Certainty as Care: Purity Culture, Authoritarian Religion, and Sexual Impunity in Korean/U.S. Protestant Contexts

Purity culture is often described as conservative sexual morality. This paper argues that, in Korean, Korean American, and U.S. evangelical Protestant contexts, it also functions as an authoritarian religious formation. Focusing on the U.S.–Korea Protestant corridor, it examines how sermons, curricula, and public religious rhetoric cast obedience, patriarchy, and sexual discipline as forms of safety, belonging, and moral clarity under conditions of threat. I call this dynamic certainty-as-care. Drawing on political psychology, psychodynamic approaches to religion, attachment theory, and scholarship on institutional betrayal, the paper shows why disclosures of abuse are often received as threats to sacred order rather than as calls to protect the harmed. When authority has already been coded as protective, communities may defend leaders, blame survivors, and suppress dissent. Sexual impunity, then, is one of purity culture’s structural risks.