A review by khuizenga
Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free by Linda Kay Klein

4.0

This is a really important topic I’m glad is being discussed. While I didn’t experience all of the shades of purity culture described in this book, I would posit that most women in the evangelical church have experienced some if not many of them in the past few decades and I’m grateful to see a careful handling of the variety of ways that it has harmed people and how they are dealing with it now. There were some structural weaknesses in the book that made me mark it down a star, but I think the author tried to be as honest about her own biases and as true to the perspectives of the people in this book as possible. I think she should have done more in the final chapters on LGBTQ+ since it felt a bit like it came out of left field, when she could have drawn a stronger parallels between the ways that heterosexual women and the LGBTQ+ community have been reduced to nothing more than their sexuality within the context of many evangelical communities, a point which I think she tried to make but didn’t really solidify.