I’m a licensed clinical psychologist. And so I went and got my doctorate right after undergrad, and so was pretty young when I graduated and worked as a therapist in several different settings, worked as a college professor at a Christian college for psychology students.
Camden (02:13.888)
And then I went into private practice and I always knew I wanted to write a book and didn’t know exactly what until I started to realize that purity culture, these teachings about sexual absence that I had really believed in and really held to growing up, actually had some harmful and unanticipated and unintended consequences that I was seeing in myself and in my clients. And so I started to think, you know, how can I help people heal from the hurt using tools that I’ve learned as a psychologist, using all this knowledge and this education I’ve gained while also holding on to their faith? Because when I started this process of speaking out about purity culture on social media and on podcasts and started kind of the work of developing a book proposal and things like that, a lot of the books that have been written about purity culture are by people who are no longer Christians or no longer hold to a Christian sexual ethic. And so I really wanted to provide that perspective for people who are trying to do the hard work of disentangling our faith from these harmful teachings.
Juli
And that’s, and let me ask you, was it seeing yourself in your clients where it was sort of like an aha, like, ‘wow, that’s me too’? Or did you kind of go through your own struggle first?
Camden
I mean, I certainly see things in my clients that I haven’t personally experienced. You know, we see quite a variety, but I think it was looking at how I struggled with my faith in my twenties. So my story of purity culture is growing up in the church and being very entrenched in purity culture. Like I said, I really believed in it and held to it. I had a ring, purity ring, signed a pledge. Like it was just very much a part of my Christian upbringing. And then when I had uh, my first serious relationship in college. And after that ended, I was just devastated because I really expected to marry him and really thought that by following the rules and staying pure, that that was a guarantee, you know, that God was going to give me the desires of my heart. And so when that ended, yeah, I was relationally and emotionally devastated, but also my faith was really impacted because I started to question the goodness of God, and is God trustworthy?
Camden (04:23.348)
So really seeing purity culture’s effects on my faith is what got me started on analyzing it and kind of critically looking at how are my clients being impacted too in different ways than I was? Because I really, my heart is to help people stay in their faith, help people to be able to hold on to their relationship and their love for Jesus and not have to throw that out along with these misguided teachings.
Juli
Yeah, boy, I’m right with you. You know, sometimes, you know, I’ll say the reason I do what I do is not because I love talking about sex, but because for a lot of people, sex is an area that keeps them distant from God. It’s that thing where they begin to doubt the goodness of God. They don’t know how to find them and find him in their struggles or their questions. And it sounds like that was your experience as well.
Camden
Yeah, yeah, I just felt really far from God and wondered kind of what the whole point of faith was with when I didn’t get the guarantees that I really felt like I’d been promised. And I now realize like how kind of shallow and short-sighted that was. But unfortunately, I felt like that’s kind of what purity culture did to me.
Juli
Yeah, and I’m quite a bit older than you. I didn’t go through purity culture the way you did. I think I was raising babies and toddlers at that point. But I feel like sometimes people in my generation or older can hear these messages about purity culture and they’re like, ‘Just get over it’. Like, ‘You guys are making everything about trauma and it’s not that big of a deal’. So for somebody who would have that reaction, how would you describe to them that it is a big deal and there really has been harm done?
Camden (06:02.638)
Yeah, I think I try to listen to people’s own perspectives and validate that. Like if your experience of purity culture was positive or just neutral, you know, that’s great and I’m happy for you. And there are certainly good things that came out of purity culture. I even acknowledge that. I’m content with the choices that I made and I’m happy, you know, happy about that.
But we can’t ignore the people who have been harmed and we really need to listen to them and validate their experiences too, even if they’re ones that we’re not familiar with or ones we just never would have considered. Because different teachings can impact people in different ways. Like I said, I have clients who’ve been impacted in ways I haven’t and sometimes they’ll share things they heard and I think, well, I heard that too, it didn’t affect me in the same way or just didn’t hit me as deeply or in the same way. But it makes their experience no less valid. And so we really need to listen to the variety of people’s experiences and try to understand them and partner with them in their healing instead of judging them or invalidating it.
Juli
Okay, so if we kind of take at its core nugget this idea that God wants you to save sex from marriage, which you and I probably both agree that core nugget is true, what was it in the messaging of purity culture that made that toxic? Like what were all the add-ons that ended up being so destructive?
