Spirituality, Shame, and Sex-Positive Healing
Growing up in a conservative Evangelical pastor’s family in the part of the US frequently referred to as the Bible Belt embeds a certain set of ideas about sexuality in a person’s head.
I was taught that sexual acts (including masturbation) were only acceptable when performed inside of a marriage, which biblically had to be between one man and one woman. Any sexual expression outside of that was not only unacceptable socially, but was also a sin that would send a person to hell for eternal torment if one did not repent of that sin.
Yes. I was taught that people would be literally tortured for a literal eternity for masturbating.
This, of course, results in young people who have either repressed their sexuality so much that they’re screwed up by the time they’re adults or connected guilt and shame to their sexuality so that all sex feels wrong.
I fell for the indoctrination at three years old. Yep, at three years old I believed I was a sinner and needed forgiveness from my many, many sins. My parents homeschooled me, so the indoctrination was non-stop: I heard it in church 3+ times a week, I heard it in “school” every day (because, you know, “Bible” is a normal class people take in K-12, right?), and I heard it at home because my parents were determined to “train up a child in the way she should go” (Proverbs 22:6).
Determined to be a good Christian girl, I desperately tried to shove down my sexuality. Don’t look sexy, don’t act sexy. Definitely don’t admit you’re attracted to her as well as him. Don’t date someone you wouldn’t marry.
Funnily enough, repressing sexuality doesn’t work. I still watched (lesbian) pornography. I still read and wrote erotica. I still masturbated. I still lied about my age to gain access to Adult themed role playing games, where I engaged in wildly unsafe online behavior, especially for a minor. Sure, I felt terrible for failing to be a perfect, sexless robot, and I repented for it over and over and over and over.
But all this did was create a cycle of white-knuckling an impossible goal, failing, deepening my self-loathing, and repenting again.
It taught me that I was not enough. That I was a failure. That I was not capable of achieving my goals. That I could not be faithful. It taught me to hate myself.
What it didn’t do?
It didn’t teach me how to be safe from predators online. It didn’t teach me how to navigate sexual relationships maturely. How to deal with new relationship energy. It certainly didn’t make me straight or cisgender. And it didn’t even do the thing it was supposed to do: It didn’t make my marriage better.
This entire sexual ethos depends on two things: How one interprets Scripture and whether one believes Scripture is the infallible arbiter of right and wrong.
If you take the bumper sticker approach of, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it,” then, yeah, you’re going to end up with this particularly fucked up sexual ethos.
If you begin to study things like textual criticism, redaction history, and the politics of translation history, you end up with questions. Most of those questions start with “Why” and end with even more questions but few answers. In the process of questioning, though, you can grow in your connection to the Divine and in your humanity.
I was taught that sexual acts (including masturbation) were only acceptable when performed inside of a marriage, which biblically had to be between one man and one woman. Any sexual expression outside of that was not only unacceptable socially, but was also a sin that would send a person to hell for eternal torment if one did not repent of that sin.
Yes. I was taught that people would be literally tortured for a literal eternity for masturbating.
This, of course, results in young people who have either repressed their sexuality so much that they’re screwed up by the time they’re adults or connected guilt and shame to their sexuality so that all sex feels wrong.
I fell for the indoctrination at three years old. Yep, at three years old I believed I was a sinner and needed forgiveness from my many, many sins. My parents homeschooled me, so the indoctrination was non-stop: I heard it in church 3+ times a week, I heard it in “school” every day (because, you know, “Bible” is a normal class people take in K-12, right?), and I heard it at home because my parents were determined to “train up a child in the way she should go” (Proverbs 22:6).
Determined to be a good Christian girl, I desperately tried to shove down my sexuality. Don’t look sexy, don’t act sexy. Definitely don’t admit you’re attracted to her as well as him. Don’t date someone you wouldn’t marry.
Funnily enough, repressing sexuality doesn’t work. I still watched (lesbian) pornography. I still read and wrote erotica. I still masturbated. I still lied about my age to gain access to Adult themed role playing games, where I engaged in wildly unsafe online behavior, especially for a minor. Sure, I felt terrible for failing to be a perfect, sexless robot, and I repented for it over and over and over and over.
