"Growing Up Pure" with Lauren D. Sawyer, PhD
The Allender Center Podcast
The Allender Center
4.7 • 648 Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What if healing from purity culture requires more than naming how you were hurt? What if it also means asking how you participated?
In this episode, Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen sit down with their colleague Dr. Lauren Sawyer, to explore her new book, Growing Up Pure.
Lauren names something many haven't had language for: as teens, we weren't only victims of purity culture; we were also moral agents within it. We made choices. We found belonging. We sometimes resisted in small ways. And at times, we participated in systems that harmed others and ourselves.
That tension between vulnerability and agency, harm and complicity can feel destabilizing. Yet Lauren invites us to see accountability not as punishment, but as a sacred, even hopeful, practice.
What if repentance wasn't shame-driven, but a pathway toward integration? What if healing meant not only tending to the wounds purity culture caused, but also examining how we were formed by—and sometimes upheld—it?
This episode is honest, nuanced, and tender. It creates space to grieve the damage of purity culture while also imagining a different story. One rooted in the belief that we are made in the image of God as embodied, relational, sexual beings… and that restoration is possible.
About the Allender Center Podcast:
For over a decade, the Allender Center Podcast has offered honest, thoughtful conversations about the deep work of healing and transformation. Hosted by Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen, MDiv, this weekly podcast explores the complexities of trauma, abuse recovery, story, relationships, and spiritual formation. Through questions submitted by listeners, stories, interviews, and conversations, we engage the deep places of heartache and hope that are rarely addressed so candidly in our culture today. Join the Allender Center Podcast to uncover meaningful perspectives and support for your path to healing and growth.
At the Allender Center, we value thoughtful dialogue across a wide range of voices, stories, and lived experiences. In that spirit, our podcast features guests and hosts who may hold differing perspectives. The perspectives shared on this podcast by guests and hosts reflect their own experiences and viewpoints and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, or endorsements of the Allender Center and/or The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Spiritual abuse leaves profound wounds. |
| 0:11.0 | It shapes how you trust, how you connect with others, and how you perceive yourself and the world around you. |
| 0:17.0 | At the Allender Center, we are committed to creating spaces where your stories of religious |
| 0:22.2 | harm can not only be heard and understood, but met with the kind of care that leads towards healing. |
| 0:28.2 | I'm Rachel Clinton Chen, and I wanted to personally extend an invitation for you to join me |
| 0:33.5 | for the upcoming story workshop for spiritual abuse and healing. This story workshop was designed |
| 0:39.1 | in response to the countless emails and DMs we've received, expressing a need for more resources |
| 0:44.5 | to navigate past spiritual abuse. Whether the spiritual abuse is rooted in your family of origin, a church |
| 0:50.8 | setting, or a youth or campus ministry, this story workshop is designed to guide you through your stories of harm. |
| 0:57.9 | Our hope is that over this transformative three-day experience, you'll not only find strength in a support of community that truly understands, |
| 1:06.3 | but also learn to reconnect with yourself and rediscover the goodness of God. |
| 1:11.4 | If you're ready to reclaim your story, your sense of self, and your faith, |
| 1:16.1 | I invite you to join us for the next story workshop for spiritual abuse and healing. |
| 1:20.6 | You can find dates and details at the allender center.org slash workshops. |
| 1:58.9 | Thank you. Allender Center podcast. |
| 2:00.6 | I'm Dr. Dan Allender. |
| 2:02.2 | And I'm Rachel Clinton-Cent. We're fiercely committed to providing hope and healing to a fragmented world. |
| 2:07.0 | And restoration for the heart. |
| 2:09.4 | Thank you for joining us. |
| 2:10.7 | Let's get this conversation started. Rachel, one of the things I think we get to do a lot is to talk with fascinating people. |
| 2:30.7 | But sadly, I don't think we get to talk enough with kind of our family. And we get to talk with |
| 2:40.4 | someone in our family. Dr. Lauren, Sawyer, welcome. Thank you. I'm going to introduce you, |
... |
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