sexy Christian music

While at seminary in Southern California, I got to meet musician, writer, activist, and "coolest guy you know" Andre Henry. Andre is doing a lot of great work in this world, not the least of which is making music, so you should definitely look him up.

So Andre has this song called "The Love in Her Eyes"

I see love in her eyes for me
and I'm not afraid anymore
of what may or may not be
All I feel is the warmth of her love

The lyrics are beautiful, yes, but this song is seeeeexy. Go listen now.

At the time I was first listening, though, I wasn't sure if it was acceptable to openly feel this way. Even thinking my wife and I had a fairly healthy sex life, I felt weird expressing to her the way that a piece of media was making me feel like a sexual being.

Sexual shame is seemingly ubiquitous, be it Christian sex shame, Hollywood sex shame, or whatever else. In my background, sex wasn't totally taboo, but you could only talk about it in context of Christian, heterosexual monogamy. The juxtaposition of some song being "Christian" and being sexy was somewhat jarring. Now, I wouldn't actually label Andre's music (or any music, if I can avoid it) as "Christian." But in the whole seminary context plus my own background, that label is always floating around any one who openly associates with Jesus/church in some way and makes art.

As I talked about the other day, I've been in a process of demythologizing many of my spiritual experiences. There were a lot of charismatic elements later in my Christian upbringing. Lots of shared space, hugging, "laying hands" on one another in prayer, singing together in dimly lit spaces. It all seems so sexual, and that seems fine to me. I don't mean that everyone was turned on and that we were always just one step away from an orgy. But I feel like so much of the passion that was present was a real desire to connect with people deeply. Art connects people. Music in some way draws out what is deep inside ourselves and can put us in touch with different facets of who we are.

To give some credit to my Evangelical setting, I don't think their true aim was to suppress people's sexuality and force people into a one-size-fits-all version of body positivity. But I think the inherited limits for body and sexuality had continually warped the Christian imagination over time to the point where there is really only a narrow strip of acceptable experience in which one acknowledges that one is a sexual being.

In the Evangelical version of sex positivity, the preacher can make off-color jokes or call his wife hot and even make suggestions during the Valentine's Day-week sermon that wives make sure to wear some lingerie from time to time (true story!) But one never leaves the safe zone of closed-door, hetero-normative, patriarchal coitus. It's a sort of compromise that I think hints at the ways in which everyone wants to be affirmed in their own sexuality and to not feel shame.

I guess those compromises are a large part of the fissure in my relationship to Christianity. I'm interested in that underlying desire to be seen and known for who one really is. To let the boundaries that are only there to maintain the hegemonic status quo fade and to find out what it truly is to be human.