"Give Me Sex Jesus"

I watched Give Me Sex Jesus, a documentary about the Christian evangelical purity movement, for the first time last night.

That title though.

The film is streaming for free on Vimeo. 

Background: I've had my eye on this documentary ever since the Kickstarter campaign in 2012 when the title was "Jesus, Don't Let Me Die Before I've Had Sex." I attended the same church as Matt Barber (the director) for a few years, and I know some of the people interviewed. 

No, I never signed an abstinence pledge (though memories of doing so are notoriously tenuous) or wore a purity ring--though I might as well have. 

Purity culture raised me, and I fully embraced its principles. 

So, watching this documentary, I had quite a few thoughts and emotions--

I laughed. I cringed. Many of the interviews were some combination of funny, poignant, and heartbreaking. In the end, I wanted more.

I wanted to know how it all turned out--how the gay son of a prominent Christian family worked out his faith and his sexuality, if his dad ever spoke to him again or invited him to family dinners.

I wanted to know what happens when getting married doesn't give you the amazing sex life you were promised, how purity culture affects Christian dating culture, and how the filmmakers came to make the film that they made. 

Truthfully, it is the story behind the story that intrigues me the most. And it's a quite a story: 

Matt Barber left his faith and his marriage during the making of this film, as he details in this Life After God podcast. He is currently in a relationship with producer and co-filmmaker Brittany Machado.

Machado tells a similar story about leaving Christianity. She writes about having sex for the first time in college after a youth spent embracing purity culture:

"If my faith were a Jenga tower, then this brick of sexual truth was pulled from the bottom of the stack. From there everything started wobbling a bit."

This. This is the story that I'm interested in. Matt and Brittany's stories make plain what I have long suspected: That if you give up on the sex part, then you might as well give up on the Christian part too--

Richard Beck at his blog "Experimental Theology" writes about how purity is a metaphor, and not a good one, for sexual morality. Unfortunately, the purity metaphor seems to hold true in another way: 

Essentially, just as there is ONE way to have sex (in heterosexual marriage), there is also only ONE way to think and feel and talk about sex. Anything I might think or say or feel about sexuality that contradicts this doctrinal purity throws my entire faith into question. 

It feels like heresy--which is probably why I find stories about leaving Christianity so fascinating.

Watching this documentary, I realized that for me, sexual morality and what I do with my body are so intertwined with my identity as a Christian, that I can't even begin to untangle them. 

It's hard to imagine other aspects of my identity in the same way:

For example, if being a feminist or a writer or a college graduate or heterosexual or writing about racism seemed to be incompatible with Christian faith, would I have left long ago?

Maybe this happens to us all. We hit a wall--something that seems irreconcilable--whether it's our sexuality, our beliefs about the nature of men and women, racism, evolution and the study of science, "Christian" political beliefs, etc. 

In the end, I don't think it's about sex (YES IT IS! EVERYTHING IS ABOUT SEX!), but about purity--about a certain kind of certainty that I can no longer embrace.

It's about asking the kinds of questions that I want to ask, having the kinds of conversations that feel taboo, writing about what I want to write about.

Wanting these things and pursuing them doesn't feel like leaving Christianity, but it does feel like leaving behind being a certain kind of Christian, if that makes any sense.

Even if I didn't have to give up faith itself, I would have to take a leaving of a different sort--leaving behind evangelical Christianity and the community that has felt the most like home here in Los Angeles.

More conversation:

Watch the film HERE
Life After God podcast
Hot Buttered Shame on the Dana Gould podcast
How Christians Have Sex - Personal response to watching "Give Me Sex Jesus" from a lapsed Christian (?) slash LA comedian

If you've watched the film and want to talk about it, or you haven't the watched the film and want to talk about it, I'm here. Let's talk.

Friendship & Grief: Holding the Story Only

I've always been perplexed by how effortless female friendships are supposed to be--as portrayed in movies, books and TV shows. Friendships were never that easy for me.

As a kid, having an incredibly fun, outgoing and winning twin sister didn't help matters. One time I invited a classmate over for a sleepover. We must have been around 9 or 10 years old. By the next day, the classmate and my sister were as thick as peas in a pod, chattering away as I trailed behind them, alone. I may or may not have been crying. Wow, this is a horrible story. Moving on.

Things certainly haven't always been as bleak in the friendship department. And after I moved to LA almost four years ago, I've seen and felt my close friendships deepen and grow.

Friendship is easily one of the best things about life.

I've found that there's an element of mystery to friendship. I'm not sure I can fully explain why I have the friends that I do. [Yeah, not completely buying the genetic similarity explanation, sorry.]

There are some people you meet and everything points to the fact that you should be bff's, but you're not. You have it all: shared interests, mutual friends, the same social group, shared beliefs, a similar sense of humor and appreciation for the finer points of medieval Norse, but yet there's that certain something that's missing.

