NEW RESEARCH: Modesty Messages Groom Boys to Become Predators

And make girls more unsafe!

Teaching modesty messages makes church more dangerous for teen girls.

That’s what our newest paper, out in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, shows.

It’s based on our dataset for our book She Deserves Better, and the lead author on it (Nicole Gallego) collaborated with us through the Good Fruit Faith Initiative, so the funding that you all donated allowed us to partner with an amazing professor who wrote this up for us! We have a number of partnerships on the go where we provided some funding so other profs can write journal articles based on our datasets, allowing more information to get out into the academic world and change the way pastors, counselors, and other professionals are trained.

We’re so excited, and this paper especially is so ground-breaking and well-written. I’d like to share some highlights with you today, though you can read the whole thing here!

Professor Gallego wrote this so well, so I’d like to just summarize and share a bunch of quotes with you!

Purity culture taught girls that they were responsible for boys’ behavior

Using the “tropes” that we asked about in our survey, Prof. Gallego measured modesty beliefs based on five points:

• gender essentialism (“boys struggle with a visual nature in a way that girls will never understand”)

• sexual prosperity gospel (“If you wait to have sex until you are married, you will have the best sex life possible”)

• immodesty as a “stumbling block” where girls pose a threat to boys: (“Boys can’t help but lust after a girl who is dressed like they are trying to incite it”)

• gendered surveillance, where you can judge a girl’s character and walk with God by what she wears: (“Girls who dress immodestly are worse than those who don’t”)

• inner modesty (“girls talk too much”)

She quoted liberally from Dannah Gresh and Shaunti Feldhahn’s work to show how these ideas were spread, and how wrong and dangerous they are. It was very validating to see that other academics noticed the same things we did when we looked at literature for teen girls during purity culture! Here’s a basic summary of the argument of the article:

Historically, practices surrounding female modesty have been framed as protective measures aimed at safeguarding women and girls from violence and abuse. However, this study suggests that such practices may have the opposite effect, increasing the vulnerability of young girls and placing them in precarious situations.

Gallego, Sawatsky and Lindenbach: It's Not Just Fashion, It's Sin: The Impacts of Modesty Messaging on Female Adolescents Within the White Evangelical Church

Now let’s break it down into showing the argument Professor Gallego makes:

1. Our respondents showed a strong purity culture effect

Our survey of 7300 women for our book She Deserves Better showed a strong purity culture effect to these modesty messages. Girls growing up during purity culture were more likely to internalize them, and were more likely to have had the harmful effects we measured.

This paper focused on a subset of the data of people who had completed all the relevant questions. (Often people take surveys but only complete a certain percentage of the survey!)

2. Girls who internalized modesty messages were more likely to be assaulted in church as teens

This is the HUGE takeaway that I desperately want pastors, churches, and authors to understand: When we teach the modesty messages, we put girls are heightened risk for sexual assault and harassment.

Professor Gallego divided respondents into high IMM (high internalization of modesty messages) and low IMM (low internalization of modesty messages). From the article:

To further examine group differences, Mann–Whitney U test was conducted to analyze comparisons between the two subgroups. Results indicated a significant difference in the distribution of sexual harassment experiences between the two groups…Further comparison analysis of the means of both groups found that the high IMM subgroup reported approximately 79% higher incidence rate of sexual harassment in church during adolescence than the low IMM subgroup.

Gallego, Sawatsky and Lindenbach: It’s Not Just Fashion, It’s Sin: The Impacts of Modesty Messaging on Female Adolescents Within the White Evangelical Church

Do you see that?

Girls who internalized modesty messages were 79% more likely to be assaulted or harassed in church.

She goes on to explain that churches that teach these messages, that girls are responsible for not being stumbling blocks and putting the responsibility on girls for controlling boys’ behaviors, end up enabling sexual abuse, making it more likely.

