122: Rehumanizing Men

Trigger warning: this episode contains a short discussion of childhood sexual abuse. Please proceed with caution.

Purity Culture was bad for men, too. In this episode Zachary Wagner joins us to share his story combined with his theological study on how to build a non-toxic masculinity. We discuss:

• how purity culture dehumanized men
• growing up from boys to adult men
• strategies to help you grow

Partner with us for $3/month (USD) to listen to this week’s Purity Culture News & Views episode on Hillsong’s latest legal battle in Australia. Plus we talk about the Apple+ show Shrinking and more. 

Show Notes:

Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality by Zachary Wagner
Women and the Gender of God by Amy Peeler
Heavy Burdens: Seven Ways LGBTQ Christians Experience Harm in the Church by Bridget Eileen Rivera
37: It’s Queer, Not Same Sex Attracted (with Bridget Eileen Rivera)

Zachary Wagner is an ordained minister and a DPhil (PhD) candidate in New Testament at the University of Oxford. He also serves as the editorial director of the Center for Pastor Theologians. Zach’s academic research focuses on the concept of reward in the Letters of Paul and Matthew’s Gospel. HIs first book, Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality is being released with IVP in April, 2023. Zach lives in Oxford, England with his wife and three children. Follow Zach on Twitter

Full transcript

Devi Abraham:
Well, Zach, welcome to the show. It’s exciting to talk to you.

Zach Wagner:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Devi. It’s good to connect like this. I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Devi Abraham:
Yeah, well, we usually start our interviews, especially this kind of interview with a question about your experience in purity culture, but your entire book is about this. And so a lot of our conversation and it is very personal. And so there a lot of our conversation is going to be about that. So I’m actually going to start a little bit differently. Zach, you know, you were really involved with the online conversation about THAT article, as we now refer to.

Zach Wagner:
the article.

Devi Abraham:
the article in the Gospel Coalition

Devi Abraham:
several weeks ago. And one of the big things that that article revealed was this question of who is qualified to write on topics of sexuality and theology. And I really actually wanna start there to just say like why, what qualifies you to write about this? And I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point.

Zach Wagner:
Yeah, it reminds me of the episode of the office. Yeah, I have some questions. Number one, how dare you? Not that I’m hearing that as antagonistic,

Devi Abraham:
Yeah.

Zach Wagner:
but it’s something I’m wrestling with. Well, I shouldn’t say I’m wrestling with. I wrestled with in the kind of lead up to writing this book for sure. And I think it’s a super fair question. Part of the trouble with writing a book on sexuality, particularly a Christian book on human sexuality, is it sits at the intersection of so many concerns, high stakes, like theological, public, political conversations, as well as academic disciplines, history, biblical interpretation, theology, gender criticism, gender studies, feminist studies, masculinist studies, you know. So, when you ask kind of who’s qualified to write it, in some sense, no one. If you’re looking for the kind of perfect profile of you have all the relevant expertises and that was honestly a big kind of question mark for me when I set out to write this. But I do have, you know, in terms of my academic training, some relevant expertise, So that’s one thing. And then I think there is the aspect of personal experience that you already alluded to where I am very much in the middle of the generation that I think was most formed and shaped by purity culture. And I was a person who. very much was all in and affected by it and read all the books and through some life experiences down the line and different things that I read and various various streams of kind of challenge to my ways of thinking about sexuality came to reevaluate some of the messages that I had grown as well. And then I think there was a, you know, these post-purity culture books that have been published in the past six, seven years, you know, there’s probably been a dozen of them.

Devi Abraham:
Yeah.

Zach Wagner:
And it seemed to me, and this is one of the reasons that I felt like I needed to step out and add to the conversation in a way that I hoped would be helpful. It seemed to me that – this will sound a certain way, but I don’t quite mean it in the way that it sounds. So I’ll back it up after I say it. That the straight male voice was not being represented in these conversations. And that’s not me saying that I think, straight white males should be leading these conversations. I think it’s largely been a kind of conservative white male phenomenon that led to the rise of purity culture such as it existed. So I try to take a posture in the book of, hey, I’m entering this conversation as a latecomer in a many of the things that I highlight. But there, I feel like this is going a little bit away from your question. But I, one of the things that I didn’t always appreciate about the kind of post-purity culture conversation was this narrative that purity culture was very harmful for women – of course it was. And it only privileged men. It only led to good things for men. And I would read things like that. And I was very interested in many of the kind of post-Purity culture resources and conversations that were coming out a few years ago. But it didn’t ring true to my experience. And I was like, hey, I’m a straight dude. And I don’t feel like purity culture has been a good deal for me. feel like it has malformed me and you know. This is sort of like I’m thinking to conversations with my therapist about this. I hesitate to use the word harmed, but he would say, no, like there’s harm there. And that’s not

Devi Abraham:
Absolutely.

Zach Wagner:
to say that I’m ranking harm or saying that men’s suffering from purity culture is worse than women’s or it compares to the way queer folks and have experienced some of these messages and narratives. So, To try to get back to your original question, long answer to say, I felt like as a straight married dude. I was bearing a lot of scars from purity culture. And I had, through kind of good resources and relationships and therapy, started to, an education I should say, theological and biblical education, understand some of the dynamics were at play there that were theologically, relationally, sociologically, harmful to me and I wanted to represent that and kind of add that to the conversation.

