Embracing Sacred Sexuality: Discovering the Divine Within Our Desires

My spiritual home — the Black Church — was erected out of a deep yearning for spiritual freedom and bodily autonomy. This sacred space coupled unapologetic Blackness with a demand for recognizing the divinity in our humanity. It dared to advance a new spiritual technology that insisted on marrying body and Spirit as sites of divine encounter. It refused the false dichotomy that sought to sever the sacred from the sensual. These technologies — forged in the grungy, inhumane realities of chattel slavery — demanded recognition of our dynamism.

Unburdening themselves from the shackles of respectability, the forebears of my spiritual home saw every part and parcel of their humanity as a gift meant to be cherished and fully realized. In a colonial project that ceaselessly sought to render them invisible, they mustered the unmitigated gall to see their literal bodies — voice, hands, feet — as temples. As Sacred. In the hush harbors of the Antebellum South, the modest storefront tabernacles, and the grand cathedrals in modern cities, the ancestral and collective voice of Black spirituality deems our bodies as the Imago Dei. As reflections of the Divine.
A queer son of the Black Church, I saw the blurring of the spiritual and physical, the sacred and the sensual, the human and the holy as my spiritual inheritance.

This duality became a rite of passage for me — allowing my clapping hands to invoke Spirit and the wailing in my voice to call down heaven. Mimicking the movements and motions of the church mothers whose bodies responded to being mounted by Spirit, whose voices trembled with visitations from the Divine, I learned that to be fully alive in the Black Church meant allowing every part of my body to be an invitation to Spirit.

I saw my body not as a barrier to God, but a conduit to God. This was an immutable truth for me, felt so deeply that I carried it with me into every space. It was in my pleas for justice after an instance of state-sanctioned violence against Black bodies, in my advocacy for Black trans women, and in my sermons on Sunday mornings.

Meeting Queerness with Silence and Violence

It was here, immersed in a longing for liberation, that I began to discover spaces where my beloved community would not embrace the Sacred. Instead of customary shouts of affirmation, certain parts of my witness were met with silence at best and violence at worst. I realized that these areas of hesitation all shared a common denominator that seized Black ambassadors for embodied spirituality with fear: my queerness.

The manifestation of my queerness and its association with the Divine in secular or sensual settings spurred condemnation and the harshest rebukes. While I saw no distinction between my sexuality and spirituality, the duality professed in my Black Church stopped short of endorsing queer embodiment, and especially queer sexuality. Lambasted with calls to repent and to abstain from living into my desires, the tradition that once beckoned me to honor my body through liberation was now insisting that I police it.

The beloved community that taught me to embody my faith often struggled to embrace the fullness of my body. Rather than accessing the divine in my authentic queer identity, I was told to don a mask of heterosexuality, relinquish same-sex attraction and pursue chastity.

These calls to hide certain parts of myself from the view of the steeple rang hollow in my mind, body, and Spirit. It ran counter to what I knew — and what I felt the Black Church, itself, taught: that the Sacred loved and adored all of me and delighted in the fullest expression of my humanity, including my sexuality. She relished in my pursuit of sexuality that affirmed my inherent worth and testified to my inherent divinity.

I could not, in good conscience, answer the call to abandon a now-cherished meeting place of the Divine: within my sexualized self. Despite the church’s insistence, this purported contradiction was, in fact, no contradiction at all. No, it was the manifestation of a new (at least, to me) kind of spiritual technology: sacred sexuality.

The Fallout from Rejecting Sacred Sexuality

The rupture I experienced — between what I had been taught about the sanctity and holiness of my complete self and the demand to deny it — was not mine alone. Similar schisms cut through the soul of every queer person raised in hypocrisy. In these moments of rejection over acceptance, what’s at stake is not solely inclusion but survival. It is the risk of spiritual erasure and the psychological toll of being severed from a person’s sense of divine worth. For queer communities, this directly translates to public health consequences that are steeped in vulnerability and shame.

The tendency of faith institutions — or any other institution that purports to care for humanity — to outright deny sacred sexuality has life-threatening consequences that are not merely theoretical. This is especially evident in the ongoing HIV epidemic. I see it firsthand in my role as CEO of Pride in the Pews, an organization dedicated to the holistic health and wellness of Black LGBTQ+ communities. Although they only comprise 12% of the population, Black people — and Black women, in particular — account for 40% of new HIV diagnoses. Despite the increased availability of new medical interventions, I’ve witnessed Black communities continue to face significant barriers to accessing information healthcare for conditions clouded by stigma.

The inability to see how inextricably connected spirituality and sexuality are has led to the promulgation of medical misinformation, exacerbation of public health crises, and underutilization of preventive medical intervention by impacted communities. What if the Black Church or any institution claiming to care for our souls could see sacred sexuality not as heresy but as a vital component of our existence where the body and Spirit are in concert? Framing sacred sexuality as a spiritual imperative becomes more than a personal revelation; it becomes a framework for communal restoration and public health transformation.

