(RNS) — Growing up Southern Baptist in West Virginia in the 1990s and early 2000s, Anna Rollins heard one message clearly: Your body is a liability. Like many evangelical Christian women raised at a time when secular America became consumed with diet culture and evangelicalism sought to control young women through purity culture, Rollins tried to transcend her body altogether, restricting her eating and exercising obsessively. After she married, she was diagnosed with vaginismus — a condition in which involuntary muscle spasms in the vagina prevent intercourse, which is twice as common for women raised in conservative religious settings.
Rollins tells how she broke out of the expectations put on her body in a new memoir, “Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl.” Religion News Service talked to Rollins about her book, about how American Christianity’s teaching about “depravity” — the power of original sin — exacerbated what was a difficult time for growing girls and her advice for today’s parents on how to discuss food and sexuality with kids and teens. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What messages did you receive about growing up in the 1990s and 2000s in a fundamentalist Christian setting about womanhood and desire?
I was taught to question all my desires, that, at baseline, my desires were probably wrong because the idea of depravity extended to every part of you. Even the desire to get good grades — maybe that was really being fueled by unhealthy ambition. I was taught to question even things that seemed good and to think about the ways that they were probably tainted by sin. I think that was related to my struggle with OCD, but I also think fundamentalist settings encourage that kind of constant turmoil of turning something over in your mind and always questioning the “self” in it.
When you got to college, you write, you were struck by a course about gnosticism, the dualistic theology that grew up alongside Christianity and influenced it. How did that impact you?
On the first day of class, the professor quoted Harold Bloom, who said that gnosticism, not Christianity, was America’s real religion. This is reductive, but gnosticism hinges on the belief that the body is bad and the spirit is good, and so we’re trying to transcend our bodies. I’d been struggling with disordered eating for most of my adolescence, and I knew my belief system was playing into the anxiety that perpetuated my struggle. I became curious about what I had been taught about my body, about our flesh being bad.
I do think American Christianity is suspect of bodies and of people’s needs. We see that playing out in this underlying belief that to be good is to not need physical things. As I was trying to deny my body food, I intuited that there was something highly regarded about needing less. I saw it too in the way we talked about money. There was a lot of austerity in the circles I grew up in. I think of Dave Ramsey, and this idea that good people restrain themselves.
What are some of the ways that purity culture and diet culture are similar?
They both have to do with controlling desire, and this idea that good people restrain themselves. Diet culture affects both men and women, but there’s a lot more messaging toward women that really centers patriarchy and catering to men’s desires. In purity culture, there’s this emphasis on controlling your female body so that men don’t become out of control. Both are rooted in the prosperity gospel — the idea that if you do these things, then good things will come to you. In purity culture, if you save yourself for marriage, you will have a happy, fairy-tale married life. In diet culture, if you eat right and do these things, then you will have a good body and good health. It’s very formulaic.
Part of the reason these ideologies are resonant is because they hit on something that can be true — we shouldn’t always give in to our desires. But it doesn’t give much room for listening to your own needs, and it doesn’t allow for pleasure or surrender or spontaneity.
How did yearning for control impact your relationship with food and exercise?
(After giving birth) I was having horrible health concerns, and so was my husband. So was my baby. It was like my entire life was falling apart. I felt like I had done a lot of the right things leading up to the situation. So I leaned on dieting. I knew that wasn’t going to fix my life, but it was something that I could hold onto. Everyone in my family was sick, but I could try to lose the baby weight.
That was when I realized I needed to unpack a lot of my beliefs, because they had become unsustainable. I realized I was hurting myself and I was hurting my family.
A few times you tried to talk about your struggle with disordered eating, and people responded poorly.
People were often dismissive. I remember one of my math teachers gave an extra credit assignment that involved calorie counting. If she had been paying any attention, what I turned in should have been concerning. I told a Bible Study leader, I think I have an eating disorder, and she said to me, “Oh, most women have these issues. It’s really not that big of a deal.” She was right, in that a lot of women struggle with it, but in general, we don’t take things seriously that we associate with women. We often tell them things are in their heads.
How should people have responded?
I would have wanted curiosity, rather than minimization. We don’t like problems we don’t understand. A lot of times we want to run away from them, or try to fix them. But one of the most loving things we can do is to listen to people and ask them questions. Maybe I would have wanted her to refer me for more help. But I think just being taken seriously can be a huge gift.
How did you get to the point of deconstructing — and then reconstructing — your faith?
After that postpartum experience, I saw that how I was raised led to a lot of my struggles with food, as well as vaginismus and being able to have sex with my husband. I was trying to determine, is this all of Christianity? It involved a lot of therapy, a lot of reading. I took a break from church for a while. I visited some new churches. I went to trauma therapy. Ultimately I realized I still believed in sin, and I still believed in God and in forgiveness. I had to go back to the basics. I do believe the basics of Christianity, and there’s a lot of other stuff that I unpacked and continue to unpack.
What advice do you have for parents and faith leaders to improve how they talk about food and sexuality?
Purity culture was a reaction to the AIDS crisis. When I was growing up, people were afraid that sex could lead to disease and even death. So much of the messaging I received in the ’90s and early 2000s was rooted in fear and shame. I didn’t receive much information about my own body. The expectation was that I would get married and have children. It felt like my body was my primary currency for life, but I was told nothing about it.
We can talk about sexual ethics and food without being fear- and shame-based. Trusting people with robust information about their bodies is important, as is unpacking the belief system that says there are good bodies and bad bodies.
