Adolescent Conceptions of Purity and Self within Canadian Evangelical Protestantism

• Author / Creator

  Brown, Stephanie

• This research broadly examines how people consider two opposing but compelling ideas and whether they synthesize the two concepts or reject one of them. Specifically, I focused my research on evangelical Protestant adolescents who participate in church youth groups and look at how they negotiate messages about sex and sexual purity from popular media and their church.
  Through the ethnographic methods of participant-observation and interviews, I collected data about the beliefs of youth participants, youth leaders, and congregants who had previously participated in the youth group. While most resources indicated that some blending and negotiating between the messages presented by media and the church would occur, the research did not support this: rather, youth rejected the messages from popular media in favour of the message about sexual purity from their church.
  In this thesis, I discuss the way that the history and belief system of evangelical Protestantism contribute to the rejection of the messages about sex from popular media by youth participants, as well as the factors in participants’ lives that position sexual abstinence as a legitimate option for evangelical Protestant youth.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Sexuality
  • Identity
  • Abstinence
  • Gender
  • Youth
  • Religion
  • Evangelical
  • Purity
  • Adolescents

• Graduation date

  Fall 2014

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R38K7537N

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.