Who is Purity Culture Content For?Purity Culture is Pedophile Culture part 4
STRONGWILLED is a project for survivors of religious authoritarian parenting methods to find solidarity and develop autonomy. You can listen to the STRONGWILLED podcast wherever you normally get your audio content, and read our chapters on Substack or our website.
Read Part 1 of Purity Culture is Pedophile Culture here.
CW: discussions of corporal punishment, sexualization of children, discussion of father-daughter incest
In March of 2024 I (D.L.) watched Quiet on Set, a documentary that detailed the culture of abuse that thrived at Nickelodeon studies in its heyday of the 1990s and early 2000s. The docuseries was an uncomfortable watch for many reasons, but as a millennial who grew up idolizing Amanda Bynes and GoodBurger I felt like I needed to know the truth of what was happening to these kids. One of the bombshell revelations was that a serial child predator named Brian Peck had been allowed to work on set and abuse at least one of the Nickelodeon stars. Peck has all of the hallmarks of a serial pedophile — he consistently pursued working with children, he corresponded with other known pedophiles (including John Wayne Gacy Jr), and he surrounded himself with famous and powerful people who would protect him over his victims.
In addition to Peck’s horrific abuse, the documentary also explores how director and showrunner Dan Schnieder fueled a toxic misogynistic workplace at every level. Schneider not only employed Peck, but he also appeared to enjoy making content that Peck and other pedophiles would appreciate. From Schnieder’s obvious foot fetish to the sexualized positions he put his teen stars in, it’s undeniable to notice that for these Nickelodeon shows, there were several intended audiences. As a Vox news article on the docuseries put it, “In addition to putting child actors in uncomfortable situations, these scenes also exposed millions of kids who watched them to sexual scenarios and innuendos in a problematic way. ‘This is a show for kids, so who is sexual innuendo for on a kids show?’ asked Scaachi Koul, a former BuzzFeed News culture writer and consultant for the docuseries. (1)
As it turns out, the innuendo was for adults watching to take sexual pleasure in, and to normalize the sexualization of children — in particular, tween and teenage girls. As I watched Quiet on Set, I couldn’t stop thinking about some of the books I had read for this STRONGWILLED project and the similar themes they referenced. From the sexism, misogyny, and fetish content I found in purity culture books I had the nagging sense that there were two audiences in mind at all times: predators and prey. Those who must abide by evangelical purity culture rules and those who used them to exploit and sexualize children and teens, and possibly abuse them.
As powerful people who exploit children sexually continue to make headlines in 2025 and beyond, it’s important to consider where this abuse might be hiding in plain sight in other parts of the United States. Taking aside the religious language of holiness, re-reading evangelical purity culture books as an adult is like being plunged into a morass of patriarchal fetish content. While young people (and even their naive parents) might not identify anything unseemly in these books, once you understand how pedophiles operate it’s hard to not see passages throughout these books in a very different light. It’s hard not to notice it was mostly men writing and signalling to other men who found young people sexually attractive — or at the very least controlling and having complete ownership over the sexuality of their children.
And thanks to Dr. James Dobson and a whole host of other Christian authors, they now had the cover for their abusive methods — and a way to view what they did as being good, moral, Christian, and pure.
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It was James Dobson’s constant mentions of his work on the Meese Commission on pornography that first prompted me to start reading the transcripts of the landmark 1985 presidential commission. Part of what made the Meese Report so important is that in 1985, child pornography had just been made illegal while at the same time personal computers were beginning to make it easier than ever to access. As a part of his work on the commission, James Dobson not only saw child sexual assault materials (CSAM) over and over again, but he was also educated on who made these materials and the bigger issue of child sexual exploitation in the United States — most often made at the hands of fathers, step-fathers, and known family acquaintances.
As an integral part of the Meese Commission FBI Special Detective Kenneth Lanning testified multiple times on his extensive work of prosecuting pedophiles. He noted that these types of offenders almost always had an not only extensive collection of CSAM, but also what Lanning describes as “child erotica” — images and materials that might not seem to be sexually charged at first glance, but in the collection of a known pedophile take on a more sinister light. Lanning believes that pedophiles collected this material for several reasons. One, it fueled their fantasies. And two, they collected materials that would bolster their belief that they were good people with perfectly normal desires. (2)
This is why Lanning identified that pedophiles often try to find other pedophiles to exchange images and materials with. “The camaraderie and sharing of this kind of material, again, of sharing with people with common interests, makes you feel better about yourself, verifies the legitimacy of the value of the behavior,” as he told Dr. Dobson and the rest of the Meese commission. For him and other detectives in the mid 1980s, they were especially fixated on the reality that, “many of the things that pedophiles do are legally difficult to prove they did with the intent of sexual gratification.” (3)
According to Lanning, child erotica is, “any material relating to children that serves a sexual purpose for a given individual.” Lanning went on to explain that these materials were not the same as child pornography and could not be legislated as such, but that, “this is the type of material typically found in the possession of pedophiles and I think it has investigative significance. It includes such things as drawings, writings, diaries, sexual aides, souvenir books, toys, nonsexually explicit photographs and so on.” For example, Jeffrey Epstein was obsessed with the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, a novel about the sexual abuse of a 12-year-old by her stepfather. Epstein was said to have carried it in his jet (which was named the Lolita Express), as well as prominently displaying a first edition in his Manhattan apartment. While not classified as CSAM, it’s clear that stories like this are prized by child sexual abusers.
