Anna Rollins is the author of the painful and powerful new memoir Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl. The book illuminates the unholy alliance between diet culture and evangelical purity culture, both of which teach women to fear their bodies and to diminish themselves. A longtime teacher of writing, Anna’s work has appeared in Slate, Salon, Newsweek and The New York Times. I’m grateful to her for this remarkable book, and for her responses to these questions.
Greg Garrett: Your formative years and your faith tradition taught you that you needed to pay attention to your body — how much you ate, how much your body provoked the men around you. The religious culture you were part of was at fault, but so is our larger culture. What can Famished teach us about your own history and also what you observe in the larger culture around women’s bodies and men’s lust?
Anna Rollins
Anna Rollins: When I came of age in the 1990s, both evangelical purity culture and diet culture were at their peak. Purity culture arose as a reaction to the AIDS crisis — a time when sex could have led to disease or even death. Because of that fear, religious and political messaging promoted sex education rooted in shame, control and abstinence. It was framed as a solution to the perceived harms sexual and cultural freedom had created.
At the same time, at the turn of the millennium, we were encountering another form of dissonance. Fashion and media idolized heroin-chic models — bodies that were extremely thin and seemingly untouched by hunger or desire — while the U.S. surgeon general was simultaneously declaring a “War on Obesity.” So culturally, there was both an extreme fear and an extreme fetishization of bodies — particularly those that could resist appetite, desire and physical need.
“These conditions led to a generation of women with deeply complicated relationships to their bodies and their desires.”
This moment created profound cognitive dissonance. People — especially girls — were taught to be hyper-vigilant about their bodies. Abstinence and the denial of desire were portrayed as ideal. These conditions led to a generation of women with deeply complicated relationships to their bodies and their desires.
GG: You talk late in the book about religious diets like the Daniel Fast and note institutional religious diets are a part of America’s religious heritage. How do you now understand the imposition of religious diets? Is there anything spiritually or physically or emotionally healthy about such things?
AR: R. Marie Griffith, in Born Again Bodies, argues Protestant Christianity played a key role in shaping the diet and fitness culture we recognize in mainstream society today. She suggests a fit body came to be seen as an outward manifestation of a fit soul — an external sign of internal regeneration.
The Enlightenment promoted a dualistic view of mind and body. Within this framework, the body was seen as something to be disciplined and subdued by the mind. This emphasis on mastering “fleshly desires” became a central value of Protestant faith and later influenced broader cultural beliefs about morality, self-control and physical appearance.
In my book, I talk about religious diets that were formally instituted in church settings. The one used in the church I grew up in was called First Place, a Southern Baptist religious diet. I also interviewed women who participated in other institutionalized religious diet programs, like the Daniel Fast. These were different from traditional religious fasts that have existed throughout church history. The difference is that these modern religious diets were focused on body modification, rather than on setting aside desire in order to feast upon God.
I think it’s important not to take a fundamentalist approach when evaluating diet culture, including institutionalized religious diets. Saying all diets are harmful is just as limiting as saying dieting is morally good. Instead, we need to look at how dieting reinforces our beliefs about which bodies are considered good and which bodies are considered bad.
We also need to consider how idolatry might show up in our relationship with diet and exercise. When we say our bodies are the temple of God, are we using that language to secure our own power and privilege — perhaps to the detriment of others? Are we using that belief to hold ourselves to a narrow bodily ideal, rather than advocating for a cultural climate that is inclusive of all bodies and abilities?
So I don’t think it’s helpful to write off all dieting as bad, just as I don’t think it’s helpful to consider dieting an ultimate moral good. Instead, we need to consider what we are worshiping, who we are hurting and what we are trying to secure — power, privilege, belonging — when we engage in diet culture.
GG: You discuss some of your growing awareness from paying attention to Martin Luther, Mark Driscoll and John MacArthur and John Piper, even coming to the point of saying, “There’s nothing for women in this belief system.” Could you tell us a bit about what you later say: “Just because my church hurt me doesn’t mean I need to give up my religion.” Where have you found life-giving alternatives to what you were taught and lived through when you felt such shame?
AR: One of the observations I made after interviewing dozens of women who came of age in evangelical purity culture was that when women began healing their relationships with their bodies, their relationships with religion changed as well — and often in profound ways.
My own experience growing up in purity culture was that, as a woman, I felt I had to be almost inhuman. I needed to be behaved and in line, small and quiet. I never felt able to access forgiveness in a meaningful way, and I did not understand how, in my religious tradition, I had any space to express my own diverse contributions in the unique way God created me.
Martin Luther once wrote, “If women become tired, even die, it does not matter. Let them die in childbirth.”
