One of the most recent Twitter outrages about which everyone has become Very Mad Online is a resurgent discussion about modesty and purity culture. One the one side, you have folks who make the very reasonable request that women should wear clothing when they’re in public, on the other you have those who find this request to be inutterably offensive and obviously indicative of sexism, patriarchy, and being an incel. Now, you probably think I’m exaggerating, but I’m really not (too much). The language emanating from the anti-purity side can become quite hyperbolic.
This isn’t too surprising if you cruise through the timelines of some of these people. While they profess to be very, very concerned about the “damage” that purity culture does to young women, it becomes pretty apparent that their main problem with it is that it doesn’t (or at least didn’t) allow them to act like whores. In nearly all cases, it really is a matter of their having some weird overreaction to what was likely just a bog-standard Evangelical Christian upbringing. Still, it’s amusing in a way to see them hang onto “Christianesque” language to try to gaslight genuine Christians into accepting their bogus reasoning, which is something they do across a whole range of contemporary issues.
However, it isn’t just outright anti-Christian heathens who get caught up in this. More than a few of the Beth Moore types within professing Christianity end up landing here as well. It’s become vogue for pseudo-spiritual female “teachers” to follow the world in pushing for “liberation” from standards of godliness that Christians have accepted for 2000 years and to try to invent novel theological justifications for doing so. Usually, these are based on some kind of argument that seeks to place blame on men for “lusting after women.” If only men could control their base instincts - which they have because they are uniquely sinful, unlike women who apparently do not possess a sin nature - then women could be free to “express themselves” by dressing however they wanted. Which is an odd argument considering that 60% of women consume pornography as well.
Fundamentally, this argument is sentimental and subjective because it treats modesty as some kind of ever-moving target that we get to define, and therefore redefine, so as to make people more comfortable with their own behaviour. But it’s not. Biblically speaking, modesty in dress is an objective definition. We see God establishing this standard in Genesis 3:21,
“Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.”
The term here used to describe “clothing them” indicates the “wrapping” of a garment around somebody and typically describes someone being clothed roughly from the neck to the knee. The “aprons” that Adam and Eve made for themselves in verse 7 to cover their nakedness were essentially just girdles that went around the waist. This was insufficient for God and He took the initiative to clothe them sufficiently according to HIS will. Not covering one’s self this way is essentially nudity. This is God’s definition of what modesty is and it matters for far more than Beth Moore’s definition or that of your typical OnlyFans hussy.
Keep in mind that this standard applies to both sexes, so it covers “poasting physique” on social media as well, gents.
Remember that the purpose of modesty isn’t just to “keep men from lusting.” Using that as a reason to condemn “purity culture” is just an excuse, not a valid theology. Ultimately, the purpose is to please God by obedience to His will. If you’re a Christian, this is something you should want to do, not try to find ways to get around. The problem with dressing like a slut isn’t just that you’re “making some incel loser lust after you,” it’s that you’re sinning against God Himself. And just because you pat yourself on the back for being “a daughter of the King!” doesn’t mean that the world revolves around you, nor does it mean that we redefine biblical doctrine so that you don’t have a sad when someone criticises you. If you’re a daughter of the King then stop bringing shame to His name.
The sad fact of modern American Christianity is that it has a powerful lot of longhouse theology that has crept into it via women “preachers” and the like. Whatever else it may be, it is not historical Christian faith and doctrine and it definitely is not the church that was established by Jesus Christ. The source of this, rather, is the moral cancer of feminism which carries with it a great number of anti-spiritual assumptions. One of the most pertinent of these assumptions is that of victimhood, with women fulfilling that particular role in “longhouse Christianity.”
Now, we need to understand up front that victimhood as it is psychologically understood in modern parlance, is completely contrary to the historic Christian worldview. Even though there has been persecution of Christians throughout the history of the church, Christians have not historically used this as an attempt to psychologically manipulate people via victimhood. Indeed, the martyrs faced death with boldness. They viewed death for the Lord Jesus Christ as a victory, as a means of demonstrating in the most final way their loyalty to the King of Kings and obtaining triumph over the world system.
“And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Matthew 10:28)
To be a Christian is to be on the winning side in light of eternity.
On the other hand, feminism (as with the rest of the constellation of progressive ideologies) is fundamentally rooted in the dogma of victimhood. Women are “victims” of men, of patriarchy, of gender roles, of being asked to refrain from public nudity. As with other epistemes within progressivism, for feminism the more of a victim you are the more holy you are. It’s basically an emotional manipulation tactic.
