Chapter 1: Original Sin
From People's Chosen God, by Chad Hayes
Content warning:
Purity culture is by its nature heteronormative and demands rigid gender stereotypes. It is impossible to discuss this topic without using heavily gendered and heteronormative language. For the purposes of this book, I will be using the terms “girls,” “women,” “boys,” and “men” primarily in the way they were used by those within the purity culture movement. It is certainly not my intent to erase or invalidate any members of the LGBTQIA+ community, many of whom have suffered significantly because of purity culture, and I have tried to use language that is as inclusive as possible when I can. Additionally, many of the harms perpetrated by purity culture involve sexual abuse of children or adults, or the mishandling of reports of sexual abuse by religious authorities. I also discuss intimate partner violence throughout the book. Additionally, the Bible just contains a lot of potentially triggering shit.
Introduction
I was going to write a book about purity culture, but as I started, I realized just how enmeshed purity culture is with the other toxic aspects of the evangelical church: racism, misogyny, Christian nationalism, and various forms of abuse both within the church and otherwise. The problem isn’t purity culture, it’s the insatiable appetite for power that fostered it along with all these other things, and I don’t think it’s possible (or wise) to disentangle them.
I am writing this book from the perspective of a cis-gender, straight, white man who grew up in the dominant religion in America, and I want to recognize that privilege from the outset. There have been many people that have been harmed more by purity culture than I was. Many gender non-conforming children, teens, and adults in the evangelical subculture have suffered severely or died from suicide due to the lack of affirmation from those around them. Many non-heterosexual people have spent decades closeted, unable to be their true selves around those who should support them most, struggling to reconcile who they are with the teachings of the Bible—or at least how those teachings are interpreted within evangelicalism. And countless women have suffered tremendous shame and guilt because of the church’s subjugation and the concept of “purity,” leaving them with a lifetime of difficult work to undo this damage and to see themselves as the valuable, autonomous, strong, and beautiful women that they are.
I don’t pretend to be able to speak to their experiences myself, and would strongly encourage readers to read their stories and hear their voices directly. While I will describe several ways in which purity culture harmed me directly, my main goal as a straight, cis-gender white man writing a book about a system designed to benefit people like me is to show how purity culture indirectly harms subjugated groups by influencing the thoughts and behaviors of the privileged.
My escape from purity culture and evangelicalism ended with me leaving religion altogether, but many other people land in progressive Christian circles, or in some other religious or spiritual community. There are a lot of amazing progressive Christians that are fighting the same fights as me. For those of you who have been harmed by the evangelical church and its teachings, I hope there is love, respect, support, and fulfillment wherever you’ve landed, or wherever you land.
Finally, it is evangelicalism as a system, not individuals in my life, that is the target of my critique. I grew up with parents that loved me unconditionally—and still do, despite our significant religious and political disagreements. They’ve been there for me through the darkest moments in my life, and I have no doubt that every decision they made for me as a child was a decision they thought was in my best interest. Likewise, I truly believe that the majority of the teachers and church leaders from my past had no ill intent and were acting in the way that they thought best, given the beliefs that had been instilled in them throughout their lives. But the theology of white evangelical Christianity is toxic.
Chapter 1: Original Sin
And the LORD God said,“The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” -Genesis 3:22 (NIV)
The story of humanity, as told by the Bible, begins in a garden where an unnamed woman, newly created by God from one of Adam’s ribs, finds herself naked and unashamed, in conversation with a legged serpent. Without provocation or preamble, the serpent asks the woman if it’s true that God had prohibited her from eating from any tree in the garden. She replies, essentially, that she and Adam are free to eat from any tree save for the one in the center of the garden—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Any contact with this tree would result in death.
The serpent (not identified as Satan) refutes this, telling the woman—honestly, as we will learn, “You will not certainly die.” The serpent explains that the reason God had prohibited eating the fruit of this tree is because if she were to eat its fruit, “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Relieved, the woman eyes the fruit, and seeing “that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.”1
The woman hands a piece of the fruit (almost certainly not an apple) to Adam, who was right there beside her and hadn’t bothered to intervene. He eats it without hesitation. Although they are the only two people in the garden—on the planet, even—they are immediately ashamed of their nakedness, and they fashion some rudimentary clothes for themselves out of fig leaves.