Other cases of child erotica are not so clear-cut. In the case of the Dan Schneider episodes for Nickelodeon, some of the jokes, storylines, and plots that involved young teenage girls could be viewed as harmless (if slightly weird and off-putting) when viewed by other children, but when adult men were the ones writing the stories, shooting the plotlines, and consuming the content, it turns into something else – something where children were imitating popular pornography tropes, often without them even knowing this was happening. This makes the possession of child erotica difficult to identify and prosecute, as its inappropriate function is dependent upon the intent of the creator or collector.
While it is true that content written for (or simply consumed by) child predators often flies under the radar of the general public, once you see it it’s hard to believe how normalized pedophilic themes have been in religious authoritarian spaces in particular. If you’re not interested in sex with children, or you are not a detective or psychologist trained to see these themes, these themes might go completely undetected. Or, it might feel off-putting — but you quickly think, they’re just not thinking about how that sounds. Or perhaps it’s downright upsetting and you wonder — how did this get published? Am I the only one thinking this sounds creepy? Like Lanning said, you can’t prove intent. But when something sounds inappropriate involving children written or produced by adults, this provides only two bad options when assessing it:
1) This was written with pedophilic intent and should not have been published
and/or
2) This is incredibly irresponsible given the frequency of child sexual abuse occuring in families and communities and should never have been published.
This isn’t a case of these authors not understanding the high prevalence of sexual abuse against children. As we argued in Parts 1 and 2, authors like James Dobson had been informed on the record over and over again about the prevalence of not only father/daughter incest but the epidemic of sexual violence against children. Many other authors — especially those who claim to be psychologists or those who counsel people as a pastor — have no doubt also been exposed to many instances of sexual abuse against children within families and faith communities. But instead of addressing the possibility of abuse and giving information that would keep children safe, the authors of purity culture books were silent on how to notice and report abuse.
Instead, evangelical men wrote passages that at best raised red flags and at worst were sexualizing children -- and encouraging fathers to do the same. The truth is, incest is one of the most underreported and taboo crimes and it is difficult to find statistics that reflect the reality of how prevalent it is within American society. But according to From Darkness To Light, when it comes to sexual violence against children the family is where the focus should be when looking for perpetrators: “the younger the victim, the more likely it is that the abuser is a family member. Of those molesting a child under six, 50% were family members. Family members also accounted for 23% of those abusing children ages 12 to 17." (4)
These numbers are staggering, and in part 5 of this series we will unpack how religious authoritarian spaces with their emphasis on grace and forgiveness for abusers often led to multiple child victims and no real accountability or justice. It’s a system that prioritizes men and downplays the reality of abuse, which is why predators are drawn to these communities.
If you’ve had your own experiences of a nagging sense of discomfort with purity culture resources that seem to play into sexually abusive or grooming frameworks, you’re not alone in noticing these things. And as we’ve read through these books, we’ve ear-marked pages that cannot be proven to be written with this intent, but feel unsettling and are incredibly common throughout these books.
We’ve included a few here. And for context, these are all written by fathers:
(CW: discussions of corporal punishment, sexualization of children, romanticizing the father/daughter relationship, using religion to advocate for the abuse of children.)
