Tim Carson and Tessi Muskrat

A native woman of Cherokee and Irish descent, Tessi Ynada Muskrat is a Counseling Psychology PhD student and researcher at the University of Missouri, USA. Co-founder of the international Purity Culture Research Collective (PCRC), Tessi’s research centers the voices of those who have experienced sexual and gender-based trauma in religious contexts. Her upcoming projects will examine the impact of purity culture’s gender binary on trans and nonbinary persons, and the ways in which post-purity culture adults achieve empowerment through healing from oppressive systems in religious spaces. When she’s not studying or researching, Tessi enjoys snuggling her cats, watching trees dance in the wind, and playing complex tabletop board games with friends.

Tim: Tessi, you’ve published an intriguing paper in which you have integrated such things as liminality, purity culture, and indigenous experience. I’d like to ask you some questions about those. Perhaps we can start with purity culture. For those of us who know very little about it because we didn’t grow up with it in either our families or religious lives, we are clueless. Could you help us understand what it is and how you participated in it?

Tessi: Yes, absolutely. The term purity culture has come to define the Christian abstinence-only- until-marriage movement that is still active today. I work mostly with Evangelical Christian Purity Culture which peaked in the late 1990s – early 2000s with things like the True Love Waits movement when we saw thousands of teenagers coming together in in arenas and signing pledges to save their sexual activity for marriage. This movement included political advocacy during both Clinton and Bush administrations as leaders worked on policy for abstinence-based education in public schools, which has been continuously funded since that time.

As for me and others who were part of a more “elite” portion of purity culture, there was a book that came out in 1998 entitled I Kissed Dating Goodbye and it became very, very popular. It emphasized not only saving sex for marriage, but all forms of intimacy as well. The intention was to be as pure as possible. We were to not only save sex for marriage, but also save kissing, snuggling, touching, and the emotional entanglement of a dating relationship. It was framed as saving all things for a future spouse as a gift, one that would be retained and then opened on the wedding day.

Tim: In your article I was interested to see just how ritualized the beginning of this rite of passage was. And I had no idea about how central the role of the father was as both ritual leader and carrier of the vows. You made this intriguing statement that in a sense daughters get married to their fathers during this liminal interval. You stated that the rite of passage can be indefinite, potentially continuing for extended periods of time, but that it either ends with a failure to keep the vow or betrothal.

Tessi: Yes, my argument in this paper is that for a certain cohort of people who have been impacted by purity culture, this period of time directly correlates with rites of passage. The argument is that people who intentionally enter purity culture begin with some sort of a pre-liminal ritual. True Love Waits rallies can serve as this. We separate people from their normal daily lives, place them in a specific separated community with others who share the same experience in their lives. We teach them specific things and ask them to make specific commitments. The opening of that rite of passage can look a lot of different ways. It depends where one is located, the family culture, the religious community. The pre-liminal ritual might include signing a purity vow, one made to God and the father figure. It came to include receiving and wearing a purity ring, a ring usually worn on the wedding ring finger and often presented by a father or father figure. There is within this idea the notion that the father serves as a kind of stand-in, a place-holder, a substitute spouse, until marriage occurs. The father maintains the continuity of patriarchal authority. The father romances the daughter and takes them on daddy-daughter dates or escorts the daughter to purity ball dances. In this manifestation of complementarianism, the father or the male head figure is is key to the way that everything is structured. I’m using gendered terms because for the most part the primary emphasis in purity culture, the primary drive and marketing, is always toward preserving the virginity of (mostly white) women. There was a token expectation that that boys would also make a vow of sexual purity. But most of the focus is on the chastity of girls. So, yes, patriarchal to the core.

Tim: What is the role of the mother in this?

Tessi: There is diversity depending on the situation in the family, the church, and whether or not a father is available. What I have found through my experience and my research is that the mother usually serves in a passive role. We find most of the mothers policing the experience of daughters during the liminal phase. The mothers are often those who enforce modesty rules for clothing. They’re often the ones who enforce how much a girl interacts with the opposite sex. They offer advice on the side about boys or men. But the expectation is that before any relationship begins the father is consulted and even asked for permission.

One of the interesting parallels purity culture and indigenous cultures is the way they rely on rites of passage coming of age rituals. But there are differences. Typically, in indigenous cultures the same gendered parent would be the person who is guiding and leading the adolescent through their rite of passage. The mothers and grandmothers are teaching the girls how to become women, how to take care of themselves, how to fill their roles, how to develop their skills, how to embrace or engage in their sexuality. So it is with fathers and grandfathers accompanying young men through their passages. The father or father figure is teaching a boy how to be a man. In purity culture, however, the father figure takes precedent across the board.

