“The belief that the flesh is sinful and a source of shame is still present in the church today. This demonization of the body is central to the evangelical purity culture of the 1990s.”
—Anna Rollins
Today’s Substack is a guest post from Anna Rollins, the author of the newly released book, Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl. In her book, Anna traces the connection between purity culture and diet culture in her own experience of vaginismus, disordered eating, and scrupulosity (religious OCD).
This is a connection I did not fully explore in my book, partly because of space and the focus of the book, but also because of my own lack of experience with the topic. Yet, I know how body image and disembodiment come up again and again when I am doing purity culture recovery work with clients. Indeed, in Famished, Anna weaves in research and interviews with other women, which found that “when women worked to heal from body shame, their relationship to religious was intricately involved.”
Enjoy this guest essay from Anna in which she cleverly uses my five myths of purity culture and illustrates how they are also present in evangelical diet culture.
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The Rhyming Scripts of Evangelical Purity Culture and Diet Culture by Anna Rollins
In Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl, I examine the rhyming scripts of purity culture and diet culture, connecting both back to the false promises of the prosperity gospel. The prosperity gospel is the belief that God will bless true believers with health and wealth if they think the right way and live the right way.
Purity culture follows this logic – if I control my sex drive and abstain from sex until my wedding day, then I will have a happy marriage.
And diet culture sells a similar formula: if I control my eating, my body will look better, be better, and I will have a happy life.
In my book, I spoke to dozens of women about the messages they internalized about their own bodies in purity culture, and nearly every person I spoke to described an experience of fragmentation. One woman said she lived in a near-constant “state of contradiction.” She said she’d been told that focusing on her body was a sin – but she had to think about her body (to guard it, to keep it) nearly all the time.
This didn’t just affect women’s relationship with sex: it also impacted their feelings about food.
And maybe it’s not a coincidence that there are so many food metaphors in purity culture teaching: having sex before marriage would mean that you (usually, a girl) would be like “chewed up gum” or a glass of dirty, backwashed water.
In so many illustrations, women’s bodies were objectified, compared to meals to be consumed by men.
I’m a Christian who is still active in many evangelical spaces, and I am passionate about deconstructing teaching from purity culture and diet culture that instructs women to fear their own bodies and appetites. I love Camden Morgante’s work, and I’ve really appreciated how she makes a distinction between purity culture (which was a religious and political fear-response to the AIDS crisis and is rooted in patriarchy) and traditional Christian sexual ethics (which include things like mutuality and fidelity).
In her book, Recovering From Purity Culture, Dr. Morgante defines five myths that pervade purity culture. I want name each of these myths, and then explain how they manifest themselves in diet culture, too:
Myth 1: The Spiritual Barometer Myth
In purity culture, this myth looks like …
As Dr. Morgante explains, this myth perpetuates the idea that virginity is the key indicator of a person’s spiritual value. A good Christian, according to this myth, is sexually pure and chaste. Controlling one’s desires (or teaching oneself to not have any at all) becomes the central focus of the Christian life – not seeking Jesus Christ or loving others.
In diet culture, this myth looks like …
In diet culture, body size (and/or health status) are often considered in terms of moral value. Thin, healthy bodies are spoken of as virtuous. Controlling one’s desires (or suppressing appetite) is often exalted.
Myth 2: The Fairytale Myth
In purity culture, this myth looks like …
The more you save sexually before marriage, the happier your life will turn out. If you repress your desires before you say “I do,” your marriage and your life will be happy, prosperous, and blessed.
In diet culture, this myth looks like …
The more you abstain from indulgent foods, the better your life will be. Your best life now will be available once you have achieved a thin, healthy body.
Myth 3: The Flipped Switch Myth
In purity culture, this myth looks like …
If you restrict your sexual desires until marriage, you will automatically be able to turn it on after your wedding day – no problem!
In diet culture, this myth looks like …
If you manage your appetite for food until you reach your body size or health goals, you’ll be able to live with freedom once you finally achieve your ideal body.
Myth 4: The Damaged Goods Myth
In purity culture, this myth looks like …
The more sexual experiences (or partners) you’ve had, the less valuable/desirable you are as a person. Chewed up gum can never be made new, after all.
In diet culture, this myth looks like …
If you “let yourself go,” you are less valuable/desirable as a person. See: bounce back after baby culture.
Myth 5: The Gatekeepers Myth
In purity culture, this myth looks like …
Women are responsible for controlling both men’s desires and their own. In this myth, the male gaze is exalted.
In diet culture, this myth looks like …
In diet culture, there is an idea that negation of desire/pleasure is something near-holy to pursue. Here, too, the male gaze is centered.
All of these myths that Dr. Morgante outlines are rooted in systems that idolatrize control over surrender. They are self-focused rather than others-focused. And they all lack the beauty of the gospel: the grace, hope, and forgiveness of Jesus Christ.
In Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl, I envision a better way forward in our relationships to our own bodies and belief systems – a way of faith and surrender, not fear and control. As we move into the New Year, I hope my book serves as an antidote to the self-focused, optimization obsessions that character so many resolutions. It’s out this week, and I hope you’ll consider ordering a copy for yourself or a friend.
Thank you to Anna Rollins for today’s guest post. Check out her memoir, Famished, if you’re interested in reading more!
Anna Rollins’s memoir, Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl, examines the rhyming scripts of purity culture and diet culture. It is available now. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Electric Literature, Joyland Magazine, and other outlets. She is a 2025 literary arts fellow with the West Virginia Creative Network. Follow her at http://annajrollins.com or at @annajrollins on Substack and Instagram.
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Thank you so much for including this discussion about the rhyming scripts of purity culture and diet culture, Camden! I'm so grateful for your work, and when I've been going on podcast interviews, I often talk about how you do such a great job distinguishing the difference between purity culture and Christian sexual ethics. Thank you for the work you do!
What resonates for me in this is how purity culture and diet culture don’t just resemble one another—they train the same bodily logic.
Both operate on the promise that control will produce safety:
if I manage desire correctly, if I monitor intake closely enough, if I discipline the body before it can betray me, then I will be spared disappointment, chaos, or failure. In both systems, the body is framed as a problem to be solved rather than a source of knowledge to be trusted.
What strikes me most is the contradiction you name so clearly: women are taught that focusing on the body is sinful, while simultaneously being required to think about it constantly—to guard it, regulate it, restrain it, and account for it. That double bind produces fragmentation. You cannot inhabit a body that is always under surveillance, whether the gaze is spiritual, cultural, or internalized.
From a clinical and theological lens, I see this as an epistemic loss. When the body is treated primarily as an object of discipline, sensation stops being information and becomes evidence—of virtue or failure, purity or lack of it. Hunger, desire, arousal, fatigue, pleasure all get moralized. Over time, women learn not just to mistrust their bodies, but to outsource knowing altogether.
What feels especially important in this conversation is that the harm isn’t only about sex or food. It’s about the way goodness gets defined through self-management rather than relationship—through control rather than attunement. Healing, then, often requires more than rejecting a belief. It requires relearning how to listen to a body that was never allowed to speak without being corrected.
I appreciate the way this work refuses to separate body image from spirituality, or diet culture from theology. For many women, those threads were never separate to begin with. Repair has to happen at the level of embodiment, not just insight.