purity test

English

Noun

purity test (plural purity tests)

  1. An informal survey that assesses the participant's supposed degree of innocence in worldly matters, such as sex, drugs, and deceit.
    • 2017, Jonathan P. Eburne, Benjamin Schreier, The Year's Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons, page 224:
      […] popular online “purity tests,” which use a series of 500 questions about sexual experience and drug use to establish one's level of “purity.”
  2. (politics) A rigid standard on a specific issue by which a politician or other figure is evaluated.
    • 2019, Jessica S. Mitchell, Erin N. Vaughn, Participatory Literacy Practices for P-12 Classrooms in the Digital Age, page 211:
      To begin, we return to Will: “What started as a critical reading of a children's book became a social justice 'racial equity' purity test full of hypocrisy”.
    • 2025 March 17, Andrew Marantz, “The Battle for the Bros”, in The New Yorker‎[1], →ISSN:
      In retrospect, this was the height (or perhaps the nadir) of a kind of purity-test politics that was making some swing voters, including Rogan, feel less at home in the Democratic coalition.

Derived terms

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