God & Sex
Deconstructing Shame in the Body
Enrollment opens now.
Course begins July 29, 2026.
But if you read that line and recognized that the size of the scandal is the size of the freedom you have yet to claim, this is the course for you.
I am not here to rebuild your faith.
I am not here to tell you the Bible actually didn't want you to feel shame.
I am not here to say that your desire really isn't dirty or dangerous.
I am not interested in convincing you that sex is not a sin but a "gift."
You already know.
You can leave the church, quote the books, do the work, and still hate yourself naked.
You can believe that sex can be good, feel good, and still feel shame in your body. You can reject purity culture and still flinch, freeze in the middle of intimacy, in the doctor's office, in how you describe your body to yourself when no one is listening, in the way you receive pleasure, in the ways that you don't.
Because access to your own desire, your own body, your own knowing without an external authority granting or denying it has been unthinkable.
Have you met your self? The one who inhabits your body like it belongs to her. The one who knows what she wants, and moves from desire instead of fear.
You have been waiting for you.
But it is hard to come home when you have never been allowed in.
Here’s where we stop looking for the door.
Because sex is still taboo, still private.
Because we don't yet see how shame in the bedroom finds its way to everywhere outside it.
To the meeting where you do not speak. To the mirror. To the scale. To the risks you do not take.
Because living an erotic life seems too unfamiliar. Too luxurious. Too uncontainable. And because we have been trained to believe that wanting is the beginning of a big, big problem.
So we deconstruct the doctrine and leave the body behind, when the body is where the sacred lives.
This is a container for us to go back for the body: where one of the embodied practice is—yes—to masturbate to the Bible.
Masturbating to the Bible
is not for everyone.
Before my trailer plays, Pornhub shows you an ad. What did you feel in your body? Whose voice did you hear? That embodied experience is where the shame lives and that is where we are going.
This is A Course with somatic practice.
We will read Audre Lorde, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and many others alongside scripture to open the door.
The intellectual rigor is real.
But the more demanding work is not in the reading.
It is in what the reading asks your body to do.
Every module includes a somatic practice: not as an add-on or optional homework, but the point of the lesson.
Because if desire is part of what it means to be made in the image of a god who creates, reaches and wants a body as the site of revelation, the flesh is the fucking point.
And I am here to take incarnation as a serious practice so we can take back what was always ours.
This is not a permission slip:
This is not a course that convinces you why you can masturbate.
This is a course that explores masturbation as a way to connect with the sacred.
This is not a course that explains why kink isn't sinful.
This is a course that asks what we can learn from the erotics of transgression.
This is not a course that says queer sex is fine, or celebrated, actually.
This is a course that reimagines our relationship with ourselves when we are desired by a queer God.
This is not a course that gives you biblical permission to have sex.
This is a course that starts from the premise that God is a sexual being and asks what we can learn about God through sex.
This is not a course that makes the Bible safe.
This is a course that gives weight to its scandals and stays in the room with you while you read it.
How This Works
Shame survives by being the only story the text is allowed to tell, the only meaning available for the body and its desires. The moment you give the text back its full erotic and transgressive range, shame loses its monopoly. When you read the binding of Isaac as a bondage game, when God becomes Daddy, when the Song of Songs is read as the erotica it is, the buffet gets restocked. The somatic practices are where your body learns that there are other places to go and feel.
This class felt like a prayer
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This class felt like a prayer 〰️
10 Modules
& one live group Q&A Call
This Work Lives Between
Ancient Texts & the Lab.
It is not a well-curated reading list or me teaching existing scholarship. This is original work that reimagines God from the evidence of your body, through neuroscience, reproductive science, and embodied cognition, theory, poetry, and art. I move between them because the body has never lived in only one category and neither has God.
See an example of my framework here
The live Q&A call,
scheduled 4-5 weeks in, is intentionally collective rather than individual. You’ll submit questions in advance and I’ll address the common themes and threads that emerge. I am not asking you to process your healing in front of strangers before you’ve had a chance to do the work. Safety comes first.
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We sample the full pornographic range of the text that was used to shame you: from the erotic to the violent, from Genesis to Song of Songs to Judges 19. We read it with Audre Lorde. We stay in the room with it all.
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Close embodied reading of biblical erotica as biblical erotica that focuses on the woman’s state of arousal. Let’s make sexual religious memories in our bodies.
