Nashville's Faith Communities and the Conversation They're Not Having About Intimacy

I've been attending The Belonging Co here in Nashville for several years. It's a church I genuinely love — the worship, the community, the quality of teaching, the authentic faith that runs through everything it does. I am not writing this post as a critique of The Belonging Co or of any specific Nashville church. I'm writing it as someone who sits in Nashville's faith communities, loves them, and has spent years noticing a specific gap that most of them share.

The gap is not a failure of love or conviction. It is a failure of formation — specifically, the positive formation around intimate life within marriage that most Nashville faith communities provide in full and articulate detail on one side and almost entirely abandon on the other.

The prohibition side is well-developed. Nashville's faith communities have clear, consistently communicated convictions about sexuality outside of marriage, about the sanctity of the marital covenant, about what intimacy is not for. These convictions are genuine and they matter. What is almost entirely absent — in most Nashville churches I'm aware of — is equally clear, equally positive, equally practical guidance about what intimate life within marriage actually is, what it looks like when it's genuinely alive, and what couples can do when it isn't.

The result is a city full of faithfully married couples who were thoroughly prepared for the wedding and largely unprepared for what the wedding was supposed to begin.

A couple shares a tender moment, embracing each other with love and affection, as they smile in blissful happiness.

What the Research Shows About Faith Communities and Intimate Life

The data on faith communities and marriage health tells a genuinely hopeful story — with a specific caveat that deserves honest attention.

According to research from the Wheatley Institution, couples unified in religious practice at home — shared prayer, scripture engagement, regular attendance — report significantly higher levels of relationship quality, emotional closeness, and intimate satisfaction than couples without that shared spiritual foundation. The relational infrastructure that genuine faith community provides — commitment, trust, shared values, accountability — creates conditions that genuinely support intimate flourishing.

According to 2026 Christian marriage research compiled from multiple sources, couples who pray together daily report a 90% or higher rate of relationship satisfaction. The data is consistent: faith, practiced together with genuine conviction and shared investment, is a genuine asset for marital intimacy.

The caveat is this: the positive effects of shared faith on intimate life operate through the relational infrastructure faith provides — trust, commitment, shared values — not through the specific intimate formation most faith communities offer. And according to Barna Group's 2025 family research, one of the most consistent findings across Christian marriage studies is the gap between the quality of the relational foundation faith provides and the quality of the practical, embodied, shame-free intimate guidance that would allow couples to actually inhabit that foundation fully.

The foundation is strong. The formation for what to build on it is largely absent.

What Nashville's Faith Communities Are Actually Saying — And Not Saying

I want to be specific here rather than vague — because the gap I'm describing is specific, not general.

Nashville's faith communities are, in my experience, genuinely committed to the institution of marriage. They celebrate it, protect it, and invest significantly in premarital preparation and marriage enrichment programming. They teach clearly about the sacredness of the marital covenant. Many offer counseling resources for couples in crisis.

What they are not doing — in most cases — is offering their married congregants the specific, positive, shame-free guidance for building a genuinely alive intimate life within marriage that both the research and the couples themselves consistently identify as needed.

The qualitative research on faith community marriage programming consistently finds that marriage comes up regularly in church contexts — in sermons, in illustrations, in applications — as an institution to protect and honor. What rarely comes up is the specific, embodied, honest conversation about what genuine intimate aliveness within marriage actually requires — the language for desire, the permission to pursue genuine intimate fullness, the practical frameworks that help couples understand their own erotic wiring and communicate it honestly within the safety of their covenant.

This absence is not typically malicious. It reflects a genuine discomfort — in most pastoral contexts — with the territory of embodied intimate life. Pastors who are deeply equipped to address the spiritual, relational, and theological dimensions of marriage are rarely equipped to address the specific, practical, embodied dimensions of intimate aliveness within it. And in the absence of that guidance, couples are left to figure out something genuinely complex on their own — carrying, in many cases, the accumulated shame of a formation that prepared them thoroughly for restraint and not at all for genuine embodied intimate joy.

The Specific Costs of This Absence

The cost of this gap is not hypothetical. It shows up in the couples I work with regularly — and in the research that documents what faith-formed marriages actually look like from the inside.

According to research by Sheila Wray Gregoire published through Bare Marriage — a comprehensive survey of more than 20,000 married evangelical women — specific messaging patterns common in evangelical sexual formation were directly correlated with lower intimate satisfaction for women in those marriages. The research identified the obligation framework — the understanding of sexual intimacy primarily as something a wife provides for her husband — as one of the most consistent suppressors of genuine desire and intimate satisfaction in Christian marriages. The theological framing around sexuality that most evangelical women received, the research found, was significantly more likely to produce intimate suffering than intimate flourishing.

This is not an indictment of faith. It is a specific, evidence-based finding about incomplete formation — about a tradition that prepared couples for the what of marriage without adequately preparing them for the how of genuine intimate aliveness within it.

The gap between what Nashville's faith communities believe about the sanctity and importance of marriage and what they actually provide in terms of practical, positive, shame-free intimate formation is the specific space where a significant amount of intimate suffering accumulates quietly, without language, without permission to name it, and without access to the support that would address it.

Why Nashville Specifically Needs This Conversation

Nashville is one of the most faith-saturated cities in America. The Belonging Co, Crosspoint, Brentwood Baptist, Redemption Church, and dozens of other significant congregations shape the intimate lives of hundreds of thousands of Nashville adults — not only through their direct teaching, but through the cultural atmosphere they collectively create.

In that atmosphere, the expectation of a strong, godly marriage is real and consistent. The practical guidance for building one that is genuinely intimate — genuinely alive in the embodied, physical, vulnerable dimension that marriage was always meant to include — is largely absent.

The couples navigating this gap are not doing anything wrong. They are faithful, committed, genuinely loving people who were handed an incomplete map and told to find their way. Many of them are quietly suffering in intimate lives that are faithful and flat simultaneously — and carrying shame about that flatness that has no legitimate basis in the theological tradition they actually hold.

The Song of Solomon — eight chapters of the most joyful, explicit, and unapologetically embodied erotic poetry in scripture — is not a footnote to the biblical vision of married intimacy. It is central to it. A theological tradition that takes its own sacred text seriously has resources for this conversation that most of its practitioners have simply never been equipped to use.

What I Offer Nashville's Faith Community

I am a person of faith. Brittney and I both share that faith as a genuine, important part of who we are and how we've built our marriage. The work I do with faith-formed Nashville couples is not designed to move them away from their convictions. It is designed to help them more fully inhabit them.

The specific conversation that Nashville's faith communities are largely not having about intimate aliveness within marriage — I am equipped to have that conversation. In a space that takes faith seriously. That holds both the theological tradition's genuine invitation toward embodied intimate joy and the practical, shame-free guidance for actually building it. That meets couples within their values rather than asking them to set those values aside in order to address this dimension of their lives.

If you're a Nashville couple navigating the specific intersection of genuine faith and the longing for something more genuinely alive in your intimate marriage — this is the work I do. And it is work that your faith tradition, read carefully and completely, fully supports.

Book a free discovery call and let's have the conversation that your faith community may not be equipped to have — in a space that takes both your faith and your intimate life with equal seriousness.

And if you'd like to begin exploring privately, Coelle offers guided audio intimacy experiences designed for individuals and couples who are ready to invest in this dimension of their lives — in a warm, shame-free space that honors the full complexity of who they are.

Scott Schwertly is a Nashville-based sex and intimacy coach, founder of Coelle, and co-host of Do You Feel That? with his wife Brittney.