As myths of white purity and national greatness animate American politics today, Sara Moslener argues that these themes are not new. The purity culture of the 1990s, with its pledges and rings, was built on the same myths of sexual and racial purity that undergirded the government’s response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, and restrictive immigration acts in the late nineteenth century.
Sara Moslener teaches at Central Michigan University; her first book was Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence (Oxford University Press, 2015). In December, she published After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America (Beacon, 2025), which draws on archival research and interviews with purity-culture survivors. In this conversation, she argues that in order to understand the present moment and seek healing for many survivors of purity culture, we must confront disembodiment and white supremacy at the heart of the purity philosophies today.
Emma Cieslik: In After Purity, you investigate the myths that surround the innocence of bodies, white racial identity, and national greatness—ideas that are timely for our cultural moment. Drawing on interviews with people affected by purity culture, interviews that were part of your After Purity Project, what were your major takeaways from these conversations, and what prompted you to write this book?
Sara Moslener: I started doing the interviews during the [COVID-19] pandemic, and I did over sixty interviews. The main thing that I got out of those was this theme of disembodiment. We can certainly think about the sexual harm—women and girls not being allowed to claim ownership of their bodies, and the implications of that. In 2015, scholars began to talk about purity culture in the context of rape culture. Now there is significant research about that, as well as growing conversations about sexuality, including the erasure of sexual and gender minorities.
But we can also talk about whiteness, and the way that whiteness as a racial category is also a project in disembodiment. White people are socialized into a world where we don’t think about race. We’re not expected to, and that shapes everything about the way we think about the history of the United States, the way we think about sexuality and contemporary politics.
EC: As a purity-culture survivor, I really connect to how these philosophies encourage people to deny bodily experience as inherently sinful or destructive to a spiritual end. How is this connected to other systems of bodily harm, specifically ableism, diet culture, systems of police brutality, and the hypersexualization of Black bodies?
SM: I think white supremacy and the patriarchy are the big culprits, and this idea of bodies being bad, which is related to this idea that the feminine is bad and needs to be controlled—the body needs to be controlled by the mind. All of this conversation about classical dualism is still very prominent in our culture. We can see more clearly now how dualism is so limiting, but seeing it isn’t the same as learning how to embody it. Now it’s dangerous, especially for trans people, to be out. We’re really in this time where we’re wanting to double down on these dualisms.
We have, in the United States, a history of distinguishing between good bodies and bad bodies, good meaning controlled and bad meaning unruly. If we go back to arguments in favor of slavery, there was the argument that these are people who cannot govern themselves. They cannot physically control their bodies enough to be able to contribute to society, therefore they need to be controlled. That idea is so foundational, and we see that these practices, many of which are rooted in Christianity, in a denial of the body, are just about controlling our bodies and seeing our bodies as an impediment. The idea that there is a pure version of us is very gnostic.
What bodies are good bodies? What bodies are good citizens? I grew up under the shadow of the religious right, and a good citizen wasn’t dependent on the state and was self-sufficient. If you have any kind of disability, you need resources, and that can be perceived as a drain, similar to the way people use the welfare system. We see the real push towards privatization, which evangelical Christians have been behind since the 1980s. That is part of the legacy of Reagan, that we privatized all of these things, and when you do that, you give Christian organizations so much power. If you don’t need those resources, you have the right kind of body, or you need to do the right kinds of things with your body so that you deserve those things. It’s all about what bodies deserve and what bodies are performing goodness, what bodies are supporting the stability of the nation-state by not depending on it.
That’s been part of the conservative rhetoric since at least the 1980s, the idea that bodies become an impediment to a strong nation-state, whether because of sexual desire, physical or mental issues, impairment or disability. When you throw white supremacy into that framework, we have a long history. In 1790, the first federal naturalization law indicated that in order to become a citizen, you had to be white.
There were ways of expansion for Native Americans and freed slaves over time, but whiteness, for most of the history of the United States, including the colonial period, has always been the foundational requirement for being a citizen. We’ve always had the United States built on these assumptions of who can be a citizen and who’s going to contribute to the greatness of our nation-state.
