Shameless

Have you ever felt torn between longing for connection and a fear of desire? In Shameless: A Sexual Reformation, Nadia Bolz-Weber invites you to rethink everything Christianity and culture have taught about sex, shame, and holiness. She dares to ask: What if the church’s sexual ethics—the systems that have controlled, shamed, and defined bodies for centuries—were never truly about God at all? What if we burned those harmful teachings down and started over?

Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran pastor and former stand-up comic, approaches this sensitive subject not as a detached theologian, but as a storyteller and spiritual guide who has lived deeply flawed and deeply human experiences. Through vivid personal anecdotes and stories of her parishioners at House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, she argues that the church has confused purity with holiness—an error that has caused generations of people to despise their bodies, silence their desires, and fear pleasure itself.

The Problem: When Theology Harms Bodies

Bolz-Weber begins with a simple but devastating observation: the Christian church has often harmed people by equating holiness with abstinence, male dominance, and bodily control. She recounts stories of devotees who were told they were adulterers for simply thinking sexual thoughts, women taught to hide every curve, and queer parishioners driven to self-harm because their bodies were deemed sinful. Her argument is both theological and profoundly pastoral—if the teachings of the church hurt people, it’s time to change those teachings, not the people.

This central thesis mirrors Martin Luther’s Reformation itself: that salvation and moral worth were never earned through rigid rules but given freely through grace. Bolz-Weber likens our shame-based sexuality to the spiritual bondage Luther fought against—another prison the Gospel should liberate us from, not reinforce.

The Gift of Sexuality

Bolz-Weber presents sexuality not as a moral test but as a God-given gift. She reminds readers that even Genesis opens with blessing sex itself: “Be fruitful and multiply.” Pleasure, she insists, is not the devil’s lure but divine design—seen in everything from our taste buds to the clitoris. These details, both biological and poetic, ground her claim that our ability to experience and desire pleasure is part of creation’s holiness.

She sharply contrasts this with the theology of Augustine and Tertullian, who centuries earlier taught that Eve’s sexual curiosity and Adam’s erection were the entrance points of sin into the world. By reclaiming the erotic as sacred, Bolz-Weber suggests that pleasure itself can be a pathway to the divine. Her God is not a cosmic voyeur tallying violations but a creator delighting in human embodiment.

From Doctrine to Flourishing

Instead of rules of abstinence and punishment, Bolz-Weber offers a radical re-centering around compassion and attention. She borrows the World Health Organization’s definition of sexual health—pleasurable, consensual, and free from coercion—and adds an essential Christian layer: concern. True sexuality, she argues, must consider how our actions affect others. Consent and mutual pleasure matter, but so does not causing harm to those we love. Concern transforms self-gratification into love. She calls this “holy attentiveness,” echoing Simone Weil’s belief that attention is the purest expression of generosity.

This, for Bolz-Weber, is sexual reformation: replacing the rigid ideal of “purity” with a dynamic rhythm of grace, desire, and responsibility. We move between feasting and fasting, indulgence and restraint—listening to our own wiring and the needs of others—rather than striving for flawless balance.

From Shame to Incarnation

In the book’s closing benediction, Bolz-Weber reminds readers that Christianity begins not with purity but incarnation—God becoming flesh. The divine did not separate from the body; it sanctified it. Every form, curve, and scar is part of “the body of Christ.” By tracing this theology back to its source, she situates sexuality within the same miracle that animates faith itself: God’s breath in human bodies. It’s a vision of Christianity that welcomes everyone—queer, single, divorced, asexual, kinky, celibate—to the open table of grace.

In short, Bolz-Weber’s sexual reformation isn’t about discarding faith but redeeming it. She invites readers to recover sacred connection—to see holiness in desire, dignity in difference, and God’s image shimmering in every human body. This book matters because it doesn’t just reinterpret doctrine; it reclaims humanity itself.

Bolz-Weber argues that one of Christianity’s most disastrous mistakes has been conflating purity with holiness. Purity systems—whether about sex, dieting, or morality—divide the world into insiders and outsiders. Holiness, by contrast, unites what was separated, fusing heaven and earth, body and spirit. In her opening chapter, she traces how this confusion ballooned into restrictive commands about abstinence, virginity, and gender roles that have little to do with Christ’s life or love.

Fear Disguised as Morality

The purity obsession arises, she says, from fear—fear of desire, of losing control, of vulnerability. Like the temperance movement absolutism that banned alcohol, purity culture offers a false sense of safety through prohibition. She likens it to the transformation of the temperance movement from moderation to total abstinence: when rules become the only proof of faith, hypocrisy flourishes. Prohibition didn’t make people sober; it made them secretive. Likewise, sexual puritanism didn’t make people holy; it made them ashamed.

“Purity leads to pride or despair—not holiness.”

Bolz-Weber captures how purity systems create the illusion of moral superiority for rule-keepers and perpetual self-loathing for rule-breakers.