3. Girls are more likely to be sexually assaulted by peers when churches teach modesty messages.

Another big finding: when we hear about sexual assault and harassment in church, we usually picture the creepy youth pastor–and that is a thing. We did find a significant percentage of girls who reported sexual harassment and abuse were targeted by pastors and youth pastors or adult volunteers. But about half were also targeted by peers.

In other words, boys who wouldn’t otherwise be predators are becoming predators because of these messages.

This part is so good I’m going to quote a longer passage:

One of the most significant contributions of this research is the expansion on our understanding of the impacts of purity culture on young males. The primary aggressors of child sexual harassment in religious spaces were identified as other minors (40%) within the congregation, which was an unexpected finding as the majority of research surrounding sexual assault in faith communities focuses on pastors and clergy as the main perpetrators (Denney 2022; Denney et al. 2018; Scarsella and Krehbiel 2019; Więcek-Durańska 2022). Although it was beyond the scope of this study to analyze further the profiles of minors who committed the sexual assault, the findings can be interpreted to mean, based on prior research (Muldoon and Wilson 2017), that spaces where modesty messages are promoted not only vulnerate female adolescents but also normalize sexual aggression (specifically perpetrated by boys). This can be linked to the idea within purity culture that male sexuality is something that is innately uncontrollable and that all men struggle with lust (Muldoon and Wilson 2017; Owens et al. 2021; Sawatsky et al. 2024; VanderHeide 2023; Wolfe 2024). Modesty messaging therefore teaches young men that they are not responsible for their sexual desires. Many of the items used in this study focused on this specific facet of the modesty messaging, measuring the internalization of tropes such as “Boys will struggle with their visual nature in a way girls will never understand” and “Boys can’t help but lust after a girl who is dressed like they are trying to incite it.” These ideologies can provide a justification for male sexual aggression as it sanctifies predatory behavior as God-ordained design. This further supports quantitative research linking purity culture tropes to a higher rates of rape myth acceptance (Barnett et al. 2018; Owens et al. 2021) but adds an additional layer of understanding by associating IMM with peer-to-peer sexual harassment experiences. (emphasis ours)

Gallego, Sawatsky and Lindenbach: It’s Not Just Fashion, It’s Sin: The Impacts of Modesty Messaging on Female Adolescents Within the White Evangelical Church

4. Girls who believe modesty messages are more likely to have low self-esteem long-term.

The problems don’t stop with sexual harassment and abuse; modesty messages also erode girls’ self-esteem, and low self-esteem is linked to worse economic and job outcomes; more abusive marriages; more mental health struggles; and more.

In this vein, the current study found that higher church attendance, net of modesty messaging, was positively associated with self-esteem. Church settings that promote extreme modesty messaging, however, appear to mitigate this positive effect. This study found that when religious institutions reinforce sexist ideology, it comes at a psychological cost for young women. This aligns and expands previous research that has found that women attending structurally sexist religious institutions report significantly poorer health outcomes compared to those attending more inclusive congregations (Homan and Burdette 2021).

Gallego, Sawatsky and Lindenbach: It’s Not Just Fashion, It’s Sin: The Impacts of Modesty Messaging on Female Adolescents Within the White Evangelical Church

5. Girls who most internalized the modesty messages are most likely to leave their faith tradition

Girls who grew up in these churches that preached this form of modesty messages are most likely to deconstruct their childhood faith, and far less likely to call themselves evangelicals today.

Interestingly, those with high IMM during adolescence were more likely to leave the evangelical faith later on…

Additionally, the study uncovered that disassociation from evangelical beliefs—although not a central focus of the initial hypothesis—emerges as a significant factor, particularly given the high proportion of participants with reported levels of high IMM who now identify as former evangelicals.

Gallego, Sawatsky and Lindenbach: It’s Not Just Fashion, It’s Sin: The Impacts of Modesty Messaging on Female Adolescents Within the White Evangelical Church

6. The Big Conclusion: Modesty Messages made church more dangerous, and undid the benefits of church

This is something we’ve talked about at length on the podcast, especially when She Deserves Better was published, but girls who grew up in churches that taught these messages, and then internalized them, lost all the benefits of religiosity, and would have been better off not going to church at all on many measures.

