SEX & RELIGION (PART 2/4)

SEX & YOUR RELIGION EXPERIENCE (Part 2/4)

One of my biggest obstacles overcoming my negative mentality with sex, and re-programming my brain to enjoy and even want sex came as I overcame my religious upbringing that had poisoned my sexual wants and needs. You see, religion and sex, when presented accurately has the power to shape a healthy and beautiful sexual journey. In contrast instead we see many religions who not only do not understand sex, but go overboard and condemn it, leading to just terrible marriage sex, and poor self health mentally. 

We’re so grateful for our 4 different volunteers who have been willing to write about their experience in Catholicism, Christianity, Mormonism, and the Baptist faith, and how each of their marriages were impacted as they navigated what their religion taught, verses what they did find a happy and healthy sex life despite their religions philosophies.

Todays religion of focus will be Christianity

HOW PURITY CULTURE ROBBED ME OF A HEALTHY SEX LIFE BEFORE MARRIAGE

HOW PURITY CULTURE ROBBED ME OF A HEALTHY SEX LIFE BEFORE MARRIAGE: My secret battle with depression, and how sex saved me.

By Hannah-Joy Lehman

I’ve never really felt compelled to “tell my story,” but now I do.

I’ve had what most people would assume was a relatively average life, as a middle class white girl who was raised in an affluent town. I’ve always had food on the table, I smile often, and I am viewed by most as a generally “positive” person who is pleasant to be around. However, most people don’t know what I’ve been battling beneath all of that.

I want to start by saying that a huge reason I want to write this is that — for one of the first times in my adult years — I am feeling a sustained sense of ease and lightness, or what some may call “happiness.” That might sound crazy for a 32-year old, but the reality is that I have battled severe, debilitating bouts of depression for as long as I can remember. I’ve always had good days, but inevitably I return to a state of dire misery (if it isn’t already just there, laying beneath the surface). My depression is defined by extreme loneliness, self-doubt, insatiable analysis, and the struggle to understand why sex and religion had a grudge against each other.

So here it goes.

When I was 5 years old, my father died. My mom and him were young and in love, but he suffered from severe alcoholism, and one drinking bout put him in a coma for a week before he was pronounced dead. To this day, when I really stop to think about it, it absolutely takes my breath away. No pain could have felt greater at the time to me, who (at that age) had no reason not to believe that life is perfect, life is great, and everything will be fine. Yet with the flash of a light, all of that goodness was taken away.

However, parallel to all the pain I was feeling over the course of those years was a different and completely separate narrative that (at least for a time) worked all of it’s wonders against me. See, after my father passed away, in the dire straights of being a 30-year-old widow raising two children, my mom was converted into a cult, which was the furthest thing removed from demonstration of a healthy place of spirituality, hence I won’t call it a “church.” This cult masked itself behind big hugs, contemporary music and the “mission of God,” not by any means uncommon in the south. I was a diehard member from the age of eight to 20, spending every moment that I was awake (and momentarily not missing my dad) 100% certain that I was placed on this earth to Save Everyone. I knew nothing other than these two truths for those 20 years.

And it wasn’t just about saving the lost — I believed so wholeheartedly that everyone outside my 600-person church needed me to save them, which meant that nothing. else. mattered. Not even my own self, my own desires, my own dreams. In fact, everything I did revolved purely out of an attempt to personally avoid going to hell, and to make sure I could save as many other people from hell as well.

There is no way to fully put words to the amount of early self-understanding that this hell-hole took from me. Not only that, but when we started attending this cult, I was explicitly and frequently reminded that since my father died in “sin,” he thereby had no way to repent and was existing in hell. It’s no wonder, then, that my devotion to God, and the expenditure of all of my energy, went to making sure that no one who crossed my path would have to live with this pain that I did, or would have to suffer in hell themselves.

