UNITED STATES
The Huffington Post

December 4, 2017

By Hannah Paasch

And purity culture teaches women that it’s all their fault.

“Do I out my high school abuser?” she typed into the group chat on the night #ChurchToo was born. “Probably, huh?”

I knew the weight behind this seemingly nonchalant question. Years ago, when I first met Emily Joy, a college freshman at Moody Bible Institute, she was fresh off the evangelical assembly line. While still decidedly her own person, she had been indoctrinated with some views about holding hands with boys so strange that even my sheltered mind couldn’t quite wrap itself around them.

It took a few months of the late-night coffee dates and Bible school sleepovers that made up our budding friendship before she revealed her secret to me: that a church youth leader had groomed and manipulated her into a romantic relationship…