Hearing the sound of God meandering through the garden in physical form, they hide from him. When God asks Adam where he is, Adam responds that he had hidden, explaining, “I was afraid because I was naked.” God does the thing parents do when they know their child did something but feel compelled to get a confession anyway, asking Adam, “Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” Adam does the thing men do when they don’t want to be held to account, immediately shifting the blame: “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”2
God’s gaze follows Adam’s outstretched pointer finger as he turns to the woman and asks, “What is this you have done?” She replies, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”3
God curses the serpent who, again, had both a larynx and an unspecified number of legs, to a lifetime of slithering and dust-eating, as well as transgenerational animosity with humans. (Mutism isn’t mentioned, but may be presumed based on the characteristically nonverbal nature of modern serpents.) The woman receives a sentence that includes painful childbirth and subjugation to her husband. And Adam, for his part, is cursed with toilsome horticulture and eventual death and decomposition.
Adam names his wife Eve.
After creating some more durable leather clothes for the couple, God says (seemingly to other gods), “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” Adam is banished from the garden—the reader is to assume he takes his woman with him, and God secures the entrance to the garden with “cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth,” which I was told as a child remain there to this day.4 I wondered more than once why the flaming sword was necessary, since the garden had been so effectively hidden.
In Christian theology, this story is known as the Fall of Man. It is the basis for the doctrine of original sin, the belief that humans are inherently sinful. I was taught this was not only the reason for the proclivity of humans to sin, but that even if one were to live a life without sinning (which is impossible because of the astonishing array of things that are labeled as sinful), one would still be deserving of eternal damnation, because of the hereditary sin that was present from the moment of conception.
Of course, there’s nothing in the text about hereditary sin; like the modern notions of heaven and hell, the doctrine of original sin was conceived by early church leaders like Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine of Hippo, and refined over the centuries by Christian theologians. Somewhere along the way, someone concocted the “age of accountability,” an age about which theologians have yet to agree, to explain away their discomfort with a hell full of infants and children too young to have understood or accepted the message of salvation through Jesus Christ.
But we can find in Genesis 3 a lot more than an account of how sin entered the world—that is, if we are to take this story as prescriptive.
Immediately, and most obviously, we learn that our bodies are inherently shameful. The first thing Adam and Eve did after eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was to cover their naked bodies, certainly not because the newly-enlightened couple now saw their bodies as “good.”
We learn that women are viewed as being weaker-minded and more easily deceived, even if they aren’t. Adam and Eve knowingly and willingly ate the same fruit, and Adam required significantly less persuasion than Eve. Adam was the one that God had commanded not to eat from this tree, before Eve had even been created. But still the blame is immediately placed on her.
We learn that women are to be subordinate to their husbands: “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”5 In 1 Timothy, this story is used to justify the silencing and subjugation of women: “For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.”6 This patriarchal structure, we are told, has been present from the beginning of time.
We learn that a man’s role is to work, while a woman’s primary responsibilities are bearing and rearing children. The foundation for strict gender roles is laid from the very start.
We learn that knowledge is a thing to be concealed, a dangerous thing. The only thing, in fact, to which access was prohibited. Today, we see this in the rise of Christian schools and homeschooling, the push for abstinence-only sex education, and the rampant and lethal science denial.
Reading this story as a person who no longer believes it to be a literal account, Genesis 3 seems like a story created by men to justify and codify the patriarchal beliefs and practices of their existing culture.
Similarly, white evangelicalism is a system that weaponizes the Bible to preserve a power structure where nominally straight, cis-gender, white, conservative Christian men are in power—in the church, in the home, and in government. Enabled by the doctrine of Biblical literalism, they curate Scripture to further this cause and distort the text to support their political objectives. They take some passages out of context, ignore the inconvenient ones, and choose to literally interpret the select few that support their aims.
In doing so, they cause tremendous harm. And the only way to stop them is to eat from the tree of knowledge and learn to distinguish the evil from the good.
Turn the page to Chapter 2: My Testimony, If You Will.
Genesis 3:4-6 (NIV)
Genesis 3:8-12 (NIV)
Genesis 3:13 (NIV)
Genesis 3:22-24 (NIV)
Genesis 3:16 (NIV)
1 Timothy 2:13 (NIV)