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In 2022, a couple of evangelical stud muffins posted a startling video to TikTok. In an intimate space charged with emotion and prayer, Christian influencer Ryan Foley nervously confessed his love of trans porn:
Sixth grade, I jumped into some weird categories, man. This is tough. Transgenders having sex with chicks. And why am I watching this stuff? Well, because I’m opening myself up to spirits the more I watch the porn, and I don’t even realize it. And you know, as it gradually goes, it gets darker, and I was watching (groans) transgenders having sex with transgenders, and then dudes. And I’m like, “why am I watching this stuff?” Eventually, the porn’s not going to be enough, just like Ted Bundy – eventually the porn wasn’t enough for Ted Bundy. And he started actually doing the acts, and I started doing the acts. Never, ever thought I’d be doing something like that, know what I’m saying? That’s my quick testimony on porn and how it just dragged me to a dark place.
The answer, Ryan then explained, is submission to Jesus, and realizing that porn was standing between him and God.
“Amen dude,” says his companion, “powerful testimony, dude.”
I don’t hold Ryan’s sexual preferences against him. Trans porn is one of the most popular categories on the internet, and a lot of guys are into it. There’s also enough sexual pseudoscience and fear-mongering in his short testimony to occupy an entire article. Set all that aside for now.
More than the words, notice the vibe. Ryan has been a very, very bad boy. He’s habitually masturbated to porn that falls outside sex-role norms. He’s had sex that falls outside the heterosexual norm. Is there anything more vulnerable, animal, and diminishing for a traditional Christian man than that? And then, like the prodigal son in the age of TikTok, he drags himself, humiliated and ashamed, onto the internet to confess his sordid crimes before God and the church. He is putting himself through a powerful, cathartic, and humiliating experience.
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This video took me back to my own time in evangelical spaces. I sat in many male spaces just like the one in the video. Anguished young men confessed their sexual desires and porn use with the downcast countenance of golden retrievers caught tearing up the sofa.
I’ve had a weird feeling about Christian sexuality ever since I left the faith. As obsessed as many Christians are with self-restraint, repentance, chastity, obedience, and monogamy, it all struck me as incredibly kinky. There is a sort of sexual gratification and indulgence in confessing one’s sins to his accountability partners, or an evangelical Christian trying to overcome one’s addiction to porn. I got the uncomfortable feeling that the act of sexual chastity was itself sexually gratifying, and we were all engaging in divine sub/dom kink play, together. Ryan’s confession on TikTok elicits the same feeling — he isn’t just fleeing from porn and sex. He is playing out a mystical pageantry of BDMS with God, humiliating himself in front of the entire world in the process.
Within the Christian commitment to chastity runs a crimson vein of kink. A glance around the Christian landscape makes this apparent.
Consider John Donne’s “Batter My Heart, Three Person’d God”. John Donne, a courtier in Queen Elizabeth’s court, underwent a conversion experience and transformed from a party boy skank who wrote erotica to a devout Christian skank who wrote steamy divine erotica. His poem is a rape-bondage fantasy with God, in which he confesses that he is so utterly faithless and insatiable that the only way for him to be obedient is if god ties him down and rapes him:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
And then there is this sculpture of Teresa of Avila. Look at her face and ask yourself: is it the divine love of the Holy Trinity, or her favorite vibrator?
A modern example is Derek Webb’s classic worship song “Wedding Dress”, which has all the themes of sluttery, punishment, and release. I have vivid memories of young, single, Christian 20-somethings fawning over the song in a way that felt positively priapic. The chorus reads,
‘Cause I am a whore I do confess.
I put you on just like a wedding dress,
And I run down the aisle,
Run down the aisle.
I am a prodigal with no way home.
I put you on just like a ring of gold,
And I run down the aisle,
Run down the aisle, to you.
The Christian fixation with obedience is itself a kink and provides its own sexual gratification. The struggle against sexual pleasure and indulgence is itself a sexual pleasure and indulgence. The struggle of bondage and submission, and the ensuing feelings of shame, vulnerability, and eventual relief by submitting to God, get channeled back into the mystical practice of divine intimacy.
Perhaps this mystical erotic bondage goes to the very core of Christian tradition: to the life, teachings, and iconography of Jesus himself. In the garden of Gethsemane, we see Jesus broken by obedience. “Not my will, by thine be done.” Are these not the exact words uttered in our most secret and innermost fantasies? Jesus on the cross, the embodiment of naked torment, must surely resonate with unspeakable and forbidden yearnings.
Certainly, many will be immune to the sexual themes of bondage and submission in Christianity. But, an untold number of people will be turned on by them, consciously or not, and use that horniness as fuel for deeper devotion to God.
Sexuality is such a powerful force that it will be expressed somehow. There is no escape. As Dan Savage recently said on the podcast Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em:
One of the lies we tell kids is you’re going to grow up and have sex one day. No, no, no. You’re going to grow up and sex is gonna have you one day. You are not in charge of sex; sex is in charge of you. You negotiate with sex from a position of inferiority and weakness. How are you going to do that? You’re negotiating the terms of your surrender.
Given this reality, it’s no surprise that Christians abstaining from sex are so sexual in their chastity. Sex will always have us. Abstinence becomes indulgence, and Christian faithfulness becomes kink.
Sex is not the simple act of inserting a penis into a vagina. It is a vast realm of human imagination and yearning. It is a language with which humans express domination, surrender, love, play, and fantasy. It is also the realm of the transcendent – a catalyst for intimacy with the divine. By engaging in this bondage play with God, going through the pageantry of lust, sinning, confessing, and obedience, the excess pressure of erotic desire finds expression, and becomes fuel for deeper intimacy with their conception of the divine.
Stephen Bradford Long 