Camden
Yeah, I think the ‘myths’ is what I call them, the myths of purity culture. You know, the teaching was so much more than just, ‘Sex is sacred and should be saved for marriage because that reflects God’s covenant with us’. That’s my personal theological belief, but the teaching was so much more than that. It was teachings that were not biblical, teachings that were, again, well-intentioned.
Camden (07:55.106)
They were trying to communicate to us the dangers of sex or the blessings of waiting, but sometimes they added promises that were not in the Bible. And when those guarantees didn’t come, like my example that I went through, for example, then that can really hurt a person’s faith and also hurt them in their marriage or in their sexual intimacy later on. So the myths, the false promises, and then also the use of shame and fear. I don’t believe that we need to use shame and fear to coerce people into a relationship with God or into the choice of abstinence.
I think if people really taste the goodness and truth and beauty of God, and they really grasp the deeper reasons for abstinence, then that’s gonna be compelling enough. We don’t have to use shame by telling them ‘You’ll be damaged goods if you do have sex’, or fear by telling them ‘No one’s gonna want you if you have sex’, things like that. We don’t have to add that in in order to try to control the choice. People can make that choice out of an overflow of their love for God and their faithfulness to Him.
Juli
I think one of the things that’s challenging having raised teenagers and young adults now and seeing that culture is particularly, let’s say you’ve got a 14, 15 year old and in today’s day and age they’re sexually awakened, they have access to the internet, access to sexting, pornography, all the things. They don’t yet usually have a relationship with God or if they do, as you know, you’ve written a lot about moral and spiritual development, they’re usually not at a state yet where Christianity has become theirs. It’s like: my parents are Christians. I grew up in a church. I want to be a good kid. I want to please my parents. I believe in God. I don’t want to go to hell. Kids around that age, that’s usually the extent to which the relationship with God is.
Juli (09:52.94)
So, yeah, I think sometimes people use sort of the carrot on the stick, either the reward or the fear, because the idea of do this because you love God and you believe in Him and you trust in Him, it doesn’t resonate with young kids or young adolescents, I would say. So what are your thoughts about that?
Camden
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and I think they may not be at the cognitive moral or spiritual development yet, but sometimes in the reasons that we give them it can help them to move forward in their development. Like I even think with my young kids like when we talk about not hitting or sharing or all kinds of things, you know It’s more than just I’ll be mad at you or I’ll punish you if you do that. It’s talking about having empathy for the other person, how they’ll feel and you know, deeper, I’m trying to instill those deeper values in them like empathy and self-control.
So I think we can do the same thing with adolescents and young adults. And certainly we can also integrate the science and the research that talks about the dangers of early sexual activity and oxytocin, how it bonds you and just our own personal experiences if parents have experiences of emotional pain or the benefits of waiting. You know, I think that all of those things can be shared. And yeah, if, I kind of think if they don’t have the moral and spiritual development, then they shouldn’t be making that kind of a decision too. Like, you know, they’re just too young to be engaging in sex at that age.
Juli
Yeah, so, you know, at a very practical level, we know that kids can’t make good decisions about their food. So we don’t just say, you know, to a seven year old, have anything you want, you know, so we, you can have a snack, you can’t have this junk food, but you also want to be teaching the why. And in some respects, what I’ve learned is that I guess the downfall of purity culture is not just in the extras it taught, but what it neglected, which was teaching that foundational why.
Juli (11:46.828)
You know, and also teaching the redemption of Christ. Like, your purity is not what you do sexually. It is in your relationship with Christ. Like, it sort of became a gospel of itself.
Camden
It did, yeah. And it’s been called the sexual prosperity gospel because of those false promises of, you know, prosperity in your marriage and in your sex life if you wait. But yes, I say that it neglected the deeper why of purity. And I completely agree, like, our purity is not what we do sexually. It’s the saving work of Christ in us. It’s something that He’s done for us, not something we accomplish, which makes it very works-based. So it’s important for parents to know themselves, what the deeper why is, to be able to communicate that and share that with your kids.