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This module takes kink seriously as a theological category and reads it through the history of Christian mysticism, through the body that finds God at the edge of what it has been told not to want.
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Every orifice the church made shameful is an orifice the church had a theology about. This module follows that theology to its end: what becomes possible when you remove reproduction as the center of what bodies are for. What does the biology of the prostate say about its Creator?
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Desire that isn't immediately satisfied is a theological experience. This module reclaims the erotics of waiting, of approach, of the mouth as sacred site.
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The presence that's been in the room with you your entire sexual life and what a different theology of divine presence makes possible.
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1 in 5 people in the US lives with an STI. This module confronts the doctrine still hiding in our science: that infection is evidence of disobedience. We will ask what STIs teach us about touch, connection, and what is holy. Read a short preview of this work here.
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Masturbation as spiritual practice.
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What does reading the clitoris as scripture tell us about the nature of its Creator/about the nature of what is holy?
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Commitment to living from the body. What it means to move through the world from desire instead of fear.
* A note on sexual violence. The Bible contains sexual violence. These texts are part of the course because they are part of the book that was used to shape your body. I engage this content directly. I do not use it gratuitously but I do not look away from it either. If you carry trauma related to sexual violence, please know this material is in here. The course is self-paced precisely so you can move at the speed your body allows.
What You Take With You
This course gives you access to many ways of knowing, many ways of reading, many ways of inhabiting the body, that do not start from the assumption that you are a problem created to be fixed.
You are not leaving with better coping strategies for shame. You will have a different relationship to the authority that produced it.
You will leave with interpretive tools and somatic practices that will travel with you to the bedroom and every room where someone uses a text against you. You will have a framework that takes incarnation seriously, not just as intellectual exercise, but as an invitation to inhabit your own flesh without transcending it, to cultivate a lived relationship with your incarnated desire that continues to develop, surprise you, frustrate you, and ask things of you.
You are invited to live an erotic life. An erotic life can be a sex life but is not just a sex life. It is what happens when you stop organizing your existence around what your desire might cost you and start moving from what your body already knows. This course is not a finish line. It is where that life begins.
Who Made This
Connie Chen
Connie Chen holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She is a mystic, a tragedian, a feminist theorist, and a student of her disabled body. Her work lives at the intersection of feminist theology, embodied work, and cultural criticism.
FAQs
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No. The tradition shaped your body whether or not you still hold the belief. Shame in the nervous system doesn't ask for your current theological position. Neither does this course.
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No. Therapy works with what happened to you. This course works with what your body can do with the texts. If you are in active crisis, please work with a therapist. This course is not a substitute.
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Yes. That is the course. The lectures open the door. The practices are what walk through it. You cannot take this with your mind alone.
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It will be. You are being asked to stay in the room with material the tradition specifically trained you to flee. It will be difficult but in new ways.
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If the healing you've done has stayed primarily in the mind, in the theology, the deconstruction, the reframing, then yes. This goes somewhere else. The nervous system is not impressed by better arguments. It needs something different. This is my radical attempt at meeting it.
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It's for everyone the church had opinions about. Which is everyone. Queer bodies are centered explicitly in one module because the church was explicit about them. But religious sexual shame does not only live in queer bodies, and this course does not pretend otherwise.
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Both. The shame is the same. The source material is the same. What you currently believe about God is your business. What the text actually says is what we're working with.
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This course includes one live group Q&A call, scheduled 4-5 weeks in. You'll submit questions in advance and I'll address the common themes and threads that emerge.
I will not ask you to process your healing in front of strangers before you've had a chance to do the work. Safety comes first. This course is designed to be taken in the privacy of your own body, at your own pace, with me as your guide through the content.
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The course engages the sexually explicit content of the biblical text directly. The somatic practices ask you to engage your own body directly. If the first line of this page stopped you, this course is probably not for you. If it named something, you already know what to expect.
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This course is nonrefundable.
If you can already feel what this work might crack open,
and know that you would need a witness in your excavation, the premium offer is built for you. It adds 3 private integration sessions with me to help you move through, not on. Five seats available.
Ready to arrive?
Ends July 24, 2026
Early Bird
$696
or 2 payments of $349
Lifetime Access. Course begins July 29, 2026.
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Lifetime Access. Course begins July 29, 2026. 〰️
After July 24, 2026
$777
or 2 payments of $399
Premium
$1,999
5 seats available
3 private integration calls