Book Review: “Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Reading This: A Christian Doctor’s Thoughts on Sex, Shame, and Other Troublesome Issues”

Editor’s Note: The following book review appears in the Fall 2024 issue of Eikon.

Lina AbuJamra. Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Reading This: A Christian Doctor’s Thoughts on Sex, Shame, and Other Troublesome Issues. Forefront Books, 2023.

What If It Is About the Nail?

I love “It’s Not About the Nail,” a short comedy sketch about the eccentricities of men and women that has made the rounds online for years.^[1] In it, a woman with a nail embedded in her forehead persistently rebuffs the efforts of a well-meaning husband or boyfriend to remove it. “It is not about the nail!” she insists. “Are you sure?” he asks. “Because I bet if we got that out of there…” “Stop trying to fix it!” she snaps. Eventually, he learns that what she really wants is for him to empathize with her pain, even if that means pushing the nail deeper.

I was reminded of this sketch while reading Lina Abujamra’s Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Reading This: A Christian Doctor’s Thoughts on Sex, Shame, and Other Troublesome Topics. The book is largely a confession of lifelong struggles with sexual temptation, and an elaboration on how painful unfulfilled desires can be. Abujamra, a self-proclaimed “50-year-old virgin,” has seen and treated a lot of physical trauma in her career as an ER doctor. She knows how to fix bodies. Yet when it comes to spiritual and emotional wounds, self-inflicted or otherwise, she seems strangely reluctant to prescribe practical treatments. Instead, she urges readers to open up as she has, to confess their failures and temptations, and to prioritize the process of falling in love with Jesus over moral change. The result is a book containing much honesty and insight, an evident affection for God and a desire to please him, but little in the way of prescriptions for sexual flourishing, much less holiness.

Like most “real talk” evangelical or ex-evangelical books on sex, this one is deeply critical of the church and so-called “purity culture,” and how both have treated topics like lust, dating, masturbation, premarital sex, and even marriage. Abujamra correctly identifies the numerous and highly public ways in which Christian leaders and pastors have failed sexually in recent years, pointing specifically to the sins of men like Ravi Zaharias, sex abuse cover ups in the Southern Baptist Convention, and the apostasy of authors like Joshua Harris (I Kissed Dating Goodbye) as evidence that something is deeply wrong. And not just with our leaders. She also points to statistics showing that the average evangelical congregation is filled with porn addicts, adulterers, same-sex attracted persons, and masturbators.

Two things set her book apart from others and make it a refreshing read. First, Abujamra does not use these failures as evidence that churches should abandon historical Christian teaching on sex. Quite the opposite. She clearly holds a high view of Scripture and has no illusions about the depths of human depravity. As her argument develops, it is apparent that she thinks of sexual morality not as an arbitrary list of dos and don’ts, but as commands for our good, grounded in God’s original purpose for man and woman in creation.

Second, she doesn’t seek to let anyone off the hook, not even herself. Despite never having engaged in extramarital sex, Abujamra views herself as the chief of sinners, due mostly to her lifelong struggle with erotica and masturbation, which she airs out at length.

Clearly, there is a deep longing for connection and intimacy, here. Not only does Abujamra confess her struggle with physical and mental temptation (107), she also offers glimpses of a hurt and confused inner woman who was never asked out in school (51), who suffered the disappointment of two broken engagements as an adult, and who eventually gave up on finding the “big love” she has always dreamed of and prayed God would send her (52):

I had dreamed that one day I would find the big love, that one day, I would look across the room and just know — here was the one I had waited for. I know it sounds idealistic and a little bit naïve, but I truly believed that if I honored God with my life, He would fulfill my wildest expectations, and I expected to fall in love in a big way. I wanted it all — a man who still loved me on my bad days, a son who looked like my husband, and a daughter with my attitude in life. I dreamed of laughter at Christmas and staying up late making s’mores in the summer (79-80).

Eventually, she writes, she “became too cynical to dream about love,” and began dreaming instead of dramatic, exciting service to God on the mission field (that dream, too, largely failed to materialize). With remarkable self-awareness, Abujamra admits that this romantic predisposition and the lofty standards that went with it are probably why she remained single and continues to fight unfulfilled desires (142).

Reading this, even as a married man of a younger generation, I felt her disappointment. Yet surely, I thought, as a doctor, she would get around to offering practical solutions for the problem of unwanted singleness, which has reached epidemic proportions^[2] both inside and outside the church, and is contributing to historic delays in marriage^[3] and a drop in fertility.^[4] Surely, she would suggest ways to remove this nail. Yet the book ends with barely a word of actionable advice about the most obvious (and biblical) help for people like her beset with sexual passion and desiring connection and family: marriage (1 Cor 7:9).

