"Purity Culture" emerged in the 1990s as conservative Christians sought to promote sexual abstinence before marriage. It was, however, part of a larger religious tendency to see correctness or "doing the right things the right way" as the core of spirituality.

We can see this broader, deeply performative, tendency operative in all sorts of places, even well outside conservative Christian spaces. And, in many of those places, it becomes a suffocating approach to life that subordinates life to an unhealthy ideal.

Part one of a three part series.