The gospel of Britney Spears
An Evangelical girl went off-script
Britney Spears was always an Evangelical. Her first concert, age four, was in church. Every aspect of her upbringing was keyed into the religious culture of the time.
She was homeschooled. The great Evangelical idea throughout the 1980s and 1990s was that public school was evil. She became a performer at Disney, a rare entertainment outlet to be Evangelically-approved.
In her public romance with Justin Timberlake, who was also Southern Baptist, she was the sexy virgin, ready to be his Evangelical wife. But was she too sexy? That was her appeal. She was dramatizing a religion’s roles and fantasies, until she went off script.
Evangelical culture at the time was in a particularly deranged moment.
Britney’s career tracks with the end of the “purity culture.” For around a decade the religion had locked down on the sex lives of its youth — instructing them not to have premarital sex, not to date, just to “wait” until God led them to their intended spouse.
The Southern Baptist sexual messaging organization ‘True Love Waits’ was founded in 1993. Joshua Harris’…
