Shame Is Not the Same as Reverence: A Faith-Informed Look at Desire

I want to make a distinction in this post that I think a great many faith-formed people have never had made for them, and that changes a surprising amount when it lands.

Shame and reverence are not the same thing.

They can feel similar from the inside. Both produce a certain carefulness around sexuality. Both generate hesitation, a lowered voice, a sense that this territory requires seriousness. Both can be mistaken for the other by a person who was formed in an environment where the two were consistently blended.

But they are different in origin, different in effect, and different in what they produce in a marriage over twenty years.

Reverence says: this is sacred, and sacred things deserve care.

Shame says: this is dangerous, and you are suspect for wanting it.

One of those is a theological position. The other is a wound wearing a theological costume. And a great many faith-formed married people are carrying the second while believing it is the first.

A couple sits apart in a shared space, each grappling with their own emotions and the weight of mutual shame.

How the Confusion Happens

The blending is usually not malicious. It is structural.

Faith formation around sexuality, particularly for people who came up in evangelical or conservative Christian environments, is typically delivered in a specific season of life — adolescence — with a specific goal: preventing sexual activity outside of marriage. That goal is coherent within the tradition, and the formation is generally effective at producing the intended restraint.

The problem is what the formation uses to produce it.

Adolescents are not primarily motivated by nuanced theological anthropology. They are motivated by feeling. And the feeling that most reliably produces sexual restraint in a teenager is shame — the sense that wanting is itself suspect, that desire is a danger to be managed, that the body is a liability requiring vigilance.

That formation works, in the narrow sense of achieving its stated goal. And then the person gets married, and the formation does not switch off, because nothing in it was ever designed to.

Nobody hands you a document at your wedding that says: the shame we cultivated in you for a decade was situational and it is now retired. The shame was installed as a permanent orientation toward your own desire. It remains a permanent orientation toward your own desire.

What Reverence Actually Looks Like

Here is the alternative, and I want to argue that it is the more theologically serious position rather than the more permissive one.

Reverence toward sexuality holds that this dimension of human experience is genuinely significant — that it carries real weight, deserves real care, is capable of real harm when treated carelessly, and is capable of real goodness when treated well. Reverence produces intentionality. It produces attention. It produces the sense that this is worth doing thoughtfully rather than casually.

What reverence does not produce is suspicion of desire itself.

The Song of Solomon — eight chapters of unapologetically embodied erotic poetry that the rabbinic tradition considered the holiest of the writings — is a reverent text. It treats desire between married partners as significant and worth extended, detailed, celebratory attention. It is not casual. It is also not ashamed.

That combination is the theological position. Serious about it. Not suspicious of it.

Most faith-formed adults received the seriousness and the suspicion together and have never been offered the version where they come apart.

How to Tell Which One You Are Carrying

The distinction is testable, and the tests are worth running honestly.

Does it produce care or avoidance?

Reverence produces engagement with attention. Shame produces avoidance. If your orientation toward the intimate dimension of your marriage is primarily to not think about it, that is a shame signature rather than a reverence signature.

Does it apply to your spouse or to yourself?

Reverence orients you toward the other person — toward their experience, their dignity, their good. Shame orients you toward yourself — toward monitoring, evaluating, and managing your own suspect wanting. If the primary object of your attention in intimate moments is your own performance and acceptability, that is shame.

Does it survive being spoken out loud?

Reverence can be discussed. You can say to your spouse, "I want us to take this part of our life seriously and do it with real care," and the sentence holds. Shame cannot be spoken without distortion. If you cannot articulate your position on your own intimate life to the person you are married to, the thing you are holding is probably not a theological conviction.

Does it produce freedom or constriction inside the covenant?

This is the clearest test. Within a marriage — which is, in the tradition, the appropriate and blessed context for sexual expression — does your orientation permit genuine freedom and delight? Or does it maintain the same restriction it maintained before the wedding?

If nothing changed at the wedding, the thing operating was never about context. It was about desire itself.

What This Costs Marriages

I want to be concrete about the stakes, because this is not an abstract theological quibble.

A person carrying unexamined shame into a marriage cannot be fully present in intimate encounter, because a portion of their attention is permanently allocated to self-monitoring. They struggle to articulate what they want, because wanting is the suspect activity. They have difficulty receiving genuine desire from their spouse, because being desired activates the same alarm system that was installed to prevent exactly that.

Their spouse experiences all of this as distance, or as reluctance, or as rejection — and typically concludes it is about them.

Twenty years of that produces marriages that are faithful, committed, functional, and quietly starved. I encounter them regularly. Both partners love each other. Neither has done anything wrong. And something that was installed in both of them at fifteen is still running the intimate life of two adults in their forties.

The Work

Separating shame from reverence is not deconstruction. You are not required to abandon the tradition to do it. In fact I would argue the tradition, read carefully and completely, supports the separation — because the tradition contains the Song of Solomon, contains a theology of the body as created good, and contains a robust account of marriage as a context of genuine mutual delight rather than mere permitted release.

The work is specific: identifying what you actually absorbed, distinguishing what is genuinely yours from what was installed for a situational purpose that has passed, and building the positive formation you were never given.

That work is exactly what I do with faith-formed couples in coaching. Not to move them away from their convictions. To help them hold the convictions without the wound attached.

Book a free discovery call — a space where both your faith and your intimate life are taken seriously, and where this specific conversation is genuinely welcome.

And if you would like to begin privately, Coelle offers guided audio experiences designed to help people develop a genuinely at-home relationship with their own bodies and desire — in a warm, shame-free space.

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.