Teaching Purity, Producing Futures: Sexual Literacy and Gendered Authority in Exvangelical Narratives

How do religious communities teach people to understand sexuality, and what kinds of futures do those teachings imagine? Within conservative American evangelicalism, sexual knowledge has often been framed through purity culture, complementarian theology, and instruction on marriage and gender roles. These teachings do more than regulate behavior. They provide an interpretive matrix through which believers learn to understand desire and self-sovereignty. This paper examines evangelical sexual literacy through memoirs by former evangelicals (exvangelicals), including Jamie Lee Finch, Glennon Doyle, Matthias Roberts, and Linda Kay Klein. Reading these narratives together, I explore how sexual teachings were internalized and later reenvisioned through deconversion. Methodologically, I treat memoir as a site of religious reflection in which former evangelicals wrestle with earlier instruction and emerge with new meaning-making. These narratives not only reveal how evangelical sexual literacy is formed, but how it is contested and reworked in a post-evangelical future.