Is Purity Moral?
Just When You Thought You Were Safe, Here Comes Yet Another Moral Foundations Post
Recently, I listened to an episode of the Judge John Hodgman podcast (the Judge hears and resolves petty and comical disputes). A wife brought a case against her husband because he wanted to sell his soul to the devil on blockchain to raise money for a down payment on a new house. I was surprised at my negative reaction to the husband’s idea. I mean, I don’t believe the devil is real,1 nor do I think selling one’s soul on blockchain will cause one to be tormented by Mephistopheles. And yet, the husband, by making light of the concept of a soul, was mocking something special about us humans that my gut says we ought to take seriously.2 Which got me thinking about Moral Foundations Theory again, as is my wont, and about sanctity and purity in particular. (If you haven’t read my earlier Moral Foundations posts, here is part 1, and here is part 2.)
Most of us associate purity with scenes like the one in this photo, which I took on a hike in the Swiss Alps last summer:
A clear blue sky, a glacial lake so pristine you could drink from it, snow-capped peaks, and no litter whatsoever (this is Switzerland, after all). How could anyone ever make a case against purity? And yet, with a couple of provisos, that is exactly what I will do in this post.
Definitions and Examples
As the stereotype would have it, conservatives respect the sanctity vs. degradation foundation, while liberals reject it.3 So what is the sanctity vs. degradation foundation? Religious people who value sanctity adhere to beliefs and practices that will make them pure and holy (according to their religion’s teachings). Some practices—for example prayer—are spiritual, while others require actions in the physical world. A desire for purity isn’t confined to religions, though: We also see the quest for purity in discussions about the environment and our health. All sanctity practices attempt to separate the “pure” from the “polluting,” and the sacred from the profane.4 The most helpful way to think about this foundation is through concrete examples. Below are a few examples that should give readers an idea of how those seeking sanctity will separate themselves from profaning substances, actions, and even people in an attempt to become pure and holy.
Some religious examples of sanctity and purity:
dietary rules, for example kashrut in Judaism, halal in Islam, the Hindu prohibition on eating beef, fasting in many religions, and the pre-1983 rule that communion must be taken on an empty stomach in Catholicism
rules separating sacred time from secular life, for example the sabbath and religious holidays
rules requiring that women who are menstruating or post-partum be kept away from other people
rules prohibiting sex outside of marriage and regulating how sex is practiced within marriage
rules about funeral practices that specify who can touch dead bodies and how the bodies must be prepared for burial
Some secular examples:
“cooties,” “the cheese touch,” and similar playground games
zero-Covid policies, for example the current total lockdown in Shanghai
vegetarianism, veganism, and “clean eating”
strict environmentalism, including avoiding plastics and chemicals
alternative/holistic/natural medicine, including opposition to medications and vaccines
abstinence-only treatments for addiction
The Advantages of Purity
There are of course advantages to striving for sanctity in one’s life, whether we are following religious rules or adhering to a secular moral code. In the process of trying to become pure, we hope to become better people. Prayer and meditation quiet the mind, refresh us, and make us better equipped to take on the frustrations and challenges of daily life. These practices also help us to stop ruminating over angry, negative emotions and encourage us to focus on higher matters instead. When we adhere to purity rules, we practice self-discipline. We may feel tempted by forbidden foods (I have been a vegetarian for most of my adult life, but I confess that I still crave bacon now and then!), but we know that we have the power to resist our cravings. As another example, I have a Muslim friend who wears a headscarf. A secular feminist, I had assumed the headscarf helped Muslim women be taken seriously for their minds rather than for their looks, but my friend told me that, for her, the headscarf is a sign that she has given something up for God. The headscarf is a daily practice of self-discipline. Purity rules can remind us to be grateful. Right now it’s Passover, a festival that celebrates freedom. When Jews eat the special Passover foods at the Seder, we think about the suffering of people in bondage throughout history and around the world, and we express our gratitude that we can live in peace and comfort.
Purity rules can also help other people. Prayer and meditation connect us with other people; when someone is suffering, it can be a comfort for them to know that friends are praying for and thinking about them. Purity rules foster empathy, which often leads to charity. Fasting is practiced in many (even most?) religions; fasting gives us a visceral experience of the suffering that millions of people around the world face every day. It is common for people to donate the money they would have spent on food during their fast days to food pantries and other charities. My sister-in-law’s Turkish family donates the price of a goat every year to honor Ramadan, for example. Purity rules often have side benefits, too. Kosher and halal slaughter methods cause much less suffering to animals than they would undergo in a conventional slaughterhouse, and kosher meat is so expensive—and the kosher rules for eating meat are so onerous—that it is likely that observant Jews eat less meat than most Americans. Sabbaths and religious holidays in many religions gave followers a break from work in the days before the labor movement codified weekends and holidays into secular law.
The Problems with Purity
I confess that I struggle with one issue, though: For me, morality is about how we treat other people (and, to a lesser degree, animals)—whether we actively help them, remain neutral and allow them to live their lives as they see fit, or actively hurt them. As I discussed above, the effort to be pure can make people more thoughtful, grateful, and self-disciplined, but otherwise the quest for purity is in my opinion a morally-neutral expression of one’s culture and/or preferences: If people choose to remain virgins until marriage, or obey their religion’s dietary restrictions, or adhere to any other religious or political practice having to do with purity and sanctity, that is of course their right and not anyone else’s business.
