Lollipops and Paper Hearts: The Trauma of Embodying False Truths

Picture this: it’s Friday evening. The church hall is full of excitable teenagers – gossiping, sulking, judging. Staccato bursts of high-pitched laughter punctuate the rumble of conversation. Eventually, they settle down. Today, their youth leader tells them from the front, they will be continuing their series looking at identity, specifically, today they will be looking at…pause for dramatic effect (or maybe to steel the nerves)…sex and sexuality. Giggles, embarrassed snorts, guffaws. “Alright! Settle down!”

Following a short sermon-style talk that details “God’s plan for sex: marriage,” the children are separated. The boys follow the male youth leader into a side room. The pastor’s wife, who is a special guest this evening, remains with the girls in the main hall. She hands them each a small pale pink paper heart. As an instrumental version of a popular worship song plays, they are invited to write on these hearts all the things they hope for in their future husbands, their dreams for their marriages. Low laughter from the next room interrupts some of them in their musings – the boys are talking about the dangers of porn and masturbation. When the song ends the pastor’s wife calls the children to her. They sit, cross legged, in a circle. Some hold their hearts close to their chests. Some have filled them with tiny writing. Others have only written single words. Two close friends have swapped and are reading each other’s, whispering about how suspiciously one of the descriptions matches a boy next door. The friend in question colours and snatches back her heart.

These desires, hopes, and dreams, says the pastor’s wife, are God-given to these girls. God has a man in mind for each of them who will fulfil them. But they must persevere, must wait. They might be tempted along the way to give up their dreams or to prematurely give their hearts (she means, their bodies) to someone else. They must resist. For, if they give in, the consequences will be dire.

To illustrate her point, she asks the girls to pass their hearts to their neighbour. They are hesitant. All their hopes and dreams are poured into these pink paper hearts. What if someone laughs? The pastor’s wife encourages. Pass them along face down if that makes it easier. They comply.

“Now, tear a piece off the heart you’ve just been given.”

Blank stares. The sound of slowly tearing paper. Others join in, tearing small slivers of pink off their friends’ dreams. Once they’re all done the pastor’s wife asks them to repeat the process. They keep passing and tearing until they have each received their own heart back. Except… it doesn’t look like a heart anymore. Only jagged-edged shapes with half-legible words remain. Small fragments of pink are scattered on the floor in little heaps.

“This,” the pastor’s wife explains, “is what happens when you give yourself to a man who is not your husband.”

As if on cue the boys burst back into the room. The girls shuffle, scattering pink snippets of dreams. The youth leader bounds back onto the stage. He thanks the pastor’s wife, closes in prayer, and tells them that that’s it for this week. The children drift apart, chattering.

Nobody notices the girl sitting quietly, fidgeting with the remainder of her heart. The youth leader sees her and waves the pastor’s wife over. Together they hear the girl’s confession. They pray for her and reassure her that her mistakes are forgiven. She tucks her mangled heart into the pouch of her hoodie. Next week, when her boyfriend’s hands wander again, she won’t know how to stop him and she will hate herself for it.

Nobody notices the girl who has locked herself into the far toilet cubicle. She is shaking. She’s not even sure why. The repressed memories of the abuse are pressing against the surface of her consciousness. She picks at the scab on her arm. It had almost healed over this time. A small piece of pink paper is stuck to the bottom of her sneaker when she leaves that night – another girl’s dreams.

Nobody notices that a decade later a woman weeps as she walks home alone from a date with a man she loves. Why can she still not let him hold her? Why is she still haunted by fragments of pink paper dreams?

---

Purity culture is rife with metaphors constructed to illustrate (primarily to young people) the consequences of breaching the boundaries set by this sex ethic. They are, by their very nature, objectifying and usually reduce all sexuality to the event of penetrative heterosexual sex. This in itself is a facet that deserves deeper investigation. However, it is not the subject of this article. Whilst some of the metaphors used are purely linguistic in nature, a prominent feature of purity metaphors is that they are often embodied, either by the educator or church leader, or by the children themselves. This article explores the specific power that such embodied metaphors hold. Drawing on previous work in which I studied embodiment and narrative truth telling, I will explore how embodying false truths in this way contributes to a particular kind of trauma that lives on in our bodies, even after we have intellectually overcome the falsity.