Juli
One of the ways I’ve thought about this, you again, as I’ve moved through some of these stages of parenting is you build scaffolding, like scaffolding on a building. And those are sort of the boundaries, the guidelines, like, no, you can’t have a cell phone at 12, you know, like, no, you can’t go out with this guy, you know, or whatever it might be, but underneath that, you know, the scaffolding is just temporary while you’re working on the building, while you’re working on the character development. And then understanding the deeper reasons, because you having worked on a college campus, know, as soon as kids leave the home, the scaffolding comes off and usually kids go off the rails in one way or another, you know, like whether it’s something like they eat whatever they want and they get sick or if it’s sexually or morally or they’re like, I don’t have to go to church, you know, I can do whatever I want. So I don’t know if you’ve seen sort of that dynamic.
Camden (13:28.206)
Yeah, or they stay up too late. I certainly did that, you know, just neglecting my sleep, yeah, and I think that’s a normal part of adolescence is to test out that autonomy, just like they did as toddlers, but in a different way and hopefully if you’ve set that foundation and a scaffolding they have something that’s not shallow to rely on, something that is deeper and thicker that’s going to get them through those the peer pressure or the yeah, the moral decisions that they have to make.
But I was thinking when you were talking about like giving a seven-year-old food choices, like one of the things I sometimes hear from my audience is like, purity culture was so damaging to me that I’m not going to teach my kids really any religious morals about sex. I’m just, I’m going to give them like sex education, like about anatomy and things like that. But I’m just going to leave that between them and God. And I kind of push back against that. Like, you know, we don’t say that about food choices. We don’t say that about technology. Like we don’t just like hand them the phone and that’s between them and God. You know, we do provide some guidelines and some boundaries and the reasons why and help them think through questions of, you know, how do you feel when you’re on social media, for example, or how would you feel in this dating situation? Like we talk through those complex situations with them to help them develop the decision-making abilities that they need. Yeah, so I think it’s understandable that some parents like, I guess, having those moral conversations because they don’t want to do the damage that purity culture caused them. But it’s also, that’s part of our role as parents, so the work really starts with us and doing that work in ourselves first.
Juli
Yeah, I guess some parents, particularly in your situation the way you’re describing, that they would say okay ‘Well, what is the narrative I’m supposed to use then if it’s not save sex for marriage? You know God says premarital sex is a sin, and it’s not you know, ‘discover yourself and do whatever you want”. What is the essence of the narrative that we want to teach our kids?
Camden (15:30.264)
Yeah, I think that’s the million dollar question. I always come back to values and rooting your sexual ethic in larger values like respect for self and others and like faithfulness to God and obedience to God. And so I think some of that can depend on your family’s values, like what’s unique to you. And then some of it really depends on your faith and your beliefs and convictions when it comes to sex, but also helping your kids, yeah, discern their own values and discern their own reasons. Yeah, so I include a few scripts that people can tailor in my book with their kids so that they can kind of make them your own. But in doing that, you don’t have to offer the shame and the false promises and the myths. You can really root it in Christ and root it in values, I think.
Juli
A couple of things you brought up in your book I’d love to dive into. We have talked a lot on this show about recovering from purity culture in terms of marriage and how do you learn to say yes when you’ve been saying no, like how do you work through that. I think a few things that we haven’t talked a lot about is dating, like how purity culture shaped our view of dating and then also modesty.
Camden
Okay.
Juli
So I’d love to dig a little bit into those. So let’s start with dating. Yeah, take it away in terms of what you learned growing up with dating, like how that was sort of messed up. You know, like what advice you would give people to have a healthier perspective of dating.
Camden
Yeah, I call it courtship culture. I grew up in the ‘I Kissed Dating Goodbye’ era and where you court to marry and avoid dating. And again, I think there’s some good intentions behind that and some hopes. And yet it really created, I see a lot in my generation, a fear of the opposite sex, a fear of even being friends or being around the opposite sex.
Camden (17:29.358)
And then a fear of dating to the point where many of my clients who are single and even in their mid to late 30s have really never dated, never had a relationship and they don’t really know how, but yet they have this desire for marriage. And so all of that led to prolonged singleness for some people that can be really painful and led to this fear of the opposite sex. So me as a psychologist, I often take a both and perspective on topics instead of black and white either or, and so I think with dating, I’m not a either courtship or just free for all, you know, date whoever. I’m really kind of in the middle path of making wise and discerning choices with dating. I certainly don’t think it’s a free-for-all and there’s wisdom and discernment that goes into those decisions. But yet I don’t think it should be something that is banished or feared either because that can set people up for inexperience and, you know, heartbreak in the other direction.
