In the mid-’90s, fresh off an intense weekend at Christian horse camp, I took a virginity-until-marriage pledge. The impulse to slip a promise ring on my 12-year-old finger didn’t come from my family of twice-a-year Christians, nor my friends at the progressive public school I attended in a Seattle suburb, where our teachers evinced more concern for saving the orcas than saving sex for marriage. But even in my young liberal bubble, evangelical Christian culture seeped in. And in particular, purity.

Purity was, after all, having A Moment. There was True Love Waits, a national movement to tell adolescents (but really mostly girls) that premarital sex sullies you and ruins your chances at true love. Abstinence-only educators raked in cash from public schools. In 1997’s best-selling I Kissed Dating Goodbye, author and pastor Joshua Harris argued that the path to marital bliss involved withholding sex and even kissing until your wedding day. The movement, it turned out, was an overwhelming failure: Not only did the vast majority of the 2.2 million pledgers not keep their promise, but when they did have sex before marriage, virginity pledgers were more likely to become pregnant. (Harris later apologized for the harm his book had caused.) As I watched a nearly all-white crowd chant “send her back!” about Somali-born U.S. rep. Ilhan Omar, however, and heard Donald Trump opine that if you don’t love America you should leave it, and witnessed the fallout from a mass shooting perpetrated by a gunman who parroted the president’s us-versus-them fears of an immigrant “invasion,” I improbably thought of Harris and my promise ring.

On its face, evangelical purity culture and American racism overlap only insofar as white people are the dominant participants in both. About two thirds of evangelicals are white (although Latinos make up a growing share), and more than 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump. Evangelical Christians have long made up the Republican Party’s base, a fact that was front of mind for Trump when he selected Mike Pence as his vice president. Still, evangelicals have long professed to value traditional sexual mores; it was telling to see them largely put those aside to support a thrice-married adulterer. It was telling to see evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr. claim not just that Trump was a vehicle to achieve certain policy goals, but that he was a fellow traveler.

But that assumes that sexual morality is the primary organizing force for evangelicals. Historically it hasn’t been. Indeed, the origins of evangelicalism as a modern political movement have more to do with opposition to Brown v. Board of Education than Roe v. Wade. American evangelicalism cannot be disentangled from racism—particularly as it becomes further intertwined with the larger religious right.

There’s also a deep psychological overlap between evangelical purity culture and Trumpism. Making America great again and forgoing kissing for courtship both promise an easy route to a glorified past. Both come from a fear of the unknown, an aversion to new experiences, a deep disgust at a perceived other attaining equal footing. (Though in theory purity culture mandates that both men and women remain chaste, in practice the burden falls almost entirely on women.)

In no other pivotal area of life do we insist on the total mindless fidelity that the “send her back” crowd demands. Similarly, for no life-shaping decision do we believe it’s healthy to have the total lack of experience that the “save yourself until marriage” brigade mandates. Team Love It or Leave It also hews to the bizarre theory that less information makes for better decision-making. Both movements are fundamentally invested in embracing ignorance. The flip side to “if you don’t like it, leave” is the suggestion that those who truly love America would never deign to cross its borders, let alone look abroad for valuable lessons. Adherents would rather know less, and as a result risk stagnation and decline, than come into contact with information that complicates their view of America as a red, white, and blue “We’re #1!” foam finger. Virginity-until-marriage proponents offer a similar promise: If you don’t know any better, you’ll never want anything more.