SEX101:Intro to Sexual Reformation

I was sitting in the living room at my in-laws, my legs, stretched out on the luxurious sofa sectional, serving as a table for my laptop, as I wrote out a quote from Nadia Bolz-Weber, a pastor and author I had recently discovered. My sister-in-law was on the couch near me, and typing out the words in silence was making them expand inside me in an uncomfortable way. They just felt too immediate not to share right away.

“Listen to this,” I said. She looked up, and I started reading aloud.

Many of us were taught that if you do not fit inside the circle of the church’s behavioral codes, God is not pleased with you, so we whittled ourselves down to a shape that could fit those teachings, or we denied those parts of ourselves entirely…But our sexual and gender expressions are as integral to who we are as our religious upbringings are. To separate these aspects of ourselves—to separate life as a sexual being from a life with God—is to bifurcate our psyche...¹

I looked over and caught her eye when I finished.

“Well, damn,” she said.

I wholeheartedly agreed. It felt like Pastor Nadia was speaking directly to me. I found her book unexpectedly while looking for something else on the Ohio Online Library and checked it out because it sounded interesting. Shameless: A Sexual Reformation. What’s not to like? I’ve been reforming my sexuality for years now, and I’m not alone. A lot of us who grew up in the Fundamental Christian culture of our home church were scarred by exactly that phenomenon, the bifurcation of the psyche, that Pastor Nadia describes. I had to look up bifurcate. It means to “divide in two,” or to “separate into two parts,” as in branching or forking. I like the word especially in this context because it sounds kinda dirty. Say it: bifurcate. It sounds like what my mother called a “bathroom word.” Like something done in the dark and kept secret. Except it’s been done openly to billions of us humans over the course of centuries. But like any dirty secret, I grew up holding the shame close and hidden and thought I was the only one…until, thank God, a few of us old friends started having conversations.