It can be easy to stereotype all Christian writers as conservative, Bible-thumping believers who sneer at anyone deemed different or sinful. Yet that would do people like blogger and author Dianna E Anderson a great disservice.



Anderson writes at Faith and Feminism about her Christian faith from a nuanced and modern perspective, stepping away from the fundamentalist belief in purity culture and forging a new set of sexual ethics for Christians and non-Christians alike. I spoke with her about her forthcoming book, Damaged Goods: New Perspectives on Christian Purity, and why other Christians can make the worst trolls.

What’s your background and how did you begin writing online?

I remember having my first blog way back when I was in high school in 2002-2003. I’d been doing all sorts of random stuff writing online, and it only became focused on to women’s issues and feminism in the last five years when I began graduate school for English at Baylor University in Texas, which is the largest private Baptist college in the US.



My agent often tells me I’m being too academic in my writing because I focus a lot on theory and how the language we use often plays into our cultural prejudices and privileges.

You regularly blog at Faith and Feminism. One thing that immediately stands out about your blog is the subtitle – ‘taking up sacred space’.



The subtitle is a modified phrase that I borrowed from the writer Brené Brown who writes a lot about shame, and how it makes us feel smaller, and even guilty for taking up space in the world. My goal in Faith and Feminism is to tell women and people of marginalized sexualities and genders in the Christian church that they have the right to take up sacred space. They are who God created them to be. Most of the messages that we get about being women, especially within the church, contradict this; we’re treated like children, sort of ‘seen and not heard’. A lot of the work that I do is trying to inspire women to take up that space and to be willing to step forward.

Could you describe the basics of Christian purity culture and how your approach differs?

Purity culture is this idea that part of God’s holiness in our lives is saving sex for marriage. There are different forms of abstinence: abstaining from everything, including kissing, to abstaining from just sex. It happens in evangelical Christian culture, and it’s something that developed during my generation since the 1980s, but the early 2000s, when I was a teenager, were the heyday of purity culture. This idea advances the belief that sex before marriage becomes the “unforgivable sin”, which means when you’ve had premarital sex, you can be forgiven, but you won’t ever be totally healed from this act. It sends a weird, anti-Christian message. It’s developed into an entire culture that is also an industry built around abstinence-only education and purity balls. There’s even the National Abstinence Clearinghouse, which does a lot of work with lobbying and promoting purity in Christian youth groups. Essentially, sexual purity has become what Christians would call a “primary” characteristic of salvation. To them, if you aren’t a virgin on your wedding day, you have committed the worst sin.



My book goes through the history of purity culture. I spend the first couple chapters going through the biblical ideas behind this culture and then deconstructing them. From my research, I conclude that Christian purity culture is a set of sexual ethics based simply on saying no. It doesn’t give you any idea of what to do once it’s time to say yes, or even how to say yes, or what a good healthy yes looks like. This is because sexual ethics in American Christianity gets sorted into two areas: sex before marriage, any kind of sex, is bad; sex after marriage, any kind of sex, is good.



There needs to be a delineation where we can say that no, this kind of premarital sex isn’t bad: it’s between two consenting adults, who are maybe in a loving relationship. There also needs to be the recognition that sex that happens without consent is bad, even after a wedding. My goal in the book is to implement a new set of sexual ethics that will provide a health framework for the sexual lives of those who are still immersed in Christianity, or are coming out of fundamentalist Christianity, or who simply want to learn about it.

Most Christian circles aren’t ready to discuss some topics you cover on your blog.



I’ve always felt that I’m a little bit ahead of the curve when it comes to purity culture because I started writing about it back in 2011. It didn’t become a big topic in Christian circles until writer Sarah Bessey wrote a post, I am Damaged Goods, in January 2013.



There is this tension in a lot of the more liberal-leaning Christian circles where they want to challenge and critique the world that they come from without making themselves look too far “leftist” or “‘progressive”. I’ve never really been one to stray away from criticizing people who are “in my camp”, so there is this weird tension that develops where I’m writing about purity culture and queer theology, but some of the Christian audience isn’t quite ready for it. I have found an audience who is receptive, ready and willing to embrace these ideas.



I think all of the Christian bloggers that exist do play their role in that journey. I feel like Rachel Held Evans is the middle ground, who is guiding people saying, “Maybe it’s OK to say gay people aren’t going to hell.” And I’m over here saying, “Yes! Gay people can contribute to church; so can trans people, and non-binary people.” I feel that I’m the person towards the end of the journey, ushering people further into this idea of liberation, and showing my readers that there are different ways of looking at Christ and his sacrifice and what it means for us as people who aren’t just souls, but who exist in embodied space.



You often write in monthly series centred around one topic.



I really like the one I just completed on masculinity. I feel that that’s something that doesn’t get talked about very much in the church. We assume that we know what masculinity means, just like we assume what femininity means. My goal in writing is to question those assumptions.



What has your experience been writing online? Have you received any negative pushback, especially since you frequently challenge Christian authorities in your writing?



By far the worst trolls I’ve gotten have been cisgender heterosexual white men who claim to be Christian. They’re the trolls who don’t know they’re trolls. They’re going to be really mean to you, but in a nice way. I’ve been told I’m going to hell because I’m bisexual — but they do it in this super-nice way where it’s like I know what they’re saying, but they have enough plausible deniability that if I call them on it, I’m going to be the mean one.



It’s a constant balancing act, especially in the Christian sphere, of figuring out who’s genuine, who’s just being ignorant, and who is genuinely trying to trap me in a discussion that I don’t want to have. The worst trolling in that respect was back in September when I wrote for the Frisky about losing my virginity and the impact that had on my faith. The Christian manosphere and men’s rights corner of the internet got ahold of it and went nuts. There were no personal threats towards me, but a lot of insults. I think my favourite was when they called me a “temple prostitute”. It was such an old-school insult.



There are things that I do that are second nature to protect myself from the doxxing going on — outing someone’s personal address and private personal information. I have a PO box that I use. I don’t ever agree to meet in person, unless it’s a journalist. There’s this weird trend, also in evangelical circles, when someone has a disagreement to say, “Let’s take this off of the internet and talk in person.” It’s like, I already don’t like you talking to me on Twitter; I’m not going to have a phone call with you. I think a lot of it is so they can stay mean stuff completely off the record. That’s just my theory.



Being a woman online in a Christian feminist space brings out a really bananas level of meanness. For instance, there is a parody troll account called Fundie Feminist that began around a year ago. It was based on myself and another Christian blogger, and friend, Sarah Moon. It’s this amalgamation of our personalities. We don’t know who does it but we have our suspicions. It’s this parody account, but it’s only funny to people who share that same misogynistic mindset. I just lump them in with the mean Christians.

Do you feel that writing online has changed you as a person?



I think it’s made me stronger and bolder as a person. I come from a really, really conservative family. One of my aunts actually told my sister-in-law a couple of weeks ago, “I hope you’re being a good influence on her.” Writing online gives me an outlet where I can talk about this stuff and consequently it makes me a lot more able to take some of the BS I get from conservative friends and family in real life. In that way it’s strengthened my world view, it’s showed me that I’m not alone in this, which is huge. If I didn’t have the internet, and I was just living at home in Sioux Falls, it would be bad.



Who are some women writers that you would recommend?



I can’t make a list like this without mentioning my friend Sarah Moon, who writes over at Patheos. She has a paper out in the Journal of Integrated Social Sciences that is an academic analysis of different Christian dating books. Tope Fadiran, who tweets under @graceishuman, does a lot of really good analysis on the intersections between race, feminism and Christianity. She’s someone I met on a comments section in a blog and have become friends with. Jessica Luther has a book on sports and sexual assault coming out sometime in the next year. The one stereotypical girl thing about me is that I’m not really into sports, but her analysis of the way sports culture contributes to a culture of sexual assault is spot on.



What is some advice you have for women who want to write online?

For anyone put off by trolls, my advice is to take the reasonable safety precautions against trolls — like don’t put your address on your blog, or just write anonymously if you feel more comfortable.

Otherwise, just get started and put stuff out there. I think it was Hemingway who said that anyone who wants to be a writer, but isn’t writing, doesn’t. If you want to to pursue writing, the internet is really the hub of where everything is happening right now.

Something to remember when you’re writing, either print or online, the second you put it out into the world, it doesn’t belong to you any more; it belongs to the readers. For writers, having that sort of separation, saying, “OK, this is yours now, you can do with it what you will”, it can really help to emotionally separate yourself from the critiques and the comments you get.

What’s one fun fact you’d like to share with our readers?

I love anything to do with cats. My cat is actually sleeping next to me right now. I volunteer at the local animal shelter, partly because it’s a method of self-care, but also because of the cats.

Dianna E Anderson’s Damaged Goods: New Perspectives on Christian Purity is available for pre-order and will be in stores on 10 February 2015.