Juli
So flesh out for me what was meant by courtship date, courtship model. I mean, I think at some level, you shouldn’t be dating if you don’t have the intention of, like eventually I wanna find a spouse, not just like dating recreationally. But I know the courtship model took that further and was more like you should never even spend time with somebody unless you’re pretty sure you can marry them. Is that kind of where it’s extreme?
Camden
Yeah, just often it was parent arranged, you know, parents kind of guiding or arranging the courtship, which again, it’s good to have the insight of your parents. If you have wise and Christian parents, that can be healthy. But for my clients in their 30s, you know, that’s just not gonna be really practical. so they need to be able to make their own decisions and be able to trust themselves and use their own discernment too in prayer.
Juli
So let me just clarify. So courting was like you go out with who your parents pick for you?
Camden (19:24.374)
Often that was a part of the process or it was just avoiding dating for a really long time and then as soon as you met somebody, you were kind of evaluating them for marriage and that puts a lot of pressure on it instead of you seeing that getting to know people and developing friendships or interacting with people of the opposite sex can be way to understand yourself better and relationships better. It can be a way to develop relationship skills. Yeah, so I agree, like, the idea of casual dating or dating just to date recreationally is probably not wise, but there is a component to dating where it’s a way to learn about yourself in relationship with others. And then not everyone we go on a date with obviously has to be our spouse. Sometimes that is the way that you learn and develop those skills.
Juli
Well, I think you hit on something there too. If there’s a fear of the opposite sex, then the only way you can spend time with them is by being on a date. You know, whereas I think in reality, there’s a lot to learn about yourself being around the opposite sex and having time and fun with them. you know, like, I feel like the only way now in our culture, especially Christian culture that you can do that is I’m going to ask you on a date like we’re gonna go out alone, we’re gonna have dinner, it’s gonna be awkward about who’s gonna pay. Like there’s no way to just like I would with a girlfriend, you know, say, ‘Hey, would you like to go for a hike?’ Or something like that without it being assumed with the opposite sex that this is a date. So I don’t know if you wanna kind of parse that out at all.
Camden
Well that just automatically puts a lot of pressure and expectations on things. And yeah, I think once people are in their 30s, especially in Christian circles, a lot of people are married already. A lot of people are married and have families. And so it’s hard to interact with other singles unless it’s a one-on-one date and online dating for a lot of people. And there’s pros and cons to that, of course.
Camden (21:24.312)
Yeah, so dating is a very nuanced topic, probably again something that’s gonna be individual to the person and their own convictions and boundaries. But yeah, purity culture’s, like, one-size-fits-all script of courtship just didn’t work for a lot of us.
Juli
Yeah, did you go through that? The courtship model?
Camden
Yeah, I read that book and I think that was like my parents hope. But I don’t think I really ever adhered to that. I had this serious relationship in college that ended and then I was single for many years when I’m a few dates here and there and then met my husband in my late 20s and got married when I was almost 30. So in a sense, I had just those two serious relationships and didn’t really casually date a lot.
Juli (22:59.638)
I talk to a lot of parents who are in the position that your parents were in of loving God, loving their kids, know, being kind of discipled by some of these books that promoted some of these ideas. And now they’re like, man, like my kids are in their 20s or 30s. And I’m starting to realize that the way we didn’t talk about sex or the way we did talk about it, you know, some of what you’re describing here, has been harmful for them in their faith. What advice do you have for those parents and maybe even how have you navigated that with your own parents?
Camden
Yes, I love it when I have followers or clients who are older GenX or even baby-boomers because there’s so much humility that they bring to it of recognizing like I got some things wrong and I’m seeing how my kids have either really rebelled against it or they’ve really been hurt by it in other ways. And I think, approach that conversation with that humility and ask your kids, would you be willing to share how this affected you?
And if you’d be willing to apologize to your kids, that can go a really long way in making a difference in their experience of healing too, to see that from you. And certainly you can express that your intentions were good and hopefully your kids see that. I certainly see that in my parents. But we wanna also focus more on the impact that it had than just the intentions, because good intentions don’t negate the impact.
So I really appreciate and respect when I see that humility in people and the willingness to say I’m never too old to change my mind or to learn something new or to apologize with my kids.
Juli (24:42.17)
And the reality of it was like when you look historically, you know those parents when they were kids they got nothing on sex and so it’s like okay, we know we need to address this. How do we do it? And this was like really the church’s first, the modern church’s first efforts to address this topic, and as usual when we try something usually we don’t get it all right the first time but yeah.