But all this did was create a cycle of white-knuckling an impossible goal, failing, deepening my self-loathing, and repenting again.
It taught me that I was not enough. That I was a failure. That I was not capable of achieving my goals. That I could not be faithful. It taught me to hate myself.
What it didn’t do?
It didn’t teach me how to be safe from predators online. It didn’t teach me how to navigate sexual relationships maturely. How to deal with new relationship energy. It certainly didn’t make me straight or cisgender. And it didn’t even do the thing it was supposed to do: It didn’t make my marriage better.
This entire sexual ethos depends on two things: How one interprets Scripture and whether one believes Scripture is the infallible arbiter of right and wrong.
If you take the bumper sticker approach of, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it,” then, yeah, you’re going to end up with this particularly fucked up sexual ethos.
If you begin to study things like textual criticism, redaction history, and the politics of translation history, you end up with questions. Most of those questions start with “Why” and end with even more questions but few answers. In the process of questioning, though, you can grow in your connection to the Divine and in your humanity.
Owning My Own Ethos
I would need a blog dedicated specifically to my deconstruction to do justice to all the incredible nuances involved in how I got from the wildly conservative Christian girl I was at 18 to the pansexual, polyamorous, spiritual, socialist non-binary person I am today at 34. What I will say here, however, is that this has been a journey of over a decade. This is not an “I’m bored, I think I’ll deconstruct” experience. This is not something I did out of malice or a desire to destroy religion. This was my journey to make sense of my life and my faith.
Every single step of this journey has been accompanied by an experience that has kept me on track.
I call this experience the Pillar of Faith’s Light. Not long after I began asking questions like “Where in the Bible is the list of English swear words we’re not supposed to say,” or “How can a good God command genocide,” or “How can a God who never changes be so different in the New Testament from the Old,” I prayed a variation of a theme I prayed regularly. Remember, my questions came from a genuine place of wanting to understand my God and my faith better. They were sincere questions asked with the intention of growing closer to God through the questioning. My prayer? “God, I seek Your truth. Send Your Holy Spirit to guide me and correct me when I err. Let me not be deceived.”
This time, God answered me. In my head, I saw a field of green stretching for acres. Several meters away, I saw a beam of light shooting out of the ground and extending so high into the sky its top was lost to sight. The pillar was so wide it would have taken at least four people fully extending their arms to encircle it. The light shone so brightly, I could barely look directly at it. While taking this in, I heard the voice I had long come to associate with the Holy Spirit say, “Do you see that pillar? That is your faith. It burns brightly and cannot be extinguished by seeking truth.”
Throughout the years, I have thought of that light and the faith it represented on an ongoing basis. I continue to ask the Holy Spirit for guidance and correction from error. And I feel that light blazing within me to this day. My faith is not gone, merely shifted (though I suspect everyone I know from my former world of conservative Christianity would call me a backslidden heretic, if not an outright apostate).
Every single step of this journey has been accompanied by an experience that has kept me on track.
I call this experience the Pillar of Faith’s Light. Not long after I began asking questions like “Where in the Bible is the list of English swear words we’re not supposed to say,” or “How can a good God command genocide,” or “How can a God who never changes be so different in the New Testament from the Old,” I prayed a variation of a theme I prayed regularly. Remember, my questions came from a genuine place of wanting to understand my God and my faith better. They were sincere questions asked with the intention of growing closer to God through the questioning. My prayer? “God, I seek Your truth. Send Your Holy Spirit to guide me and correct me when I err. Let me not be deceived.”
This time, God answered me. In my head, I saw a field of green stretching for acres. Several meters away, I saw a beam of light shooting out of the ground and extending so high into the sky its top was lost to sight. The pillar was so wide it would have taken at least four people fully extending their arms to encircle it. The light shone so brightly, I could barely look directly at it. While taking this in, I heard the voice I had long come to associate with the Holy Spirit say, “Do you see that pillar? That is your faith. It burns brightly and cannot be extinguished by seeking truth.”
Throughout the years, I have thought of that light and the faith it represented on an ongoing basis. I continue to ask the Holy Spirit for guidance and correction from error. And I feel that light blazing within me to this day. My faith is not gone, merely shifted (though I suspect everyone I know from my former world of conservative Christianity would call me a backslidden heretic, if not an outright apostate).
