So in May, I started a feminist book club. (How else am I supposed to hold myself accountable for reading all the great feminist books I want to read? Anyway, I needed people I could talk with about these feminist books. Good discussion = a better book review ). Then, I kicked things off with a book written by a Lutheran minister. Oh, it gets better. The book’s theme is basically that the church has completely messed us all up with messages about sex that were meant to shame us into never wanting sex and only wanting God.
As one of the women I recently interviewed for my Badass Women Blog Series said, I like doing things the hard way.
But honestly, I didn’t realize until later that I’d done something bizarre selecting a book by a Christian minister for a feminist club. I think that’s because it never occurs to me that discussions about shame and sex are anything less than feminist.
But maybe it wasn’t that bizarre…
After all, the book I chose, Shameless: A Sexual Reformation, wasn’t just written by any Lutheran minister. Nadia Bolz-Weber wrote it. She’s a total badass with a terrible potty mouth. She started a church called House for All Sinners and Saints, which describes itself like this:
…a group of folks figuring out how to be a liturgical,
http://houseforall.org/
Christo-centric, social justice-oriented, queer-inclusive,
incarnational, contemplative, irreverent, ancient / future
church with a progressive but deeply rooted theological imagination
You see where I’m going with this, don’t you? I knew there was absolutely no way that anything Nadia wrote could possibly be less than feminist.
I was right, the book was amazing.
If you are a feminist, you should bump it up on your reading list. Read it tomorrow. Or as soon as you can get it from your local bookstore in hardback. The cover is beautiful. No, it doesn’t matter if you identify as Christian. Because the fact that you are not religious doesn’t mean that religion isn’t affecting you, does it? And this book says out loud, clearly and unapologetically, one thing that never seems to get talked about. Yet, this one thing is at the root of bunches of the problems feminists care about:
Sex competes with the church.
Or at least the church competes with sex. Because sex, like religion, has the power to alleviate the pain of separateness. But the church seems to think that its rituals must serve as the only way to alleviate that pain. Otherwise, the church itself might disappear.
How the church fears sex…
Here, we should probably stop and say that by “the church,” we are mostly referring to the conservative, evangelical church. Though there are other places where you see this, too.
But in any case…that church seems to think that the kind of erotic experience that overwhelms two (or more) people and puts them in that holy togetherness place cannot possibly come from God. I mean…why would God give us something so great? Or maybe more importantly: why would you go to church if you could get that sense of holy unity outside the sanctuary?
Answer: well, I don’t know your answer, but Nadia Bolz-Weber basically argues that the church answers this question with a great big “no.” It says, “nope, you wouldn’t go to church if you could get this unity somewhere else.” Because of that, it attempts to scare the bejesus out of any church member that might stray from a perfect, cisgender, heterosexual, only-sexually-active-within-the-church-defined-confines-of-marriage life.
Basically: if you want to f*ck and pray, you’re on the outs with God, and you better right that ship or you’re going straight to hell, you beast. (Excuse my language.)
Actually, don’t excuse my language. Accept it.
Because I’m really, truly with Nadia Bolz-Weber on this. When it comes to what the church has taught about sex, let’s “burn it the f*ck down.” It’s bad for us.
Well, it was bad for me. See, I grew up in an evangelical Christian church. I know exactly what kind of messages get sent to kids about their sexuality. I seriously thought masturbation was a sin when I was kid, and it caused a huge crisis of faith for me. I mean…think about that. When a young teenager gets told that masturbation is a sin, what does that leave them with?
If orgasming before marriage puts your soul at risk of eternal damnation, your choices get pretty limited fast. You can fight to repress any impure urge ever have. You can determine that you’re incapable of meeting those standards and turn to atheism altogether. Or perhaps most likely, you can vacillate between those two and land in a shame cycle. That cycle might look a bit like this: repress, repress, repress, rebel-and-give-in, shame, shame, shame, and back to repress.
And when you get caught in a shame cycle…
There are consequences. Those consequences don’t rear their ugly heads only in the bedroom after you’re married, either. They’re in how you see your body generally and how you define your sexuality and gender. They are in whether you believe in God at all as an adult.