Devi Abraham:
Yeah

Zach Wagner:
That’s what comes to mind. I mean, I’m happy to kind of follow up on that. But yeah.

Devi Abraham:
I think, yeah, it’s interesting. We just released an episode on virginity and as just one little part of it, we included some comments from guys and their experience on the subject. Just I just asked on Twitter. And all of their answers were very similar to what women would say their experiences were.

Zach Wagner:
yeah.

Devi Abraham:
And I thought it was a really insightful thing that for us experiencing it, because I think we often experience purity culture teaching in separate groups, right? like women in one group and men in one group. We didn’t

Zach Wagner:
100%

Devi Abraham:
often

Zach Wagner:
yep.

Devi Abraham:
realize that men were just getting the same amount, we’re not the same amount, but they were getting shame heaped on them as well. Even if

Zach Wagner:
totally.

Devi Abraham:
they were at the top of the totem pole getting the shame heaped on them.

Zach Wagner:
Yes. Yeah. And I would say that purity culture is a more overtly misogynistic system.

Devi Abraham:
Sure.

Zach Wagner:
It’s not, you know, there isn’t straight up just kind of anti male rhetoric baked into it in the way that there is anti female rhetoric. So I want to very much acknowledge and emphasize that. But yeah, I mean, for as I say, and some of the themes, some of the themes that I Talk through in my book. I think when women are dehumanized and when men Dehumanize women men are also dehumanized and are dehumanizing themselves

Devi Abraham:
Yeah.

Zach Wagner:
So

Devi Abraham:
Yeah, we’re going to talk extensively about that in just a second. OK, so I saw this tweet by somebody who has not read your book. But this is a so important caveat for people who are listening.

Zach Wagner:
Sure.

Devi Abraham:
They have not read the book, but they are basically he is saying that that I want to read it because I think I want you to I’d like to give you a chance to respond to this. I know it’s on

Zach Wagner:
Sure.

Devi Abraham:
people’s minds is this conversation of what makes something purity culture or purite culture 2.0. So he says, “a PSA, there’s an upcoming book purporting to address the ways purity culture harmed men, non-toxic masculinity from Zachary Wagner. It’s published by Intervarsity Press and everything I see indicates it will be sex-negative, unaffirming and not a safe resource. So he’s got in quotation marks, not a direct, not a quote at all from your book, but it’s of the idea. ‘”‘Men should be nice to women in ways that still won’t categorically reject patriarchal assumptions. And sex with your monogamous cis heterosexual wife should be good for both of you.’ Everything else still applies, though.” No, not a sufficient response to purity culture. OK, so this is a conversation, I think, that exists more online, like on Twitter, than it does in real life. But I think people are very interested in this idea of what makes something, purity, culture 2.0 or not, specifically resources that are still affirming the idea of monogamous heterosexual, marital sexual relationships as the exclusive ideal in the Bible, which is what your book is doing. So I’d really love for you to respond to that and say, okay, this is what, yeah, tell us why you don’t, obviously think you probably don’t believe it’s purity culture 2.0.

Zach Wagner:
Yeah. Well, I think first of all, I want to acknowledge and grant the heavy dose of skepticism that people may have towards me. I’m a first time relatively unknown, I wouldn’t even say relatively super unknown kind of author. And what people can about me kind of from the outset is that I’m a straight white male publishing with inner varsity press. And I get why that puts up red flags in people’s minds. And I also get I don’t think it’s the right way to approach any book, frankly. But I get why in some people that’s guilty until proven innocent. So that. And yeah, and I should say like it’s painful to hear comments like that, but I get it. Um Yeah, so as it relates to what makes purity culture 2.0, I think there are some people that define that as any, even like the gentlest, gentlest, gentlest exhortation that young people or people in general should abstain from sexual behavior outside of a permanent relationship or marriage relationship. There are people that just say that in general is purity culture and that’s the kind of can’t go there and that

Devi Abraham:
Yeah.

Zach Wagner:
automatically defines purity culture. And I will say while I try to be honest about my view and I do take that view in the book, I don’t think I spend a ton of time. forcefully arguing for it or even defending its per se. That’s something I’d be willing to do in certain contexts, but it’s not what I was trying to do with this book. I’m not, so that’s number one. But the idea that teaching that marriage and sex should go together is purity culture is one in terms of terminology. It narrows this kind of very widespread, very normative, moral view that isn’t just a Christian thing from the past 30 years, which is what purity culture is, but is actually a Christian thing from all of Christian history.

Devi Abraham:
Well, and most world religions, frankly,

Zach Wagner:
that’s what I was gonna say next,

Devi Abraham:
Yeah.

Zach Wagner:
most world religions, certainly the kind of big monotheistic, This is just how people think about it and have tended to think about it. Narrowing the just kind of basic moral framework of exclusivity of sex in a opposite gendered marriage relationship to quote unquote purity culture, it just doesn’t doesn’t work for me. I don’t think that’s that’s that’s a good way to define purity culture. frankly.

