I was reading several other books when the book Shameless: A Sexual Revolution by Nadia Bolz-Weber came in the mail. I started reading it and finished it the next day. I am not actually sure why it captivated me that way. I do not spend a lot of time thinking about sexual shame, but it did enter my life through an experience a few years ago. Not my own experience of sexual shame, but dealing with it when a close friend was working through it. Maybe that was the fascination for me.
Regardless, I liked Shameless. I’ve been a fan of Nadia Bolz-Weber for quite a few years. I was eager to read what she had to say about this subject, in particular pornography since I’d read one of her tweets about that which caused me some concern. I was afraid she would say that pornography is perfectly fine, and that was not my experience. I’ll write more on that soon.
In the beginning of the book, Bolz-Weber tells the story of talking to a parishioner, “a large transwoman,” and telling her she (Bolz-Weber) had recently read her Christian sex-ed book from forty years ago. She said,
“It taught me that God’s plan is for everyone to be a hetero-sexual, cis-gender Christian who never has sex with anyone until they marry their one true love and make babies...I mean, I do think there are genuinely those kinds of people out there…” The parishioner held up her hand and touched her thumb to the rest of her purple nail-polished finger. “Sure there are. And this is how small that circle is.”
Bolz-Weber makes the point that few people on this planet fit in that circle, and says,
So my argument in this book is this: we should not be more loyal to an idea, a doctrine, or an interpretation of a Bible verse than we are to people. If the teachings of the church are harming the bodies and spirits of people, we should rethink those teachings.
She talks about Martin Luther and how he looked at the harm the church had inflicted on his people’s spiritual lives and decided to teach people the “story of God coming to humanity in Jesus of Nazareth, and speaking to us the words of life,” which freed them from the harm their church had done.
Luther was less loyal to the teachings of the church than he was to people, and this helped spark what is now known as the Protestant Reformation.
She concedes that the church is not the only place where harmful ideas about sex and the body are taught, but she claims, “as harmful as the messages from society are, what society does not do is to say that these messages are from God.”
Another important point Bolz-Weber makes is
...we must also bring concern to our consent and mutuality. Concern moves us close to the heart of Jesus’ own ethic:love God and our neighbor as ourselves. It requires us to act on another’s behalf. It reframes the choice entirely outside of our own self-interest in a way that consent and mutuality alone do not.
Here is where she talks about failing to show concern when your behavior hurts others, such as hurting your spouse if you commit adultery, taking advantage of someone who isn’t in position of their full facilities, and so on. Concern for yourself is also a factor.
Bolz-Weber brings in this need for concern in the proposal for a sexual revolution:
It’s time to pay attention to what is happening to the people around us, and to our loved ones, and it’s time for us to be concerned.
I read an article in Christianity Today by Wesley Hall, saying that Bolz-Weber is doing away with the need for confessing sin and forgiveness (absolution) that attracted him to Bolz-Weber in the first place. I did not find this to be true in my reading. Bolz-Weber did not, as far as I saw, specifically address the topic of absolution. She did, however, talk about not hurting others in sexually related behavior and, as I already noted, the need for concern. I think that did not go far enough for Wesley Hall and most likely others. Hall speaks specifically about sexual purity as a scriptural category and “that the biblical rules against, say, premarital and extramarital sex are still binding on believers today.” Bolz-Weber has several things to say about purity.
But no matter how much we strive for purity in our minds, bodies, spirits, or ideologies, purity is not the same as holiness. It’s just easier to define what is pure than what is holy, so we pretend they are interchangeable.
and
Purity most often leads to pride or despair, not to holiness. Because holiness is about union with, and purity is about separation from.
Bolz-Weber brings up alcohol and the temperance movement. This has always been interesting to me -- the conflict between insisting on absolutely no alcohol (teetotalling) and drinking responsibly. And add in the fact that some people must give up alcohol completely or they cannot control themselves. Bolz-Weber herself is a recovering alcoholic and talks about her desire to drink even after decades of sobriety. She describes it as a switch that gets flipped. For some reason if she drinks alcohol, that switch flips and she cannot stop.
Bolz-Weber uses that same switch flip concept when she writes about pornography. And she talks about how some people can eat a piece of chocolate cake once in a while, then return to a balanced diet, while others cannot control their eating. “Same with video games. And exercise. And nail biting.” She writes,
But if you find that when you eat chocolate cake a switch gets flipped and suddenly you have no taste for anything else, to the extent that you desire only cake, cake might not be good for you. Still, I will not sit here and say that no one should ever eat cake and that it destroys people’s lives, just like I would never say that people should not drink because alcohol destroyed my life. Or that no one should ever view erotic imagery because [someone] has developed destructive behaviors around it.