However, when purity rules are taken to extremes or are imposed on other people, they can cause suffering in a number of ways. First, purity makes the perfect the enemy of the good. For example, abstinence-only sex education not only fails to give kids the information they need to protect themselves from pregnancy and STDs, but it doesn't even achieve its ostensible goal: Studies show that students who received abstinence-only sex education begin having sex at the same age and have the same number of partners as students who received comprehensive sex education. What does work? Colorado tried an experiment in offering free birth control to everyone in the state, and in the program’s first year the teen pregnancy rate was cut in half, the abortion rate was cut nearly in half, and, as a bonus, the state “saved $70 million in public assistance costs.” Colorado’s pragmatic approach wasn’t “pure” or “holy,” but it had the virtue of being effective.
Similarly, zero-tolerance drug-education programs like D.A.R.E.5 fail to stop kids from trying drugs. Even worse, abstinence-only drug-and-alcohol-treatment programs like AA and other 12-step programs don’t work—their long-term success rate is only between 5 and 10 percent according to peer-reviewed studies. (AA claims a long-term success rate of 33 percent, but they only report data from people who remain in the program, not those who start the program but drop out.) The best medical research now recommends treating addiction with a combination of medication and therapy, and recent studies show that psychedelics are an especially effective treatment for addiction. Again, a focus on purity—the demand that alcoholics and other addicts take no drugs whatsoever but just white-knuckle it—denies vulnerable people the benefits of medications that actually work to treat addiction.
I don’t mean to pick only on conservatives either; opposition from some environmentalists to GMOs could deny the nutritional benefits of golden rice to millions of malnourished children in developing countries, for example. And while I yield to no one in my fears about climate change, I also recognize that such approaches as the degrowth movement, with its demands that we live in conditions of extreme austerity, are unlikely to win many converts. Less pure but more pragmatic approaches to fighting climate change—like investing in renewable energy rather than subsidizing fossil fuel companies and turning to nuclear power to meet our energy needs—would help us decarbonize without having to give up such modern necessities as heat, electricity, and transportation. Similarly, as a vegetarian who is concerned about the environment, I think it would be great if people ate less meat, but the carnivores among us will only be repelled by demands that we all go vegan, or that we get our protein from insects.6 Whether it’s sex, drugs, rock and roll, the environment, or really any other problem, a harm-reduction approach is not only kinder to our fallen human nature, but is more effective in absolute terms.
Second, purity separates people from each other. The preachy, killjoy vegan is a cliché, but the stereotype unfortunately has a basis in reality: It is possible to be so strict with one’s dietary rules that one denies oneself the opportunity to connect with loved ones, even family members, whose diets aren’t pure. (I feel like I’m allowed to criticize here, because I never ask anyone to cook special food for me; I will take my own vegetarian food to gatherings or stick to salad so as not to put my hosts out.) Some religions prohibit their followers from setting foot in houses of worship of other religions, even for a wedding or a community event. One amusing story, from A.J. Jacobs’s book The Year of Living Biblically, tells of a wife’s playful revenge when her husband tried to keep himself from being “polluted” by her. He was following the strict Orthodox Jewish Laws of Family Purity, which forbade him to touch his wife or indeed anything his wife had touched while she was menstruating. So his wife, who was not a fan of these rules, touched every chair in their house when she had her period. Jacobs had to buy a portable stool and carry it with him everywhere so he would be guaranteed a chair that hadn’t been sullied by a menstruating woman. All joking aside, in our current era of extreme political divisiveness, our country’s best hope is for people to bridge these separations. Instead of walling ourselves off from each other, we should meet up, have honest conversations, and share our diverse perspectives, perhaps even over a meal.
Third, purity hurts the pure. While there is no evidence that the attempt to purify oneself causes mental illness, the pursuit of purity does in some cases contribute to and aggravate existing mental illnesses, particularly OCD and eating disorders. Scrupulosity, for example, is an intrusive preoccupation with following the rules of one’s religion or moral code. People suffering from scrupulosity can become greatly distressed at the thought that they have inadvertently broken a rule or had a stray bad thought. I once had a friend who was the daughter of missionaries. When she was a child, she became obsessed by the thought that she had “blasphemed the Holy Spirit,” which she believed was the unforgivable sin. She was tormented by the thought that she would go to hell, and these terrible ruminations began to consume her life. Judge John Hodgman’s podcast often features people suffering from the secular version of scrupulosity, particularly on environmental issues. One poor, misguided woman found herself digging through trash constantly, in an effort to “rescue” plastics from landfills. Her entire kitchen had been taken over by plastic containers that she had dug out of the trash, and her “gifts” of this trash plastic to everyone she knew had begun to damage her friendships.
