I really appreciated this post from Allison Murray at Women in Theology critiquing evangelical purity culture, and exploring how sometimes overly focusing on avoiding a thing somehow still keeps that thing central, which is its own form of idolatry:
A Bible study teacher I had once tried to get us to think more critically about the idea of idols. She said that idols were, yes, things in life that we gave too much attention or allowed to drive our lives in place of our faith (listing some of the usual suspects in these types of discussions: money, fame, power, sex, etc.). But she also encouraged us to think about how the desire to flee from idols can end up shaping our lives just as drastically as when we centre them. One might, out of a desire to not let thirst for material comfort take hold, decide to live as a modern-day ascetic, and spend their life running away from money. What if, she posited, an idol wasn’t only something we ran towards, but something we ran full-steam-ahead away from? What if we think about idols as something that we give undue power and authority in our lives, either negatively or positively?
In their pursuit of uprightness and sexual morality, the evangelical purity industrial complex still ends up making a negative idol of sex. Fleeing from it makes it present everywhere, but in a haunting, overbearing present absence/absent presence kind of way.
I did it anyway – haunted by the battles (Allison Murray)
I read the “Every man’s battle” books she critiques at a formative time in my teenage years… I’m grateful I read healthier books about sexuality and the spirituality involved in it too. A few decades later even hearing the name of the book was a throw-back, but the critique I find useful.
There’s probably lingering ways that ideology has influenced me I should be aware of, and there’s still a tonne of people in churches who are being told this worldview is the true one… when it’s not, and it can be pretty unhealthy!
(I will say, those books did have some positive impacts – it helped me learn self control when it comes to the Male Gaze – which aligns with some feminist values: they’re not completely opposite worldviews! But she points out plenty that’s wrong with the worldview and I agree.)