Bolz-Weber says she does not have answers, but she won’t join in the moral outrage about porn, and goes on to note that the consumption of porn is ubiquitous and many who express outrage about it are very likely themselves secretly watching porn. “I believe we can apply an ethic of concern here by acknowledging the potential harm without shaming the behavior entirely.”
She brings up 1 Corinthians 10:23 where Paul says all things are lawful but not all things are beneficial. This is all very interesting to me. I am no Biblical scholar, but I cannot find a verse explicitly saying premarital sex is a sin, or even specifically forbidden. There are, rather, verses about marriage being holy, faithfulness between spouses, and many other verses that might be read to imply premarital sex is not allowed. They speak to all the ways that sexual desires and actions can be harmfuL. I wonder, though. Maybe premarital sex is like so many other things, something to pay attention to, to discern whether it is giving glory to God, life-giving to yourself and others, asking if the behavior is compulsive or bringing yourself or your partner more deeply into the sacred. That is hard for me to think. My inclination is to believe premarital sex is something God would see as sinful. It can be forgiven, of course, and good can come of it, but I have always thought it was sinful, regardless of the context. need to ponder it more.
I find it helpful to think of the purity movement in a similar way to the temperance movement. Why does the church (not all) build up a big teaching in regard to sexual purity for women, and not do the same for drinking (and also not do the same for men -- again, typically)? You don’t hear of wearing a “non-drinking ring” as you do a purity ring. You don’t hear of assemblies where everyone is lectured on the way that not drinking is holy. You don’t hear of “non-drinking father-daughter dances,” and all the other teachings, rituals, and emphasis often put on sexual purity. Of course, churches certainly preach against drunkenness, and I’m sure there are some churches where people sign a promise not to drink at all similar to the purity pledges, but I think there is no doubt the lesson of purity is preached and taught and given special attention in a way unlike other beliefs, and it has harmed a lot of people.
In Hall’s article he wrote:
Bolz-Weber is out to set Christians free from the angst and humiliation churches have often foisted on them because of their sexual proclivities and behaviors. But the way the book goes about doing so is by rejecting wholesale the idea of “sexual purity” and, with it, the need to confess sexual transgression. In one of the book’s most straightforward moments, Bolz-Weber sums up her message like this:
I’m here to tell you: unless your sexual desires are for minors or animals, or your sexual choices are hurting you or those you love, those desires are not something you need to “struggle with.” They are something to listen to, make decisions about, explore, perhaps have caution about. But struggle with? Fight against? Make enemies of? No.
The message of Shameless, in short, is that feeling like a transgressor never bears the seeds of redemption, and the way to flourishing lies in throwing out any standard that isn’t giving you life.
What if you substituted “drinking” for “sexual” in the quote from Shameless?
I’m here to tell you: unless your drinking desires or your drinking choices are hurting you or those you love, those desires are not something you need to “struggle with.” They are something to listen to, make decisions about, explore, perhaps have caution about. But struggle with? Fight against? Make enemies of? No.
I don’t think when you make that substitution, you would then draw the conclusion that “feeling like a transgressor never bears the seeds of redemption, and the way to flourishing lies in throwing out any standard that isn’t giving you life,” the way Hall does with sexual desires. Bolz-Weber is not saying sexual desires are never sinful. We would not say drinking is never sinful. Nor many other behaviors. As noted before, what Paul says applies to sexual desires, drinking, and many things, all things are lawful but not all things are beneficial (1 Corinthians 10:23).
i think it is good that Bolz-Weber is showing concern for those who were hurt by the church’s actions towards premarital sex, and doing what she can to show them the love of God, to promote healing. I understand a strong reaction to what seems radical and differs so much from what we have been taught. I cannot, however, believe that it means Bolz-Weber’s message rejects the need to confess sexual transgression, any more than it rejects the need to confess all transgressions. I see no reason to think she has changed her mind on that. Her message is, rather, that premarital sex is like other desires and actions. It is not always sinful, but can be. It does not need to be singled out and used to harm people the way it has been in the past. And we in the church need to understand the consequences of that history, and work toward healing the hurt.
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