Devi Abraham:
Well, I was going to say, for what it’s worth, I’ve read your, you know, for people who are listening, I’ve read your book and you are very light on the subject. Like, I think as much as you do take that position, I think, and I want to ask you a question about that later. You call it a secondary issue.

Zach Wagner:
Sure, yeah.

Devi Abraham:
And yeah, so I think that that is a really, I think that’s a fair representation. Well, let’s talk about the book while you’re actually here. read it this and I read it with great interest as a mom of three boys.

Zach Wagner:
Mmm.

Devi Abraham:
This book is really to me about rehumanizing versus dehumanizing or dehumanizing versus rehumanizing. So let’s start with this idea of dehumanizing and Zach, we have spent so much time or not Zach listeners. We have spent so much time on this podcast talking about
the ways purity culture has harmed women. So when I asked Zach about harming men, just understand that it’s because that have literally over a hundred episodes on how it has harmed women. Zach talks a lot in the book about how it has harmed women. I just am asking him about these specific things because we’ve not talked as much about this. One interesting thing you say is that how purity culture made women a threat to your relationship with God.
This is fascinating to me. Talk more about.

Zach Wagner:
Yeah. Well… Is that me personally or the kind of male experience?

Devi Abraham:
Both, both.

Zach Wagner:
Oh, sure.

Devi Abraham:
Yeah, well, however you, yeah.

Zach Wagner:
yeah. Well, I will say that I was through kind of various church family book pressures. very much, kind of prepubescent, indoctrinated into the Joshua Harris Dating Is Dangerous narrative. And that led to really early on in my adolescent experience as you kind of become aware of and awake to your sexuality as a person. And for me, obviously, that was emerging as a sexual orientation towards women. That… The high stakes rhetoric and purity culture around sexuality and the great harm that it could lead to in your relationship with God, which of course is the most important thing about your life, led to like a real, yeah, there’s this terrible ambivalence really because you find your kind of body experiencing these desires for relationship and for connection and for love. love, but then your mind and your emotions and all sorts of other things, not that your mind and emotions aren’t activated there, but from this this purity culture narrative of this is dangerous and will destroy you. kick in to, Kurt Thompson talks about this in his Soul of books, the split self, where you’re desiring something, but you’re also afraid of that thing. So as that relates to women, I think women become then for some men raised in purity culture and kind of indoctrinated on this view. the if you experience your kind of sinful brokenness through a sexual lens and you’re sexually oriented towards women, of course women are a barrier between your relationship, like a barrier in your relationship with God. They are a threat. And that’s not, that’s a, that’s a systemic prejudice against women, but it is a kind of baked into the system fear of women that I think leads to a culture of antagonism towards women that can be acted out in various ways and dangerously can lead to all sorts of or at least leave the door open to abuse, and all sorts of terrible harms that are downstream from that. Yeah, so that’s a little bit of how I see that working out. And for me as a teenager, man, so, so preoccupied with any romantic connection that I had towards a girl I felt like, and this is Elizabeth Elliott’s a big influence here too. We could talk about Jim Elliott if you want, but Like this idea that Romantic Connection with another person is not like a beautiful thing about being human and a gift from God, but it’s actually a threat to your service and Devotion to God and then of course pornography is the other aspect of it where you kind of feel drawn towards This taboo you’ve been told it’s the worst thing in the world your sexuality that in the pornography industry is profoundly misogynistic in many ways and at many levels. So that again creates and the shame of acting out with porn and then feeling just the shame towards self that is then associated with your feelings towards women and the way you feel like women’s bodies affect you. Man, that’s a deal. And I found that to be the case with, you know, the men, mostly men that I interviewed for this book and a few women. That was a consistent theme, for

Devi Abraham:
Yeah.

Zach Wagner:
sure.

Devi Abraham:
Yeah. You define toxic masculinity as a way of thinking, living and acting as a male that dehumanizes self and others. How do you see that dehumanizing playing out specifically as it relates to you and to men? Like how are men getting dehumanized because of this toxic masculinity in the church.

Zach Wagner:
sure how are men being dehumanized. Yeah.

Zach Wagner:
Well, I think a huge one, and you can tie this, I think, pretty directly, although it’s not exclusive to this, and it’s not necessarily didn’t necessarily originate here. But the reason it was so formative in my generation is certainly, I think, because of the Everyman’s Battle series of books,

Devi Abraham:
Yeah.

Zach Wagner:
which, again, you know, to talk about my interviews, think Joshua Harris is the name that kind of comes up as the the poster boy for purity culture, I think

Devi Abraham:
Yeah.

Zach Wagner:
oftentimes, but in conversations with men, every man’s battle is the one that came up consistently. And,

Devi Abraham:
Thank you. Thank you.

