Welcome to the Bear Marriage Podcast, I'm Sheila Ray Greg where from to love

honor and vacuum.com and I'm here with my daughter Rebecca.

Hello! And we have an exciting guest. We decided that this week you get to see more than just our faces and so we invited Rachel Joy Wellcher who is the author of the awesome book talking back to purity culture and, thank you so much for being here. Oh, it's an honor.

I feel like we're kind of like soldiers in the same battle. I think so.

And it was so funny because over the weekend my husband read your book and I've been reading your book and you talk about so many of the same books and talking back to purity culture that we talk about in the great sex rescue it's like I wish she gets us yeah

exactly from a different perspective that was so cool we're talking about it from a totally

different lens like a different side of the same coin kind of thing. So, yes, which is so needed.

Yeah, and they're actually really great companion books.

Yeah, because it's really interesting as we're reading excerpts and stuff.

You know, what we want to do the Great Sex Rescue

is not address purity culture quite as much

because we knew there were other books that did it really well.

And so we know, we looked at a lot of the same teachings but we didn't tackle purity culture itself so that's why you are here so that you look for us.

That's great. So I want to focus on one particular aspect of the book, but before we get to that, do you want to give us like your snapshot of why you wrote the book and what you see the problems with purity culture?

It is hard to summarize quickly because there are so many facets, but I started this research in

graduate school and my goal was to revisit the books of my youth on dating and marriage and sex and see what they how they communicated to

victims of sexual abuse so that was actually my dissertation and I was so

interested and moved by that research that I decided to expand it to

tackling what other messages were we taught in Christian purity culture that

weren't actually biblical. And so my book is, it comes out of a love for the church.

I love the church and I want her to do better.

And so, and I have an Orthodox biblical sexual ethic. But I do believe that purity culture did make a lot of mistakes and hindsight is 20-20 and so I think it's worth looking back over some of those messages and seeing did they really come from scripture or were there other sources and how can we do better moving forward?

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