HAS RELIGION ALIENATED you from your body, demonized your sexuality, or caused you to see your body as a source of shame? If so, it’s time to come home. In Sensual Faith: The Art of Coming Home to Your Body, body- and sex-positive pastor Lyvonne Briggs invites Black Christian women and femmes to reconnect with and feel at home in their bodies, sexuality, and sensuality: “You see, Sis, home is not an address; home is where you feel safe.” Finding home in our bodies is important because, all too often, Christian spaces have deemed our bodies “temptations” and our bodily processes “nasty.” And historically, American society has tried to control Black women’s bodies and sexualities, denying our humanity and womanhood through slavery, sterilization policies, and degrading stereotypes such as the asexual Mammy and the hypersexual Jezebel. So, the type of bodily reclamation Briggs writes of is an act of personal and societal justice.
Similar to theologian Candice Marie Benbow’s Red Lip Theology (2022), Sensual Faith is a womanist work that centers the experiences of Black women of faith. “Womanism” is the term coined by writer Alice Walker in the early 1980s to honor the experiences of Black women, who were often overlooked and excluded by the feminist movement. By utilizing a womanist interpretation of the Bible, Briggs challenges harmful religious messages around women’s bodies: “Womanism says: Your sexuality is a sacred gift. Your body is holy. Just as it is. Pleasure is your birthright.”
God didn’t intend for our bodies to be sites of fear and shame. As Briggs writes, “Our sexuality, a gift from God, was demonized by the church.” In Sensual Faith, Briggs debunks myths of purity culture and encourages us to understand our bodies, sensuality, and sexuality as good, sacred, and holy.
Grounded in scriptures and personal experience, Sensual Faith takes on topics often considered taboo in the church: menstruation, masturbation, sexual assault, miscarriage, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). In interrogating the text, Briggs models what we might glean from the biblical stories about women such as Ruth and Bathsheba concerning sex, sexuality, and consent.
Briggs also presents Song of Songs as a biblical book that affirms both Black women’s beauty and sexuality. Contemporary readers of Song of Songs have often framed the text as “a book about how God loves God’s people or how Christ loved the church,” Briggs explains. But, she continues, this “is a book about an erotic, passion-filled, sexual relationship, and we should not be ashamed to explore its depiction of intimacy.”
Alongside these scriptural reflections, she shares what she has gained and learned in her own journey of coming home to her body through dating, healing from sexual assault, grieving a miscarriage, and more.
In addition, Briggs enters this process with the reader. Each chapter concludes with a scripture for reflection, an invitation to act in some way, and an affirmation. Throughout the book, Briggs encourages readers to go through a faith-filled process in which we come to trust our intuition. She invites us to feel and experience everything from pleasure to grief, and to prioritize rest and self-care.
Deirdre Jonese Austin is a minister, writer, scholar, and womanist whose work focuses on religion, race, gender, and sexuality.
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