Well, usually we go to extreme and then we overreact and swing the pendulum too far the other way. so, yeah, hopefully, you know, at some point we come back in the middle and recalibrate.
Let’s talk about all this related to modesty. So there’s a lot of conversation about modesty. First of all, let’s start with what was the message about modesty with purity culture?
Camden
Yes, it was very intertwined modesty and purity culture because it was all about controlling and managing what women wear and young girls as a way to manage boys lust or temptation. So we heard a lot of messages of don’t cause your brother to stumble and you don’t want to tempt him with what you’re wearing. There were a lot of rules and restrictions placed on like short length and you know how wide your straps were on your shirt and just very arbitrary kind of rules like that. It became micromanaged in a way. And to me, it missed the larger biblical virtue of modesty by just narrowly focusing on what women are wearing. And it also often blamed girls and young women for boys’ sexual, lack of sexual self-control, rather than putting the responsibility on the men and boys.
Camden (26:25.15)
Because self-control is a fruit of the spirit for both of us. We’re both responsible for managing our thought life and our eyes. So, yeah, so I think that did a lot of damage to women because there’s an insecurity about your body that can persist even into adulthood, like women who are uncomfortable even showing their bodies to their husbands in intimacy because of these messages or they just have a lot of body shame. And then at its extreme, it can turn into blaming young women and girls for sexual assault because of what they were wearing or where they were or who they were with and things like that. Yeah, and so that’s certainly very damaging.
Juli
And I’m sure you’ve heard, I’ve certainly heard women in that situation when they reported a sexual assault to a parent or to a pastor. The first questions were, where were you? Why were you there? What were you wearing? Did you have anything to drink? Which is essentially saying, this is your fault. You put yourself in this situation. What did you expect?
Camden
Right. Yeah, it’s blaming her and taking the responsibility off whoever the perpetrator was instead. And instead, our immediate response should be just care for the victim and coming alongside her in her healing.
Juli
Yeah, so what’s a healthier message? Like you have a little boy and a little girl, they’re not quite at the place where you’re talking about clothing and modesty and all that yet, but I’m guessing you’re not gonna take your 12 year old and then just say, pick out anything you want to wear. So what’s a healthier framework for understanding that, as you mentioned, modesty is a biblical virtue. How do we communicate it in a way that is honoring to our bodies and honoring to the Lord?
Camden (28:11.074)
Yeah, that’s exactly my heart, is, modesty is a virtue is about humbleness and gentleness of spirit and heart and not being boastful or showy with whether that’s with your body or with your wealth or with, you know, things like that. And so those are the bigger virtues that I want to instill in my kids.
And then when it comes to clothing choice, I think focusing more on practicalities, like the context that they’re gonna be in and the weather and like just what activities are gonna be doing, things like that work really well for us right now. But later on, it’s also about respecting yourself and others. And so there is an element of respecting others and who you’re gonna be around, but then it’s respecting yourself and your body as a temple of Christ too. I think just I hope that that’s a message that parents can kind of translate and impart to their kids.
Juli
Can you give an example of a way that somebody might dress where it’s not respectful to other people?
Camden
Yeah, I mean, I think maybe if you’re dressing in a way that’s intended to provoke or intended to arouse someone besides your spouse. Yeah, I think that would be not respectful of them and of yourself. But even like I was saying, know, being modest, like modesty is also about not being showy or boastful.
Camden (29:44.31)
So sometimes like in the Bible, Jesus condemned these really showy expressions of wealth to kind of say you were better looking down on other people who were less wealthy. So even something like that, that doesn’t really have to do with how much skin you’re showing, but just this boastfulness about wealth can be immodest as well.
Juli
Yeah, thanks for clarifying that. Yeah, and I think that, you know, clothing gets into all these other issues that we don’t necessarily have time to get into, but even, you know, cross gender dressing and, you know, some kids that want to wear goth stuff where it’s black and, you know, like pictures of skulls and yeah, there’s all kinds of challenges of, okay, didn’t see that one coming. How do we navigate it? So there’s a real need in all these areas, modesty, sexuality, to go back to the principles of what does the Bible teach, what do we want to teach our kids in their character and do that without making it legalistic and rule-based. yeah, there’s a of challenges.
