Emerging Adulthood: Living in Your 30s as a Former Evangelical
In 2000, Lucky Severson produced a short video called Abstinence for PBS’ Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. He begins:
As parents, teachers, and politicians debate the role of abstinence in sex education, religious teenagers are making promises to themselves, their parents, and God to delay sexual intercourse until marriage. To date, the Southern Baptist group True Love Waits — a leader in the movement — boasts over one million pledges from youth. The movement is nationwide.
Severson notes that Southern Baptist pastor Richard Ross created a nonprofit called True Love Waits in 1993 to promote a theocratically informed abstinence only agenda to teenagers. He notes that Reverend Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church creates Pure Love Alliance during that time.
Oh yeah, the US government was pumping over $50M per year in grants to school systems and nonprofits that provided abstinence only sex education.
1994 was also the year that 200,000 purity pledges were planted on Capitol Hill, by the way.
Gotta hand it to the 80s and 90s Evangelicals—they were master organizers. Ugh.
So if we mark the beginning of Purity Culture as 1993, that means that the oldest teenagers who were impacted by this were born in 1975. If youth ministry typically begins for sixth graders, those folks were born in 1982. Julia would argue that purity culture-informed lessons began for her in first or second grade; those folks were born in 1987.
For a frame of reference, I was born in 1984, and was in 4th grade at the beginning of Purity Culture. Julia was born in 1989, which means that she was one of the first people who had Purity Culture-informed messaging throughout the entirety of her church education.
That means that the original people who had Purity Culture forced upon them are currently between the ages of 36-48.
The first people who grew up with Purity Culture informing the entirety of their church childhood and teenage education are currently in their early-mid 30s.
The field of developmental psychology has attempted to create markers of success for humans at various ages. Erik Erikson famously identified eight stages of psychosocial development, rooted in common psychological tensions that people in each age bracket face:
0-18 months: Trust vs. mistrust
18 months-3 years: Autonomy vs. shame and doubt
3-5 years: Initiative vs. guilt
6-11 years: Industry vs. inferiority
12-18 years: Identity vs. confusion
18-40 years: Intimacy vs. isolation
40-65 years: Generativity vs. stagnation
65 years+: Integrity vs. despair
Two quick reflections.
Obviously, Erikson’s and other developmental models are based in a Euro-centric, working/middle-class understanding of human development. There are numerous neurological, familial, cultural, and sociodemographic factors that impact one’s movement through this process. But Erikson’s work is a fantastic start for setting some guideposts for human development.
18-40 years is a really wide gap. There’s a huge difference between a 39 year old person and an 18 year old person.
That brings us to the work of Jeffrey Jensen Arnett. In 2000, he wrote the seminal article “Emerging Adulthood: A Theory of Development from the Late Teens Through the Twenties” for American Psychologist. In short, he and his colleagues suggest that period between the ages of 18 to late 20s consists of five features.
Identity exploration: Occupational, presentational, sexual/relational, as well as exploration of values, behaviors, and interests that reinforce said identity.
Instability: Both economic insecurity, as wages for entry-level workers are commonly lower (and that’s before we get to the fact that entry wages are lower for 21st century 20-somethings than they were for late 20th century 20 somethings), and the psychological insecurity that comes with a high volume of experimentation.
Self-focus: In the psychotherapy world, we refer to this as “individuation”—the process of choosing things for oneself at the expense and often in opposition to their communities and families of origin.
Feeling in between adolescence and adulthood: I see you, imposter syndrome.
Possibilities and optimism: There’s a reason that college campuses and towns and higher involvement in political and social causes than towns without colleges.
It’s helpful that a lot of sociological and psychological research happens at universities with university students as research subjects, much of which reinforces the theory developed by Arnett and his colleagues.
But that still doesn’t speak to the experiences of 30- and 40-somethings, many of whom were the primary subjects of Purity Culture indoctrination.
Fear not! Early this year, Jeffrey Arnett and Clare Mehta published a series of articles called “Established Adulthood: New Perspectives on Ages 30-45” in the Journal of Adult Development. They explain that during this period, people are typically settling into their careers, forming long-term relationships, and having children in their 30s and early 40s.
Their colleagues, Alan Reifman and Sylvia Niehuis, wrote the article “Extending the Five Psychological Features of Emerging Adulthood into Established Adulthood”, where they track the development of Arnett’s five features of emerging adulthood as a person enters their thirties and forties. They suggest five adapted features:
Solidifying identity: This stage involves a “reevaluation of one’s identity in response to not only external events but also internal motivators."
Somewhat diminishing sense of possibility in work/career and other domains: As child rearing responsibilities arise and occupational and financial goals intensify, the options for possibility narrow by necessity. In my own life, I have evolved from a generalist couples and family therapist to someone who specializes in providing sex therapy to couples impacted by conservative religion.
Focusing on others: Specifically, partners/spouses, children, and colleagues/employers.
Continuing stress: Simultaneously meeting the needs and demands of partnered relationships, young children, and occupational settings.
Beginning to consider oneself an adult, though not to the capacity of dispensing wisdom on younger generations.
So what are the implications for Sexvangelicals?
There are a couple of articles in “Established Adulthood” that focus on religion that I want to reflect on later this week.
But for now, consider these three hypotheses:
Purity Culture encourages young folks to skip the Emerging Adulthood stage and move directly to the Established Adulthood stage.
Commitment to organized religion for folks in their 20s-40s correlates an acceptance of the skipping of the emerging adulthood stage.
The deconstruction community, the community of 20-40 somethings who are leaving organized (especially Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Mormon) religions move from the Established Adulthood stage “backward” to the Emerging Adulthood stage.
Unfortunately, at this stage, a lot of proving these hypotheses will be anecdotal, as we are just now creating longitudinal and cross-cultural research on the impact of Purity Culture on teenage and adult development, sexuality, and relationships.
However, there are a myriad of combo memoir/qualitative research projects, from Pure by Linda Kay Klein to Sex, God, and the Conservative Church by Tina Schermer Sellers, that hint at these hypotheses.
In the coming months, we will begin a donation page for Julia and I to conduct research on the impact of Purity Culture on sexuality, specifically pertaining to the third hypothesis: how deconstruction impacts marriages, sexuality, and human development.