“[When I was a teenager] I made a really, really, really strong wish for my life: Please, God, no matter what, I want to be surrounded by beautiful women. Today I am. Their names are Victoria, Whitney, Hailee, and Madison, and they are 17, 16, 15, and 13 respectively. I share life with these beauties every day…[God] was having a gut laugh remembering my hormonal teen fantasy about how I wanted to live in the company of the lovely opposite sex.” - Greg Wright, Daddy Daughter Dates (5)
“Show me a little girl whose father rejects her spontaneous expressions of affection, and I will show you a girl with a predisposition toward [sexual] frigidity before she is six to eight years of age.” - Tim Lahaye, Spirit-Controlled Family Living (p.6)
“I believe it’s the job of every husband and father to understand that his job—perhaps his most important job—is to be the pursuer.” -Greg Wright, Daddy Daughter Dates (p. 22)
In She Calls Me Daddy, Robert Wolgemuth encourages fathers to develop rituals of what he calls “Secret Connections” with their daughters. In this ritual, they use what he calls “a kind of ‘squeeze’ language,” in which the father uses touch to ask his daughter, “Do you love me?” and she is prompted to respond with a corresponding signal that reassures him, “Yes I do.” (p.86)
“One of the gifts I gave my wife when the girls were small was taking responsibility for giving baths…I remember sliding them back and forth in the slippery tub, pretending they were hockey pucks…I can feel the weight of Missy’s or Julie’s head in my hand as I washed each girl’s hair…As I lifted them out of the tub, they would kick the excess water from their feet. Then standing them in front of me as I sat on the closed commode, I towel-dried their slippery bodies.” - Robert Wolgemuth, She Calls Me Daddy (p 89)
For many Christian therapists like H. Norman Wright (author of Always’s Daddy’s Girl), “healthy” sexuality looks like a girl who is feminine and is able to be in a long-term relationship with a man. Speaking to young women, Wright says: “Your relationship with your father was your critical initial interaction with the masculine gender. He was the first man whose attention you wanted to gain. He was the first man you flirted with, the first man to cuddle you and kiss you, the first man to prize you as a very special girl among all other girls . . . the fawning attention of a father for his daughter prepares her for her uniquely feminine role as a girlfriend, fiance, and wife.” (p.36) James Dobson loved to quote this particular passage in his books like Bringing up Girls and Dads and Daughters.
“When a father does not value or respond to his daughter’s femininity, she is stunted in her development . . . she is left to discover her femininity for herself, often with tragic results in her relationships with men . . .A father who is not too threatened by his daughter’s sexuality . . . her femininity is encouraged by his smile or wink when she bats her eyelashes at him, and by his expression of enjoyment for her hair style, new dress, or new shoes.” Norman Wright, Always Daddy’s Girl (p 36)
The father “must see, feel, appreciate, and respond to every aspect of the little girl’s femininity—her hair, her body, her clothes, her laughter, her voice, her walk, her gestures…The pleasure he gets and the pleasure he gives in open response will determine how far the little girl can be pleased by the presence and existence of a man.” Norman Wright, Always Daddy’s Girl (p.37)
“‘How does this look on me?’ takes on a whole new perspective when a daughter says it, because I can’t analyze that without my own mental circus kicking in. -Greg Wright, Daddy Daughter Dates (p 181)
“I wish I had a dozen granddaughters like the little ladies whose pictures grace the cover design of this book . . . I love the way God created little girls, romanticized in a classic song written for the movie Gigi: ‘Thank God for little girls, for little girls get bigger every day! Thank heaven for little girls, they grow up in the most delightful way.’—James Dobson, Bringing Up Girls (p 13) (it should be noted Gigi is a 1957 musical about a 14 year old girl being groomed to be a courtesan who ends up marrying a much older man).
“Some fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girls already have the bodies of women, and their dads are not supposed to notice — but they do . . . His attraction to her is involuntary and usually quite innocent.” -James Dobson, Bringing Up Girls (p 94)
Speaking of his 13yo daughter, the author writes: “All of a sudden Madi’s developed little curves. And all I can think is, She’s got this walk, for the love of Mike, and some kid’s gonna want some fries with that shake. I want to scream, “Stop!” Why is she walking like that? Cut it out. -Greg Wright, Daddy Daughter Dates (p 155)
“A lot of men are leaving their wives for younger women because they yearn for attention from younger women. And God gave them a daughter who can give them that. And instead, they go find a substitute daughter. … We’ve all seen it. These old guys are going and finding these substitute daughters.” Voddie Buaucham, speaking on Biblical Womanhood
Here is a clip of John Piper in 2013 talking about his theology of spanking. Notice how he talks about his adopted daughter. He paraphrases Hebrews 12 as saying “God disciplines every son he loves and spanks every woman he delights in.” He then goes on to say that God designed children with “fat little bottoms” to be “whooped on.”
https://www.tiktok.com/@dlmayfield/video/7411950525597420846
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It might feel like reading these passages through this lens might be too far of a reach, like we’re reading too much into it, or making a big deal out of something slightly off kilter — and we hope that is the case. But unfortunately, as professionals like Lanning have discovered, serial sex offenders often count on this kind of reaction. They often operate in plain sight, search for others who believe and act the same way, and sometimes even find delight in how brazen they can be while getting away with the horrible harm they inflict. We can’t know for sure about the intent of these passages, but we do know that the more informed and aware we are as a society — asking questions and taking a second look when we hear something off-putting — the more prepared we will be to protect children.
