What happens when you link national renewal to the sexual lives of teenagers? This is exactly what evangelical purity culture did in the 1990s. In this first episode, host Dr. Sara Moslener recounts the history and details of purity culture's advent, leaving us with an important question: If sexual purity is the way to restore the nation - what does "purity" mean when we go beyond individual sexual decisions to a vision for our nation? In the case of the United States, the answer is surprising: the national vision cultivated in purity culture has historical roots in White supremacy. Subscribe to Pure White: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pure-white/id1718974286 To purchase Virgin Nation: https://massivebookshop.com/products/9780199987764 To Subscribe to Chew On This, A Newsletter from the After Purity Project: https://afterpurity.substack.com Axis Mundi Media: www.axismundi.us Homework for Episode Two: https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html

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Episode 1: Prelude to a Reckoning

A podcast about the White supremacist origins of evangelical purity culture with historian Dr. Sara Moslener.  

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In this final episode of Pure White analyses how myths of white women’s innocence are deployed to demonstrate national innocence. The events of January 6, 2020 included several white women who willfully disobeyed the law. When arrested, many claimed innocence despite evidence of their illegal behavior. Ashli Babbitt became well-known as a martyr to the cause of White Christian Nationalism. Early reports of her death focused on her innocence in an effort to exonerate the insurrectionists.  
 Subscribe to Pure White: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pure-white/id1718974286 To purchase Virgin Nation: https://massivebookshop.com/products/9780199987764 To Subscribe to Chew On This, A Newsletter from the After Purity Project: https://afterpurity.substack.com Axis Mundi Media: www.axismundi.us The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-undertow-scenes-from-a-slow-civil-war-jeff-sharlet/18515351?ean=9781324006497 
    

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Ep. 8: The Myths and Martyrs of White Christian Nationalism

This episode examines how the True Love Waits and the Southern Baptist church influenced Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform bill with an amendment that created funding for abstinence-only education. This pairing demonstrates how myths about sexual purity deeply impact how the system uses the assumption of sexual purity as a normative experience to reinforce poverty, racism, and misogyny. Subscribe to Pure White: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pure-white/id1718974286 Axis Mundi Media: www.axismundi.us To purchase Virgin Nation: https://massivebookshop.com/products/9780199987764 To Subscribe to Chew On This, A Newsletter from the After Purity Project: https://afterpurity.substack.com Re-thinking Sexual Citizenship by Jyl Josephson https://sunypress.edu/Books/R/Rethinking-Sexual-Citizenship

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Episode 7: Purity Culture and Welfare Reform

This episode focuses on the organization True Love Waits and its founding as a highly ambitious campaign to transform the diversity of sexual cultures, expressions, and ethics in the US into a singular ethic based on Christian principles. While doing so, the campaign also contributed to the culture of abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention by sacralizing the practice of victim blaming.  For anyone experiencing sexual or gender-based violence in their religious community: https://intoaccount.org/our-team/ Staying Alive, How Martyrdom Made Me a Warrior by Stephanie Krehbiel https://mla.bethelks.edu/ml-archive/2006Dec/krehbiel.php The Myth of Colorblind Christians by Jesse Curtis https://nyupress.org/9781479809370/the- myth-of-colorblind-christians/

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Episode 6: True Love Waits and Sexual Accountability

Emmett Till. Lionel Richie. The Atlanta Massacre.  This episode looks at how the legacy of lynching remains active in the promotion of myths of sexual danger which even today promote white women’s sexual purity and racial innocence.  It examines several cases over 7 decades that demonstrate how this myth remains an active part of the white racial imagination. Includes discussion of Caroline Bryant, the Lionel Ritchie urban myth, the Central Park jogger, Central Park dog lady, and the Atlanta Shooting Subscribe to Pure White: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pure-white/id1718974286 To purchase Virgin Nation: https://massivebookshop.com/products/9780199987764 To Subscribe to Chew On This, A Newsletter from the After Purity Project: https://afterpurity.substack.com ﻿“The Flaw at the Center of Purity Culture” by Angie Hong. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/purity-culture-evangelical-church-harms- women/618438/

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Episode 5: Myths of Sexual Danger

This episode is named after an especially violent time in US history immediately following Reconstruction in the US South.  Frequent racial-terror lynchings were justified by what journalist Ida B. Wells called the lynching myth. The myth was rooted in two racialized stereotypes: sexually violent black men and sexually pure white women. When Wells publicized her analysis, she found herself in conflict with white women such as Frances Willard, a prominent social purity activist. Their debate offers significant insight into how white Victorians utilized sexual purity to signal their own racial supremacy. Subscribe to Pure White: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pure-white/id1718974286 To purchase Virgin Nation: https://massivebookshop.com/products/9780199987764 To Subscribe to Chew On This, A Newsletter from the After Purity Project: https://afterpurity.substack.com Southern Horrors and Other Writings by Ida B. Wells https://bookshop.org/p/books/southern-horrors-ida-b-wells-barnett/92999?ean=9781502768001

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Episode 1: Prelude to a Reckoning

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