It’s like a car wash for our shame and secrets.
I’m Nadia Bolz-Weber and you have stepped into the confessional.
I Kissed Dating Goodbye sold over 1.2 million copies. In the opening chapter of Shameless I mention that in 1997, 21 year old Joshua Harris wrote the wildly influential book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye in which he made the case that not going all the way before marriage was not going far enough, Harris took the teachings of the purity movement and moved the goal posts even farther away claiming that in order to be truly pure and earn God’s approval, young people should not ever kiss each other or touch each other or even go on dates with each other.
Which I guess might have made a lot more sense when there was no access to reliable birth control and marriage took place about 45 minutes after puberty but I digress.Ī lot of us who were raised with these teachings have tried to dig ourselves out from heavy layers of shame about our bodies and desires and are left later in life, trying to reconnect the frayed wires of our sexual responses systems. They must repress any sexual thoughts, desires or feelings until they can punch the golden ticket of heterosexual marriage. The sexual shame that comes from religious teaching has a particular acuteness to it …which is why I am convinced that messages delivered to us in God’s name embed inside of us, far below the surface and stay with us longer than anything the media or society alone can dole out.įor decades, what is known as the Evangelical purity movement in America has told those wild, beautiful, ever-changing, hormone-soaked beings we call “teenagers” that, in order to be good, in order to be pleasing to God they must disconnect from their bodies. In it I tell my own stories as well as those of others like a woman who even in middle age, still cannot make herself wear a v neck because she was taught it was immodest, and a gay man who never reported their sexual abuse because they were told that being gay was a sin, and some married folks who still cannot manage to be fully present during sex because the shame of it all has just never gone away. NBW: In 2019 I published a book titled Shameless: a Sexual Reformation, in which I explore the connection between sexual shame and the teachings of the church.
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