Religious and Purity Culture Healing

The Messages We Received

For many women, sexuality was shaped by religious or purity culture messages:

Your body is dangerous. It tempts others. It must be hidden, controlled, managed.

Desire is sinful. Sexual feelings outside marriage (and sometimes within it) are wrong. Wanting is shameful.

Purity is your value. Your worth is tied to your virginity, your “purity.” Sexual activity outside sanctioned bounds diminishes you.

Sex is for men. Women endure it, permit it, give it. Female desire is particularly suspicious.

Pleasure is suspect. Even in marriage, pleasure—especially female pleasure—is uncomfortable territory.

The body is separate from the spirit. The body is lower, base, to be transcended. Spirit good, flesh bad.

These messages may have been explicit or absorbed through silence and implication. Either way, they shape sexuality long into adulthood.

How These Messages Manifest

Shame about desire: Feeling sexual arousal is wrong or dirty. Hiding your desire even from yourself.

Difficulty with pleasure: Even when sex is “allowed,” pleasure feels inappropriate. Women may be able to give but not receive.

Dissociation during sex: Leaving the body to avoid the discomfort of physical sensation.

Performance of purity: Even as adults, performing sexual naivety or disinterest because that’s what “good women” do.

Vaginismus and pain: The body physically refusing penetration, sometimes as a manifestation of psychic conflict.

Guilt after sex: Even in marriage, even when desired—feeling dirty afterward.

Split sexuality: Separating sex into “good” (procreative, marital, restrained) and “bad” (pleasurable, passionate, desirous). Being unable to integrate them.

Inability to communicate about sex: Not having language for sexuality because it was never spoken of.

The Complication

For many women, the religious tradition that carries these harmful messages also carries deep meaning, community, and connection to the divine. You may not want to leave your faith—and you shouldn’t have to.

The work isn’t necessarily rejecting religion. It’s disentangling the cultural accretions of shame from the core of faith. Many religious traditions have strands that affirm embodiment, pleasure, and the goodness of creation—including sexual creation.

You can keep what nourishes you and release what harms you.

The Healing Path

Examine the Messages

What specifically did you learn? From whom? Bring the implicit into conscious awareness.

Write them down: “My body is dangerous.” “Good girls don’t want sex.” “Pleasure is selfish.”

Seeing them clearly begins to diminish their power.

Question the Source

Where did these messages come from? Are they actually from scripture, or from cultural interpretation? Are they from God, or from men’s fear of female sexuality?

Many purity culture messages have more to do with patriarchal control than spiritual truth. Distinguishing can be liberating.

Find Alternative Voices

Seek out religious or spiritual voices that affirm embodiment and sexuality. They exist in every tradition:

Christian writers who see sex as sacred gift
Jewish traditions that emphasize sexual pleasure as mitzvah (commandment)
Feminist theologians reworking harmful narratives
Spiritual directors who integrate body and spirit

You don’t have to figure this out alone. Others have walked this path.

Body-Based Practices

The body needs experiences that counter the messages of shame:

Pleasurable touch that feels good, not guilty
Movement that celebrates the body
Practices that connect body and spirit (yoga, dance, embodied prayer)
Gradual exposure to sensation without the shame response

Grief

There’s real loss here—years of missed pleasure, shame you didn’t deserve, distorted relationship with your own body.

Allow grief. The messages weren’t your fault, and their impact is real.

Professional Support

For deeply embedded religious sexual shame, working with a therapist who understands this intersection can be invaluable. Look for someone who can hold both your faith and your healing.

For Those Still Religious

Some women lose faith through this process. Others deepen it.

If you remain religious, you may find:

Sexuality becomes a form of worship, a celebration of creation
The body becomes a site of divine encounter, not something to transcend
Physical intimacy becomes a metaphor for spiritual intimacy—and vice versa
You develop your own theology of sexuality that integrates desire and devotion

Your sexuality and your spirituality don’t have to be at war.

For Partners

If your partner carries religious sexual shame:

Don’t mock or dismiss their beliefs
Be patient with the slow process of untangling
Understand that shame responses aren’t about you
Don’t pressure them to act against their conscience
Celebrate their progress

A Different Inheritance

The messages you received were not the only possible messages. You can create a different inheritance:

Your body is good.
Desire is natural and can be sacred.
Pleasure is a gift to be received.
You are whole, not diminished by sexuality.
Body and spirit are not enemies.

Go Deeper

These are the original writings this entry draws from: