Latest / Follow the Leighder / How Purity Culture Lives in the Body | Jenny McGrath
Transcript
- Leigh/@followtheleighder: Howdy folks and welcome back to another episode of Follow the Leighder. I'm your host, Leigh Larson, and joining me from down south, oh my gosh, from Louisiana, in Orleans, we have Jenny McGrath. Welcome. Jenny: Thank you so much, I'm so excited to be here. Leigh/@followtheleighder: ⁓ man. We're in for a treat today. We're going to be talking a lot about the body. We're going to talk about purity culture. We're going to talk about how mental health and somatic experiences all come together because, this is your focus. You consider you are a licensed mental health practitioner, licensed counselor. You've done some somatic experience therapy and guidance coaching as well. We'll talk about that. then, ⁓ of course, you're a purity culture reader. researcher, scholar, I have your paper pulled up. Wow. Tell us, you know, ⁓ you talk about being a dancer, you talk about being in your body, you talk about your Christian faith growing up. Kind of share with us, how did you come to be this mental health, purity, culture, somatic experience person? You know, where are you from? Who are you? Jenny: Yeah, great question. I will say it was, it's, I'm doing sort of the opposite work that I envisioned myself doing for most of my life. I grew up in Colorado Springs. So for many people who listen to this, I imagine there may be some familiarity, but in case there's not, it is essentially the epicenter. of white evangelicalism in the United States. And I grew up in the heart of that movement in the 1990s. I was homeschooled most of my life. ⁓ And I also grew up in purity culture. So by the time I was turning 13, I was begging my parents to give me a purity ring so I could wear it as a symbol of my virginity and my commitment to God because I thought that was so important. And ⁓ I ended up moving to northern Uganda to be a missionary by the time I was 19 years old and thought I would live and die and be martyred there. I really thought I would be dead by the time I was 23 and thought that that was a great idea and ⁓ didn't really understand at the time how the religious indoctrination that I had experienced my whole life had sort of groomed me to become a martyr. And it was actually really my body that started talking back. I broke out into shingles everywhere. I had boils everywhere. My immune system stopped working and ended up coming home for what I thought was going to be a few weeks. And long story short, I ended up in graduate school studying counseling psychology. And I thought that I would use that to go back to Uganda. And it was in that program that I started for the first time questioning why as a 19 year old did I think it was appropriate, much less a good idea for me to step into a context that I didn't know, I didn't have any familiarity with and become a missionary. And so that set a long trajectory of my own personal research. Leigh/@followtheleighder: It's such a very astute, just like, why did I do that? Why? I was like, what did I? Okay, I should look into this. Great, great. No, I love this. I've done the same thing. I exactly what you're talking about. That's why I'm laughing. I'm like, yep, I know that question. Continue, sorry. Jenny: You were right. How did I get here? I don't know. Yum. Yeah, no. And so I, you know, that was sort of always on the back burner was my own inquiry. And because I didn't feel well ethically stepping back into Uganda in a professional context, I was like, I guess I'm a mental health counselor now. It really wasn't something I had set out to do. But because of the world that I had been in, Over the years, the clients that were coming to see me were primarily white cisgender women who had grown up in purity culture. And I just continued year after year to see these themes of self-abdication and martyrdom, whether that was as extreme as moving overseas and being a missionary or starting nonprofits or being the best wife and mother there could ever be. it just it started to click. Okay, so my experience is not an anomaly, but it's also there's something that was in the water at this time. So what was that? And so over six years ago, I really dove into researching the somatic effects of purity culture, primarily on white cisgender women. and how those conditions groomed us to become agents of the Lord and what I would argue would be agents of white Christian nationalism as well. Leigh/@followtheleighder: That's... That's a hell of a story. Thank you so much for sharing that. And ⁓ I know that, you know, wrestling with some of those trips as well. mean, I, humanitarian mission trips, like they started to get really sideways and like, it's so important to like separate, I don't even know, like we had a Peace Corps panel recently at the library and it was great. Like, I mean, and the individuals did great work and they're like good people. But I also know that the Peace Corps is a little bit finicky. What's seen as a little bit as an extension of like, know, colonial empires and sort of America's still got its fingers. And so it's just, you know, can we ever be ethical even like with our best intent? Like what? And so thank you for tackling this question. I don't think you're the first white woman to ask. Did I? Should I? What if? I wasn't trying to do that. was just looking back later. And ⁓ how pertinent too, because there are so many people to waking up. Yes, the whole Christian nationalist movement is ongoing, but there's so many deconstructionists, ex-evangelicals that are looking at new ways to still be of service spiritually, but don't want to be so patronizing, don't want to be so paternal. Jenny: Mm-hmm. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Can you talk about that before we get into purity culture? ⁓ What does it look like to still be an ally? Jenny: Definitely. Yeah, so I tend to think in quotes, so there might be a lot of quotes that come through in our conversation today. And one of them is from a professor named Feroz Monge. And he's from Kenya and is a professor in Canada who has studied development work in Africa for most of his career. And he says, you cannot fight poverty. What you can fight is those who make people poor. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah. Jenny: And I think for me being an ally, it doesn't mean forgetting that people are suffering, but it has been less about running around trying to give handouts and take care of these little problems and more looking up and going, what are these problems downstream of? as you asked, like, how can I move ethically? How can I engage my own complicity? Because I'm not going to not be complicit. I am talking to you on a computer that's battery is made from slavery in Congo. There's no way in this world that I can make a decision that won't be in some way implicated with imperialism and the detriment of harm to the global South. And so how do I then grow in my awareness of that rather than ⁓ sort of medicating my own guilt? by going and doing service and going, well, I'm just so privileged, so I'm going to go help. It's, well, I'm so privileged, but how can I actually work to create a world where this hierarchy of privilege doesn't exist? Leigh/@followtheleighder: it. That kind of reminds me too of this was like coming in the Industrial Revolution, 1800s era, there was, ⁓ you know, so many monopolies and different, you know, these, these giants of capitalism emerging, ⁓ different organizations are doing volunteer work. And people start asking, like, I'm tired of responding. Like, we need to look at these systems. And so emerged the social gospel and ⁓ that kind of got stomped out later. But it was the Social gospel is still pretty much used in progressive Christianity, but conservatives are like, nope, I don't wanna question the systems. Don't do that. Don't do that. Just pray. Jenny: Right, and I would have Jesus quoted to me by more conservative Christians in my life that said, well, Jesus said that you'll always have the poor with you. So we shouldn't try to eradicate the poor. We should just try to take care of them. And I'm like, I don't think that that's actually what Jesus meant by that. Leigh/@followtheleighder: That's an interesting, like, yeah, that's not how I took that verse, but it makes sense. mean, when you approach it, it's just like, yeah, well, they're always going to be there. So you just say, and you're like, do they have to be? I don't know. But. Jenny: Right. But could we at least ask maybe how they got there? Leigh/@followtheleighder: What systems? I mean, feel like, yes, gosh. Well, talk about ⁓ when you do mental health, when you do somatic experience, and we'll get into purity culture after, how you, ⁓ you talk about having bodily reactions to what you were going through, like the boils and the hives. ⁓ What does somatic experience and mental health therapy look like for you? How do you, what skills or ⁓ advice do you give to your your patients. Jenny: Yeah, so so many of my patients, because of the world of purity culture, which I'm sure we'll get into more, grew up with a sense that the body was the source of danger. Because the body was going to cause your brothers to stumble or the body was going to lead you into temptation. And when we experience a threat in our body, we will do one of multiple survival strategies. We will fight, we will flee, or we will shut down. And shut down is really our last line of defense against a threat. We shut down when our nervous system says there's nothing I can do to fight this off, and there's no way I'm going to get away from this. And so what purity culture did to a generation of young girls was it told us that the inescapable threat was our own body. And so by the time I was in high school, I was asking my parents, what does it mean when you feel like you're dreaming? And they were like, I have no idea what you're talking about because they didn't have the language at that point for dissociation. And what was happening was that I had totally left my body and I was super accident prone, I would get hurt all the time because for me living in my body was too unbearable. I couldn't trust my body. And again, I would religiositize this. I don't think that's a word, I would say, you know, the heart is deceitful above all else. And so I would try to escape my body as much as I could. And so really what I... do with my clients is just introduce them back to their bodies in a way that hopefully can untangle some of the religious harm that has been done to their bodies. I've come to see our bodies as pretty sovereign and significant and important. Whereas when I was a missionary, I would literally say my body is a machine and I treated my body as such. And then I got the consequences to that. And so for me somatic experiencing is about finding safety within the body. And this to me is also why I don't think individual therapy can or should be separate from collective justice is that we live in a world where not all bodies are safe to be in their body and dissociating can be a really brilliant mechanism. And so I never want to tell someone you should be in your body if they're community, their situation, their place isn't safe to actually be in their body. And so I see it as this ⁓ tangential work of being in the body and creating as much safety as we can while co-laboring to create a world where all bodies do get to feel safe to be present from the inside out. Leigh/@followtheleighder: And it's so funny because it's, ⁓ it's, it's how the faith is so sacred. There is so much passion. There is so much, ⁓ particularly in evangelical traditions, lots of talk of blood, lots of talk of the body. is just, and for so much talk about the body, it's almost disembodied. Like there, like you were saying. And, ⁓ It's a, there's so much focus on the community, which I understand putting focus on the community, but it can be hard to differentiate yourself from another. ⁓ Talk about like when you were going through this, I know you talk about the somatic experience and mental health. What was it like socially to navigate all of this? This was your community, your ritual. What was that like? Jenny: Yeah. Yeah. It's so weird for me because I lived in two different worlds. Well, maybe three different worlds by the time I got to high school. Before high school, I did go to public high school, but before then I was homeschooled. So most of my week was just me and my three older brothers. And then once they graduated, it was just me and my mom. ⁓ And then I also grew up as a dancer. And I think dance was the one thing that got me back into my body. It was the place where I could feel and express an emote. And it was also weird because I did competitive dancing, which is often a very sexualized spectacle. And so I had this total binary mindset of my body can't be sexual, but it can be sexualized. And this is, think, so much of the experience of white women in purity culture is that we are sexualized and desexualized at the same time. And so it's very confusing. ⁓ And so I tended to be pretty isolated while I did have friends in dance and in high school. ⁓ What was really important for my story was I was taken by my dance teachers to New York. when I was 14 years old and I was sexually assaulted by an adult man in a bar. And because purity culture did not teach me consent, it did not teach me bodily autonomy, it did not teach me appropriately about pedophilia, all I knew was I just broke my purity ring covenant I had made with my dad. And it shut me down in such deep shame and grief. And during the time that I was feeling that, ⁓ just a couple months later, I was in dance class and I did a leap and I landed wrong and I broke my foot. And I couldn't dance for about a year and a half. And in my 15 year old brain, what I said was God broke my foot because I sinned in New York and God needed to take me away from this slippery slope to hell and like redirect me back to being a good Christian. And so that really created a split for me where for the last couple years of high school, I didn't have much of a social life because I was 100 % dedicated to kind of atoning for my sin and for being a missionary. And what was also really important during that time was while I was still in a cast, I saw this film called Invisible Children, which many who grew up in the 1990s, early 2000s may remember. It was this documentary style film done by three young white men in college ⁓ from Southern California. And it was about a quote unquote warlord named Joseph Kony in Northern Uganda. And it was about child soldiers and them commuting, like children commuting to keep themselves safe. And it was this very ⁓ erotically charged, ⁓ racially and sexually coded documentary style film. And when I watched it, I immediately felt the call of God to move to Northern Uganda and be a missionary. What I didn't know was how many other young white women at that same time. felt that same call from God. And Amy Finnegan is a scholar in purity culture. She has this brilliant ⁓ article called The White Woman's Burden and talks about this ⁓ population and this time of white evangelical youths that had already experienced so much of this powerful message about invisible children. And so All of that is to say I didn't have much of a social life because I was trying to figure out how to be a missionary as soon as I could graduate high school. Leigh/@followtheleighder: And then, and that's the great psychology about it is like so many, so many children went on to be missionaries because they were told that's what they were doing. But also, like, it was almost like they related in some way to being invisible, like in like their own white privilege. And I feel it's kind of your point was like there is like, in this own weird privileged opposite, you know, upside down world, it's like these, there's so many white women that understood and that that wave of feeling oppressed. So ⁓ brilliant, you know, note and I appreciate you bringing that to the front. When you got there, what, how many, when you engage with the other white evangelical women, ⁓ was it good? Like, did you build good community? Was it competitive? Like, what was the environment like between y'all? Jenny: Yeah, that's a great question. I sort of stayed on the periphery. So I joined YWAM. I was actually in Montana. That's where I did my discipleship training school right out of high school. And ⁓ then I led what was supposed to be a short-term team with YWAM to Uganda. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah. Jenny: And the team left and I ended up staying in Uganda by myself. And so after they left, I really literally didn't have a plan for where I was staying, what I was going to do. I had no computer. I had no phone. I just believed God would make it work out for me and ⁓ didn't appreciate the privilege I had in my body to trust that things would just work out for me. And they did, I think because of what my body represented in that culture and how it moved through those spaces. So I ended up actually living for my first month with a group of other young white women around my age who had started a jewelry company and they were having Ugandan women make paper beads and then bring them back to the United States and sell. And I honestly started to get pretty jaded because I felt like all of the white people had these three coffee shops that they went to that nobody who lived in the community I lived could actually really afford to go to these. I jokingly, like, Mizungu means white person. And there was like this one coffee shop that was all glass. And I would just like start to call it the Mizungu Fish Bowl because you would just like walk by and it was just filled with all white people. and Uganda has a long entrenched relationship with the US Christian right, which I didn't know at the time as well, ⁓ where the relationship that the US Christian right has had with Uri Museveni and his wife Janet have been, ⁓ have propelled a lot of the heteronormative rhetoric that we're seeing now find its way back into the United States. ⁓ And so not to say there aren't other countries that were experiencing this, but Uganda specifically after the Invisible Children film had just an influx of white Christian missionaries. Some are more famous, like Katie Davis moved to Uganda by the time she was 23. She had adopted 15 Ugandan girls. ⁓ Renee Bach moved to Uganda and started a medical clinic even though she didn't have appropriate medical training and over 100 children died in her healthcare clinic. Kelsey Nielsen started No White Saviors, which was this Instagram account that had quite a public imploding in around 2020, 2021. So there was like so many specifically young white women that were taking on these really powerful roles in Uganda. And what I argue is that we didn't know the backdrop of the US rights relationship with Uganda, but we really were the foot soldiers bringing trickle-down economics and the ideals of white Christian capitalism into this culture. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah. Well, and it's just like you were saying this like fever ⁓ of missionary white women, I'm going to save I'm going to adopt 15. That's not even I don't know what the story I'm sure I don't like. I ⁓ hope that all the children are great. I hope all the best for these women, but I mean, it can be reckless, irresponsible, and like you said, where people die. ⁓ It's scary. even, you know, like realize like when I've gone and done things abroad, they the Christian organization I went, it was a progressive Christian organization and they have worked really hard to make sure like it's in a different format. Like it's I'm coming in to support and help and like volunteer, like just be like whatever they need. I'm not coming in like top down, you know, but even there were things like that. And I'm glad you were really perceptive. on that bit where it was like, ⁓ God will protect me. it's like, yeah, I don't want to diminish anyone's faith. But also a lot of the reasons why I was protected was because I was a white American woman. And that was said to me. They were like, ⁓ no, I'd be like, ⁓ I want to go out to this market or this bazaar. And they'd be like, Or that you can't do that because it's not safe as a white woman. And it's a privilege to Jenny: Mm-hmm. Leigh/@followtheleighder: to not go there or on the flip side, like, ⁓ you can go there and you'll have a driver and he'll be male and you'll have all these things, but like a lot of women don't go to that area or something. It's just like, yeah, I could say like, yeah, God was with me all, and I was like, also so is social status and privilege and colonialism and like all these things that were unspoken and. ⁓ And if, you know, I, here's a good example. I got sick, I got food poisoning and I like was driven to the hospital, got taken care of in and out, like fine. That's not the case for a lot of people. And again, ⁓ it's, I'm really supportive of your work for, for naming that. so that we can name the systems instead. Like, I had such a great time in Uganda or Pakistan because God was with me. Well, I mean, yeah, but also. ⁓ Jenny: Mm hmm. Yeah, I one of the one of the cracks for me actually happened when I was in Uganda. I was preaching in front of this church as like a 20 year old. And honestly, I was very self righteous. I had just finished a YWAM Bible school. But there was something in me that was like, wait a second, like there was this old man who'd walked miles like every morning to come listen to my sermon and I just asked the congregation, do you think that I am smarter than you or that I have something that you don't have? Why did you come all this way to hear me talk? And this old man stood up and he said, we are black people. And so we are the descendants of Ham and we are cursed. And so because you are white, we need you to come teach us about God. And I did not know it that point that that was a myth that early colonizers and enslavers had used to tell black people that all of the descendants of Ham were black people and that slavery and colonization would save them through them learning about the gospel. And so it was this moment of this like fracturing of me having the the authority and the power and the privilege as a 20 year old to gather a congregation in another country without blinking is not separate from the hundreds of years of imperialism and colonialism that have raced our bodies in the first place. Leigh/@followtheleighder: three point kudos snap snaps I mean like and ⁓ I'll here's a good story to match that so here I was over in Pakistan last summer Pakistan for any of my Pakistani followers I know that's You say it appropriately, but I was there. We're working on child marriage and girls access to education. And I would check social media and it'd be the Epstein files. And I'd like, why am I here? Why am I here? ⁓ What are we doing? And I mean, I'll work with you and let's do this project together. But this whole idea of America being some sort of, I don't know anything. Like we've got Epstein files, we've got something like 30 % or sorry, like 30 states or so still practice some form of child marriage. it's not, America's pretty dark and I'm really glad you're shedding light on this because it does cause us to question our own systems. Jenny: Yes, absolutely. And I've so appreciated in the last few episodes I've seen you put out this talk about how purity culture is pedophilia culture. you know, my practice didn't start out as a purity culture practice. My mental health counseling practice actually started out as survivors of early childhood sexual abuse practice. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Hmm? Jenny: And so it was mostly people coming to see me because they had experienced pedophilia and sexual abuse when they were children. And what I realized was how prevalent this is in the world of purity culture. And one of the tenets of purity culture is that you don't teach kids consent, because if you teach kids consent, then they're going to have sex. So there's often not even a language or an understanding for survivors that what they went through was harmful and non-consensual. And they are trained from very, very early on that any sexual ⁓ experience they have is going to be their fault, primarily if they're in a female body. Leigh/@followtheleighder: I appreciate you bringing up the pedophilia purity culture thing because it sounds shocking until you really sit with it and you're like, there is a whole connection here. ⁓ Especially like you said these children don't are not taught consent ⁓ Because it would feel inappropriate it almost feels like it's inappropriate to teach them that because then you would have to break their innocence by even telling them what sex is and ⁓ That in and of itself is frightening it's harming but it shows how infantilizing we want to keep children and We want this idea of like you said pure children And that's, it's just, it winds up, like you said, you get into older as you age and a lot of it comes with shame and you're just like, these are hormones, I don't know what's going on. ⁓ Or something like what unfortunately and terribly happened to you, tragically happened to you and I'm so sorry to hear that, that ⁓ someone else takes it. Someone else does that. ⁓ And then you have to reconcile with that. It's like you said, the God, the shame aspect of it. And it wasn't, you did nothing wrong. And ⁓ I'm just very sorry. So I'm gonna pause. I feel like I keep talking. But thank you for sharing your story. ⁓ Can you share a little bit? ⁓ We've talked. ⁓ Jenny: No, I appreciate that. Leigh/@followtheleighder: What that looks like now as women start to, not even just women, men as well. In fact, I had a conversation with someone who also felt that way, that they could not even acknowledge their queerness until later. What does that look like now to start the work of deconstruction and to reclaim being in the body? Jenny: Yeah, I would say it's often a very ⁓ slower than people want it to be process. ⁓ I often tell my clients that healing is like a spiral staircase where we're actually going to probably look at the same four or five things just over and over and over and over and over again from a different vantage point. And there's so many times that my clients or even myself, I'm like, why am I still struggling with this thing? And I think it takes appreciating how somatically lodged these messages and these experiences can be. And if you grew up in the world of purity culture, it was the air you breathed that everything was a subtle or not so subtle message about your sexuality. and about your body and as you named, like it was especially like if you didn't fit in the heteronormative ⁓ lens then there was often no conversation at all about queerness or if there was it was the unforgivable terrible sin and so so many people have been riddled with shame. ⁓ Dr. Tina Shermer Sellers has this beautiful book called Sex, God, and the Conservative Church. And it looks at how what she calls religious sexual shame has been infused that even if people didn't experience what we'd consider kind of overt sexual abuse in their childhood, for many people who grew up in purity culture, they exhibit the same symptoms as someone who has experienced overt sexual abuse, where there's ⁓ maybe ⁓ an aversion or a rigidity or a shame around sexuality. And, you know, I don't think ⁓ we are compartmentalized beings. And so it's not like I can feel shame about my sexuality over here, but I'm good with everything else. It's like usually if we have shame in a pocket of one area of our life, it's going to be infused into the other areas of our life. ⁓ And so for me and the work that I do and the clients that I see, it's this slow, gentle, compassionate untangling of, know, one of my favorite questions is who gets to decide? ⁓ Because there's so many ways that we don't even realize the indoctrination that we've experienced. Purity culture really is a world of black and white. So everything is all good, all bad, all right, all wrong. And life is just a lot more complicated and nuanced than that. And so a lot of times I find that the biggest work is just growing compassion for the ways in which our bodies did what they did to help us try to survive and to navigate this world. Leigh/@followtheleighder: So beautiful. ⁓ I liked earlier when you were talking about going back to dance. In fact, I had a guest on a few weeks ago and that was her story. was, was reclaiming her voice. now like she was a professional dancer, did a whole thing, but now she has moved into somatic dance as a, job. And it's just so needed. It's so needed to have women say their story, own their story, unpack it and then give language and I know that sets it up so like you know we suffer and recover so that others can heal and I don't like that you know I don't I don't I don't think that's why we suffer but ⁓ using what you have gone through I think is really what I am drawing to is using your story ⁓ to give language to study this and and help a lot of people have you found ⁓ when you work with your clients what are the some of the best ways that you have came come across them do do conferences retreats classes how do you work with clients? Jenny: Yeah, a lot of times it's kind of word of mouth ⁓ or clients find I've literally had people find me because they googled does purity culture cause trauma. And there's there's not enough information out there about how insidious purity culture is. But it is growing. I'm actually a member of what's called the purity culture research collective. And so we are a collective of scholars, therapists, artists, activists, all looking at so many different things in purity culture. to me, it's it's fascinating what, and heartbreaking, how many tendrils purity culture has. So there's colleagues studying affect and facial expressions within evangelicalism, purity culture, and eating disorders. and just so many different ways in which we can look at the different intersections of this impact. So a lot of times it's kind of word of mouth of people that are kind of in these worlds or who find me on, I have a website, Indwell Movement and Indwell Counseling or social media at indwell underscore movement. And so that's kind of how folks tend to find me at this point. Leigh/@followtheleighder: I'm really proud of you and just generally like impressed ⁓ because It's a lot to navigate. It's a lot of holding on. ⁓ When you are in this community, I hope that you find not only support, peer support for yourself, but ⁓ what does it look like to come up? I know is this research collective and purity culture? Is it really just a white evangelical thing or like where else, who else is a part of this collective? Jenny: Yeah, we are primarily looking at white evangelical purity culture. While there certainly are purity cultures in many different religious and patriarchal and liberal ideas, ⁓ primarily what the Purity Culture Research Collective is looking at is ⁓ the white Christian nationalist patriarchal project in the United States. Leigh/@followtheleighder: It's certainly needed and like I said, you'll find a lot of patients and clients and people looking for you. What does your research look like next? I know that you're working and you're going this. Are you working on any books or articles or what can, where can we learn more about you? Jenny: Yes. Great question. Yes, I do have a book coming out. So part of my research was that I did an ethnographic research study and I interviewed many white women who grew up in purity culture and became missionaries. ⁓ And so I have compiled a book. Right now, the working title is Anatomy of a Missionary that may or may not change. But I'm working with North Atlantic Books and that will be on shelves in fall of 2027. So I'm really, really excited for that. And then I have an article coming out with the Feminist Studies of Religion soon that started as a panel I did at the American Academy of Religion. And we did a panel on how understanding purity culture logics lets us understand Trump. getting re-elected for a second term. And so my panel was beyond America and looking at what Amais Hezere calls the boomerang of imperialism. And so what I'm arguing is that the same white, Christo-fascist ideals that we have been exporting to countries like Uganda are now boomeranging themselves back into the United States. And we need to have a global perspective of Christian nationalism. to really help us navigate this current moment that we're in. Leigh/@followtheleighder: That's, I would love to see the notes on that panel. That's terrific. And that's the thing too is ⁓ how much this Christian nationalist purity and that's even more hypocritical is like you have some of the most corrupt, greedy, like particularly at a political leadership level, ⁓ talking about purity culture or talking about doing all this like hegephth and it's just, It makes you sick. it's, like you said, hypocritical and not just American. This is global. ⁓ There's going to be a shift. There are shifts. There's a lot. As you remember in Project 2025, they talked about they were going to strengthen their relationships with conservative Christians abroad. And I was like, I bet you are. Jenny: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Jenny, I hope that you come back ⁓ and bring more of your research. Please keep me in the loop. You have been an absolute fantastic guest. ⁓ Do you have any parting words for us before we end this? Jenny: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I feel like we've just like touched the tip of the iceberg on so many of these, so I would love to keep talking to you about this. I think there's so much to explore and yeah, I just, if people are hearing this conversation for the first time and are like, ⁓ my gosh, I never even realized how I was affected by these. Leigh/@followtheleighder: please. Jenny: cultural phenomena, feel free to find me, to reach out, would love whether that's either working with me or pointing you towards other resources. These are the waters I swim in and it is heavy work, but it is work that I wouldn't do if I didn't believe that healing was possible and if I hadn't experienced that and with myself and the clients that I work with and so. ⁓ I know we've talked about some really heavy things today, but I really do believe that there's hope ⁓ and transgenerational hope for the types of worlds that we can co-build when we heal ourselves from these types of indoctrination. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Absolutely, absolutely. And I was just looking, like as you were speaking, like ⁓ at your, ⁓ the paper that I read for Pure to Purpose Pipeline. ⁓ And I hope folks, you all get a chance to read that. There is a link on there. ⁓ But it's Pure to Purpose Pipeline by Jennifer McGrath on top of all the amazing other research that she just shared with you. ⁓ Jenny: Yes. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Jenny, thank you for being here. I so appreciate it. And folks, yeah, that was awesome. Yes. Jenny: Thank you. I just love the work you're doing. I think it's so important. So I'm so honored to be a part of the conversations you're having. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Whoa. And you'll have to come, there's no way we could've, I don't think we dove right in. It's heavy stuff and yeah, you gotta come back. And folks, if you have any questions that you all want me to ask her for the next time, please leave those in the comments too. That would be really cool. ⁓ Other than that, that was another episode of Follow the Leighder. Let me know what you thought in the comments. Make sure you like, follow, subscribe. You know the drill. Other than that, I will see y'all next time. See ya. ⁓