A Review of Nadia Bolz-Weber’s “Shameless”
A Book About Christ and Fucking
Sex.
Now I’ve got your attention.
Sex and religion.
Hey, why are you guys now running for the hills?
Well, I don’t blame anyone for running for the hills at the mere entanglement of sex and religion. The church, whether it be Catholic or Evangelical, has done a lot of damage in people’s lives by comingling the two. If I had a dime for every Twitter post from an Evangelical that I’ve seen telling people that they are going to Hell simply for masturbating, I would have enough money to go buy me a large coffee at Starbucks.
Into the fray to make sense of these things is one of my favourite Christian authors, Nadia Bolz-Weber. She’s a very progressive, liberal writer and her lifestyle matches her writing. She has tattoos up the yin-yang, and is known to drop the f-bomb in her books like no tomorrow. No wonder so many Evangelicals — who have problems with women preaching scripture to begin with — hate her. (Honestly. I’ve seen reviews of her previous books online that ignore the content of the book and whether it has merit in exchange for a screed about how Bolz-Weber isn’t Christian because of what’s on her skin and what naughty words she utters in the course of her sermons or books.) Needless to say, this third book from Bolz-Weber is a bit of a departure for her. Her first two books — Pastrix and Accidental Saints — were straight-up memoirs. In this book, she’s interested in telling stories about the people of her congregation as much as she writes about herself.
To that end, Shameless winds up being a bit of a mish-mash between social critique, other people’s narratives and memoir. I’m really torn about it. It was obvious to anyone who read Accidental Saints that Bolz-Weber was reaching the end of the road with what she could do with the memoir format, simply because it seemed that she was running out of stories to tell about herself. In that sense, Shameless is both a welcome relief and a new path in writing that the author is exploring.
However, the problem with this book is that it is terribly unfocused: it reads like a collection of vaguely-linked essays that have sex and religion as the thread that runs through them. Thus, Bolz-Weber takes a lot of scenic detours into why Evangelicals make abortion a hot-button issue (though, after reading this book, I’m still not entirely clear why Evangelicals have done an about-face on this position since the 1970s or so) and the temperance movement around the abolition of alcohol. To say that Shameless meanders would be putting it mildly.
That all said, there is stuff that is wonderfully fascinating about the book. Shameless works best when Bolz-Weber digs deeper into her past than she’s ever done in print and tells stories about her own hang-ups about sex. The stories of those in her congregation are just as fascinating, too, but — not to be hyper-critical — there doesn’t seem to be any closure with many of these tales. For someone who has grappled with being queer, or being told that they were being sinful if they didn’t save sex for marriage, there’s (usually) no conclusion as to how any sort of healing happened.
The tough thing to reconcile is that Shameless offers no solutions to the conundrum that is posed by the Bible and its divergent views of sexuality other than turn to the Bible for advice on how to view sexuality in a positive, healing way. I wish that Bolz-Weber spent more time on this because I’m not sure how the Bible can be anything of a solution, when it instructs men to stone their newlywed wives if they don’t bleed after having sex on their wedding night. This book is just a couple of pages short of the 200-page mark, and while it often feels a lot longer than that, it feels like a very surface view of sex and the church. I was expecting a lot more, in other words. I know that this was the best book that Bolz-Weber could have possibly turned in, but I think the thing that nagging at me is a wish that she went a little further than her church to view sex and Christianity.
The other thing that bugs me a bit about the book is that a lot of it is spent slamming Evangelical culture, even though Bolz-Weber states at the front of Shameless that if the Evangelical gospel works for you and you’re not harming anyone or yourself, then it’s all good. I wish she had spent some time looking at the inner-workings of the Catholic Church, which I grew up in and am more familiar with. I suppose Catholics don’t have as much of a toe-hold on power that the Evangelicals do in the United States, but as someone with his own Catholic guilt baggage when it comes to sex, I was curious to know more about that denomination and its views of sex. In other words, this book could have been more wide-ranging.
Still, while this review may feel like a bit of a slag (partially perhaps because I’m still grappling with the theme of the book), it’s a complete joy to read anything Bolz-Weber writes. She can be and is very, very funny (she was once a stand-up comedian before deciding to become a Lutheran pastor). And, of course, she isn’t afraid to say the f-word like a motherfucker — a quality I deeply admire in a Christian and a woman. However, Shameless feels transitional. It’s as though Bolz-Weber wasn’t sure of what book she should write, so she decided to cast her net a bit wider. That her reach sometimes exceeds her grasp is something that should be probably expected by the reader. However, if the book’s topic is of interest or you’re already a Bolz-Weber fan, there’ll be something here of deep interest. If not, that’s okay. After all, sex and religion get along usually just as well as oil and water does, and that you’ve read this far, at least, is probably something of a marvel. Just sayin’.
Nadia Bolz-Weber’s Shameless: A Sexual Reformation was published by Convergent Books on January 29, 2019.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
