From ‘Good Girl’ to Free Woman: My Journey Beyond Purity Culture

• The article reflects on growing up within purity culture and how early lessons around religion, modesty, and morality shaped the author’s relationship with her body and sense of self.
• It shows how purity culture operates as a system, instead of a personal choice, which places unequal expectations on women while normalising control, silence, and shame.
• The piece explores the tension between faith and feminism, and how questioning from within, supported by collective spaces like Faith Futures Collective, can open paths toward healing, resistance, and shared liberation.

The first lesson, I didn’t know I was learning

“No one wants a blotting paper,” this is a stern warning my English teacher gave us in the eighth grade, describing girls who did not wait until marriage. At the time, I did not properly understand sex or my body, but a lesson on purity culture was delivered. It taught me that my worth was conditional and could be stained. To be ‘worthy’, I had to preserve myself for one man, my future husband. Looking back, this was not my first lesson on purity culture. 

Growing up, I was socialised in an ecosystem where, from the family level to the institutional level, there was constant messaging around purity. In my family, I was taught that as a girl, I had to cross my legs when sitting down, that I couldn’t go to church wearing trousers, and that I couldn’t show too much skin. Born and raised as a Christian, purity culture remains one of my biggest struggles as it continues to affect how I relate to my body and with others. 

With the constant messaging around purity, I grew up with a deep sense of fear of being perceived as ‘unworthy. ‘As a result, I became good at performing and self-silencing to conform to the culture. I became disconnected from my own body as I would suppress my own desires. I remember thinking that even my natural, ovulating desires were “sinful”, and I had to pray the feelings away lest I lose my “good girl” status. For the longest time, I felt like I needed permission to do things, which amplified my self-doubt, fear, and shame.

What I experienced in my socialisation is not unique to me.

Across different religions and cultures, the system effectively operates to convince us that purity culture is a personal choice or a moral preference, thus obscuring the structures that enforce and sustain it. This is why victim blaming continues to happen, because purity culture fundamentally shifts our attention from the system by placing responsibility on individuals. 

Purity culture also maintains the status quo because its burden is never shared equally. While women and girls are taught shame, restraint, and submission, men are usually taught that desire and domination are natural. At its core, purity culture pegs women’s worth and value to men.  

By the time I was 17 years old, the purity culture had become suffocating.

I began to realise I had multidimensional interests that were not embraced in religion. For instance, on some days, short dresses felt empowering, whereas on other days, baggy clothes felt empowering, and on most days, I just wanted my mood and occasion to inspire my dressing. However, under a religious household and system, only ‘modest’ clothes and ‘holy’ hobbies are acceptable. Anything attached to the secular world was sinful, and to be a “good” Christian girl, I had to criticise secularity.

Living two lives at once

This made me live double lives because to my church and parents, I was the obedient one, but to my siblings and close friends, I was the multidimensional, fun-loving one. However, deep down, I judged myself as a hypocrite because I had not fully reconciled my religious beliefs and personal interests. On one hand, I wanted to pursue ideas, desires, and relationships that felt natural to me, but on the other, I also wanted to remain connected to the spiritual life that gave me community and grounding.

How could I detach myself from spaces that, despite their harm, also offered support and a sense of community?

Over time, the contradictions became intense, and I chose to distance myself from religious spaces. I still struggle to find my voice in religious spaces because I often wonder how I, as a feminist, can stay in spaces that sustain my oppression. How can I thrive in spaces that mean shrinking parts of myself to fit in?

However, I have realised that leaving religion does not always mean liberation, and staying does not always mean ignorance.

Sometimes liberation means questioning from within. So, as I continue to challenge my limiting belief systems, I am also learning that I can still question and resist within religious systems, especially when that resistance is done in solidarity.

Now I am building spaces of solidarity.

This is why joining the Faith Futures Collective has been instrumental in my journey. Spaces and communities that actively challenge mainstream religious narratives by centering women’s voices and other marginalised groups are rare, and finding them is necessary.

As a Kenyan woman, joining the Collective as a volunteer is a deeper process in my ongoing journey of challenging systems of oppression and reimagining our Futures. As someone who heals by isolating, I am learning that isolation alone cannot bring true liberation. True liberation needs community and infrastructure that will hold and sustain us as we challenge systems that constrain us. Faith Futures Collective is a testament that our liberation must be collective because the systemic issues we face are interconnected, and in the famous words of Fannie Lou Hamer, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”