Zach Wagner:
you know, when I kind of put out the call, like, hey, I’m writing this book, if you are a man who feel like you had purity culture negatively affected some harm from that talk to me and I got people coming back And it was it was every man’s battle over and over again and almost the thesis of every man’s battle is this idea that men are by nature hypersexual and have this erotic lens through which they view the world and I Gotta say that sounds like dehumanization to me it sounds like like making men into animals or machines that are oriented only towards the erotic and not, of course, you know, sexuality is part of the male experience, but not every man experiences sexuality in this kind of hyper heterosexual mode. And what I really have come to suspect strongly is that way of talking to people, and I think to young men about their sexuality is actually a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy where if you teach boys that you know men are visual and that’s just kind of the way it is and I get that that can be well-intentioned and you’re trying to not make them feel shame about what there might be feeling in their body or something like that but you know certainly as Christians I think we and countering that and battling against that mentality and seeing the kind of misogynistic and dehumanizing tendencies in the way that women are spoken about and not allowing boys and men to internalize them as statements about what is true about what it means to be male. So yeah, I think purity culture For me reduced kind of all of my brokenness to something sexual and it reduced my vision of myself as a man as this kind of like out of control sex machine That needed to be kind of like boundary and penned in Until marriage at which point it you know often times the narrative is, go nuts,

Devi Abraham:
Yep.

Zach Wagner:
which is also dehumanizing. Like it doesn’t, it’s, you know, men are animals, but that can kind of hurt people. So just hold that in and then go nuts when you get married. Without any like, well, would that hurt my partner? Would that hurt my wife? And I just kind of unleashed this animalistic kind of part of myself. um on her. So you know something I say a couple times in the book is that if purity culture de um over sexualizes women’s bodies it over sexualizes men’s minds and it sets the bar terribly low in terms of what it means to just be much less a godly man just like a mature adult male for crying out loud and it kind of baptizes and solidifies this immature adolescent expression of male sexuality. You know, all the stereotypes of, you know, teenage boys giggling about this or that or the other thing or typing in boobs on the Google search and all of this like stuff you can kind of chuckle about. Those stereotypes, like that’s something that, you know, at least a meaningful percentage of little boys will act, actually not little boys, but adolescent boys will act out in some way. But that is, it’s immature. So when we, and being immature in a sense isn’t wrong, but we do expect adults to grow out of their immaturity. And I fear that purity culture dehumanized men by giving them allowance to remain as adolescent boys in the way they lived and express their sexuality as adults. And that just leads to a lot of bondage to unwanted behaviors and harm towards women and continuing to kind of emotionally medicate with sex in ways that are not life-giving and all sorts of things. So long answer. I’ll stop there and let you respond.

Devi Abraham:
that’s great. I think one of the things you talk about as far as the impact of purity culture on you personally, and I think so many guys are going to resonate will resonate with this, you say that the destructive power of my sexuality demanded that it stay fully locked up. And then you go on to say, though my mind assented to purity culture is logic, my adolescent body wasn’t so sure. I hated my body.

Zach Wagner:
Yeah. Yeah, you want me to, it’s funny just hearing you read, I mean, that just brings back a lot for me just hearing that, hearing that read. Yeah, I mean, hatred of your sexuality is hatred of your body. Our sexuality cannot be separated out from our embodiment. and… man just if if You were taught, you know, if you’re listening to this and the way you were taught about sexuality in a Christian context led you to feel similarly to the way that I described feeling there. I just want to underscore that that is not a Christian way of thinking about bodies. It’s not a Christian way of thinking about sexuality. And it’s not a Christian body hatred is not Christian. You know, we believe in the resurrection of the body, the renewal of the body, not the destruction of the body. not the escape from the body. Um, yeah, I don’t, I don’t know, I don’t know where, where to go from there. So maybe you can prompt me a little bit. I’m just noticing myself kind of getting, getting emotional, honestly.

Devi Abraham:
Yeah,

Zach Wagner:
But yeah.

Devi Abraham:
no, it is. I mean, it is, it is emotional. What, what describe maybe for us the impact on your faith and your life of hating your body?

Zach Wagner:
Well, as I would think I was just saying… It. pushes you towards more than one, you know, I don’t use this word lightly, more than one heretical Christian view. If you think human sexuality is so corrupted or irredeemable or male embodiment specifically is so terrible, or your body is so terrible, that it can’t, it’s not good. The created goodness of it has been lost or never existed in the first place. You immediately have problems with the incarnation because the fact that the Son of God became a man and every time I say this, I want to qualify and shout out to my friend Amy Peeler’s recent book, Women and the Gender of God. She does a great job of grappling and addressing the question of how to deal with the scandal of the incarnation of God in a male body and how that relates to the goodness of female embodiment. So I just want to direct people there. But I felt pushed towards this docetic view of Jesus. And docetism for people don’t know is a… a heresy from the early centuries of Christian history that taught that Jesus only appeared to be human and wasn’t actually a human being. And it was often motivated by this idea that fleshly existence, bodily existence, was in itself bad. And for that reason was literally below something that God could inhabit. as a magic trick appear to be human, but could not actually be human. And man… I wish I would have had people pressing on the incarnation and the goodness of embodied sexuality as communicated in the incarnation of the Son of God in the person Jesus. Pressing on that as it relates to my sexuality and pressing on the Jesus knows what it’s like to be human. He knows what it’s like to be sexual. And that’s not just like this rah rah, like he resisted the temptation and you can too. It’s actually deeper than that. It’s God loves your body and didn’t abandon it to the brokenness of sin. and isn’t going to scrap it and start over, but actually enters into creation to heal and renew it. So how it affected my faith is I felt like I was pushed away from all those, I think, profoundly Christian ideas sourced in incarnation, resurrection, things like that. And that’s something that, frankly, I feel like is missing from these conversations around purity culture too often. How does this fit into that story redemption and the narrative of Scripture, not just like what’s the Bible’s sexual ethic, but like how does this relate to the story of Scripture? And then the other thing in terms of how it affected my faith is I think it just dug me deeper into what I think, you know, even in the best of times, a lot of teenagers can, you know, teens are curious about sex, like they think about it a lot. you get their attention, they perk up, you know, the kids who never pay attention in youth group pay attention when it’s like the sex week.