In other words, all of the people who taught this stuff made things worse for girls than they were before. Attending church is overall a good thing, and helps all of us tremendously. Faith is positive. But when girls are taught these messages, those benefits are outweighed by the harms.

Inferential testing found a significant positive correlation between church attendance and IMM (see Note 1), highlighting that the more female teens went to church, the more likely they would report higher levels of IMM. These churches were also found to engage in other purity culture practices such as purity pledges at twice the rate of churches where modesty messaging was not promoted. Religious institutions that promote modesty messaging were also found to be linked to higher rates of unwanted sexual attention. These churches, by promoting sexist ideology, were undermining the positive effects of religious involvement and participation on female adolescents and creating spaces that were psychologically and physically unsafe.

Gallego, Sawatsky and Lindenbach: It’s Not Just Fashion, It’s Sin: The Impacts of Modesty Messaging on Female Adolescents Within the White Evangelical Church

The authors, teachers, and pastors of purity culture did tremendous damage.

And now we have numbers for it: Girls who attend churches where they teach the modesty messages have a 79% higher rate of being abused–and the boys are more likely to become predators.

That is ugly. That looks nothing like Jesus! And we have to listen to Jesus and look at the fruit. The fruit is rotten.

Remember survivor bias and pastors:

A Facebook commenter brought up a great point that has to do with survivorship bias. When something is hurtful, it doesn’t hurt everybody. And the people who are really hurt are more likely to leave or drop out. That’s what this study found–those who were most hurt by these messages were the least likely to still call themselves evangelicals.

What this means is that those who grew up in this, but didn’t experience it as harmful, stayed. These are today’s pastors, youth group leaders, and adult volunteers. Those who knew purity culture was bad largely left; those who remain in leadership positions in evangelical churches are more likely to still cling to it.

And the men who are the pastors and youth pastors are also the men who are more likely to have assaulted their peers when they were teens, and are more likely to believe that this was somehow the girls’ faults.

This is all the more reason to be very, very careful about what church you take your children to, and talk to the youth pastor and pastor about their views of purity culture. If they do not loudly repudiate it, or even understand why it is an issue, that is a huge red flag.

Resources to help others understand the importance of eliminating these modesty messages

Want to dive deeper, or show others why these modesty messages are hurtful? These can help:

1. Read the whole article (it’s open access) at the Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion

2. Download our Toolkit, which has beautiful handouts summarizing the problems with all the harmful things we measure, including the modesty message. There’s a great handout to talk to your youth pastor/Christian school about dress codes, etc.

3. Read our book She Deserves Better! There’s a much longer discussion about modesty, and it will change how you parent. It will validate the things you felt as teens. It will let you reparent yourself! We also have a free video series that goes along with it if you want to study the book with some friends.

See the book here!

Help us publish more articles like this one!

We were able to collaborate with Professor Gallego, who did an incredible job, because of people who donated to the Good Fruit Faith Initiative.

Frankly, writing academic papers doesn’t pay. There is no way to monetize it. But with our four huge studies, we have a wealth of data that can be mined for more articles that show what is actually heathy in evangelical relationships and teachings. We’ve barely scratched the surface.

Articles like these can change how things are taught in seminary.

Be part of the change you want to see in the church, and help us get more papers out there!

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You may also enjoy:

• The Whole Story puberty & sex course for parents & teens, to help talk about this in a healthy way!

• We fix Shaunti Feldhahn’s survey question so it doesn’t enable date rape

• Podcast: what modesty messages did to us long-term

• Revisiting “stumbling block” messages: Can we please stop referring to women as alcohol?

• Little girls in mini-skirts in church parking lots aren’t the enemy: a response to Josh Howerton