Orthorexia is an eating disorder that is related to scrupulosity. People suffering from orthorexia become obsessed with eating correctly, whether for health, ethical, or religious purposes. They will scrutinize food labels, refuse to eat in places and with people who might not match their level of purity, and deny themselves needed nutrients in an effort to keep their diets pure. Rigid fasting is a health risk too. In Israel, studies have shown that pregnant women who fast on Yom Kippur have twice the rate of preterm birth in the days following Yom Kippur than do pregnant women who don’t fast.
Finally, purity cultures hurt people who aren’t “pure.” Elizabeth Smart, who was abducted and repeatedly raped as a young teenager, never reached out for help, because she believed her church’s teaching that unmarried women and girls who aren’t virgins are like “an old piece of gum, and who’s going to want you after that?” She thought that no one would help her because she had been polluted by what had been done to her.
In the US and around the world, families expel children from their communities—or even pretend they are dead—because the children refuse an arranged marriage, or date outside their race or religion, or otherwise violate that culture’s rules about sexual purity. In the US, LGBTQ youth make up a disproportionate 40 percent of homeless teenagers, often because their families have rejected them. Extreme requirements for purity can lead to even more severe abuses, including honor killings, female genital mutilation, and—in the past—rendering certain groups of people (the Dalit in India and the Burakumin in Japan, for example) literally outcast and untouchable. Unlike the other moral foundations, which forbid hurting other human beings, the sanctity vs. degradation foundation in my opinion encourages some people to hurt themselves or others in order to obey a particular idea of God.
The Third Commandment
Let’s close with a story. I used to volunteer for Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic. Another volunteer, Gerald, was Muslim. When I first met him, he didn’t shake my hand but instead put his hands into the prayer position and made a little bow. He explained that he was not allowed to touch women who weren’t in his family, but he wanted to be friendly and to show women respect, so he came up with the idea of bowing. I thought this was a lovely idea, and in fact I have used this greeting myself throughout the pandemic. When Gerald noticed that his purity rules could conflict with other people’s feelings, he resolved the conflict in a way that emphasized kindness. I believe that it is incumbent on us to be like Gerald and to figure out how to obey the rules of our religious or ethical codes while still considering the feelings and rights of other people.
The Third Commandment, “Thou shalt not take God’s name in vain,” is usually taken to mean that we shouldn’t use any name of God as an expletive. But a better translation from the original Hebrew is actually “You shouldn’t carry God’s name in vain.” In other words, we shouldn’t use God or our ethical code as a justification for being a jerk to other people. It’s pretty insulting to God to say that God wants us to hurt other people’s feelings, let alone to ostracize, injure, torment, or murder them. Any moral code that requires us to hurt other people isn’t all that moral, is it? And in any case, being imperfect isn’t degradation; it’s just human. To me, the best way we can be good people is to humbly acknowledge our imperfections and then get to work to make the world a better, kinder, more generous place.
This is where I’m requesting your help, readers. I would like to think about this issue in as unbiased a way as possible. So if you would like to defend the value of purity, please comment on this post (or, if you’d prefer to respond to me privately, reply to the email) and make your best case. What am I missing? What do I need to consider? And if you agree with me, please say so! Thanks—I look forward to reading your thoughts.
The Tidbit
This has been a long, philosophical, and possibly controversial post, so let’s close with something lovely and relaxing: An otter being gently brushed and squeaking with happiness!
Cue Keyser Söze: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.” Nonetheless, I truly don’t think the devil exists—and Keyser Söze doesn’t exist either.
For the record, the Judge agreed with me: He forbade the husband from selling his soul. But to help the couple raise money is a less diabolical way, he had t-shirts made that feature the wife’s needlepoint designs, and he is selling them in his online store. The Judge is a mensch, and I highly recommend his podcast.
As I argued in my second Moral Foundations post, I disagree with this claim. I think everyone across the entire political spectrum sometimes respects and sometimes rejects all five moral foundations, depending on the situation.
If you are interested in this topic, I recommend Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, by the anthropologist Mary Douglas. I read Douglas’s book when I was working on my chapter about the 1665 London plague for my erstwhile dissertation, and her ideas have influenced me ever since.
And a fortiori Nancy Reagan’s failed “Just Say No” campaign quickly became a byword for clueless non-solutions. My college even had an annual Nancy Reagan Smoke Dope on Campus Day in her honor. When was it? April 20, of course!
This is likely a sign of my particular internet bubble, but a recent Google search for “eating insects” turned up scores of articles that were enthusiastically in favor of the practice. Somehow I doubt that this attitude is representative of the majority of Americans!
Mari, thanks for a thoughtful essay on purity. Some people struggle with choices like the lesser of two evils, or the greater of two goods.
I noticed that on your Seder plate you have an orange. So do we.
I think you’ve hit on something crucial here. When I was younger and religious, I held fast to purity for purity’s sake—and because of my nature and personality, it was fairly easy. Then I started to see the world differently, and those rules caused me a great deal of inner conflict. Then, somehow, I’ve let go of all those rules. But now I’m coming back around to an appreciation for a moderate version of “purity.” Parameters for personal conduct can be freeing and anchoring, just as parameters in any venture actually can be helpful for making progress. But now I believe the rules of purity one follows should be chosen, not imposed. “Everything is permissible; not everything is beneficial.” What doesn’t benefit one person may benefit another.