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A new book about purity culture shows the difficulty of reconciling women's liberation with evangelical faith.

Last fall, Dianna E. Anderson wrote an article for a women's website about losing her virginity and realizing that sex outside of marriage can be holy. Commenters around the Internet "started calling me the temple prostitute," she said.

For a woman writing on the Internet, particularly about sexuality, this is kind of reaction is normal; shocking, yes, but totally unsurprising. What's interesting about Anderson's case is the flavor of the antagonism: She writes about feminism and gender identity, but she's also a committed evangelical Christian. Theoretically, these two aspects of her identity aren't mutually exclusive, but in practice, balancing them requires a lot of translating. "As I began to study [sexuality] more, I received a flurry of messages from family members that I was choosing feminism over Christianity and justifying sinful living," she writes in her recently released book, Damaged Goods. "One message said I was questioning the Scripture about sex because I couldn't get Christian men to sleep with me."

Reading Anderson's book is a little like staring intently at an optical illusion: It can be difficult to tell whether she's a Christian sleeper agent embedded in the feminist blog-o-sphere or an evangelical migr who found solace in judgment-free gender theory. Her book would read like a simplified Intro to Feminism textbook, if not for all the Bible quotes. Her explication of Paul's teachings would seem totally normal in a Sunday-school classroom, if not for section headers like "Virginity as a Social Construct."

"As a Christian feminist, Ive been dismissed by feminists for being a person of faith, and Ive been dismissed by people of faith for being a feminist," Anderson said in an interview. Self-identifying feminists who don't believe in God might be hostile to any kind of Bible-driven sexual ethics like what Anderson proposes, while "a large swatch of evangelicalism ... believes in very strict gender roles and separation between men and women," she said. "Feminism is read as challenging that Biblical precedent."

Anderson, though, is determined to reconcile feminism and Christianity. Her writing is part self-help book, part college paper, and part Girls-esque confessional of awkward sexual exploitsan approach fit for a Millennial who writes on Internet, where people can be freely and messily self-defined. Anderson came of age in the late days of the culture wars, and she treats feminism and Christianity as equally fundamental parts of her identity, rather than incompatible ideologies. For her, sexuality and faith are means of self-understanding; they have to be reconcilable, because they're both part of who she is.

The Warrior Wives of Evangelical Christianity

But at some level, publicly identifying as a Christian or as a feminist is a political act: It's a way of declaring affiliation with a certain culture that promotes certain values. The history of these two cultures in America makes this act of identification all the more meaningful; in the past five decades in America, the politics of evangelical Christianity and feminism have evolved symbiotically, although in tension. The sexual revolution of the 1960s rejected female domesticity, which had been encouraged and supported by a deeply Christian culture. In turn, "[evangelicals] responded to the changes that had taken place since the 60s by creating their own alternative sexuality industry," Anderson writes. In 1976, Timothy and Beverly LeHaye published a best-selling guide to "Christian sex." Youth-ministry groups like Young Life encouraged high-school and college students to remain sexually pure. The preacher Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a conservative Christian lobbying organization, to advocate "family values" in American policy.

But the tension between political feminism and political Christianity is fundamentally philosophical, Anderson argues: Whereas feminism relies on the idea that individual women should have control over their bodies, certain Christian theological traditions have more of a communal focus. By way of example, she points to the theologian Stanley Hauerwas, who wrote in 1991 that Christians "do not believe that we have a right to do whatever we want with our bodies ... because when we are baptized we become members of one another ... In the church, we tell you what you can and cannot do with your genitals."

Despite being at odds in their politics, evangelical Christians and feminists share a fixation on sex. Arguably, the focus on "purity" in evangelical culture arose in response to a secular, sex-obsessed American culture; for example, the first purity ball was hosted in 1998 by a Christian family in Colorado Springs as a celebration of father-daughter relationships and girls' virginity. "Endeavoring to claim the title of counterculture, the modern evangelical church responds to what it sees as a sexually permissive culture by locking down on purity and virginity," Anderson writes.

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Christian, or Feminist?