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#ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing
How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing
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- USD 15.99
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- USD 15.99
Descripción editorial
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 survivors of abuse to live full, free, healthy lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this powerful debut, poet Allison, who coined the title hashtag in 2017 to add to the #MeToo movement, argues that evangelical theologies "enable abusers." Allison starts with her own adolescent experience of being groomed by a youth pastor and draws on a conservative Christian education—as well as numerous interviews with abuse survivors and academics—to identify a toxic, theology-driven "purity culture." Teaching that sexual contact is solely for monogamous marriage between a cisgender heterosexual man and a cisgender heterosexual woman, purity culture, in Allison's estimation, creates a perfect environment for would-be predators due to adherents' shame and fear over lost status combined with a belief in forgiveness as a virtue. Other key features of the culture include alienation from one's body, homophobia, hypersexualization of Black people, and calls for self-sacrifice by less powerful people in a relationship or community. For Allison, rejecting "this black-and-white thinking that evangelicalism handed down as gospel truth" in favor of a "sex-positive Christian theology" that allows members control of their sexual values is the only way forward. Part memoir, part sociological exploration, and part support kit for survivors of abuse, this is a jarring and persuasive exploration of the mechanisms that make abuse possible. Allison's persuasive testament will resonate with readers of a Christian background in ways that both comfort and disturb.