#A real criticism of the idea of cultural Christianity is it tends to assume purity in thought w/o cross pollination

[bijoumikhawal]

honestly my hot take is you can end up being culturally Christian if your family is irreligious enough even if all of you belong to a completely different religion, and even if you aren't irreligious being a minority within a majority means the majority culture and customs impacts you, whether you adopt those customs or run from them

[nonbinarypastels]

Do you know when/how/why "purity culture" started being used on tumblr to refer to people pushing for moral purity in fandoms and politics? When I left the church and started doing research to better understand what happened to me there, I only ever encountered the term as specifically referring to the intense focus on sexual and emotional purity before marriage, and it's really weird and slightly uncomfortable and confusing for me to see it used in this context. (1/2)

(2/2) I'm not entirely opposed to the term being used this way - terminology changes all the time - but it threw me for a loop the first time I saw it and I'm kind of worried that using the same term for both things could take the focus away from survivors of religious hyper-policing of sexuality, so I think a discussion about it would be useful (and you always seem super reasonable about this sort of thing, which I really appreciate). Thanks in advance!

I don't know exactly when 'purity culture' was first used within fandom discussions or who first used it in that context, though I would assume it would have been some time in the last two years or so considering that's the time frame by which this particular sort of fadom disc/ourse came about, so I'm unfortunately not really able to answer you there.

As for the why, though:

'Purity culture' is most often used in the context of fandom and politics to describe a movement where people are seeking complete moral, political, and individual 'purity', essentially seeking for everything and everyone to meet an impossible standard of perfection and---when that standard is inevitably not reached---shunning and punishing people for not meeting those standards. This is often (though not always) a mindset that seeks to attack people for their expressions of sexuality and I've seen it theorized by multiple people who take part in these discussions regularly that this 'purity culture' in the context of fandom has roots in Christian conservativism, that though the people who perpetuate this culture may not consider themselves to be conservatives or religious that they have internalized a lot of the same rhetoric that conservative religious sects push (likely due to being raised in a conservative religious environment themselves) and are repeating it without actually realizing it.

This basically works off the idea that while it's not exactly the same as purity culture in the context of religious sects hyper-policing sexuality in real-world actions (e.g. who people actually date and have sex with), it has a lot of the same roots---the majority of people in fandom are women and a lot of the major disc/ourse topics WRT to purity culture in this context essentially boil down to women expressing their sexuality through fiction, writing and shipping, and people taking issue with that. It's been thought, then, that a lot of the policing of what content people consume is built off of the same misogynistic policing of women's sexuality outside of fandom except rather than policing who women can have sex with/how much and what kind of sex they can have, it's policing their fantasies instead.

As someone who was also raised in an extremely conservative Christian household, I see a lot of parallels between the kind of 'purity culture' that is criticized in the context of fandom and the culture I was raised in. Both seek to police fantasies and actions (particularly sexual ones) because they do not meet the standards of purity set forth by an authority (whether this be the church, parents, or a sect in fandom; an individual or a community hivemind), both attach a sense of 'purity' to individuals and considers them to lose that purity when they take part in certain actions (having sex, having the 'wrong' kind of sex, having certain fantasies or reading certain content), and both consider a loss of purity to essentially mean a loss of humanity and loss of any right a person may have to basic respect and kindness (shunning from the church or the community vs. shunning from the fandom, a person being deserving of scorn from their neighbors vs. them being deserving of cyberbullying and harassment campaigns). Fandom's purity culture and religion's purity culture also tend to have the same targets---not only women but also LGBTQIA+ people, mentally ill people, people of color---and it tends to rely a lot on the concept of 'thought crimes' (that your thoughts/fantasies are as equal to your actions, that thinking negatively or thinking 'impure' things makes you a bad person who must 'repent' or else you're 'condemned') which is a main componenet of religious purity culture as well.

I think that, basically, a lot of purity culture as we discuss it WRT to fandom has a lot in common with purity culture as it relates to religious conservativism and the policing of sexuality there, it's only that these cultures are taking place in different venues with fandom's purity culture taking place primarily online and religious purity culture taking place primarily offline and that purity culture as it's used in the context of fandom is often divorced from being blatantly religiously motivated (meaning that no one is saying outright "reading this fiction is bad because it makes you impure in the eyes of God" and most are likely not even thinking it, and yet the undertones and the concept of purity and the scorn that one is faced with when they do something that is 'impure' are still there).

As for whether using purity culture in the context of fandom is taking focus away from survivors of religious purity culture...I think that fandom purity culture has enough of an attachment to that same religious conservativism that it can accurately be considered a form of purity culture but I also see how people who are talking about purity culture in terms of religious manipulation and abuse want/need a term to talk about that and only that, where they can search for information and connect with one another about the subject without finding a tag full of fandom dsic/ourse. I think maybe the solution then is to be more specific in how we label these things---perhaps use 'fandom purity culture' when we talk about it WRT fandom, 'religious purity culture' or 'Christian purity culture' when it's WRT religion, 'political purity culture' when it's WRT politics, etc. Because while I think all of these things have roots in the same ideology, they all also have their own unique issues that aren't shared by the others. In a venn diagram of fandom purity culture and Christian purity culture, there's overlap yes, but there's also a section on either side that doesn't overlap with the other.

In any case, I definitely think this is something that should be discussed more and I don’t think I have enough context/information to speak about this topic more in-depth so I’m tagging @fiction-is-not-reality​ @shipwhateveryouwant​ @anti-anti-kitten​ @antipurity​ @anti-anti-survivor​ because I feel like y’all might have some more context/thoughts on this that I don’t?