Metaphors

Very basically defined a metaphor is a figure of speech that maps meaning from one term (the source domain) onto an unrelated other (the target domain). It speaks about one thing in terms of another. Traditionally, philosophy and theology alike have often treated metaphors with suspicion. At best, they were understood to be merely ornamental to speech (and therefore superfluous), at worst, they were seen as a tool of deception, used by orators to conceal real intentions. More recent metaphor theories have thankfully moved away from these ideas, recognising the real emotional and cognitive content of metaphors. Cognitive linguists, in particular, have, in recent decades, developed “conceptual metaphor theory” which posits that metaphors are not merely figures of speech but conceptual tools that allow us to think about things in ways that we otherwise could not. Eve Sweetser and Mary Therese DesCamp write, “Metaphor is a matter of thinking, not a matter of language: human beings use metaphors to conceptualise one mental domain in terms of another.”^[1] This understanding of metaphors recognises the power they hold: metaphors are not merely pretty or clever turns of phrase, nor are they methods of deception, but literally allow us to think in ways that literal language does not.

Purity culture makes use of this power (almost certainly without having a developed theory of conceptual metaphor). Educators and church leaders in the purity movement use metaphors to help their charges think about complicated and abstract ideas like “(biblical) purity,” “modesty,” and “sexual immorality.” They use metaphors in particular to drive home the supposed spiritual (and tangible) consequences of extra-marital sex (and the transgression of other boundaries constructed by purity culture). In doing so, they are not merely using interesting language. They are suggesting a way of conceptualising physical intimacy. When writers of a dating advice book aimed at teenage girls ask, “Would you buy a beat-up, old, used car at a new car price?” and assert that “every new sexual experience when you are not married puts another ding, another scratch, another scar on who you are. You keep running your car into other people, and then you wonder why no one treats you special”[2] they are not merely using accessible language to say that premarital sex is harmful. They are inviting young people to think about sex in these terms, to think of women as objects whose value must be preserved so as to fetch a high price. They are encouraging young women and girls to imagine their value as tied inherently to their sexual inexperience, a fragile and dependent value that can be irrevocably lost or destroyed.

Embodying Stories

The terror of purity metaphors, however, does not end with their becoming thought patterns inside young minds. Many purity metaphors do not remain linguistic or even mental phenomena but are embodied.

I have previously written about the idea that embodying stories helps us to recognise the truths they contain. Living out a story (for instance through performing rituals that recall the narrative) individuates the truths it is communicating, making them recognisable and thereby relevant. I will give a brief introduction to these ideas which will serve as the basis of what I want to assert with regard to the trauma caused by embodying purity metaphors.

Humans have an inherent tendency to connect with truth through stories. Neuroanthropologists Charles D. Laughlin and C. Jason Throop have proposed that this tendency is even biologically predicated.[3]

Myth…is not just an externally acquired cultural deposit, but is already present, at least formally, in the inherited neural structures by which we are disposed to experience the world in a distinctively human way: “Although myth frequently takes the form of a narrative, we hold that the essential structure of myth is nonlinguistic – it is neurocognitive, a structure of consciousness.”

Laughlin and Throop, “Imagination and Reality: On the Relations Between Myth, Consciousness, and the Quantum Sea,” 719.

The suggestion is that our brains are literally built in a way that allows us to construct and conceptualise truth in the form of myths and stories. These ideas are not a million miles away from conceptual metaphor theory.

