Cross Purposes: Love and Purity at a Puerto Rican Protestant High School

Abstract

A “native” Christian ethnographer finds religious education at this church‐sponsored school to pursue two distinct, and occasionally conflicting, curricula: “love” and “purity.” The curriculum of love draws on what Turner called liminality and communitas in an effort to promote spiritual “encounters with God,” whereas the curriculum of purity stresses adult–student hierarchies as students are urged to reject “worldly” popular culture. Adults were caught between the two goals when one student asserted a gay identity.

Language Ideology, Christianity, and Identity: Critical Empirical Examinations of Christian Institutions as Alternative Spaces

“…Often, these communities seemed to end up embracing values more conservative than the mainstream, such as participating in marginalizing other minorities, notably women and LGBTQ (Han, 2007a(Han, , 2007b, and internalizing linguistic nationalism and racism (Han, 2014b) as well as nationalist ideologies (Han, 2011a). Some members of the mainstream churches also hold socially-conservative views, disciplining practices of gender (c.f., Jule, 2005) and sexuality (c.f., Peebles, 2005;Seale-Collazo, 2013), and mobilizing politically on these issues. Indeed, in multiple societies around the globe, conservative members of the mainstream and minority churches have been joining forces to mobilize; they have already been a force to reckon with.…”