Thread by @eaton

While breaking down the different conceptual building blocks of modern evangelical "Purity Culture" for the next episode of @CRightcast I've come across a critical component that — weirdly enough — also appears a lot in the internet Rationalist community.

A big part of tackling complicated issues — poverty, why evil exists, why my wifi keeps dropping — is getting to root causes and patterns, rather than just focusing on the surface stuff. It's important!

Often, the process of searching for those underlying patterns can help us sort through the confusion and identify how a challenging problem can be solved.

…But that "what's REALLY going on here?" process can also be used to obfuscate, to minimize, to shift blame.

An example is the way that evangelical Purity Culture talks about the profound seriousness of "sexual sin" — things that deviate from "God's design" for sex. Stuff like cheating on a spouse or rape or sexual harassment would generally fall under that umbrella.

Some of those are _crimes_ and some are _betrayals of trust_, so there's already some distinction being lost, but it's at least recognizable. However, Purity Culture is built on the idea that EVERYTHING is about "purity and piety"… and that's where it gets really troubling.

Because evangelical Purity Culture also clusters things like "women dressing immodestly" and "being gay" and "masturbating" and "lingering while looking at a suggestive perfume ad" as sexual sin, too. Just like, say, a pastor grooming 15 year olds.

Even more, it explicitly insists that trying to tease out distinctions between those things is just an attempt to rationalize one's own secret sins. (@C_Stroop wrote a great piece about this: flux.community/chrissy-stroop…)

I won't go into the twists and turns it takes in the purity culture community (gotta save that for the podcast, it's a tangly one). But despite insisting that the "definition collapse" is all about taking things VERY SERIOUSLY, the result is that really huge shit is minimized.

That's how you get eye-popping stories like "Church pastor sexually abuses young parishioner, then publicly apologizes… for 'infidelity'" — it collapses into a slurry of "not measuring up to the ideal," erasing important distinctions between a "poor choice" and "predation."

In situations where there are clear abusers and victims, it codifies the idea that only a _literally perfect and sinless_ person will ever be treated decently; everyone else is probed for "their role" in what happened. When in doubt, that's "bitterness" or "unforgiveness."

Now, I said at the top of the thread that the same pattern appears in a lot of internet ~Rationalist~ communities and their discussions about complicated problems. Stick with me for a second.

A common trope is to approach topics like economic inequality, systemic racism, authoritarianism, and so on as "popular hot button issues," presuming that the emotional plebes are missing the real problems, which require ~dispassionate rationalism~ to tease out.

Like the "definition collapse" of purity culture, though, this often erases all *meaningful* nuance. The mechanisms, impact, and perpetuation of antiblack racism for example become "treating people differently due to arbitrary inherent qualities."

While it's not *untrue* that systemic racism could fall under that umbrella, the new definition is so broad that it *also* includes any attempt to remedy racism's harms — because that would imply treating its victims differently than those who benefitted from the systems.

A few weeks ago, one of the editors at Christianity Today posted a scolding message to ex-evangelicals. He asked them, apparently in earnest, whether their snarky and sometimes angry internet posts weren't "the same" as the abuses of authority they protested.

I often come back to the opening chapter of @redsesame's excellent book "Everyday Information Architecture." It's a very approachable book about a very nerdy topic, and one of the things it stresses is that _categorizing things is not a neutral act_.

Taxonomy doesn't expose objective truth; it encodes a particular view of a complex world. That's a really, really useful thing! We need it!

…But it can also be used to obscure important distinctions. To invisibly encode profound injustice. To erase profound crimes.