Camden
Yeah, a good question to come back to would be like, does this clothing reflect my character and the character of Christ that I want to have the fruits of the spirit that I want to display?
Juli
One of the threads that often comes up in conversations about purity culture, and it’s something that you address in your book, is how patriarchy has historically kind of played into this. And this might be an area, as we talk about it, where you and I might have a different perspective, but that’s what makes these conversations fun. But I’d love for you to define what you mean by patriarchy.
Camden (31:19.394)
Yes, patriarchy is the belief that men are superior to women and should be in control and make the decisions and that women are denied full agency and personhood and of their own. Really, they gain some of that agency or identity through their relationship to a man instead of through Christ and who they are in Christ. so, yeah, so there’s definitely a spectrum when it comes to patriarchy. In my book, I share that I hope those of us who come from different positions, whether egalitarian or complementarian, can still unite in refuting patriarchy and refuting the subjugation or objectification of women and still valuing them as equals and recognize the role that patriarchy has played in purity culture. So that’s something we can kind of unpack if we want to.
I…as you define it that way, I’m like, wow, that sounds horrible I don’t see that anywhere in how Christ called us to treat each other and to understand male and female relationships, and I would love for you to unpack that. I think something that goes along with it that you mentioned in your book is gender essentialism. Can you talk about what that is?
Camden
So gender essentialism is the belief that men and women are inherently different and that God created us with those differences, they’re blessed by God, and that those differences then lead us to different roles or kind of different levels of leadership or abilities. So I’m not denying that men and women have differences, you I think no scientist is going to deny that. Yeah, so I just think that between men and women differences are often socially-culturally based. There’s a lot of differences that are shaped by our culture and there’s also more differences between two individual women than there are between you know any random man and woman. So I look at that rather than like gender stereotypes of all men are like this or all women are like this. So where gender essentialism plays a role in purity culture I think is that you know: ‘All men struggle with lust’, All men are very sexual and are always going to want sex’.
Camden (33:31.534)
‘All women you know, sex is really not for them or their pleasure, it’s really for the man and she needs to give him sex in order to keep him from cheating or from looking at porn’. Things like that is where gender essentialism comes into play and where, yeah, where I would see patriarchy at play that would harm both the women and the men because as I said earlier, self-control is a fruit of the spirit for all of us and not something that we want to rob men of the opportunity to cultivate in their life and to grow in.
And when we just put the blame on women for what are you wearing or who were you with or for married women, did you give him enough sex, know, things like that, that’s really taking the opportunity away from him to develop that self-control.
Juli
I couldn’t agree more. You know you use two words that are sort of like words that describe different theologies. One is Complementarian, the other one’s Egalitarian. We have had some conversations around that on this podcast before but from my understanding essentially like the last statement you made in defining gender essentialism is where you would define most of us would define once egalitarian and once a complementarian where the differences in gender are prescriptive in terms of different roles, particularly within the church and within marriage.
And we don’t have to get into all that. I think it’s a fascinating discussion that we can have another time. But I guess what I would want to talk about is what you’re saying led to and maybe perpetuates some purity culture myths and damage is a very extreme view of complementarianism, where it’s not just that a man for example might be the leader in the home but that he’s superior, he gets what he wants, you the woman is there to serve him, she doesn’t really have a voice or rights or she can’t speak into any of this. So would you agree with that sort of characterization?
Camden (35:28.866)
Yeah, I have readers who are more complementarian and I’ve given like talks about the book to more complementarian audiences and there’s definitely areas, some areas of disagreement between us, but there are so many areas of agreement when they can see, gosh, how misguided these teachings were or how extreme the patriarchal roots of these teachings were. yeah, so just really the difference is in roles like you were talking about, like how we see as our roles.
But yeah, I think we can all agree that women having no voice in marriage is not what God wants because, she’s supposed to be a helpmate and, you know, we have different translations or interpretations of that word sometimes, but I think like, you know, an equal and strong force to contribute to the marriage, to the home and to partner with her husband. And so when these teachings are saying that sex is for him and she’s in a subservient role of serving him with sex, it really takes away the mutuality that I think God wants us to have in marriage, that sex is supposed to be a mutual place of pleasure and intimacy for both and fruitful for both, whether that produces children or is just beneficial to each partner. Like it’s something that builds them up rather than the wife feeling resentful or feeling, you know, obligation.
