ABC News found a 2015 German TV segment that examined a grotesque ritual popular with ultra-conservative Christians: purity balls. Father-daughter pairs dress up in wedding-like attire to attend balls, which culminate in daughters signing a “purity pledge” promising they won’t have sex before marriage.
Purity balls are creepy and gross but not uncommon among far-right evangelicals. The German TV segment is only significant eight years later because the father-daughter pair featured on the program is current Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Mike Johnson (R-LA) and his then 13-year-old daughter.
Johnson, his wife Kelly, and his daughter participated in interviews for the segment, which was posted on the German news channel’s website.
The news segment also features interviews with Johnson’s daughter, who is now in her 20s, and shows her at the purity ball pledging to her father “to make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future husband, and my future children … to a lifetime of purity, including sexual purity,” in between shots of Johnson nodding along in agreement.
In one brief interview clip, Johnson’s wife Kelly Johnson, a Christian counselor, told the German news outlet, “We don’t talk to her about contraception. Sex before marriage is simply out of the question.”
For no particular reason, I looked up the states with the highest rates of “nonmarital” births. Louisiana was #2 after Mississippi. Interesting!
I don’t speak German, but my guess is the tone of the TV segment is “look at these weird puritanical parents — the poor kids!” That’s the correct tone. I grew up Southern Baptist-adjacent (my mom’s father was a preacher), and the “purity” mindset is coercive, unrealistic, infantilizing and downright abusive, IMO.
There’s nothing wrong with parents encouraging adolescents to wait until they are more mature and emotionally ready for intimate relationships. Most of us who are parents have probably had awkward conversations with our offspring communicating that idea.
That’s not what’s happening with the purity ball set. What’s happening is men are facilitating a future transfer of “undamaged goods” to other men. They’re protecting the breeding stock.
In the article, ABC News quotes Linda Kay Klein, who wrote “Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free.” Here’s her take on purity culture:
“In my book I talk about eternal girlhood,” Klein said. “There’s this way in which purity culture attempts to create this eternal girlhood among girls — you never really grow up, you never really have headship over your own life. You ultimately are there to be guided by and to support and to champion and to be led by somebody greater than you: a man.”
“People often think about it from a purity ball perspective, like, ‘Oh, that’s creepy.’ You’ve got the father with the daughter in a wedding-like ballgown,” Klein said. “But I actually find myself also thinking about what that means when you have your headship transferred over to your husband and what the girl has internalized from that.”
Well, yeah. And kudos to Klein for escaping that hyper-patriarchal shit-show.
I hope the country is as determined and fortunate as Klein is. A fanatic like Johnson would absolutely establish a Republic of Gilead if given half a chance. Therefore, it’s disturbing that such a zealot is now second in line to the presidency. To paraphrase something Mr. Cole once said, I’d be willing to serve as human bubble wrap for Biden and Harris to prevent Johnson from moving up.
Open thread.