As I was working to heal from disordered eating, I was unpacking everything I had been taught about God. That meant revisiting some of the key teachers who shaped my faith formation — including Martin Luther, John Piper and others — and I found deeply troubling things they had said about women. Martin Luther once wrote, “If women become tired, even die, it does not matter. Let them die in childbirth. That’s what they are there for.” John MacArthur chastised Beth Moore for teaching the Bible and told her to “go home.”
This dismissal and denigration of women was very troubling to me. I began sorting through how people who claimed to love God and believe in both sin and grace — along with forgiveness — could speak in such disparaging ways about women. Over time, I’ve found many individuals have both brilliance and horrible blind spots.
What I’ve ultimately landed on is that I cannot worship what another person says about God. Even if someone like Martin Luther has profound insights, I cannot worship him — or any human — because they are still fallible.
And so I’m learning discernment. I’m learning I have a mind and a voice that can push back against people placed in authority, because ultimately, it is the God who loves me and created me who is in authority. Also, I’ve sought out writers and teachers who do have more expansive views of God’s grace and forgiveness.
GG: Tia Levings told me last year that once I understood how women were treated in patriarchal Christian cultures, I would know everything about how white Christian nationalism works. What does your story teach us about life in America under Donald Trump and his evangelical allies? Who wants to keep women — and others — in a place of powerlessness and instability, and why?
AR: Sabrina Strings writes in Fearing the Black Body that the thin ideal really began to emerge during the transatlantic slave trade, when white women used thinness as a way to distinguish themselves — a kind of physical and moral counterpoint to what were characterized as “greedy Africans.” Thinness became associated with whiteness and power, and it signaled not just beauty, but virtue, discipline, restraint and moral worth.
The thin ideal has persisted, although there have been periods of more inclusive representation, including the fat activist movement that arose in the 1960s during the sexual revolution and the recent body positivity movement that gained momentum (primarily on social media) in the 2010s. But often, those gains in broader beauty ideals are followed by backlash. And we’re seeing that backlash now with the rise of SkinnyTok and widespread, nonmedical use of GLP-1s — and this is happening at the very same time women are actively losing rights.
“As women’s rights shrink, their ideal body size shrinks too.”
As women’s rights shrink, their ideal body size shrinks too. It makes sense that in a cultural moment where women are discouraged from ambition or influence, they might be encouraged instead to focus inward — to modify and manage the body, rather than turn outward to shape the world in more expansive ways.
GG: Women and men alike have concerns about their bodies, eating and other consumption disorders, a dislike for the way they look to themselves, or they imagine they look to the world. You’ve thought and written about food and body image with honesty and consciousness. What advice would you offer to those who feel pressured to act differently, to do better, to look different — or who feel shame they can’t live up to what society asks? I’d be especially grateful for a faith lens for recovery to counteract the harmful faith lens you endured.
AR: In my book, I talk a lot about how fundamentalist thinking keeps us stuck. When we look for very rigid right-or-wrong answers or rely on strict “us versus them” categories, we lose our capacity for nuance, empathy and growth. I’ve come to believe one of the most meaningful ways to heal is to cultivate curiosity and compassion rather than rigid dogma and fear.
For me, one of the most transformative practices has been this: When I struggle to offer compassion to myself, I try to offer it to others. I might find it difficult to relinquish my own perfectionism, but when I show grace toward someone else — when I allow others to deviate from my expectations or ideals — I begin to shift internally. Practicing compassion for others not only changes the world, but it slowly changes how I relate to myself.
This has become especially challenging, and especially important, when I’m in conversation with people who hold more fundamentalist beliefs — beliefs I may find harmful. Rather than reacting with anger, exclusion or dismissal, I’m trying to approach even those people with curiosity and compassion. I truly believe treating others with kindness has the potential to change people. I know in my own life what has changed me never has been an argument; it always has been radical love or hate rooted in personal experiences
This is incredibly hard, and I often have to pray for strength and guidance. But I have found one of the ways I heal is by offering radical love even to those whose beliefs trouble me — by trying to understand them and by trying to offer them the kind of love I wish they might offer to me and others.
It might seem small. But I think those small acts are what ultimately change us and our world.
GG: Where are you finding grace, hope and courage these days? Barbara Brown Taylor sometimes asks, “What is saving your life just now?” Could you share what some of those things might be for you?
AR: My children are always saving my life. I have two elementary school-aged boys and a toddler girl, and they love to have dance parties. Those are absolute joys.
We have a wood-burning stove where our whole family will sit around and play the piano or read or play card games, and those are also some of my favorite times.
And I really love a slice of Dolly Parton’s decadent chocolate pie and some peppermint tea for dessert in the evening.
Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.
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