It was only by the miracle of being in love for the first time (at 19), and deciding that I believed it natural to want to have sex with my partner (outside of marriage), that I was able to break free from the bondage of the cult. It was an excruciating decision to make, at the time, accompanied by the emotional pummeling of my self-worth and the realization that I had failed my “God-given” mission, not to mention the loss of hundreds of relationships that were all I had known for most of my life. Yet I had to listen to this instinct, to listen to my body over the scripts I had followed for a decade. It was terrifying, but in hindsight, I am so grateful. Essentially, sex saved me from a cult.

It has now been twelve years since I broke free, and that dreaded word “journey” that everyone loves to use about life couldn’t be more accurate. The first few years were frequently tragic, as I had no understanding of how “secular” people actually think and reason. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a full time Christian, I fumbled, a lot. I have hurt feelings, I asked inappropriate questions (I was just so curious!), and for at least 5 years I felt a palpable sense of always swimming against the current.

Have you ever sent a risky text and waited hours for a response, going over the worst-case scenario repeatedly in your head? When you received the response, did you flip your phone over and refuse to read it for a couple more hours? Once you were ready, did you open the message and close your eyes before you could read it, only to glance down at the words that were sure to ruin your life and find that they were … nothing? That they composed a response you either wanted or found inconsequential?

That’s how I felt, lying in bed, knowing if I told the person next to me how relieved I was that what had just happened was a nonevent for me, he would surely take it the wrong way. The mental and emotional exhalation of confirming that all the church had taught me about sex was untrue was — ha — better than sex.

I woke up the next morning, made breakfast, and went about my day. I didn’t feel shattered or ruined or irrevocably out of favor with the natural order of things. The earth didn’t swallow me, and my heart remained intact. I was ... the same.

At first, sex was an act of defiance against the dogma that owned my body for twenty years. Not rebellion. Defiance — like a child declaring emancipation from abusive parents. (In this case, a Father I guess.)

I needed to have sex to confirm that the lies were lies. I needed to have sex to figure out how I actually felt about sex because no one around me was willing to entertain even a remotely sex-positive idea.

But having sex didn’t purge me of all those years of toxicity. Sure, it was an “I told you so” to everyone who had spent the last year trying to get me back in the religious fold, but I still felt disgusted and embarrassed when anyone reminded me that sex is supposed to make people feel good, whether that reminder came in the form of a word or a deed. My body was lightyears ahead of my brain, and it still is to some extent.

I was trying to fumble my way into a healthy view of sexuality, and most of that entailed looking for an opportunity to give it another go instead of learning how to enjoy myself.

I wanted the evangelicals around me to see how casually I now viewed sex and how little it affected my everyday existence, so quantity was more important than quality. I wanted sex to be as far removed from any kind of emotional or spiritual connection as possible, and part of that translated to me not caring whether I enjoyed it. We tend to care more about things we like, right?

But that didn’t protect me. Truth be told, I couldn’t enjoy it because my sexual experiences still belonged to other people. I gave them out like party favors.

I became consumed by sex and by the people with whom I had sex, not because I liked them or even particularly enjoyed their company but because I needed to make sure they hadn’t returned the gift. I wanted them to call me up at 3 AM because I wanted to feel that I was giving them something only I could. I needed to feel that way. I had been conditioned to feel that way.

I liked this illusion of power much the way wives in the church smugly tend to their husbands’ sexual “needs,” all while knowing the pastor just preached on sex being their wifely obligation. Sex is just another to-do on a wife’s chore list, and she hates it but relishes the notion that the household would fall apart without it. So the story goes.

I projected these messages onto my objectively sex-positive attitude when it came to my personal experiences. Combine that with a sex-negative, abstinence-only education, and boy oh boy, did I do some careless things.

No condom? No problem as long as he’s happy. I’m sure he’ll pull out. No orgasm? No problem as long as he’s happy. I’ll fake it so he feels even better about himself. No walk home? No problem as long as he’s happy. I’ll go it alone to prove how chill I am.