As Bolz-Weber says in her book:
“Everything that happens to us happens to our bodies. Every act of love, every insult, every moment of pleasure, every interaction with other humans. Every hateful thing we have said or which has been said to us has happened to our bodies. Every kindness, every sorrow. Every ounce of laughter. We carry all of it with us within our skin. We are walking embodiments of our story.”
Shameless: A Sexual Reformation, by Nadia Bolz-Weber, p. 152
I have not escaped those consequences myself. I don’t think anyone does, and it was great to read a book from a minister who could admit all that.
Okay, but what if you don’t care at all about church?
Well, if you did not grow up in a church, or maybe if you grew up in a wonderful, liberal denomination of Christianity (I’m a big fan of PCUSA these days), then you might think none of this applies to you. Maybe you’re a straight, cisgender woman or man, you didn’t have any sexual repression, and you’re an atheist, so you think you don’t need a sexual reformation.
Read the book anyway.
First, because it will teach you a lot about those conservative “crazies” you don’t understand. Second, because we’re really screwing up if we don’t pay attention to the ways in which church policies around sex have affected our political conversations. Think you understand the pro-life debate and where it came from? Maybe you should read Shameless. Think you know why sex education hardly educates? Perhaps read Shameless. Think you understand why the anti-shame movement had to happen at all? You know what I’m going to say.
Surprise: a book called “Shameless” is about shame
That’s another great thing about this book. I am an enormous fan of writer/speakers like Brene Brown. These shame researchers have helped us understand shame as a force that we need to eliminate. They have advocated for us to replace shame with joy, resilience, and vulnerability. Shameless really speaks to all of these topics. In Shameless, Bolz-Weber really helped me see shame in a different light, though. She connected demons to shame and “the devil” to “the accuser.” God, she seems to be saying, doesn’t want you to feel ashamed. God gave you gifts to enjoy. Gifts like the ability to experience multiple orgasms in a row with a passionate lover.
Who says you can’t have that? What demon is that? What devil is accusing you of doing something wrong for being a sexual person? What a great way to make shame something that is alive for us. (And no, I don’t think your religious background is going to make Bolz-Weber’s discussion of these things less potent for you. The analogy stands for all of us. Just because you don’t believe there are little monsters waiting to torment you in hell doesn’t mean you don’t have little figurative monsters tormenting you right now, right?)
Also, not to get preachy on you but…
I do think that if every church thought of God and Jesus the way Nadia Bolz-Weber did, it would be a lot easier for more people to get on the church bandwagon. I feel like you could kind of sum up the basics of her beliefs with these quotes:
“When people asked Jesus how to be righteous and live in God’s plan and be pleasing to the Lord, Jesus didn’t say, ‘Don’t be trans’ or ‘Don’t have sex outside of marriage.’ He just said, ‘Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself’ (Mark 12:30-31).”
Shameless: A Sexual Reformation, by Nadia Bolz-Weber, p. 57, 83
“To God, everyone is different but no one is special…We all have the same God who placed the same image and likeness within us and entrusted us imperfect human beings with such mind-blowing things as sexuality and creativity and the ability as individuals to love and be loved as we are.”
One more reason to read the book:
Finally, if you are interested in healthy, consensual sex, this is also a book for you. What I have said in the past is that I want sex between my characters to be consensual and heart-to-heart. I always assume that heart-to-heart includes mutual respect. But Bolz-Weber puts mutual respect and consent out there as pillars of “good” sex. Well, it occurred to me that I never actually say “mutual respect” out loud myself. But see…this is why I read feminist books. I rely on other feminists to remind me of things I should know but might forget and make me think hard about things I thought I know but didn’t really.
Shameless absolutely did both of those things for me, and I think it will for you, too. Heard enough? Go get the book now. It’s a well-written, easy read. And in the meanwhile, I’m onto my next feminist book (The Princess Saves Herself in This One, by Amanda Lovelace)…
*The featured picture is Adam and Eve by William Blake (1808), watercolour on paper