Devi Abraham:
Thank you. Bye.

Zach Wagner:
And that makes sense. But I think purity culture, the excessive airtime it gave to sex and sexuality issues, solidified what Samuel Perry and others have called this sexual exceptionalism, where the kind of essence of Christian discipleship is like keeping it in your pants until you get married, not watching porn, not masturbating,

Devi Abraham:
Yeah

Zach Wagner:
just keeping those sexual thoughts under to the exclusion of so much discipleship and you know exhortations that we get in scripture about what it means to live into the kingdom of God. That’s just an it’s an it’s out of balance it

Devi Abraham:
Yeah.

Zach Wagner:
understanding of what it meant to be Christian, I think malformed my faith in a pretty significant way.

Devi Abraham:
Yeah. All right, let’s talk about rehumanizing. Now, this might be a word that people are not totally familiar with. When you talk about rehumanizing as a sort of antidote to the dehumanization that most of us experienced growing up in the church, what are you talking about? What is rehumanizing?

Zach Wagner:
Yeah, it’s one treating yourself like a human being. I mean, that seems very simple and I don’t mean that in kind of a cheeky way, but treating others like human beings, rightly ordering sexuality in our vision of what it means to be human and not centering it, making it a part of our humanity, not the sum total of it. Um, and you know, I will say more, but I kind of want to just like let that be the the broad generic not so much vague as as just simple definition is treating yourself and others like human beings, which of course raises all sorts of questions. What does that look like? And I think one of the things I want to do is not be overly prescriptive necessarily, although I do talk at some length that, but I want to invite a certain type of reflection and curiosity because I think in purity culture there are there is and was this fixation on rules like sexual ethics as you know a checklist rather than um sexual ethics as well how should human beings engage sexually and think about and act out our sexuality And it also, of course, raises the question of how should Christians act out, engage, and think about our sexuality. And then rehumanization also ties back into, rather, what I was saying in my answer to your previous question, in the sense that Christians, and the Christian story, you know, takes us off a trajectory of dehumanization and becoming less human. And, you know, when I use the language of dehumanization, a lot of times I, not what I mean, but you could swap in sin. What is sin? It’s not merely a breaking of a rule, though many people think about it that way. It’s a way of acting, or living that makes you less human. But then the Christian narrative sets us off that path of sin and calls us to be and promises that we will become rehumanized and become the true human beings that we were created to be. It sets us back on an upward trajectory and tells us, how to live into that present and future reality of true humanity. So Jesus, you know, I almost apologized for bringing it back to Jesus. I don’t know if I should apologize for that, necessarily.

Devi Abraham:
Don’t, please don’t.

Zach Wagner:
But to bring it back to Jesus, one way of thinking about this is Jesus is, it’s not just a way of thinking about it, it’s just true. Jesus is the most human person who has ever lived because, precisely because he never sinned, not just because he was the incarnate son of God or anything like that, or he was, you know, the best at, you know, it would be difficult to identify any kind of human achievement that. But he was the most truly human being that has ever lived. And we are called to not only imitate him, but participate in the new humanity that he inaugurated through his life, death and resurrection. So dehumanization and rehumanization. Part of what’s going on accessible language around the Christian narrative of sin and redemption. Partially because I get that like Bible-y language like sin and forgiveness and even redemption is like super-triggery to a lot of people that grew up in a context where the Bible was kind of like sexuality that Didn’t feel beautiful it just felt like authority pressing in over you. Don’t care what you feel, don’t care what you think, this is the way it is. And I don’t think long-term people are gonna be successful at living out any moral, quote unquote framework if they don’t think it’s beautiful.

Devi Abraham:
Yeah. Yeah. I think the other part of what you talk about as far as rehumanizing goes is tied into some of what you discussed in the book and what you’ve already mentioned. The way that adolescence is encouraged almost like a perpetual adolescence is encouraged or men or for Christian boys that then become men. They’re never, you said something earlier about development, but then you grow out of it. And what we did with Christian men is we never told them they can grow out of it. It was sort of encouraged. So here’s what you said at some point, “living into non-toxic masculinity is not a matter of following rules for maintaining sexual purity and avoiding sexual sin. It’s about growing up.” So I love that. When we’re taught, like I’d love for you to speak specifically to the guys listening to this who have come out of this. And who, you know, fully were baptized into this idea of you get to be a sexual adolescent for the rest of your life. What does growing up mean? What does it look like? What has it been like for you? Because I think this has been your personal journey as well.

