The term “purity culture” might be unfamiliar to folks outside White evangelical spaces. But its principles inform how many of us understand and talk about human sexuality. Or not talk about it, since shame around sex, desire and the body is an unspoken byproduct of purity culture. Sex is something to be whispered about behind closed doors. 

In Intimate Conversations, Susannah Larry invites readers to explore human sexuality without shame and embarrassment. Her grace-filled book operates from the premise that every part of ourselves, including our sexuality, reflects our Creator, and that living faithfully requires that we love not only our neighbors and God but ourselves and our sexuality as well. 

This affirmation rarely exists in purity culture, despite its insistence that sex is special and sexual purity a gift from God. Within purity culture, girls and women are especially responsible for remaining sexually pure. They are guilty of causing males to “stumble” when they wear something presumably immodest or act in ways considered “provocative.” According to purity culture, those who have sex outside of marriage may face a reckoning, their bodies publicly compared to a crushed rose, a crumpled dollar bill or a chewed piece of gum: metaphors that suggest irrevocable brokenness.

Larry writes that although her parents shielded her from explicit purity-culture messaging, its principles seeped into her consciousness anyway. They affected her sense of self and sexuality and did not prepare her for the trauma she experienced in her first marriage nor the domestic violence in her second. Her willingness to narrate the devastating outcomes of purity culture ideology helps frame her introduction to a holistic understanding of sexuality grounded in biblical interpretation and Christian theology. 

Larry also critiques progressive Christian approaches to sex and sexuality. She says progressive Christians don’t offer strong messaging to counter purity culture, leaving young people to sort out mixed signals about their bodies and sex. Intimate Conversations endeavors to provide a new take on human sexuality, colored not by confusion and contradiction but by a compelling sense that the next generation can learn to “share their bodies, when the time and place is right for them, with reverence and love and boundaries and hope for a renewed world.”

The first part of Intimate Conversations explores biblical content on sexuality. Although the Old Testament especially has been used to craft laws dictating sexual behavior, Larry examines the contradictions and cultural assumptions at the heart of the Old Testament stories and concludes that “the Hebrew Bible seems to offer an expansive portrait of what sexuality in our world looks like, with a bit of fantasy, realism, practicality, regulation and ecstasy thrown in.” 

Larry’s explication of Gos­pel stories is especially meaningful. Jesus’ encounter with the woman caught in adultery (John 8) reflects a nonjudgmental response to her presumed sexual transgressions. We might fail to meet “God’s vision for our sexuality,” Larry says, and still, “if Jesus has any straightforward lessons to teach us about sexuality, it may be that we are in no position to declare anyone outside of God’s mercy and justice.” 

The Gospels remind us that we are made for relationship — with God and with others — and that healthy sexuality is part of the way we can know and love others fully, giving completely of ourselves. God wants more for us than to be sexual vassals for other people. 

Larry says knowing our own worth and loving our own body is an important part of creating and sustaining healthy sexual relationships. “It’s actually super hard to love our neighbors when we are incapable of loving ourselves,” she says. Sexual intimacy on its own does not connote worth. Only our identity as an image-bearer of the Creator, and our relationship to the Creator, can do that. 

Intimate Conversations provides guidelines for boundaries within sexual relationships. It offers wisdom about navigating challenges couples may face, from infidelity to sexual dysfunction and trauma. For those experiencing sexual brokenness, Jesus offers restoration and healing. 

Larry wants her book to provoke conversation. When we open ourselves to conversations about Christian sexual ethics, we are more likely to understand the gift of sexuality. Intimate Conversations is an excellent place to start. 

Melanie Springer Mock is professor of English at George Fox University in Newberg, Ore.