But the thing about victimhood is that as with every other critical theory of every kind (and that is essentially what feminism is), it essentially removes agency from the victim. To be a victim is to cease to be an actor, to become instead a passive receptacle. This is why “Christian” feminists always talk about purity culture from the perspective of “men’s lust.” Women themselves bear no responsibility, because they have no agency. While proclaiming themselves to be “strong women,” they are essentially acting as though they have no capacity for personal moral decision-making. It doesn’t matter what they do, only what somebody else supposedly does to them. I’m sure they wouldn’t say as much, but this is the basic crux of where their ideology takes them.
Of course, when you lack agency, you will become somebody else’s tool, and such is the case with “Christian” feminists as much as it is with other progressives. For most of these folks, agency is exercised on their behalf by progressive elites of various sorts who have essentially made these proles into their clients in a patronage power system. Just as blacks in the critical race theory movement are basically just clients of various elites, so also are feminists, within and without professing Christianity. Either way, what they display is not Christianity and should not be accepted as such.
Of course, this is not to say that there aren’t some perks to this lack of agency. As with any victim theology, it’s psychologically and emotionally manipulative nature will create an incentive for “victims” displaying all the classic signs of narcissism to try to weaponise their patrons against The Other. You often see this in Evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity with “ex-vangelicals” or women claiming to be “recovering from fundamentalism.” In nearly all of these cases, they’re basically just women who were unhappy about being brought up according to biblical standards and once they got out into the world, they decided to try to “get back at” parents (often adoptive) who poured decades of love and care into them.
This is a lot more common that you’d think. Women - often still subscribing to some nominal longhouse-type Christianity - will accuse pastors or other church leaders of some kind of abuse. They count on the emotional manipulation of being the “poor victimised damsel” to invoke the intervention of their ideological patrons and outside observers. In most cases, the accusations are made decades after the supposed abuses took place, which obviously casts a great deal of legitimate doubt upon their credibility. But even these cynical attempts at “revenge” really showcase their own powerlessness as individuals.
What this highlights is that feminists and “longhouse Christians” really want two contradictory things. They want to be able to exercise “freedom” - and perhaps resent that in the past they weren’t able to do so, at least as “freedom” is defined by modern society as hedonism. Yet, they also want to pursue victimhood which, as we saw above, negates any claim to agency. In many ways, this is similar to the observation that you cannot have rights without responsibilities, because the exercise of rights carries with it certain obligations to others. Yet, those obligations carry the presupposition of capacity to choose to act or not act on them, which is something that only belongs to the genuinely free person. Essentially, you can have agency or you can have victimhood, but you can’t have both.
Incidentally, if you don’t have personal agency, then it’s highly questionable that you should have political agency, either. After all, if you’re basically just some elite patron’s client who does whatever you’re told, then you basically just participate so that your patron can game the system to their own advantage (something that people who believe in democracy claim to oppose…).
But be that as it may and getting back to the issue of the longhouse in the church, the whole “victimhood complex” needs to be rejected and resisted. Literally everything about it, as well as the long-term trend in the effeminisation of the church, is unscriptural and anti-Christian. Churches are allowing psychological witchcraft inside their doors and it needs to be expunged. Whether we’re talking about “purity culture” or any other issue, the Christian’s responsibility is to “Love not the world…” and that includes the world’s philosophy of victimhood and critical theory.
"Literally everything about it, as well as the long-term trend in the effeminisation of the church, is unscriptural and anti-Christian. Churches are allowing psychological witchcraft inside their doors and it needs to be expunged. Whether we’re talking about “purity culture” or any other issue, the Christian’s responsibility is to “Love not the world…” and that includes the world’s philosophy of victimhood and critical theory."
You nailed it. Christians are fighting a spiritual war within and without. How can we have cohesion? How can we have, to borrow the phrase, 'assabiyah' when we don't always know who is obedient to the Word of God and who is just wearing "Christianity" as a skinsuit?
I agree, Christians are on the winning side in the view of eternity. And yet, I believe too many of our brothers and sisters in the church are asleep to the spiritual and material rot that has infiltrated almost every denomination, so much so that vice becomes virtue and pastors worship Mammon as much as Christ.