Wayward: A Memoir of Spiritual Warfare and Sexual Purity, by Alice Greczyn. (Austin, Texas: River Grove Books, 2021, ISBN 1632993546). 366 pp. Softcover, $19.95.
This harrowing memoir (excerpted in Free Inquiry’s previous issue) offers the most disturbing picture yet of growing up in the purity-focused Christian fundamentalist subculture of the past three decades—and that’s saying something. Alice Greczyn is an actress, perhaps best known as part of the ensemble cast in the ABC Family Network series The Lying Game (2011–2013). Since then, she’s continued acting and has launched a nonprofit to support others damaged as she was by an extremist Christian upbringing.
The purity movement swept the evangelical community beginning in the 1990s. (The Southern Baptist Convention unleashed its now infamous “True Love Waits” campaign in 1993.) The movement stressed young people retaining their virginity until marriage. It featured high-pressure “purity pledges” and so-called “purity balls” where young women danced with their fathers rather than with male peers who might, um, target their virtue. As years passed, the purity crusade rolled like a snowball through fields festooned with every crazy notion imaginable. In 1997, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Joshua Harris’s tome insisting that true purity meant forgoing dating altogether, sold more than a million copies. (Harris has since disavowed his book’s message.)
Today it seems as though the purity movement is imploding, and good riddance to it. Witness Linda Kay Klein’s book Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free (Touchstone, 2018; excerpted in FI as “Pure Anguish,” February/March 2019)—and witness Wayward.
The shelves groan under the weight of volumes written to document how toxic faith twisted their authors’ younger lives. Few can hold a candle to the horrors Greczyn recounts in Wayward. One day her parents abruptly announced that they would renounce worldly employment and devote themselves to missionary work. That’s the high-minded way to put it; to say it more accurately, her mom and dad abandoned their house and set off on an open-ended odyssey in an RV with their five children and no idea where their next meal would come from. Greczyn was homeschooled, of course, taught to look forward to a faith warrior’s martyrdom, and forbidden even to kiss a boy before marriage. Her mother was so strict that the use of tampons was forbidden lest the physical signs of Greczyn’s virginity be degraded.
Greczyn was able to break away—at least somewhat—when she was unexpectedly discovered as an actress and moved to Hollywood. The excerpt in the last issue described one of the crises that befell her then, when a young man she considered only a friend announced that God had commanded him to marry her—and her own father enthusiastically endorsed the idea. In numberless ways, Greczyn struggled to overcome the warped sexual values around which her young life had been twisted.
Ultimately, she renounced her belief in God. A searing passage makes achingly clear just how wrenching it can be to abandon supernaturalism after having grown up encouraged to rely on God for everything. “I never could have estimated how hard it would be to want to exist without the belief that there was something more,” she writes. For Greczyn, a lifestance little removed from nihilism proved the antidote required to set her free. It all makes for compelling reading—as noted, it is one of the most excruciating portraits of childhood under extremist Christianity.
The book is not without its rough spots. At one point, Greczyn stumbled on The Exactly Right Therapist Who Perfectly Diagnosed Her with a Newly Named Syndrome; it seemed too pat. I cringed when she described Dean Hamer’s credulous The God Gene as an important book and when she repeatedly mistook the neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin for opiates. But those are quibbles. Wayward is a book every secular humanist will want on the shelf (or in the e-reader).