Yeah, so those are the extreme ways sometimes that that is distorted.
Juli
And I’ve shared with my audience, like, I grew up with a of that. Like, I have a loving husband. I grew up with my parents having a very healthy marriage. But somehow I got that idea through church culture that sex was primarily for the guy. And if a woman happens to enjoy it, then great. But if she doesn’t, like, she still needs to do this. And something you address in your book that is key is, sex was painful for me.
Juli (37:25.038)
I just kind of was like, well, I guess it’s just always gonna be this way. And so I’m really thankful for teachers like you and others who are speaking into this and saying, it’s not supposed to be that way. And sometimes staying stuck in that situation can come from the wrong belief that my role is just to be a servant. And again, there’s truth in that God calls us to love each other unselfishly, but we have to put that in the context of what that looks like in a healthy dynamic.
Camden
Yes, and as a psychologist, I see that when you feel pain from sex and then you continue doing it because you feel like that’s your obligation as a wife, that’s just going to reinforce the pain cycle. Yeah. And so I will tell couples to stop having sex in those situations and just give them permission to find other ways to connect and to continue working on that. You know, it’s not a we give up forever. It’s we’re working on this in our part. Yeah. So that it can really be mutual and enjoyable for both of them.
Juli
You do work with individuals and couples who are recovering from some of these toxic messages. There are people listening right now who are like, that’s me. My faith is in crisis because of this, or I’m married and I don’t know how to enjoy sex, or I’m single and I don’t know what it is to be sexual, because I’ve always associated sex or sexuality with sex.
So, like, there’s all different fallouts of this, and we could name more. But what would be some steps somebody in that situation could take to actually pursue wholeness?
Camden
I think first recognizing what the teachings were and how they affected you. So I give some exercises in the book and then in my work I take people through some exercises to identify the beliefs, the effects on them, emotional and just behavioral like, you know, your actions, how that affected you and how it affected you in your body. And then we work to replace those messages and those myths with truth.
Camden (39:31.842)
And that truth can also come from the Bible, can come from the science like we talked about, integrating that with the Bible and with our faith and with our experience and being able to challenge those teachings with God’s truth and then living that truth out in embodied change. So I say it’s not enough to just change your mind or change your cognitive beliefs or thoughts or to say like, okay, now I know God wants sex to be for me too in marriage, but you have to take that a step further and really live that belief out in your body with what you do and in your heart, with how you feel and in your soul, with how you connect with God and see sex as spiritual and sacred. So it’s a mind, body, heart, and soul kind of integrated change that I’m working towards with my clients and helping them achieve. And that really comes through putting the new beliefs into practice.
Juli
What was the biggest thing in your own personal journey that got you to a place of freedom and joy in the Lord in all this too?
Camden
Mm-hmm. That’s a good question. No one’s asked me that. I think one would be coming to my own deeper why for my ethic of purity and the virtue of purity, like having my own reasons for it, really seeing the sacredness of sex and the covenant of marriage. That was very healing. And then I think a lot of healing came from my marriage and from my husband and feeling that acceptance from him and I just, and his partnership and my healing too. So yeah, so I would say those two things were key.
Juli (40:58.988)
Yeah, did he grow up in purity culture too?
Camden
I would say more like purity culture-lite maybe. I mean, just like he grew up with the belief to wait, but he didn’t grow up with all of the evangelical cultural stuff, like the rings and the rallies and the books. Like he didn’t do all of that. So many of these subtle messages were very new to him and very shocking. And so that can be validating just to see someone who didn’t grow up in this and they hear some of these messages and how shocking it is for them because it helps you see, this actually isn’t true.
You know, yeah, so that was helpful.
Juli
That’s good. And living with somebody like that too, as you said, not just, you don’t just hear it once, but it gives you the context to work it out with somebody who can be a good like sounding board.
Camden
Yeah, and he’s a healthy, like spiritually healthy man and I think that’s a blessing and a big part of healing because he doesn’t hold like these beliefs and these views on sex.
Juli (41:59.054)
Well, I just want thank you for the work you’re doing. Yeah, thank you for the clinical work you’re doing and just getting this message out there because it is really critical. So thank you.
Camden
Thank you. Yeah, as you said, it’s not always fun to be talking about sex all the time, but it’s the reason why we do it is because of our heart for God and people to find healing in this area so that they can experience the fullness of what God wants for them.
