ChurchToo, Emily Joy Allison
ChurchToo, Emily Joy Allison
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#ChurchToo
How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing

Author: Emily Joy Allison, Lyz Lenz

Narrator: Emily Ellet

Unabridged: 7 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/27/2021

Synopsis

When Emily Joy Allison outed her abuser on Twitter, she launched #ChurchToo, a movement to expose the culture of sexual abuse and assault utterly rampant in Christian churches in America. Not a single denomination is unaffected. And the reasons are somewhat different than those you might find in the #MeToo stories coming out of Hollywood or Washington. While patriarchy and misogyny are problems everywhere, they take on a particularly pernicious form in Christian churches where those with power have been insisting, since many decades before #MeToo, that this sexually dysfunctional environment is, in fact, exactly how God wants it to be.

#ChurchToo turns over the rocks of the church's sexual dysfunction, revealing just what makes sexualized violence in religious contexts both ubiquitous and uniquely traumatizing. It also lays the groundwork for not one but many paths of healing from a religious culture of sexual shame, secrecy, and control, and for victims of assault to live full, free, healthy lives.

About Emily Joy Allison

Emily Joy Allison is a writer, poet, and yoga teacher. She holds a degree in philosophical theology and apologetics from Moody Bible Institute and is currently pursuing a master of theological studies from Vanderbilt Divinity School. In November 2017, as the #MeToo movement was going viral, Emily came forward with her own story of abuse at the hands of her church and launched the #ChurchToo movement overnight. She has been writing and speaking about religious sexualized violence and its theological underpinnings ever since. Emily lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Reviews

Goodreads review by David on January 21, 2021

The difference between #metoo and #churchtoo is that the latter tackles a whole litany of abuses, mostly centered on sexual purity. In the evangelical world, purity means no talk, knowledge or experience with sex before marriage. It only applies to women, of course, and marriage can only be to a Chr......more

Goodreads review by Bethany (Beautifully Bookish Bethany) on May 06, 2022

I am still processing what I just read but #ChurchToo is an excellent piece of nonfiction that I would recommend to anyone who has been hurt by purity culture or abuse in the American evangelical church, or to anyone who wants to better understand what that world and its effects are like. The author......more

Goodreads review by Carissa on March 08, 2021

Emily's book provides a foundational resource for all things purity culture - what it is, how it manifests in Christian settings, and how it seeps into the rest of the "secular" world (via avenues such as the religious right's hold on US sex education). My favorite thing about Emily's writing is tha......more

Goodreads review by Cecilia on February 15, 2022

This book could have been an amazing and compelling memoir. However, the author’s lack of rhetorical and philosophical training is glaringly evident as she consistently makes hasty generalizations and conflates purity culture with the virtue of chastity as a subset of the virtue of charity. She make......more

Goodreads review by Melanie on January 18, 2023

I'm not rating this low because of the message. I 100% agree with the message in this book, however my rating is for the writing. I felt like this was a disjointed collection of thoughts, and needed more direction.......more

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