"Growing Up Pure" with Lauren D. Sawyer, PhD
About this episode
The episode explores the complexities of healing from purity culture, emphasizing personal agency and accountability.
What if healing from purity culture requires more than naming how you were hurt? What if it also means asking how you participated? In this episode, Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen sit down with their colleague Dr. Lauren Sawyer, to explore her new book, Growing Up Pure. Lauren names something many haven't had language for: as teens, we weren't only victims of purity culture; we were also moral agents within it. We made choices. We found belonging. We sometimes resisted in small ways. And at times, we participated in systems that harmed others and ourselves. That tension between vulnerability and agency, harm and complicity can feel destabilizing. Yet Lauren invites us to see accountability not as punishment, but as a sacred, even hopeful, practice. What if repentance wasn't shame-driven, but a pathway toward integration? What if healing meant not only tending to the wounds purity culture caused, but also examining how we were formed by—and sometimes upheld—it? This episode is honest, nuanced, and tender. It creates space to grieve the damage of purity culture while also imagining a different story. One rooted in the belief that we are made in the image of God as…
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