Jesus Didn’t Preach Purity

Bolz-Weber’s portrait of Jesus contrasts starkly with purity culture’s obsession with sin management. Jesus ate and drank freely, touched the “unclean,” and extended grace without prerequisite. His holiness shows up in touch, taste, and presence—not avoidance. She recounts the Gospel story where a woman anoints Jesus’ feet with tears and perfume, and he refuses to shame her. It’s the purity system, not God, that demanded she be shunned. Holiness happened instead in her messy, embodied act of longing and devotion.

Holiness as Union

To reclaim holiness, Bolz-Weber proposes a radically simple definition: holiness is union. It’s what happens whenever separation dissolves—when two beings become one through love, harmony, or empathy. She finds holiness in breastfeeding, dancing, collective bargaining, and in the erotic embrace between loving partners. Each represents connection and integration, the opposite of isolation. Holiness is fluid, embodied, and communal; purity is brittle, cerebral, and individualistic.

For readers trapped in moralism or shame, this contrast becomes liberating. You don’t earn holiness through restraint or rules—you touch it whenever you experience genuine connection.

Nothing reveals Bolz-Weber’s theological courage more than her defense of pleasure. She dissects how generations of Christian teaching have painted desire as dangerous, a temptation to be resisted. Instead, she offers an alternative creation myth—one where God’s first gift to humanity was pleasure, and where sex, food, and laughter exist not to test obedience but to awaken gratitude.

The Grandmother and the Fake Candy

In Chapter 8, “I Smell Sex and Candy,” Bolz-Weber tells the story of her grandmother Helen, who refused real sweets and instead ate a benzocaine-laced “diet candy” designed to suppress her appetite. For Nadia, this became a metaphor for Christianity’s warped relationship to pleasure: a system that numbs desire in the name of righteousness. “We learned early,” she writes, “that our relationship to pleasure is complicated.” Religion told us that pleasure was dangerous; consumer culture told us it was endless. Either way, we lost our ability to savor real sweetness without shame.

Reclaiming the God of Delight

Quoting C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, she reminds us that the world is filled with divine pleasures: sleeping, eating, washing, making love, working. Every one of these acts can heal or harm, depending on rhythm and awareness. Pleasure is morally neutral—it becomes sacred through attention. God didn’t create desire to trap us but to draw us into deeper connection.

Bolz-Weber compares this to how pornography and processed sugars have distorted natural pleasure. When we binge what was meant for mindfulness, we lose the ability to taste what’s real—whether that’s a lover’s skin or an apple’s sweetness. The problem isn’t pleasure itself but its overcompression and commodification.

Rhythm, Not Balance

Bolz-Weber’s antidote is not moderation but rhythm—a dance of feasting and fasting, indulgence and restraint. Her spiritual director’s wisdom reframes balance as rhythm: a cyclical grace that allows periods of desire and rest. “Maybe rhythm, not balance, is the key,” she writes. Pleasure isn’t evil; it’s a pulse to be honored. God’s rhythm includes celebration and solitude, Marvin Gaye and meditation.

By embracing the divine rhythm of pleasure, we begin to understand holiness as fully embodied life. Heaven is not abstinence—it’s savoring without shame.

“Who told you that you were naked?” Bolz-Weber repeats this divine question from Genesis as the mantra of spiritual liberation. Shame, she insists, didn’t come from God—it came from the serpent, the deceiver. The moment human beings began labeling their own bodies as wrong, clothed themselves, and hid, shame entered the story. Everything since—body policing, purity rings, queer silencing—has been theology built on that snake’s lie.

The Voice of the Accuser

In Chapter 11, Bolz-Weber explores shame’s psychological root: the “Accuser,” an internal voice that whispers, “You are not enough.” This voice masquerades as God’s conscience but is really self-loathing baptized in religious language. In a powerful church ritual, her community wrote their self-condemning thoughts on Post-its—“I am fat,” “I am worthless”—and burned them in a bonfire. “We really should have brought marshmallows,” one congregant joked. It was an act of sacred defiance, reclaiming joy in the ashes of shame.

Love for the Actual Self

The central theological claim is simple but revolutionary: God loves your actual self, not your imaginary perfect self. Bolz-Weber dismantles the idea that divine love depends on transformation. “Your ideal self doesn’t exist,” she writes. By embracing the truth of our wounds, desires, and limitations, we hear the real voice of God—the one that says, “You are beloved.” This echoes Francis Spufford’s playful definition of sin: the human propensity to mess everything up, yet remain loved.

The Healing of Shame

Through stories of LGBTQ+ parishioners, recovering addicts, and sexually repressed Christians, Bolz-Weber illustrates how people reclaim wholeness by naming shame out loud. Asher, a trans man once known as Mary, embodies resurrection by living openly as who God made him to be. The antidote to shame isn’t moral perfection—it’s authenticity and community. The church’s true function is not judgment but accompaniment: tending wounds and amplifying grace.

To break the shame spell is to realize that there was never a curse to begin with. The “original sin” wasn’t sex or desire—it was hiding from God’s gaze. When we step into that gaze, we find not accusation but love.

