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Purity culture reaches beyond sexuality

How purity culture thinking can affect many parts of life.

A Note From Megan | Publication Date: December 22nd, 2025

In this Note, I’m sharing my thoughts with you as they’re still evolving.

It’s one of those topics where there’s not really a tidy conclusion because there’s a lot more to collectively consider and process.

Like many in the Religious Harm Recovery space, I hadn’t even heard the term “purity culture” until I was well into my deconstruction.

And once I did learn about it, I thought it sat squarely in the realm of sexuality and the church’s policing of bodies, pleasure, orientation, and gender roles.

However, as I’ve gotten deeper into this work and have continued to educate myself about coercive control and cultural dynamics through the lens of intersectionality, I’ve noticed something—this demand for “purity” can show up in many areas of life.

It’s not limited to just our gender and sexuality.

Purity culture thinking drives the internalized the belief that there’s one right way to live, and stepping outside of that way makes you unsafe, selfish, or “bad”—or even that you’re somehow failing.

In my own life, I have seen this show up in places like wellness, justice work, and career/finances.

I’ll give a few examples of each, but just know this is certainly not an exhaustive list, as the areas where purity culture can enter the mix are far-reaching.

  • Health & Wellness
  • In health and wellness, purity might sound like, “There is one correct way to eat or move,” and anything outside that plan becomes a personal failure instead of one option among many.
  • Unfortunately, this thinking is often backed by fatphobic, ableist, and classed ideas about which bodies and lifestyles are “disciplined” or “worthy.”
  • People may feel morally “good” when they’re strictly adhering to specific protocol and secretly ashamed when they’re not.
  • Social Justice Work
  • In social justice spaces, purity can show up as rigid rules about how to talk, think, or show up politically.
  • While the values may be about equity and liberation, the way those values are sometimes enforced can start to resemble the all-or-nothing pressure many of us knew in high-control religion, especially for people with marginalized identities who feel like one “wrong” word could cost them safety or belonging.
  • That can make it hard to ask questions, learn, or change your mind.
  • Career and Finances
  • Around career and finances, purity logic often borrows from capitalism and individualism: if you’re not constantly producing, optimizing, or “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” you’re irresponsible or lesser.
  • Rest, needing support, or opting out of hustle culture can start to feel like moral failure instead of a legitimate choice.
  • And it’s important to note that expectations around career and finances often land differently across class, race, disability, and caregiving realities.

In all of these, the content is different, but the structure is built on the same foundation—one right way, high stakes for getting it wrong, and a lot of shame and anxiety trying to stay on the “pure” side of the line.

How I’m processing this at the moment…

I notice purity culture thinking showing up in my own life when I catch myself in engaging in binaries—good or bad, right or wrong, safe or dangerous—without much room for nuance, context, or grace.

I notice it when I feel a disproportionate amount of shame over something small, or when I’m performing a behavior more to avoid being “bad” than because it actually aligns with my values.

I’m especially thinking about those of you who left high-control religion only to find similar pressure showing up in wellness circles, online communities, or the workplace.

And I’m still trying to untangle how much of that rigidity comes from religious conditioning versus how much might be connected to underlying neurodivergence or perfectionism that I, myself, am still working out how to navigate on a day-to-day basis.

I don’t think needing structure or predictability is inherently a problem—especially for folks who are neurodivergent.

What I’m curious about is the point where the desire for structure tips over into moralized rigidity and shame, where breaking a personal rule feels like being a “bad” person instead of a human with changing needs.

I also want to acknowledge that, for some people, the pressure to “get it right” in certain spaces is connected to real safety risks and systemic consequences, not just internalized rules.

That complexity is part of what can make this so hard to make sense of.

And while I don’t have clear answers yet, I do think all this is worth paying attention to.

An invitation to reflect.

  • Where do you notice purity culture thinking showing up in your own life?
  • What are the moments where you feel like you have to get it exactly right to be a “good” person, friend, activist, parent, or partner? Is it in how you eat, parent, work, rest, spend money, engage politically, move through your body, or show up online and in your communities?

You can just sit with these questions as part of your own reflection, or, if want to share, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.

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