In conservative rhetoric, bodies are an impediment to a strong nation-state, whether because of sexual desire, physical or mental issues, impairment or disability.
EC: What you’re saying reflects how in [November 2025], Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed visa officers to consider obesity and other chronic health conditions as justification to deny people visas to the United States. There is a deep history dating back to the Immigration Acts of 1882 and 1891 where people were denied citizenship on the basis that they could become a public charge.
This also reminds me that America witnessed the rise of the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century, and it also recorded some of the highest rates of forced sterilization of women, policing not only people’s bodies but the ways in which people can reproduce and have access to reproductive care, which is something we see today.
SM: Yes, absolutely, and then you connect this with the eugenics movement and growing understandings of disability. This is when they started in the early twentieth century having children take intelligence tests. [There was t]his idea that we don’t want the “degenerates” coming into the United States. We don’t want people with diseases. We don’t want people who are genetically inferior. So this stuff about obesity, that’s eugenics rhetoric.
We have seen the results of those projects with the Holocaust in Germany, and there has been no learning around it. Within the After Purity argument there is this willful ignorance, because I think a lot of people don’t understand how much American eugenics informed what happened in Germany. It was right after slavery had ended, and the United States was so intense about controlling bodies, but this is a history that we’ve decided to collectively ignore. These are not histories that get taught or that we learn about.
EC: How does this tie into American innocence and exceptionalism myths, which continue to surround American colonization and control of Black and brown bodies?
SM: The narratives around the United States are all exceptionalist and improvement-based. Even the new Ken Burns documentary is around the idea that there was a pure democracy at the very beginning of the country. This is an innocent myth, the idea that the United States was this great experiment that has done amazing things. If that’s your starting point, and you’re trying to maintain that starting point, there’s so much you have to close your eyes to within American history. We need to step away from narratives of American exceptionalism and progress. That is straight-up propaganda rooted in white supremacy.
After Purity is about this erasure. In order for innocent myths to be sustained, there are certain bodies, certain histories, that need to be erased. I think of John Gast’s image of Manifest Destiny, where a white woman floats across the sky representing American progress and civilization, pushing Native Americans off their land, and bringing … trains, and white men with commerce. For so long, this idea of U.S. greatness has been so tied to erasure. Genocide is one example of that, especially Native American genocide, but erasure comes in many forms, and in all of this, the image that is reified is white womanhood. White womanhood has been constructed to require that white women sort of maintain purity within themselves, as a way to maintain the purity of, the innocence of, the nation-state. When the purity movement resurfaced in the 1990s, it was this recapitulation of the nineteenth-century nation of sexual purity that was highly racialized.
It wasn’t something accessible to enslaved women, to other women of color, to immigrant women. It was this ideal of true womanhood that became connected to this idea of a strong nation-state. That rhetoric was then used to justify racial-terror lynchings. If white women were threatened, physically, bodily, culturally, they have the right to claim things. This was often used as a guise to justify violence and murder, especially against Black men. It even ties to the concept of “Karen” and the entitlement of white women, where they can weaponize their vulnerability.
EC: With all this in mind, what is “after purity” in the context of your book, and how can people, including survivors of purity culture, begin to examine the aftereffects of purity culture in our American psyche and politics today?
SM: “After purity” for a lot of people focuses on healing and recovery [and] learning to embrace your sexuality. It’s important work, but it’s often repeating some of the same problems, in that it only sees purity culture as a project in sex and gender. It’s always been a project in white supremacy and anti-Blackness. And for those of us who are white, it formed our white racial identity.
One of the constant tensions in my writing, in my thinking, and in my teaching is how we connect what happens on the individual level with what is happening on the collective level. We tend to hyperindividualize, and that’s what we’re seeing with the purity culture healing, when we need to think about patriarchy and white supremacy. We need to do that intersectional work in order to see the cultural purity norms that have allowed individuals to be socialized into whiteness, into femininity. If we’re not working on both of those levels, we’re missing some key parts.