Zach Wagner:
Yeah. Yeah, it, yeah, I think a big part of it is learning to… This is gonna sound, to some people, it might sound like psychobabble. But learning to love your sexual self as a beautiful thing that’s given to you by God. And that’s not to say that there’s no frustrations associated with that aspect of being human, like there are frustrations associated with all sorts of limitations with being human. and not live in fear of your sexuality, but bless it because God blesses it. Um, that’s, that’s one thing that comes to mind. And I think practically it means realizing that sexuality is not all about self fulfilment. I actually think that’s a really shallow, um, view of human sexuality. And I think the culture because of all types of male privilege and male advantage that I talk about a bit in the book, um, has assumed that male, gratification in this kind of like shallow, what do I like looking at, what gets me off, what is types of pleasure do I want to experience is like at the center of what it means to be sexual. That’s not humanized sexuality. And in as much as we as young men may have been formed to think that you know access to sex in marriage and orgasms on demands Kind of on your terms is what marriage is all about, man that is so not what mature sexuality looks like that’s what immature teenage kind of fantasies about sex or like that’s not that’s not how it works it works in the real world. The very least is not how it should work in the world. Another part of that is I think I’m allergic to overly specific. And I think as someone who kind of works in this purity culture space, you, you’ll get this. I’m allergic to overly specific. Like, what does it look like to rehumanize yourself for men who grew up in this culture. I’m not gonna be like, well, it looks like putting a porn blocker on your computer and having an accountability group. And it looks like not, I don’t know, I could give other examples, but I won’t. And I kind of, I wanna invite reflection on this and not prescribe overly specific rules oftentimes. So yeah, I mean so many things come to mind for what I would just want to say to men. And I talk, you know, I’ll go to this, and this is a narrative. This is an anecdote, rather, that I share in the book. There’s one time where I was in a therapy session kind of expressing some of this angst and just frustration. with my sexuality with my therapist. And he just said to me in this quiet moment, it’s a really wonderful and beautiful thing to be a man. And I could hardly hold back from, and I didn’t, from just like sobbing at that moment. Because I realized I didn’t believe that. So if you’re a man listening who can resonate with these feelings of hating your body, hating your sexuality, being frustrated about the ways that certain cultural pressures formed you, I want to say it really is a wonderful and beautiful thing to be a man, not in spite of your sexuality or your eroticism, but to some extent because it. It’s not just, oh, it’s good to be a man. It’s like male sexuality is a good thing. It doesn’t need to be destructive. It wasn’t made to be destructive.
It was made to be beautiful and life-giving. And, you know, invite you into a sense of relationship and vulnerability and adventure it can feel like to hear that and feel like that’s just a million miles away from your experience and and to this day for me sometimes it does and I think it’s clear in the book. This is not in my story it is not a you know, I grew up in purity culture struggled with my sexuality a little bit kind of woke up had some experiences and my sex life is great now it Actually, it very much is not. And I talk about that in the book. And my wife has been very supportive and open with me sharing aspects of our story. And a huge piece of context there is that my wife is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. And that not only affected our relationship, but it invited me into a maturing process where I could no longer look at our relationship as a kind of outlet for my sexual desires and the way that purity culture led me to expect.

Devi Abraham:
No, no, that’s, so I was about, I was about to turn, turn to that. And I just, I just want to say, I love that phrase, a maturing of your sexuality, like that invited you into a maturing of your sexuality. And yeah, I think like we’re not looking, there are no prescriptive things. I think, you know, it’s going to look different for, for everybody. But I think
it’s so important to extend that invitation out to guys to say, you are invited into this maturing. It not have to be this sort of Mark Driscoll pornified idea of what sex is like for you.

Zach Wagner:
Yeah, and I’ll say it’s sorry if I can just say one more thing really quickly on that point. I would just say if you feel kind of trapped in a cycle of Sin if you would use that language or shame or acting out or you know addiction if you would use that language any any number of things Frustration around your sexuality, it is not the inevitable destiny of being male that you would live that way like there is hope of moving beyond that. There is hope of a more human, not way of relating to others, but a way of being in yourself. You don’t have to live that way. And man, I think the Christian tradition offers incredible resources towards that, maturing out of an immature toxic expression of sexuality.

Devi Abraham:
Yeah. So core to really your story and in is the the the the it feel it seemed like the spark that moved you toward finding healing in
this area of your life was the discovery that your wife had experienced sexual abuse as a child. And it is in the book. She wrote the forward for your book. And. It sounds like it’s been really just so integral to the formation of your ideas and your story. One of the things you talk about is how she was seeing a therapist, you were seeing a therapist, and you were both seeing a therapist together. And you discuss this in this idea that men need sex the way they need food. Here’s what the therapist says. “The therapist turned and looked at me, ‘Zach, you can survive without sex.’ On one level, I knew this was true, but I had never thought of the way both Shelby and I had internalized my sexual needs as of equal importance to my need for food. As if asking me to go a few months or even a year without sex as a married man was tantamount to going a year without eating.” I, and you go on to say that your therapist asked you to basically go on a time of abstinence inside your marriage to help your wife heal. How was that part of maturing your sexuality as well? It seems like there’s a connection.

