Chastity as Worship

It is a strange thing to learn that your body is a potential stumbling block to your brothers in Christ when you are thirteen, bone-skinny, and don’t even know how to properly blend foundation into your neck. Nevertheless, it was the persistent buzz in the background of my youth. When I went to Walmart to buy a new pair of shorts, I had to try them on to make sure they were long enough. The invention of the “tankini” was a pure gift for conservative Christian girls during the high tide of purity culture, because it covered our midriffs while giving us some relief from the dreaded one-piece, which inevitably gave us wedgies in the back and the front. We didn’t fit into our own skin at that age, let alone a proper bathing suit.

 I never had a problem with the idea of modesty. It made clothes shopping annoying, but it made sense to me that, as a Christian, I would consider others in the way I dressed. After all, I was called in Scripture to consider others in what I ate and drank, and apparel seemed to be at least on the same level. What was puzzling, however, was the idea that the sanctification of teenage boys and grown men depended on the length of my summer shorts. This never made sense. It just made me nervous.

“Guys think about sex all the time,” is what we were told in youth group, on television sitcoms, and in Christian books on dating and sexual purity. I never asked my peers to confirm or deny this claim. I just accepted and internalized it, nestled beside my memories of a simpler time, when I caught bullfrogs in the marsh with Chris and raced my friend Matt over and over again until we were both breathless. These same friends were now supposedly undressing me with their eyes. At least, if I wore the wrong dress.

While all this was being preached, I was dealing with my own burgeoning sexual desire, for which I had no box or category. We girls were given talks about spaghetti strap shirts and lusty boys, not about our own budding struggles with sexual fantasies and masturbation. At summer camp, the girls had to wear long t-shirts over their bathing suits while the boys could run around shirtless. I heard the message loud and clear: girls don’t struggle like boys do. So when I discovered that I had a sex-drive, I felt nothing but shame.

I have carried that shame throughout most of my life and still, to this day, have to wrestle it down sometimes and triple-punch it with the truth of the Imago Dei, the God-created goodness of sexuality, and the full forgiveness in Christ for all our sins. But I want more for my daughter.

Finish reading this piece at Mere Orthodoxy.

Cover image by Hugues de BUYER-MIMEURE