How Religion Lost Its Monopoly On Purity
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Before my interest in theology, I was an occasional dabbler in the thoughts and practices of the ‘New Age’ as well as a keen user of Instagram. Like many other women of my generation, I was oft swept up in fashionable but vague trends concerning my ‘wellness’, an umbrella term for various diets, types of exercise, meditation, pseudo-religious philosophies and even skin care products.
This phenomenon was explored in depth by theologian Tara Isabella Burton in her excellent book, Strange Rites. Before I had even read Dr. Burton’s book, however, I had already noticed this creeping mix of crystals, yoga, veganism, tarot cards, and influencers — all of whom were attractive, thin, and young white woman, using words and phrases like ‘manifestation’, ‘self-care’, and ‘living your truth’.
As Burton points out, these online communities behave like religions. Healthy eating gurus, for example, might use the phrase ‘clean eating’ to describe eating foods that are natural and unprocessed. The choice may be a healthy one, but the phrase can imply that those who do not or cannot make these same diet choices are, by default, unclean or impure.
In 2019, Yovana Mendoza, an influencer who claimed to eat only uncooked vegan food, was caught enjoying cooked fish at a restaurant in another influencer’s video and was subsequently hounded for days on social media for this transgression. After being excommunicated by her fanbase, she posted a 33-minute video explaining how she’d reincluded eggs and fish in her diet after suffering serious, debilitating health problems like missing her periods for two years.
Her experiences of being hounded online once she changed back to a conventional diet have been repeated several times with other former vegan influencers. What wasn’t commentated on at the time was that the dozens of influencers like Yovana Mendoza would never have accumulated their large cult-like followings if aspirational young woman did not have a profound interest and a visceral desire for ‘purity’ especially if it comes with the added side-effect of thinness.
As religion retreated from mainstream life, the ‘wellness industry’ pulled the most remarkable coup by redefining the concept of purity as what you consume rather than what you do, or the moral state of your soul. The wellness industry then preys on this desire by commodifying purity through making it an expensive lifestyle choice.
This is not the first time the concept of purity has been twisted beyond its original Christian meaning. The ‘purity culture’, driven by fundamentalist Protestant denominationss in the United States that over-associated purity with sexual behavior, have already distorted the true meaning of purity beyond recognition. In these groups, the rules of what constitutes pure behavior are so stringent that many former members report that they are still unable to talk about sex or even enjoy sex within their marriages. I suspect the wellness industry’s redefinition of purity is, in part, a secular reaction to the Bible Belt’s evangelical purity cults.
Purity seems to have an inherent attractiveness to people even as what we desire to keep ‘pure’ — the body, the mind, the soul — continues to change. Wellness grifters of every shape, size and creed have popped up to fill this niche in the market with new ways to work out, new meditation apps, new sticks of incense to purify your home, and other ways to plug the holes left by traditional religions.
But there’s another reason why secular society needs purity to be based on something other than sex. We now live in a world that sees sexual immorality as inevitable, unpreventable, and something young people are being told they must accept it as a de rigueur part of their lives. Polyamory is no longer scandalous; it is a lifestyle choice. Adultery has been destigmatized to the point where there are apps available to facilitate it.
The wellness definition of purity feels so hollow because it purely concerns the material world. There may be some ritual comfort in burning sage or forgoing meat. To me, the pitfall of the wellness industry’s definition of purity is obvious. I don’t know a single woman who would prefer to be married to an adulterous, criminal, vegan husband over a faithful, lawabiding husband who consumes the occasional hamburger.
Wellness purity is a form of escapism from one’s own idea of impurity rather than a genuine attempt to be a better person. Young people will do almost anything to look like they’re pure or align themselves with an identity that is perceived as pure, but when it comes to being morally pure, that’s more difficult.
Buying and consuming organic fruit smoothies is expensive but it’s easy. Making an earnest confession to another human being is challenging and uncomfortable, even in the privacy of the confessional — even when gratis.
Neither the wellness industry’s twisted version of purity nor the virginity worshipping cults’ definition of purity is what Christian purity ever was or was ever meant to be.
Thank you for reading — I hope you found my thoughts interesting. You can find links to my other work here: https://linktr.ee/sayde.scarlett