Embracing Sacred Sexuality

Sacred sexuality recognizes no chasm between sexuality and spirituality. Absent condemnation and demonization of our sexual selves, it celebrates desire and pleasure freely while rejecting the premise that God exists outside of our pursuit of sexual ecstasy and fulfillment. It recognizes our perched lips and gingerly placed hands on the other as an invitation for Spirit. It validates authentic sexual self-expression as God-given and God-ordained and understands it to be one of many paths to experiencing the liberating presence of the divine.

Sacred sexuality freed me from the chains of self-policing and self-loathing. It beckoned me to forsake shame-ridden, fear-inducing theologies that stripped me of my spiritual inheritance and bodily autonomy. The embrace of handclapping and tongue-talking alongside climax-inducing intimacy and fulfilled desire as vehicles of the divine liberated me from an inauthentic version of self. Sacred sexuality redeemed my humanity and made way for my full divinity.

While my introduction to sacred sexuality came through the Black religious tradition, I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge that this technology is not exclusive to the Black Church. Neither is the embodiment and intuitive understanding of this humanist principle exclusive to Christianity. My queer and trans, Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, Buddhist, and agnostic kindred have embraced the divine coupling of spirituality and sexuality, both within and outside of affirming faith-based institutions.

We have marshaled sacred sexuality to advocate for comprehensive and inclusive sex education, the decriminalization of individuals living with HIV, and equitable access to reproductive care. At the heart of this advocacy is the fervent and unshakable belief that caring for the body is caring for the Spirit, and sexual health is a requisite of spiritual health.

Pride in the Pews Meeting a Critical Gap

Recently, Pride in the Pews launched grant-based partnerships with Black Churches across the country to enlist their support in reducing the number of people diagnosed with HIV. Medical providers face challenges building trust with Black communities, and existing messaging around available interventions falls flat. Our program joined forces with Black Churches to bridge this critical gap.

Through the lens of sacred sexuality, we invited church partners to create programming that destigmatized sex and sexuality and promoted sexual health as a pillar of spiritual health. One congregational partner from New Covenant Missionary Baptist Church on Chicago’s South Side took this invitation seriously. To raise awareness about the epidemic in his community, the church’s pastor proposed commemorating World AIDS Day during service and hosting a one-day satellite HIV testing clinic immediately afterward.

But he didn’t stop there.

To the congregation’s surprise, their senior pastor did something unprecedented. He transformed the pulpit into a doctor’s office by allowing it to be his own HIV test site. In a powerful act of leadership, Pastor Stephen Thurston broke the silence surrounding sex and HIV, modeling the testing process for his congregation down to the actual prick of the needle.

He went on to preach a sermon entitled “When Blood Cries,” denouncing the demonization of LGBTQ+ communities and repenting for the inaction of the church during the height of the HIV epidemic. The sermon also framed sexual health as a spiritual imperative. That day, over 300 people attended the post-church health fair, and more than 20 members of so-called “hard-to-reach” communities were tested for HIV, stretching the capacity of the onsite medical practitioners.

Embracing sacred sexuality and puncturing the veil between sexuality and spirituality, Pastor Thurston continued to make history by opening a weekly testing site in his church in partnership with a federally qualified healthcare provider. He married the inner work of worship, adoration, and Sacred connection with the outward work of community service. The church has now entered an era of hosting a satellite clinic location offering connection to primary care services, including HIV and STI testing, along with gender-affirming care.

As medical practitioners and epidemiologists desperately continue their search for innovative ways to curb the ongoing epidemic, sacred sexuality stands as a proven method to stem the tide of this public health crisis while charting a path forward that honors all sexualities. Stephen Thurston and New Covenant demonstrated the power of leveraging sacred sexuality to thwart the spread of stigma directed toward LGBTQ+ communities in faith-based spaces. They extended an invitation for others to embrace their own sacred sexuality.

In one fell swoop, Pastor Thurston debunked medical misinformation, championed sex positivity, and destigmatized communities most impacted by HIV, namely, LGBTQ+ communities. He affirmed what LGBTQ+ communities have epitomized and embraced through lived experience: that sexuality is not separate and apart from spirituality. They are inescapably linked and reinforce each other.

Sacred sexuality is not about the church, a specific tradition, or even particular theological commitments. It’s an open invitation to embrace our humanity fully. To honor our Spirit and our bodies as temples worthy of being celebrated, cared for, and adored by self and by others.

As a queer son of the Black Church, New Covenant’s embrace of sacred sexuality gives me much-needed hope for what LGBTQ+ inclusion in faith-based spaces can look like. But perhaps more importantly, the adoption and normalization of sacred sexuality gives me hope for our collective liberation, making way for a healthier, more abundant expression of our humanity.

By Don Abram