Cross Purposes: Love and Purity at a Puerto Rican Protestant High School

A "native" Christian ethnographer finds religious education at this church-sponsored school to pursue two distinct, and occasionally conflicting, curricula: "love" and "purity." The curriculum of love draws on what Turner called liminality and communitas in an effort to promote spiritual "encounters with God," whereas the curriculum of purity stresses adult–student hierarchies as students are urged to reject "worldly" popular culture. Adults were caught between the two goals when one student asserted a gay identity.