Today I believe that Scripture is not the infallible arbiter of right and wrong, and that the “meaning” of Scripture has always been and should be socially constructed.
By this interpretive lens, Scripture does not prohibit polyamory, it prohibits cheating. It does not disallow extramarital sex, it disallows taking others’ property or ruining someone’s social standings and opportunities. It doesn’t forbid being queer because there was an entirely different view of sexuality that makes it impossible to compare a gay man in 2025 to what the biblical authors would have known about or experienced. Scripture doesn’t define marriage at all, and any attempts to force it to do so would result in a definition so culturally different from 2025 as to be useless.* Scripture does forbid pedophilia, beastiality, and rape.
So when my husband and I decided to open our marriage and allow for polyamorous relationships to form, I do not consider this to be a violation of my faith. I am cheating on no one, for all my partners know I am married. I am not taking anyone’s property because people aren’t property in 2025, and I’m not ruining someone’s social standings or opportunities by having sex with them.
My sexual ethos now centers around consent. Minors and animals cannot give consent, nor can adults who are under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or who have been coerced. Consent can be withdrawn at any point by any participant, and anything that happens after it has been withdrawn is assault. Potential partners have the right to know that I am married and polyamorous before they consent to have sex with me, just as they have the right to know my STI status.
Owning My Own Body
The answer to “who owns my body” ought to be pretty straightforward, especially considering the whole “you can’t own people” thing. Yet the body I found myself living in as a fully-formed adult felt like it was owned by the sexual ethos ingrained in me by the conservative church. My body was in prison, just a prison of the mind and spirit.
Accepting that masturbating was not a sin helped start the process of taking ownership of my own body. Masturbating while actively feeling guilty about it and masturbating as a celebration of what your body can do? Wow. What an incredible difference this makes!
Though my sexual ethos was not as fully spelled out as it is now, it was already forming during the years of my marriage before we opened it. Regulus always had a lower sex-drive than me, and I could have sought other partners. But without the marriage being open? That would have been cheating, and I am absolutely against cheating. Cheating is the opposite of consent, in my view. I say this not to pat myself on the back for being such a good wife, but to point out that the nature of our arrangement and my values meant that I was not doing any physical exploring beyond masturbation - all of which makes breaking out of that prison challenging.
After opening the marriage, however, I learned several things quickly and started learning some things I’m still learning. Remember, Regulus was my second sexual partner and only long-term sexual partner until we opened the marriage.
I learned that my sexuality is part of me and my body, not just something in my mind. I learned that (apparently?) having a pussy gives me a lot of power over people with penises, and that it is up to me to wield that power responsibly. I learned that I am sexually desirable to many, many people. All of this? I learned within the first month or so of opening our marriage - some of it within the first two weeks.
But the thing I learned fastest?
Conservative evangelical Christianity uses its teachings about sex to control women**.
After having sex with just two other people over the span of just a few days, I was already reconnecting with my body in ways I’m not sure I had ever been connected. I was more confident in other areas of my life. Work became less stressful (though that could have other reasons I won’t get into here). Life seemed more manageable. And I felt more capable and in control of my world. After just two casual sexual partners.
This is what the church wanted kept from me. And it’s infuriating.
I’m still taking ownership of my body, though that is happening more through my BDSM exploration than through poly exploration right now. I am still learning that I my body is sexy as it is right now, though this feels true more and more often now. I am still learning that making my body feel good, including through my sexuality, can be an act of worship. I am quite recently realizing that mutually giving sex between consenting partners can be holy. Sometimes, though? As my metamour pointed out, sometimes good dick is just good dick.
I am quite sure that my spirituality will shift more during my life, just as I am sure I will come into stronger ownership of my body and learn more lessons during my life.
For now, though? I feel like my body is actually mine, and I am at the most peace within myself that I have been in my adult life. My faith, body, and life are all mine.
*Please remember that this paragraph represents more than a decade of research and wrestling with these topics boiled down to one sentence per topic. By definition, there is missing nuance and details.
**I am using “woman” here even though I am non-binary because this version of the church does not recognize more than two genders and because I was socialized as a woman.
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