Zach Wagner:
Oh man, it was huge. Well, I was, you know, I retained a good amount and do still retain a good amount of, you know, quote unquote, traditional dispositions around outlets for, you know, I even hesitate to use the word outlets, because I think that that language itself can be dehumanizing. But I’ll just say outlets because for ease of communication, outlets for my sexuality. So I and I talk about this in the book, I wasn’t kind of I wasn’t like, okay, well, we’re not having sex. So I can just just masturbate and deal with it that way. And that was not ever something I felt super comfortable with. And… which, I mean, this is vulnerable, which is not to say that I like successfully did that. And I just feel like that’s a, that’s a perhaps potentially awkward thing for me to say, but I think it’s important to signal like this is not a like, never masturbate ever under any circumstances book. I wanna create some grace for that in certain settings. But it was not something that I was like, oh, it’s cool. this. I think that’s what I’m trying to communicate. Or I can just like watch some porn and that’s fine. So I felt kind of walled off in a certain sense from things that might have eased in a certain way the tension that I was I was feeling in my body. But even that is a shallow way of thinking about sex, I would argue. But this kind of like therapist-adviced season of aabstinence. Indefinite season of abstinence. It was not like, yeah, give it two weeks. It was like, yeah, you’re just gonna have to put this on the shelf for now. And I think that would be best. I mean, you guys decide together. I’m not telling you what to do, but you guys decide together. And that was something, it’s something I wanted to do. Like, I felt, I felt awful, just about the ways that we were experiencing the, the, this in our relationship and the ways that this was affecting my wife. It’s not like I just wanted to say ‘Needs and needs and you just got to figure this out’ like that wasn’t the case for a moment. So I didn’t really hesitate to Say yeah, let’s take it. Let’s take a break. But man The narrative in purity culture that your kind of single life is all about sexual restraint and then your married life

Devi Abraham:
Yep.

Zach Wagner:
is all about sexual fulfilment, I suppose for lack of a better word, it was not panning out for me in that season and in many ways just hasn’t panned out period. And that forced me into maybe kicking and screaming to some extent, but invited me into a, okay, well, what does it mean to live into that reality that the therapist invited me into? Like, Zach, you can live without sex. This isn’t your like, your divine right as a married man to demand this to the point of harm for your wife. And it just put me in a place where I needed to think hard not just about the kind of quote-unquote physical release of sex, which I think it’s important to say that It’s important to carefully say that men experience this in a slightly different way physiologically than women do. This has been oversold like the quote-unquote 72 hour rule or something like that,

Devi Abraham:
Yeah.

Zach Wagner:
but there is a certain physical tension that men experience when they’re particularly when they’re in a rhythm of a certain amount of sexual activity and then they step away from or they abstain from it for whatever reason. You have something something you wanted to say to

Devi Abraham:
No, I was just gonna say, I think like we can acknowledge that it’s real and I think what I appreciate about your story is that you’re saying, yeah, it’s real, but it doesn’t mean that it has to be indulged.

Zach Wagner:
Exactly, yes. So that was, I think, I think purity culture and just my immaturity set me up to think that particularly as a married man, like, hey, I did the right thing. I waited. I’m in this relationship. This is kind of, you know, I made it. That’s not supposed to be an issue anymore. And that was this idea. You know, I wouldn’t have explicitly articulated it this way. But this idea that the experience of a sexual feeling or even arousal entitles a man when he is married to a sexual encounter is again dehumanizing it seems to me and I needed to face that question of just like straight straight on in that season. And that was, you know, extremely difficult. And you know, maybe that’s a certain deficiency in me or aspects of my story that it was so difficult. But I do think, you know, people that I’ve talked to, there are people who really can really connect with that like that that would that would be hard. And it made me think about like, there are tons of single people out there that are just and married people I should I should add that just like don’t them to self pity or unhealthy modes of acting out sexually, I would argue. And it didn’t entitle me to any of that. So it was a unique experience to be married. And part of the pain was that my, you know, there’s there’s a mutual attraction between me and my wife. And, you know, we love each other and are deeply committed to one another. So it wasn’t just like this was a thing that needed to be set aside for some healing and

Devi Abraham:
Yeah.

Zach Wagner:
that brought up some some deep stuff for me. And last thing I’ll say is it raised the question of like what is sex doing for me? What emotional pains is it medicating and soothing and what are other modes that don’t obligate my wife to me in a way that is harmful to her or don’t obligate her to me at all I should say. What are other ways of sitting with blessing and relating to those dark emotions that might just lead to that itch where you feel like you need to medicate sexually in one way or another?

Devi Abraham:
So what did you find there? So what did you find instead of this? What were the things that helped you that led to that sort of being able to feel things instead of numbing?

Zach Wagner:
Sure. I mean, here I can get pretty practical. Like I picked up, I mean, a lot of this is gonna sound like take a cold shower, but this, it’s physical exercise, going to, like getting good sleep, going to bed at a decent time, things like that. I took up cooking in a new way, where that kind of, frustrated or in my head about something, I would just be like, okay, I’m making dinner tonight. And that would be a way of getting into my body and the kind of sensory experience of smelling and seeing and listening to the food that you’re preparing in front of you and tending to it. And then I mean, there are also ways of taking care of your own body. You know, I already mentioned working out, but you know, just, yeah, I could go get a haircut or I could like trim my beard or something. Like that just sounds so, so silly. But I found kind of meaning and help in just really, really simple ways of tending to my body rather than demanding or expecting that my wife tend to it sexually. And I front all those, and I should also mention, I don’t wanna over spiritualize it, but there are of course things having to do with scripture, memory, and meditation, and reading, and things like that. And this is gonna just, so some people this might just sound already kidding me, like New Agey, but that’s kind of like, the point is to find like healthy outlets for being human that aren’t just about like, having an orgasm and getting an endorphin rush from that. There are other things to being human and other ways to sit with. And journaling is another thing. And like, I get that to some people listening that just might all sound so hokey and just kind of like hard. And the very last thing that I wanna do when I’m feeling sexually frustrated. But that’s exactly the point. Like it is difficult to create new pathways And those are some things that were meaningful for me.