Regardless of intent, in the case of purity culture books, it is hard not to see overt themes of father-daughter grooming and incest under the guise of good Christian parenting. While this is a taboo topic to wade into, we believe it is important to address as nearly every week there are reports of sexual abuse against children in religious authoritarian communities.(6) These themes are especially troubling when considering how religious authoritarian parenting books all put forth the mandate for fathers to spank their children, sometimes even into their tweens and teens. Corporal punishment as practiced in these communities led to children being unable to say no to unsafe and unwanted touches on their body, and furthered the belief that parents should have complete control over their children — their inner world, their sexuality, and their body. (7)
The above passages are just a small sampling of what we came across in these books (and excludes the many similar passages we’ve referenced throughout this series). Purity rings became a major force in evangelical youth culture, and it normalized a teen daughter being taught that her body and her sexuality were not her own but rather belonged to God and her father. A Focus on the Family employee named Randy Wilson was inspired to start an event called a Purity Ball where fathers would take their young teen and tween daughters out on a fancy date for the purpose of the daughter pledging her virginity to her father. Unfortunately, both the purity ring and a purity ball (where the young girls dressed in white dresses) are the kinds of fantasies pedophiles dream about. It’s hard to unsee the child bride parallels in the imagery alone, not to mention the rituals involved in daddy-daughter dates, purity rings, and purity balls. But for those who are sexually interested in these types of scenarios, it makes sense why they would be drawn to conservative patriarchal spaces that not only normalize these kinds of relationships — but promote them.
Christian Patriarchal writers love to write about the special relationship between dads and daughters and have enjoyed the privilege and protection of writing and speaking in spaces where others shared these same views. But teaching fathers to primarily relate to their daughters as future wives seeks to train them to accept their dutiful role in the positive eugenics movement.
And beyond those harms, purposefully adding a romantic hue to the father-daughter relationship only adds opportunity to promote harmful relationships within a patriarchal home, without addressing the possible abuses of power that can and do happen. Purity culture materials, while ostensibly being for tweens and teens, appear to have another primary readership: men who primarily view children and young people as sexual beings, and who now have religious and cultural cover for these views.
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In part five we will unpack the ways that sexualizing children, crossing boundaries and even viewing CSAM became a part of evangelical culture, as men in leadership brazenly modeled this behavior. Under the guise of doing the Lord’s work in a “sex crazed culture,” they explicitly set norms and expectations of how Christian men should engage with sexual content, talk about women — and talk about children. While many people have rightly pointed out the harms perpetuated on tween and teens by evangelical purity culture standards, we here at STRONGWILLED are saying that there was perhaps a secondary audience to these books. The men who read them, and agreed heartily with these sexualized views of children. Who were purity culture books and messages and sermons really for? Who was benefiting from the highly romanticised father-daughter relationship in a patriarchal religious home?
And how long will we let them continue to get away with it?
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Endnotes:
This entire Vox article does a great job of breaking down all the allegations against Nickolodean Studios: https://www.vox.com/culture/24115802/quiet-on-set-nickelodeon-dan-schneider-drake-bell-amanda-bynes-ariana-grande
From the archives of the Meese Commision page 231: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/krvdfdcx9vcyx4a0hetfb/AGCv7B_K4kWV3E1xLtf2xWI/kenneth%20lanning-%20miami?e=1&preview=Photo+Aug+20+2025%2C+3+18+01+PM.jpg&rlkey=gk1k0gvg9eovphb1ym00f4w4j&subfolder_nav_tracking=1&dl=0
Meese Commision p. 236: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/krvdfdcx9vcyx4a0hetfb/AGCv7B_K4kWV3E1xLtf2xWI/kenneth%20lanning-%20miami?e=1&preview=Photo+Aug+20+2025%2C+3+18+07+PM.jpg&rlkey=gk1k0gvg9eovphb1ym00f4w4j&subfolder_nav_tracking=1&dl=0
Accessed here: https://www.incestaware.org/incest-rates-in-america-and-beyond. It is extremely frustrating that there are very few modern surveys or research studies on the prevalence of incest in America.
Wright, Greg. Daddy Dates: Four Daughters, One Clueless Dad, and His Quest to Win Their Hearts: The Road Map for Any Dad to Raise a Strong and Confident Daughter (introduction ). Kindle Edition.
We are grateful for accounts like Reich Wing Watch which are currently highlighting people within the MAGA movement who are arrested for CSA and possessing CSAM. You can see their account here.
For more on how corporal punishment leads to abuse, see Chapter 16 of STRONGWILLED, A Recipe for Abuse