Tim: When the rites of passage conclude we have two inevitable endings, either fulfilling your vow or entering into a prescribed form of betrothal?

Tessi: Yes. For example, in my personal life I was 31 years old when I got married, and until that point I had maintained physical sexual virginity as I understood it. That was at least a 10 -year extension beyond what I had anticipated. I received a purity ring from my father when I was 13 and had an expectation that in about 10 years, give or take, I would have a husband, start having children, and doing all the things expected in adulthood. Since marriage was delayed for me, I struggled throughout my 20s, never feeling like I had stepped out of girlhood into womanhood. I had been living on my own, maintaining a job, running my own household, and still referred to myself as a girl. I’m not a wife, not a mother, haven’t born children, not caring for a man, not under a man’s authority, though I did place myself under my pastor’s authority.

The people for whom purity culture seems to have worked best were those who got married on the timeline they and others expected. They are rewarded and given a place in that culture and society. But for others the process is delayed and long. You are expected to shut down your sexuality during this whole time and then just turn it on for a wedding night, which doesn’t work well for most people.

Through my 20s I was in a weird place as a single person, still active in a church that expected me to be married by then, therefore, my status represented some kind of danger or threat.  Churches don’t know what to do with single adults, especially single adult women. Leadership positions are withheld. I was held with deep suspicion.

Tim: How did all this work out for you in terms of your indigenous culture and experience?

Tessi: I’m a biracial person. I’m Cherokee and European American. One of the pieces I feel I’m just beginning to understand is that there was from the beginning a dialed-up suspicion of me as a woman who comes from a matriarchal culture. Every time I would learn something about the Cherokee people, about my Cherokee heritage, that there have always been strong women throughout that heritage and throughout the culture, I also discovered that it was not accepted or allowed in the Christian culture I was being raised in. I was often told that I needed to step back, not take leadership, stop trying to wear the pants of the family or of the situation. As a result, I internalized that viewpoint and came to believe that I needed to get to the starting point of being a European-American woman. Even before I began to work on purity like every other girl would begin, I had another layer of perceived impurity to deal with, my Cherokee heritage. This brings us face-to-face with inherent white nationalism and racism out of which purity culture arose. When I have interviewed other women of color, they have talked about similar things, that they have faced double standards during rites of passage. Their dress was more scrutinized, and they were sexualized in ways their white peers were not.

Tim: How has your connection with your Cherokee identity presented additional challenges, especially as regards rites of passage?

Tessi: I think one of the hard things was my being so disconnected from my culture, from the Cherokee people. I feel like those rituals are something I craved, but the Cherokee were Europeanized very early, and we attempted to assimilate into the larger culture. As a result, we lost many of the life-giving rituals, many of which were destroyed and colonized by European culture.

Tim: To extend our conversation into present social political dynamics, if you’re a person like me, and the trauma of purity culture is not in my background, when we are faced with political-religious activists attempting to enforce their sexual mores through legislation and judicial rulings, I might feel indignation, I might push back. But trauma has not been activated. What is it like for someone dealing with their legacy of purity culture when those public facing actions take place?

Tessi: That’s a great question. One piece of this is if you are a person who doesn’t fit a gender binary in a clear and easy for people to understand, if you’re not cisgender, if you’re transgender, if you’re gender expansive, or if your partnering is not going to look like cisgender monogamy in order for you to live into your full self, then there’s no way to not be a dangerous person in this culture.

Tim: That would include any political actions that coerce religio-politically based sexual norms. What is the emotional effect of that on those recovering from purity culture trauma?

Tessi: Those of us who don’t fit those racial or sexual or gender identities have just layers upon layers upon layers to dig out of that can start with religious deconstruction, can start with political deconstruction. There are lots of different pieces, but when you’ve embodied being a person who’s dangerous, viewed as dangerous by your family, by your church, by your culture, and then you are in a milieu where these sorts of narratives are now in the media, are now coming out of, have come out of the mouths of presidents, are coming out of the legislature, it’s so familiar and it activates all of that trauma of being treated as an outcast while you were within that liminal space as an adolescent or young adult.

Tim: I want to thank you for our time together in this important conversation, and for your really fine piece of work.

Tessi: It is absolutely my pleasure.