Purity Culture and Colonialism: Twin Flames of Grief
When I sat down to write this, I realized that I was writing this first and foremost because these are the words I wished to read when I was in the throes of my own experience of religious deconstruction—the pulling apart and reexamining of my Christian beliefs. I am a queer, agender, 1.5 generation Asian immigrant. The intersectionality of my identities were instrumental in both the pain and loneliness of my deconstruction process, and also in the beauty and freedom that came with uncovering parts of myself I had considered long lost. For people who have multiple intersections of identity, especially identities that have been historically and systemically excluded, navigating religious trauma can become exponentially more complicated. If you are a queer or trans person who is also Black, Indigenous, or a Person of Color (BIPOC), and your church of color is the only place where you regularly hear your mother tongue spoken—I see you. If you are a BIPOC person living in a largely white area and your Christian family is one of the only places you get to encounter faces that reflect your own—I see you. If your non-queer affirming Christian community brings comfort in many ways, while also inflicting harm in equal measure—I see you. This is a familiar dance for so many folks who hold intersecting identities, and navigating deconstruction while holding and honoring these identities brings an additional layer of nuance and complication.
The ways that I personally navigated this process are by no means the only ways forward. In fact, I believe there are many paths that can guide us through to where we need to go. However, as a queer Asian person going through deconstruction, I remember that the loneliness of not seeing my own experience reflected cut me through to my core during my most wrenching moments. Much of the writing about deconstruction is currently the perspective of white, straight, and cisgender dominant culture. I remember struggling to piece together how to deconstruct my faith in a way that felt navigable, because whenever I unraveled one part of my faith, it would pull on a thread that unraveled seven others. For me, a huge part of this process was navigating the way that purity culture touched every part of my life—my relationships to work, hobbies, social justice, my communities, and ultimately my relationship to myself even in realms that felt far removed from sexuality. Some fifteen years on from unraveling the very first thread, it is now clear to me that purity culture and Christian colonialism are deeply intertwined, especially in the way that they both seek to control our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to systems. Christian colonialism has extended its arms into the ancestries of virtually all BIPOC people, and uses faith as justification for genocide, slavery, and exploitation of resources. Colonialism seeks to subjugate and control not just physical, but also relational and psychological worlds through multiple generations. For those who are exploited, one way to cope with this is through internalized oppression—adopting the colonizer’s worldview as superior. However, it is impossible to do this without leaving core parts of yourself behind. Internalized oppression has been a big part of my, and so many others’ journeys of deconstruction.
Yet, it is only once we name these happenings, and come to terms with how they are affecting our lives, that we can move through and away from them. Through this frame, it becomes clear how purity culture, which seeks to control the way we are in relationship to our own bodies, has deep roots in patriarchy, white supremacy, and even capitalism—all fruit of the tree of colonialism. Purity culture calls us to be ashamed of having bodies, and of all the normal functions that come with having a body. It tells us to hold our natural yearnings and desires suspect, and to discard them because they are “sinful.” For queer and trans folks, it calls us to be ashamed of our sexual and gender identities if we do not conform to dominant cisgender and heteronormative standards. For BIPOC folks, it calls us to conform to white, Eurocentric standards as the benchmark. Systems of power have a stake in us continuing to hate ourselves. In this way, the act of loving ourselves is in and of itself an act of resistance.
For those who embody multiple intersections of historically excluded identities, I also want to say that I see you in your feelings of grief and loss. This process has no easy way through, and being on the deconstruction journey can be a conduit for these feelings. Emergence and blooming of parts of ourselves that have been previously unseen is a beautiful and powerful process. But the journey of getting there can mean the loss of treasured communities that already feel scarce. Sometimes ashes are a prerequisite for the forging of new life from fire, but the pain inherent in this cannot be understated. If this is you, I want to leave you with this—your experiences are valid, you are valid. Do not walk through this process alone, if you can help it. There exists a powerful lineage of many others who have traversed these steps, and they see you too. You are not alone.