Devi Abraham:
I think that’s so good. And I think maybe it’s a thing because in women’s spaces, we talk a lot about the value of self-care. We talk about the importance of a massage or a facial or getting your nails done. And all of that is tending to the body, but it’s not something I hear guys talking about a lot. And so I think it’s really helpful to hear
people, for people to hear that tending to your body, by getting a good haircut, et cetera, that can have, that’s again the maturing process of saying there’s more to me than just this. That’s what I hear anyway in you saying that. All right, let’s end on this question. You do say like, I still hold to a traditional sexual ethic, but it’s not the most important thing about my Christian faith. It is to me a secondary issue. What does that mean? Because I think this is so interesting. And I think it will be interesting to people who couldn’t see a place for having a sexual ethic be secondary, but it had to be sort of central to the faith.

Zach Wagner:
Yeah, well, I think this kind of centering of sexuality within the Christian faith continues to play out in both quote unquote conservative and quote unquote progressive spaces. And that, to me, is will lead to more disunity, more polarization, more overhyping of the role that sex and sexuality plays in our humanity, it seems to me. Of course, it’s a massively important part of what it means to be human, and Christian faith has things to say about this. And again, I have opinions about it. But I’ve come to a place as it relates to a premarital abstinence and how queer Christians should live into their sexuality as they experience it. I’ve come to a place where I have tried really hard to listen and learn and think about perspective, my background, any number of things might be functioning as a limit to what I am seeing and what I am understanding in the Christian tradition and Christian theology and scripture. But I just, and this is just me being the, and I don’t know where I’ll be in five years or 10 years. I very much still feel like I’m in process on a lot of this, but I’ve, I’ve yet to find the kind of sex positive quote unquote, sexual liberation through the Christian faith stream persuasive for me. honest about where I’m at on that. But, big but, I have been in and am in relationships with and have read and seen many Christians who land in a different place on those questions. And man, see what seems to me to be quite clearly the spirit of God present and working in the lives of these people. And many of them I love and respect and care deeply about. So, and that creates a certain tension for me in my mind as I’m kind of wrestling with intellectually in terms of value in the Christian tradition and how I approach these questions and relationally and experientially and all of this. And this is, I think, for anyone who reads my book, this is not coming from, I think, I hope it doesn’t read as it’s coming from, like a position of kind of like privileged male satisfaction in the heterosexual marriage. That’s just not my story. It really is not. So, I have come And, you know, there are people to my right that could, I could get in trouble with for saying this, but I’ve come to have a legitimate measure of respect for, I’ll just a queer affirming, we’ll call it, position on sexual ethics. I find it compelling, but not convincing. And that being said, I do, I do appreciate. in some cases, not always, but I appreciate in some cases the kind of theological and biblical approaches that people are taking that lead them to arrive at that conclusion around sexual ethics and that’s that’s fine. I have a lot of respect and. in certain cases genuine admiration for people who take a different position. I think the way the idolization of sex can prevail among both conservatives and progressives. That to me is, is, is… not helpful and difficult for me to see as having real legitimacy in the Christian tradition and the story of scripture. So yeah, how does that look like in terms of like denominational structures or like the churches that you worship in? I mean so many people. This is like, this is the deconstruction movement for so many people, like is kind of dealing with some of these messy issues. And they are messy.

Devi Abraham:
Yeah.

Zach Wagner:
But they are not, they are not to me, quote unquote, and I, you know, I would not readily or regularly use this language, but some people like to talk about salvation issues, quote unquote, or things of creedal importance, or things like that.

Devi Abraham:
Yeah.

Zach Wagner:
And there are objections that people can lift up every which way on that. And I’m sure there’ll be there are people that will feel like I’m doing this kind of squishy middle thing or like Christian Moderatism or something like that? That that’s fine. If people if people hear it that way but I’m also I think to Queer Christians and folks that I’m in a relationship with I owe it to them to be honest about what I think about this And I think there are too many people that try to enter into these conversations. And by the way, they’re not gonna hear me kind of like, unless they invite me into that conversation, they’re not gonna hear me kind of barking down about what I think about sexual ethics and how they should live their life. I think that’s between them and God to decide in every case. But yeah, because of the great harm – and I love Bridget Rivera’s work on this – the great harm that has been done towards LGBTQ folks and by the church. There’s, I owe them honesty and not being cagey about that. And I wanted to have that level of respect for my readers because it would have been, you know, book and just stayed completely vague on that. But there are a couple places where I just say, this is where I’m at. If you’re not, that’s cool. But I just want to be clear about that.