What the Church Never Taught You About Intimacy — And What the Bible Actually Says

I grew up in a faith environment that had a lot to say about what sex was not. It was not for outside of marriage. It was not to be treated casually. It was not something to be explored before the right time and the right person and the right context. These boundaries were communicated clearly, consistently, and with genuine conviction.

What was communicated far less clearly — in my experience and in the experience of most people I've worked with who share a faith background — was what intimacy actually is. What it looks like when it's fully alive. What the body has to do with a life of faith rather than simply being a source of temptation to manage. What a genuinely thriving intimate marriage actually feels like from the inside.

The prohibitions were clear. The invitation was largely absent.

Brittney and I both carry faith as a genuine part of who we are. And one of the things we've had to work through together — in year seven and beyond — is the quiet but real weight of inherited shame around our own bodies and desire. Not because our faith communities were malicious. But because the silence around what intimacy could be left us to figure out something significant largely on our own.

This post is for the Nashville couples — and individuals — who know that feeling. Who believe deeply in the sacred nature of marriage and intimate connection and who have quietly sensed that they were never given the full picture of what that sacredness could actually look like.

A loving couple shares a tender moment, enjoying each other's company while relaxing with a book.

What the Research Shows About Faith and Intimacy

The data on faith and intimate life is more nuanced — and more hopeful — than the cultural conversation around religion and sexuality tends to suggest.

According to a 2026 report on Christian marriage statistics, couples who pray together daily report a 90% or higher rate of relationship satisfaction. Research from the Wheatley Institution found that couples unified in religious practices at home — shared prayer, scripture engagement, spiritual connection — report significantly better emotional closeness and higher sexual satisfaction than couples without that shared foundation.

A peer-reviewed study published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior found that both sexual frequency and satisfaction are positively associated with marital quality — and that religious institutions, when they function well, foster the relational values and social supports that promote exactly that quality. According to the same research, most religious traditions in America give a privileged place to marriage as the optimal context for intimate connection — meaning the framework for a genuinely alive intimate life is embedded in the faith tradition itself.

The problem, in other words, is not faith. The problem is the silence within faith communities around what intimate aliveness actually looks like — and the shame that silence produces in the couples left to navigate it alone.

What the Bible Actually Says

Here is what gets lost in the cultural conversation about Christianity and sexuality: the Bible is not primarily a document of sexual prohibition. It is, in significant sections, a document of erotic celebration.

The Song of Solomon — also called the Song of Songs — is eight chapters of unapologetic, embodied, sensual love poetry. It describes the physical beauty of lovers in vivid detail. It celebrates desire openly and without qualification. It presents the longing of two people for each other as something sacred rather than something to be managed or minimized.

Most people who grew up in faith communities heard very little about the Song of Solomon. The prohibitions they heard clearly. The celebration they often didn't.

The theological tradition that takes embodiment seriously — that understands the body as created good, desire as part of that creation, and intimate connection within marriage as a reflection of sacred love — has always existed within Christianity. It simply hasn't always been the loudest voice in the room.

What I bring to faith-adjacent couples in my coaching work is not a departure from their values. It is a deeper engagement with what those values, taken seriously, actually invite.

The Specific Ways Faith Culture Can Complicate Intimacy

I want to name these directly because the couples I work with who carry a faith background often recognize them immediately — and feel relieved that someone is willing to say them out loud.

Shame that outlasts the prohibition.

Many people who grew up in faith environments carried strong messages about the wrongness of sexual desire before marriage. Those messages were intended for a season — but they don't automatically switch off on a wedding night. The shame that was cultivated for years doesn't dissolve because a ceremony happened. It needs to be consciously unlearned. And most faith communities provide no support or guidance for that unlearning.

The body as obstacle rather than gift.

When faith formation primarily presents the body as a source of temptation to be managed rather than a created gift to be inhabited, the result is a complicated relationship with physical experience that follows people into their marriages. Learning to be genuinely at home in a body — to experience it as a place of aliveness and connection rather than a liability to be controlled — is work that many faith-formed adults have never been invited to do.

Silence as a substitute for formation.

In the absence of honest, positive formation around intimacy within marriage, couples are left to figure out something genuinely complex on their own. They arrive at marriage with strong convictions about what intimacy is not and very little guidance about what it could be. That gap — between prohibition and invitation — is where a quiet but significant amount of intimate suffering lives.

The performance of godly marriage.

Nashville's faith culture produces a particular pressure around the appearance of a strong, godly marriage. Couples who are quietly struggling with their intimate lives often carry an additional layer of shame because their private reality doesn't match the public expectation. They feel they should have this figured out. They don't know who to ask. And the community structures that could support them rarely create space for this particular kind of honesty.

What a Faith-Informed Intimacy Coaching Approach Actually Looks Like

My approach to working with faith-adjacent couples is not secular coaching with a religious disclaimer attached. It is coaching that takes faith seriously as part of who a person is — and that works within that framework rather than against it.

That means several things in practice.

It means holding the body as created good — which is a thoroughly theological position — and helping couples develop a genuinely positive, embodied relationship with their own physical experience rather than a managed or shame-laden one.

It means taking the invitation of the Song of Solomon seriously — that desire within the covenant of marriage is not a concession to human weakness but a genuine dimension of intimate aliveness worth cultivating with intention and care.

It means creating a space where the specific shame and silence that faith formation can produce is acknowledged honestly and compassionately — not dismissed, not pathologized, but worked through in a context of genuine respect for the person's convictions.

And it means never asking a person to choose between their faith and their intimate aliveness. Because in my experience — in my own marriage and in the work I do with couples — they are not in conflict. They never were.

For Nashville's Faith Community Specifically

Nashville is one of the most faith-saturated cities in America. It is also a city where the gap between the intimate life couples are privately experiencing and the intimate life they sense is possible — or that their faith tradition actually invites — is quietly significant.

According to a 2026 report on Christian marriage, 61% of practicing Christians say their faith is the primary influence on their marriage. Yet the same research consistently finds that explicit, positive guidance around intimate aliveness within marriage is among the least available resources in faith communities.

That gap is exactly what I'm here to address. Not from outside the faith tradition — from within it. As someone who shares it, who has navigated its complicated relationship with embodiment in my own marriage, and who believes that the fully alive intimate life that most couples long for is entirely consistent with a life of genuine faith conviction.

If you're in Nashville and carrying both a deep faith and a quiet sense that your intimate life hasn't lived up to what it could be — this work is for you. The conversation you've been afraid to have is one I'm equipped to hold.

Book a free discovery call — confidential, judgment-free, and specifically designed to meet you where your faith and your intimate life actually intersect.

And if you'd like to explore privately first, Coelle offers guided audio intimacy experiences designed to help individuals and couples reconnect with their bodies, their desire, and each other — in a space that honors rather than dismisses 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.