Who told you that you were naked?
I have touched this question in other conversations and other reflections, but my interview with Kelly Edmiston made me feel its edge again in a fresh way. It is one of those questions that sounds simple until it begins to open under your feet. God is not asking Adam and Eve for information, as though heaven were puzzled about anatomy. He is asking about the origin of shame. Who taught you to hide? Who planted in you the suspicion that what I made is somehow disqualifying? Who introduced contempt into your experience of embodiment?
That is not an old question. It is a present one.
And in my conversation with Kelly, it became a doorway into something deeper than a debate about doctrine or church policy. It became a way of naming a wound. Kelly described growing up in a conservative church culture in which women did not preach, did not read scripture publicly, did not lead from the front. Over time, and especially as she entered male-dominated ministry spaces, she began to recognize how much shame she had internalized simply for being female. She described walking into rooms with an almost constant inner apology: I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I’m female. I’m sorry that I have a body. I’m sorry that I look like this.
That is devastating language, precisely because it is so familiar in spirit even when unspoken.
It reveals that shame does not only attach itself to what we have done. Sometimes it attaches itself to what we are, or what we have been taught to believe we are. And when that happens in religious settings, it carries a special kind of force because it does not come merely as social discomfort. It comes draped in ultimacy. It tells you not only that others may disapprove of you, but that God Himself may be difficult to reach until you get out from under the burden of your own body.
That, as I heard Kelly explain it, is one of the deepest injuries of purity culture.
Purity culture did not merely regulate sex. It taught many people to distrust embodiment.
Kelly put this with unusual clarity. She said purity culture taught her that her body—especially her female body—was a barrier between her and God. For a person who deeply loved Jesus, who sincerely wanted nearness to God, that is a catastrophic formation. It means the very thing through which you exist in the world becomes suspect. The flesh is not something to be redeemed and inhabited; it becomes something to manage, suppress, transcend, or apologize for.
This is where the damage goes beyond prudishness.
A community can believe it is simply teaching sexual restraint while actually teaching something much more corrosive: that holiness is achieved by putting distance between oneself and one’s own humanity. That is not merely bad pedagogy. It is bad theology.
What struck me in Kelly’s account was that this was not just about sex in the narrow sense. It was about the body as such. The female form became loaded with danger, responsibility, and implied guilt. It became something to cover, explain, restrain, and preemptively excuse. In that environment, one does not simply learn rules. One learns alienation.
And yet Christian faith, at its center, cannot finally support alienation from the body, because the scandal of Christianity is not that God saved us from embodiment, but that God entered it.
Kelly said something that deserves to linger: God loves flesh so much that God became flesh.
That line, if really believed, overturns a great many religious distortions.
It means the body is not the embarrassing packaging of the soul. It means the senses are not a regrettable concession to lower nature. It means creatureliness is not a spiritual mistake. The Incarnation does not sanctify sin, of course, but it does decisively affirm embodiment. And resurrection goes further still: the Christian hope is not disembodied escape to a remote elsewhere, but the renewal of all things, including the body, the earth, and the whole theater of creaturely existence.
It is astonishing how often Christians say they believe this while emotionally inhabiting something closer to Gnosticism.
Silence is not neutrality. Silence forms.
One of Kelly’s sharpest insights was simple enough to fit in a sentence: silence about sex is a message about sex.
That struck me because it applies far beyond this one topic. We often imagine that if we avoid saying the wrong thing, we have spared our children or congregations from harm. But silence is rarely empty. It has its own rhetoric. It has tone. It has emotional weather. It communicates what is unspeakable, what is dangerous, what is embarrassing, what is taboo, what belongs in darkness.
And where silence reigns, shame grows remarkably well.
Kelly’s book, Shame-Free Sex Talks, is an attempt to interrupt that silence without collapsing into either permissiveness or panic. What impressed me was that she is not advocating chaos, nor is she simply baptizing whatever the surrounding culture says about sexuality. Her project is harder than either of those. She is trying to help Christian parents recover a language that is faithful, embodied, and unashamed. That means teaching children not only what boundaries exist, but why the body is good, why desire itself is not evil, and why conversation must begin long before adolescence forces everyone into awkward emergency mode.
This point landed with me personally. As a parent, and as someone who came from a religious culture that addressed these matters more by warning than by formation, I could feel the truth of what she was saying. Many of us were taught what not to do, but not how to understand ourselves positively before God as embodied beings. We were given caution without ontology. Rules without a theology of delight. Prohibition without a full account of goodness.