Pamela J. Reeve compares Laughlin and Throop’s ideas to Aquinas’ conception of truth. She writes that in both accounts truth is “a process of our becoming ‘trued’ to the ultimate meaning of human existence.”[4] “True” is being used here in a verbal sense. Laughlin and Throop write that, “used as a verb, instead of as a noun or an adjective, the word true…suggests the domain of physical and mechanical activity.”[5] Their suggestion is that “myth operates as a truer of cognitive operations.” In other words, myths, or “religious narratives,” are tools which allow us to construct or “produce a cognized world in a dynamic and veridical way in conformation to reality.”[6] They help us to understand the world accurately. The implication of this is that, conversely, when narratives are lived out (perhaps especially in a religious context) they are, one might say, “trued,” they become or create reality, at least for those involved in the embodiment. On the one hand, the stories help us to recognise the truths in our physical world, our embodied lives. On the other, our embodiment helps us to recognise the truths of our stories. What happens, then, when we are asked to embody stories which are constructed around harmful false truth?

Embodying False Truths

Bearing in mind what we now understand about the cognitive and conceptual dimension of metaphors and the process of “truing” narratives through embodiment we turn to investigate the damage that is done through the embodiment of false truths.

Embodying truthful narratives is lifegiving, freeing. In my previous writing on this topic, I explored the ritual celebrations of Passover and Eucharist as examples of this happening in religious contexts. Scriptural, traditional, and historical witness confirm that the celebration of these embodied recollections of narratives opens up ever new avenues towards truth and religious fulfilment for people of faith.

However, this potent interaction of embodiment and story can be just as powerful in causing harm as flourishing. When the story or metaphor that is embodied contains not lifegiving truth but oppressive untruth the result can be devastating.

In her work on purity culture and trauma Katie Cross develops the concept of “body theodicy.” She shows the different and multiple ways in which purity culture pressures conspire to cause damage and trauma that manifests in bodily ways. The testimonies of the women she spoke to show clearly that the teaching they received about sex and particularly women’s bodies and roles lead to trauma that manifests in physical ways.

One quote is particularly striking for the context of this paper. Sofia recalls the shame she felt which prevented her from reporting the rape and abuse she was experiencing at the hands of her partner. She says that “now I was a chewed-up piece of gum and no one would want me.”[7] This metaphor, the chewed-up piece of gum, is one of the most common throughout purity culture. Sometimes it’s a piece of chocolate, a mint, or a lollipop (I suppose it depends on what the youth leader was able to procure quickly from the gas station on the way to the meeting or what could be found in the church kitchen cupboards), but the story and the way it is embodied are always the same. The young people are given a sweet and invited to start eating it. After a few seconds they are told to remove it and asked whether they would swap this partially consumed sweet with each other. The expected and intended answer is a disgusted and resounding “No!” (though sometimes the intended lesson is undermined by some individuals declaring themselves perfectly willing to share a half-chewed piece of gum). The moral of this exercise is of course that no-one wants a ‘used’ sweet and no-one wants a ‘used’ person.

In Sofia’s testimony she specifically connects this common embodied purity metaphor with bodily trauma. In Sofia’s case the trauma was also linked to physical abuse, however, it is important to note that no actual sexual act needs to have taken place for the trauma to nevertheless express itself physically. In an article titled “How An Evangelical Dating Guide And Purity Culture Gave Me An Anxiety Disorder,” Hannah Brashers describes how she experienced an anxiety attack that left her vomiting the first time she went on a date.[8] No physical intimacy had yet taken place, her body was not responding to her actually breaching the boundaries of purity culture, or to memories of former actions or abuse. In her article Brashers does not specifically highlight metaphors, but she does talk about the role the (now) infamous I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris played in her life and the profound impact it had on her. Throughout the book, Harris relies heavily on metaphors and stories, like those described above. Embodying metaphors then is enough to cause trauma that manifests physically. You do not have to have actually done anything.