I feel fortunate that nothing more than some emotional scarring ever happened. I threw myself into situations I neither had the tools nor access to the tools to handle. I knew if I expressed any concerns whatsoever, no one would hear them as they were. My largely evangelical circle would only hear their biases being confirmed. It’s like when an atheist stubs his toe and uses profanity so the evangelicals point to him and say, “See? Didn’t we tell you atheists are always angry?” There is a constant and willful misinterpretation of concerns that come from those who aren’t in the religious fold.

In fact, the entire concept of “owning yourself” is antithetical to Christian doctrine, which teaches that lowly, unworthy humans must “die to themselves” daily as a sacrifice of their body — physical and spiritual — to the lord.

When I was devout, my feelings, thoughts, and actions were subordinate to those of god (or at least, our interpretation of his). They were invalidated, undermined, and made to seem unreliable. Christians think I exaggerate how detrimental their dogma was for me, but that’s simply because, even in their doubts, they’ve never actually tried to disentangle themselves from the doctrine. They’ve never had to rip out their entire identity and glue themselves back together. They’ve never experienced religious withdrawals.

So, on top of the banana-shit sundae of being owned by a fickle god, women get the sprinkles of being sexually owned by the men in our lives. Weirdly, it starts with our fathers. In my case, I would probably say “parents” because my mom was the mouthpiece for a dad who turns red and leaves the room at the mere mention of a periods or panties or short-shorts. The entirety of how they dealt with my sexuality can be summed up by my mom calling me a “slutty atheist” after my deconversion.

They are good parents, but in instances like the one above, I see dogmatism take precedence over reality — over actual human beings’ actual emotions.

During the waking nightmare that was being backed so far into a corner that I had to loudly come clean about my unbelief, I realized just how mentally and emotionally disconnected I was from religion, which was nice. I also realized how much work it would take to regain my autonomy — ideologically, yes, but mostly bodily. I deserved to be in control, but I didn’t believe it.

In the church, a woman is responsible for conducting and presenting herself in such a way that doesn’t cause her “brothers in Christ to stumble.” At the same time, she is in need of protection and security, which can only be provided by those brothers in Christ. She is mentally strong but in need of emotional and physical shepherding. Meanwhile, men are in need of the opposite.

I carried and still carry all that baggage into my sexual experiences. Mentally, I was secure, but I sought out ways to keep myself otherwise in terms of my body and my emotions. I wanted men to teach me how to be what they wanted because in the church, men told me how to be what they wanted. Now, my nebulous sense of owing myself to men lacked a belief system to tell me exactly how to pay them back.

I tried to cram my new beliefs into the preexisting framework of my old ones, and shockingly, it did not work. Dismantling is much easier than rebuilding, and it took me a long time to learn the difference between them.

I’m still learning how to appreciate sex for what it is as opposed to using it to feign agency while still encumbered by the misogyny of the church. When I can do the former, I think I will finally be able to shed the latter.

The church teaches women to need to be needed even if we don’t want to be. It teaches that our worth lies in being needed and that we cannot be needed if we don’t conduct ourselves in a very particular way.

The church teaches sex with asceticism, becoming obsessed with people who do not do it under strict circumstances and in strict manners. It steals something natural and only hands it back to us if we promise to perform and treat it a certain way. It gets off on that power.

The church sexualizes every aspect of a woman’s life by trying to desexualize her completely. Then, it becomes impossible not to obsess over something made as taboo and mysterious as a woman’s body.

In general, our culture denies women’s sexual agency, but fundamental evangelicalism adds another layer to that. I did not expect to adopt a healthy view of sexuality over night, but I didn’t know it would be this easy to confuse owning myself with allowing myself to continue being owned. Our marriage has never been happier, we do it in every room, every position, we have all the toys a girl could ever need, we’ve had threesomes, swapped partners, and can’t get enough of each other.