The result is predictable. If parents say little, children still learn. They learn from peers, from screens, from fragments, from embarrassment, from jokes, from evasions, from the charged silence in the room when certain words come up. And by then, the task is not simply instruction. It is often repair.
Kelly’s insistence on early, age-appropriate, ongoing conversation is therefore not merely practical advice. It is a spiritual claim. It says that formation begins before crisis. It says that truthful speech can disarm shame before shame hardens into identity. It says that parents need language because children need reality, not panic.
The Christian life is not an escape from being human.
This, to me, was the deepest current in the conversation.
At one point, Kelly said that in much of Western evangelical culture the story has become too focused on sin in a distorted way—as though the whole point of the gospel were simply to get disembodied souls to heaven after surviving earth. That reduction not only narrows the biblical story. It deforms human beings. It makes us suspicious of our senses, uneasy with pleasure, and strangely detached from the goodness of ordinary creaturely life.
Against that, she offered something both ancient and refreshingly concrete: the Christian life is about becoming truly human.
I found myself resonating strongly with that. In the interview, I brought up the old word desire, because desire appears so early and so consequentially in Genesis. It is part of the drama from the beginning. But if the story stops there, we remain trapped in a world where desire is mostly treated as a problem. What Christians too often miss is that the New Testament does not merely repeat the prohibition. It matures the human being. It calls us, as I put it in the conversation, to exercise our senses to discern good and evil.
That means the answer to misuse is not numbness. It is formation.
Kelly’s examples were strikingly earthy in the best sense. Eating an orange slowly enough to notice its sweetness. Feeling the connection between pleasure and gratitude. Learning that delight is not secular territory God reluctantly tolerates, but part of the created order through which we may encounter His goodness. This is not hedonism. It is the recovery of a sacramental intuition: that the world, rightly received, can become luminous again.
A perfectly cooked meal. Grass under bare feet. The warmth of water. The smell of fruit. The simple, embodied experience of being alive. These are not obstacles to holiness. They are among the materials from which gratitude, reverence, and even chastity can be formed—if they are received within a truthful theology.
What Kelly is pushing back against, then, is not only sexual shame. It is the larger lie that spirituality requires distance from our own humanity. No. The Word became flesh. Heaven and earth meet, not by abolishing creatureliness, but by redeeming it. The body matters. What we do with it matters. But it matters because the body is holy ground, not because it is a regrettable liability.
That is a different emotional universe from the one many of us inherited.
And perhaps that is why this conversation mattered so much. It was not simply about sex talks, though it was certainly about that. It was about whether Christians can recover a way of speaking in which embodiment is not the enemy of faith, desire is not automatically a stain, pleasure is not intrinsically suspect, and shame does not get the last word.
It was about whether we can tell the truth more fully.
The truth that some religious cultures planted shame where God intended freedom.
The truth that silence often catechizes more powerfully than speech.
The truth that redemption is not flight from being human, but the restoration of it.
So yes, I begin where I began: Who told you that you were naked?
It remains a necessary question. But if Kelly Edmonston helped me hear anything beyond that question, it is this: the Christian task is not merely to identify who planted the shame. It is to grow past it into a fuller, holier, more joyful inhabiting of the life God actually gave us.
Not despite the body.
Through it.
Sneak Peek: What’s Coming Next on Created in the Image of God’s Substack
I emphasize the substack here, because - again - I’m behind. But I’m not feeling shame, because of my conversation with Kelly :)
On Sunday, September 6 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I was joined by Jared Byas—writer, speaker, and co-founder of The Bible for Normal People. We explored how we can approach faith and scripture with curiosity, making room for honest questions without relying on rigid answers or easy certainties. From doubt and belonging to the possibility of a deeper, more thoughtful, and more connected life with God, it promises to be an important conversation.
Then on Tuesday, September 8 at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I spoke with Amy Peeler—New Testament scholar, pastor, and author. We looked at scripture through questions of gender, holiness, and the family of God, and considered what it means for men and women alike to understand themselves as God’s children. From the book of Hebrews and biblical interpretation to identity, belonging, and life in the family of God, it should be a rich and timely discussion.
If this conversation with Kelly stirred something in you—about shame, embodiment, the goodness of being human, or the long work of learning to inhabit the body without fear—then I think these next two conversations will carry that search forward in meaningful ways.
Check them out on Youtube - they’re already there, and join me here for the recap.
