For Purity's Sake: Piety and Black Women's Religious Networking in the Digital Age

Abstract

From the turn of the century up to the present, evangelical Christians have given theological and cultural primacy to purity and sexuality, often linking the sexual subject to larger issues in the religious, social, and political world. And though scholarship on evangelical purity culture has provided interesting ways to think about this ideal, no full-length study has interrogated how media and the particular experiences of Christians of color impact its pursuit. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with an evangelical women’s group called Pinky Promise, this dissertation examines how evangelical concerns for purity continue to surface in the contemporary moment—one marked increasingly by new media and the explosion of digital technologies. It considers the ways new media factors into pursuits of purity for born-again black Christian women, creating new sites where lived experience and religious practice happen. Merging scholarship on lived religion; religion, media, and culture; African American religious thought; and the anthropology of evangelical Christianity, the project privileges the place of black women in evangelicalism and argues that their daily faith practices of disciplining the mind, heart, body, senses, and desires must be understood in light of the digital technologies that accompany them. Ultimately, this dissertation provides an example of how religiosity, religious identity, and religious community take shape in a mediated world, and paints a portrait of what lived religion looks like in a digital age.