Another thing that the stories told by Cross’s participants and many others have in common is that they show that intellectual assent to an idea is not enough to undo the false truths that the embodiment of these metaphors imprinted onto our bodies. Brashers writes that after she had left her fundamentalist church and felt she had “come to terms with both [her] agnosticism and [her] queerness, [she] felt ready to date.”[9] She was therefore surprised when her body was racked by panic attacks. Jane too says that “Even after deconstructing so much, [she] can feel guilty.”[10] This has also been my own personal experience. I thought I had dealt with my experiences of purity culture a while ago. I held different views now. I could reflect relatively dispassionately on how damaging and downright dangerous purity culture is. I know this view of sex and sexuality is untrue, life-denying, oppressive. And yet, when I got into the weeds of my research, I found that it affected me physically and spiritually in ways I had not anticipated.

Going Forward

These reflections and realisations open up a number of avenues for further exploration and action. Firstly, I hope that I have been able to demonstrate (again) the power of language, especially metaphorical language. If we (theologians, faith leaders, and simply people of faith) want to engage with and help those inside these and similar systems of oppression then we need to get better at recognising the power of language and become more aware of how we use it ourselves. Knowledge of how specific aspects of language work can help us use it more consciously.

Secondly, contemplating this topic highlights the importance of embodiment in the context of truth. The experience of those who have been harmed by purity culture show clearly that rational, intellectual reasoning is not enough to embed truths in lives, especially, when false truths have been so thoroughly imbibed through embodiment. Going forth, we might want to think about ways in which we can embody healing truths to undo the falsities we believe in our bodies.

Along similar lines, we need to further explore how we might use the power of language and embodiment for good in this context. How might churches, for instance, use embodied metaphors to teach young people healthy ways of relating to each other and their own bodies? An example of a brilliant metaphor used in this way comes from a video by Thames Valley Police[11] which likens consenting to sex to asking for a cup of tea. Realising the power of embodying metaphors brings positive opportunities as well as exposing harmful practices.

Conclusion

This paper has investigated the links between embodying false truths and trauma. It explored the power of conceptual metaphors and embodying stories. The paper highlighted the dangers of living out purity metaphors which are based around false truths and the ways in which doing so leads to a particular kind of trauma that manifests physically and lives on in the body even after the lie has been intellectually deconstructed. Finally, it suggested lessons that might be drawn from these realisations and ways forward towards making use of the power of stories, metaphors, an embodiment in healthier ways.

---

References

[1] Sweetser and DesCamp, “Metaphors for God,” 215.

[2] Justin Lookadoo and Hayley DiMarco, Dateable: Are You? Are They? (Grand Rapids, MI: Revell, 2003), 213–14.

[3] Charles D. Laughlin and C. Jason Throop, “Imagination and Reality: On the Relations Between Myth, Consciousness, and the Quantum Sea,” Zygon 36, no. 4 (December 2001): 709–736, https://doi.org/10.1111/0591-2385.00392.

[4] Pamela J. Reeve, “Truth as ‘Being Trued’: Intersections between Ontological Truth in Aquinas and the Contemporary Anthropology of Religion,” in Truth Matters: Knowledge, Politics, Ethics, Religion, ed. Lambert Zuidervaart et al. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 264.

[5] Laughlin and Throop, “Imagination and Reality,” 719.

[6] Ibid. (Emphasis original).

[7] Katie Cross, “‘I Have the Power in My Body to Make People Sin’: The Trauma of Purity Culture and the Concept of ‘Body Theodicy’,” in Feminist Trauma Theologies: Body, Scripture and Church in Critical Perspective, ed. Karen O’Donnell and Katie Cross (London, England: SCM Press, 2020), 31.

[8] Hannah Brashers, “How An Evangelical Dating Book And Purity Culture Gave Me An Anxiety Disorder,” HuffPost, 19 February 2019, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-kissed-dating-goodbye-trauma_n_5c66fedbe4b05c889d1f158e.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Cross, “Body Theodicy,” 30.

[11] Tea and Consent, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZwvrxVavnQ.

---

© Iona Curtius, 2023.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: “rot-weißer Lutscher auf weißem Stick” by Brecht Deboosere is licensed under the Unsplash License.