Panel on Sara Moslener’s After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America (Penguin, 2025)

This panel presents original engagements with, and reflections on, Sara Moslener’s After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White America (Penguin, 2025), followed by a response to the panelists by Sara Moslener. The structures and dynamics of “purity culture” and its role within White American evangelicalism have received increased attention in recent years. In her most recent work on purity culture, After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America, Sara Moslener significantly advances this scholarly agenda and extends it in valuable new directions. Drawing on her research (through the After Purity Project) on the experiences of women impacted by purity culture, she explores the constitutive role of white supremacy in the construction of so-called “traditional” or “biblical” conceptions of “purity” as it impacts the domains of not only gender and sexuality, but family, religion, politics, and racial identity.