One of Bolz-Weber’s boldest chapters, “Holy Resistance,” chronicles her response to the Nashville Statement—a 2017 manifesto from conservative evangelicals declaring homosexuality and transgender identity outside God’s plan. While political leaders exploited this dogma for cultural control, Bolz-Weber and her Denver congregation wrote their own countertext: “The Denver Statement.”

Faith in Defiance

Bolz-Weber’s storytelling here blends theology and activism. As hurricanes flooded Houston and immigrant protections were revoked, the religious right doubled down on exclusion. Instead of despairing, Bolz-Weber gathered her queer, immigrant, and female parishioners at Hooked on Colfax café to rewrite the statement line by line. Each rewrite replaced condemnation with grace: “We deny that we have the right to presume God’s will for others.” Their act was both protest and liturgy—holy resistance through love.

Scripture of Liberation

While conservatives cited “creation order,” Bolz-Weber turned to Exodus—to the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah, who defied Pharaoh’s genocidal orders. Their civil disobedience saved Moses and birthed freedom itself. For Bolz-Weber, they represent God’s true holiness: compassion that says “No, not on our watch.” Underestimate women, trans folks, and immigrants, she warns, “at your peril. We are totally a threat.”

Freedom Grounded in Grace

Bolz-Weber concludes that rebellion against unjust theology is not sin—it’s fidelity to the Gospel. True faith means caring for oppressed neighbors over protecting orthodoxy. The Denver Statement affirms Christ’s radical inclusivity: “We deny that God is a boy and has actual arms.” Through humor and resistance, Bolz-Weber models a church that stands on grace rather than compliance.

In this way, “holy resistance” becomes an ongoing practice. To love against exclusion, to write new scripture from community, is to continue the Reformation Luther started and the liberation Jesus embodied.

Bolz-Weber’s reflections on bodies—scarred, pregnant, aging, and dying—culminate in “Terminal Agitation” and “The Rocking Chair,” where she connects physical experience to theology. Every story of flesh becomes a parable of grace: from her own abortion to parishioners burned by purity culture, she invites readers to honor how our bodies hold both pain and resurrection.

The Abortion Story

In one of the book’s most courageous confessions, Bolz-Weber recounts having an abortion at twenty-four. She doesn’t repent; she reflects. “It destroyed me for a time—but it was the right decision.” She later experiences motherhood, holding her child in the same rocking chair where her mother once nursed her. Through this cyclical image, she transforms guilt into gratitude, showing that love and loss can coexist. Her theology of breath—the idea that life begins with God’s exhale, not conception—restores agency to women’s choices.

Bodies Tell the Truth

Bolz-Weber reminds us that every human carries the story of their life in their skin—stretch marks, scars, wrinkles, bruises. Her parishioner Michael, a gay wilderness guide, literally circles his detox bruises with marker to watch healing happen. “Everything that happens to us happens to our bodies,” she writes. Jesus models this truth by revealing his wounds to his disciples. To be resurrected is to remain scarred but seen.

Healing through Witness

Bolz-Weber’s church transforms confession into community healing—to show scars is to banish shame. Therapist Brené Brown’s insight, which she cites, becomes pastoral truth: “Shame derives its power from being unspeakable.” In tending each other’s pain, her congregation lives resurrection weekly. “Welcome to resurrection,” she says, “and happy bikini season.” Humor and holiness collapse into one.

For Bolz-Weber, redemption is not erasure of sin but integration of story. Scars are the proof of resurrection—visible grace written on flesh.

Bolz-Weber closes her book with a vision of sexual flourishing grounded in divine grace, not moral performance. In her church’s baptismal liturgy, every body—infant, queer, aging, dying—is described as sacred. Water becomes a symbol of both creation and cleansing, reminding us that holiness and humanity are inseparable.

Principles of Christian Sexual Flourishing

She distills the new sexual ethic into nine guiding themes: Incarnation, Gratitude and Generosity, Everyone Without Exception, Accompaniment, Forgiveness, Connection, Holiness, Poetry, and Shamelessness. Through these, sexuality is reclaimed as part of discipleship. The erotic is not taboo—it’s an echo of God’s creative impulse. Every person, regardless of orientation or circumstance, can live faithfully by practicing gratitude for their body and concern for others.

The Open Table

The image Bolz-Weber offers is the open communion table: everyone without exception invited to participate. Grace, like good sex, is mutual, embodied, and unearned. Her Denver congregation’s messy mix of divorced, queer, gender-fluid, and elderly members embodies this inclusive spirituality. Love’s table has no velvet rope.

From Sin Management to Grace Stewardship

Christianity, she insists, is not “a program for avoiding mistakes” but “a faith of the guilty.” We are all sinners and saints, broken yet beloved. The goal of sexual ethics is not perfection but integration—learning to be faithful stewards of our own bodies and those we touch. When we approach sex with incarnation and concern, we practice theology through flesh and feeling.

Bolz-Weber’s final benediction is simple: “Go in peace, Christ is with you.” This peace includes laughter, desire, motherhood, heartbreak, and the glitter of queerness. Her sexual reformation ends not in purity but presence—a faith that finally lets you inhabit your own skin without apology.