“Okay, so you guys don’t kiss, but like, do you want to have sex with him? Make babies with him?” It was a pointed question my college friend was asking me. I deliberated with myself, then decided to lie. “Yea, I mean, of course.”
My unease in talking about sex started years earlier, as soon as my peers’ curiosity around sex began. While I was a very curious child, curiosity about sex never hit me. I rarely thought about it. Now, looking back on my life, both my distress surrounding discussions about sex and my lack of desire to know more were a pattern I should have investigated. But I always thought religion was at play. It was easy for me to be the good, faithful Christian girl, at least in this sense. Sex was unpure until the wedding night, so I had time before I had to full-on worry. During adolescence, teenage years, and college years, I had no issue obliging to remain pure. I was a purity culture queen.
In church, many of us who are asexual, also called aces, travel the path of an upside-down parabola: starting off as good Christians who aren’t tempted sexually when we are young, rising to ranks of Christian leaders as we grab hold of a faith that grabs hold of us. Then we’re deemed as weird, incomplete, or unnatural Christians who, at the proper age, aren’t getting married, wanting sex, or procreating the way we should.
Aces experience little or no sexual attraction, which can be confusing in a world that rarely differentiates sexual attraction from romantic attraction (there’s also sensual and aesthetic attraction). But that differentiation is clear to at least 70 million (1) of us who identify as aces. At the time that number was figured, it was one percent of the population—probably around 2011. Now, there are 8 billion people populating the world, proof that current research on asexuality is needed. Even when this number does refresh, it’ll still likely be much lower than reality as many aces haven’t come out, due to the unique stigmas around asexuality—often called the invisible orientation.
For those of us who deeply believe in the power of church, the scandalous offer of an ideal church never goes away. If there is ever a space for asexual people to find belonging, it should be in church. But church is often the place of pain stemming from imposed expectations that cannot be fulfilled by an attraction level that will not change. Conservative churches don’t understand asexuality is created, not chosen. Progressive churches don’t understand that sexual liberation must expand to include those who feel no sexual attraction, those who are repulsed by sex, and those who don’t want to think about sex at all. All of this should be welcomed and deemed good if we believe that creation truly is good. Church isn’t always safe, let alone welcoming.
Neither is therapy. Techniques used to change someone’s orientation or identity are called conversion therapy, which is much more subtle for aces as they are told they need to explore the traumas or mental health issues that led them to feel they don’t want sex. Or they are given medicine to increase libido. In the National LGBTQ Survey report in the UK published in 2018, “Bisexual respondents were the least likely to have undergone or been offered [conversion therapy] (5%), and asexual respondents the most likely (10%).” (2) Many aces, like me, have had queer-allied therapists tell us we are not actually asexual.
The media doesn’t offer us much more than the spiritual or the medicinal world does. We are often portrayed as lame as in the case of a Brooklyn Nine-Nine episode (S2E18) and the beginning scene of Four Christmases, among others, or medically undiagnosed as the infamous House episode almost all aces know (S8E9).
For these reasons among many others, we don’t come out of the closet. It’s safer inside. Maybe. When I first became aware of my own asexuality, I worried that I would never be accepted in church. I wanted out of this orientation. I wanted to be someone I knew I wasn’t. I started harming myself. Currently using a pen name, I’m working on my own coming out story, still fearful of the social and familial repercussions.
Impressionable and still a teenager unaware of my own identity during that aforementioned conversation, as soon as my friend started talking about sex, I got uncomfortable. I had just started dating the guy I had been crushing on for a while. We were both leaders in a Christian group on campus. No kissing was a stipulation to our relationship that he initiated because of the Christian courting culture of that decade, and I easily agreed. My lips had locked with other guys, and I enjoyed the act of kissing, but this felt doable. For the several months we dated, we never kissed, and I don’t remember ever feeling tempted to break our deal.
Two decades later—which included a marriage and kids—and after having worked with a few therapists on my religious trauma, I felt like I was on a good path of healing my spiritual wounds. But something didn’t quite feel right about the topic of sex. I felt like I hadn’t budged on the issue. I started examining the differences between romantic attraction and sexual attraction, a fine line that I never knew existed. The revelation was scary and lonely, and also, the most amazing gift.
The asexual perspective on faith topples power structures in a very unique way because it pierces our human assumptions, dividing bone and marrow, as it makes one consider what sexual attraction actually is. Then from that definition, the imperceptible becomes pronounced as we learn to ask the following questions:
- How are we basing our faith on the idea that every human being should have and/or want regular sex (compulsory sexuality)?
- In what ways are our deepest cultural norms filtering how we interpret the Bible, including how we define eros love?
- What do our amatonormative (3) perceptions of desire say about God?
These are the questions aces have asked on the road to finding—and learning to embrace—our full physical and spiritual selves. These are the questions we are asking our siblings who do experience sexual attraction to learn to ask. Not just for individual revelation, but for a collective awakening that honors what aces have to offer the Church.
I don’t want to just be accepted in a group of Christians, though that’d be amazing in and of itself. Ultimately, I want to be mutually respected for my own faith and the ways in which my faith can challenge and provoke another’s. And I want that challenge and provocation to be reciprocal, because I’m not done growing spiritually.
In this age where the government is trying to erase trans, queer, and intersex identities by removing the letters from the LGBTQI acronym on government websites (such as the State Department), removing all mention of LGBTQ content on other websites, and revoking transgender rights to serve in the military or play collegiate sports, the hate against queer people, including aces, is now state-sanctioned.
At a time when hate is so open in so many places, the Church can lead the way in love. To do so, the Church needs aces, who are uniquely poised to bridge the queer community and the Christian community in such a way where everybody’s deepest humanity and highest divinity are accepted, expressed, and encouraged.
(1) Kaur, Harmeet. Asexuality isn’t celibacy or abstinence. Here’s what it is – and isn’t. October 2019. accessed 1/13/25 https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/20/us/asexuality-explainer-trnd/index.html
(3) Amatonormativity says that romantic relationships are the ideal that every human being desires.