As one friend explained to me once over tea in a trendy (is there any other kind) LA coffee shop:

"There are some people that you miss when they're gone. You feel it here."--holding her hand to her heart.

That's probably the most accurate definition of friendship I've ever heard. 

And that's the thing--you don't necessarily choose this feeling. You can have it for someone you've just met or someone you've known for 15 years. You can experience it after one conversation or 20. You can have it for someone who could be your personality twin or someone whose ways and means are as mysterious as the origin story for french toast.

To recap: Friendship. Awesome. Mystery. French toast.

All that to say, I'm currently experiencing something that feels a lot like grief.

More recently, friendship has felt a lot like the memoir class I took last year, a class in which each week, several people brought in their living, breathing, gasping-for-air stories.

And Samantha reads her story out loud. And the room falls completely silent in the presence of such naked, vital vulnerability.

And I'm sitting in my seat holding the story in my cupped hands--trying to--struggling so hard not to crush it. And the air is electric and thick with beauty, loss, grief. And I'm completely still as I hear about losing a child, becoming a mother, caring for aging grandparents.

It feels sacred. This story-cradling.

And I don't know how else to describe how friendship feels sometimes.

As if I'm holding my friend's story. Awed by her beauty. Crushed by her fragility. Desperately hopeful for her future and protective of her past.

There is pain in the tension of not yet.

I have these moments. I think everyone has these moments.

All I can do is hold the story. Without altering it to make it easier to take, or trying to "fix" it, or pretending that the painful parts don't exist, or going on as if everything's okay when it isn't.

Sometimes it's just not okay. 

On Sincerity and Being Raised Evangelical

"Each year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere. He's gotta pick this one. He's got to. I don't see how a pumpkin patch can be more sincere than this one. You can look around and there's not a sign of hypocrisy. Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see."
-Linus, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown"

I've been drawn to sincerity lately. 

"As opposed to what?" you ask.

You may not have noticed, but I'm normally drawn to sarcasm, irony and snark.

It's weird. I've been doing a lot of sincere things recently. Sincerely. 

For example, I've been going to yoga. Have you ever tried doing downward dog insincerely? It's tough. 

I've also been listening to this song a lot. 

In addition, I went to a poetry writing group. The sincerity was as thick and oozing as blue cheese that's been sitting in a 70 degree office for three days. [This is not meant as a criticism of poetry groups or of this poetry group in particular. This poetry group is awesome.]

So, in the spirit of sincerity, I need to get something off my chest: 

My childhood was crazy--freaking insane. 

Can I just admit this? Can I just say it out loud? 

I don't even know who I'm looking for permission from--my parents, God, peers. 

Maybe my childhood was crazy in a generic fundamentalist-evangelical-culture-in-the-90s kind of way, and you grew up experiencing the same kind of crazy, and we can talk about it and laugh about it over an IPA or five. 

Or maybe my childhood was crazy in a very specific, unique way, the way that all families manufacture their own specific brand of nuts. Hard to say.

As a kid, I read everything and I believed almost as much.

I read Rush Limbaugh and absorbed the term "Feminazi." I also read the Book of Genesis and cried bitterly when I came to this passage: 

"To the woman he said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
-Genesis 3:16

This was not a single tear rolling down my face. This was curled up on the bunk bed I shared with my sister, clutching my Bible, I'm not sure I believe in God anymore tears. 

I was, like most 12 year-olds, very--well, sincere. 

And on some level, I believed that God hated women. I mean, just look at that curse. I'll take thorns and thistles for $1,000, Alex. 

And yet, in many ways I bought wholeheartedly into Christian culture. I out-did the most legalistic advice from Focus on the Family. I out-Phariseed the most stringent Pharisee. I believed deeply in the sincerity of my faith. And now I feel betrayed. 

I've watched my peers raised in evangelical Christian culture go to opposite extremes:

Type Y: Further entrenchment

Type Z: Complete rejection 

But I suppose there are also a substantial number of us in the middle--Christian, but not necessarily conservative. Maybe we support gay marriage or smoke pot every other Friday or don't think twice about dropping the F bomb. 

You know the type. 

Our Christianity is snarkier, more politically correct, more hip, more in touch with the inner cynic. We embrace doubt, irony, ambiguity, paradox, and "everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial."

Even as I reflect on the church of my youth, I find it difficult to relate to the incredibly "relevant" church I currently attend. There are things about it that I just don't get, such as: 

• Why is the focus of evangelism still on getting people to come to church? 
• Is that what this slick, well-produced video is for? 
• Was that guy in the video the same guy I saw in that All-State commercial yesterday?

And through it all, I'm drawn to the sincerity of the gospel. 

I'm still sitting in that pumpkin patch. It's cold. I'm tired. I want to go home and sleep in my warm bed. I don't feel cool or hip or relevant. I feel exhausted and beaten down. I feel ready to give up. 

Maybe then, the Great Pumpkin will come.