Before I’m buried in objections (however valid) that married people can still struggle and sin sexually, let’s reckon with how seriously our fathers in the faith took the idea that the marriage bed is a refuge against temptation. Martin Luther wrote about it extensively.^[5] Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer^[6] famously cites this as the second purpose of the institution, teaching that “It [marriage] was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ’s body.” And let’s not forget that God himself declared that “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). Logically, and assuming no polygamous mischief, that means an equal number of women who lack the gift of continence should not be alone, either.

So, why haven’t Abujamra and countless readers who will resonate with her experience gotten married? Am I simple for asking that question? If there is some reason other than her disappointed romantic ideals and resulting cynicism, she does not let on. Obviously, not everyone will or should get married. But when even reporters at The Washington Post are hand-wringing over the fact that singleness has become the norm for young people in America, it seems safe to assume that there is a problem, and  important to diagnose it.^[7] Yet I, like Abujamra, was left waiting.

Of all the criticisms against evangelical “purity culture,” the one that hits closest to the mark has to be the criticism of “princess theology” — the idea that if you just obey God’s rules for sex, he will reward you with that perfect someone who will show up one day and sweep you off your feet. In other words, a “big love.” Yet this romantic (and quite passive) notion was hardly unique to evangelicals or Christians. Watch any Disney movie from the last 100 years and the idea is inescapable: “someday my prince will come,” sings (the original) Snow White.^[8] “No matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true,” promises Cinderella. Rapunzel awaits her true love locked in a tower. Sleeping Beauty is literally unconscious when he arrives!

Could our problem with low marriage rates and exhausting battles with lust have at least something to do with the persistent belief — including among Christians — that love magically happens to worthy and idealistic recipients, and that it can only be legitimized by an overpowering tide of attraction to a “soulmate” that occurs virtually by accident, and that you never have to seek or work for it? What other worthy goal in life do we approach this way? And what would we say to someone who stopped pursuing the legitimate, God-ordained outlet for their desire and fell instead into a self-confessed cycle of illegitimate release? What if this went on for decades? And what if this resulted in a book that promised solutions and tips on “how to change” on the dust jacket, only for the author to admit that nothing has fundamentally changed for her and might never change until she dies, but that therapy is helpful (24, 55, 107, 113)?

That, I’m sorry to say, is the gist of Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Reading This.

None of this is to suggest that marriage is some kind of panacea for sexual temptation, that singles are solely to blame for their own struggles, or that we should not find our ultimate fulfillment in Christ (we should!). Abujamra gets much right about sexual morality, about the hypocrisy within the church, and even recognizes that a lot of the brokenness she identifies comes from our rebellious culture, not evangelical “purity culture.” She admirably resists the temptation to “define deviance down” on issues where the Bible is silent, instead clearly defining sin as anything at variance with God’s design for one man and one woman in marriage (33, 35). She deserves praise for her obvious and heartfelt longing to hear “well done, good and faithful servant” from her Savior, even if it takes a lifetime of disappointment.

But I cannot help wondering if it could have been easier for her, and if it could be easier for countless readers who share her experience. God’s grace can overcome our weaknesses, but it was never meant to supplant our created desires — desires whose earthly fulfillment he has, in his goodness, also created.

Like nearly all Christians, I battle sexual temptation. But I would not want to fight without my wife by my side. God’s grace to me is, in part, given through my marriage to her — an arrangement that is not meant to be a rare exception, but the overwhelming norm for Christians. Books like Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Reading This treat a near-universal feature of human life — sexual desire — as a thorn in the flesh God refuses to remove. But what if it is actually more like a nail, and what if sometimes it is us, not God, refusing to pull it out?

^[1] Jason Headley. 2013. “It’s Not About the Nail.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg.

^[2] Lisa Bonos and Emily Guskin, “It’s not just you: New data shows more than half of young people in America don’t have a romantic partner” The Washington Post (March 21, 2019), https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/03/21/its-not-just-you-new-data-shows-more-than-half-young-people-america-dont-have-romantic-partner/.

^[3] Erica Pandey, “America the single” Axios (February 25, 2023), https://www.axios.com/2023/02/25/marriage-declining-single-dating-taxes-relationships.

^[4] Alex Leeds Matthews, “Fertility rates dip, people are having babies later: The state of birth rates in the US” CNN (June 1, 2023), https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/31/health/fertility-rates-still-down-after-pandemic-rebound-dg/index.html.

^[5] Trevor O’Reggio “Martin Luther: Marriage and the Family as a Remedy For Sin,” Andrews University Seminary Studies 51.1: 39-67.

^[6] “The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony” The Church of England, https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/book-common-prayer/form-solemnization-matrimony.

^[7] Bonos and Guskin, “It’s not just you.”

^[8] Taneal Lockstadt, “Rachel Zegler said her Snow White won’t be ‘saved by a prince.’ Some Disney fans didn’t want to hear it” CBC (August 24, 2023), https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/disney-princess-remakes-1.6945540#:~:text=%22We%20absolutely%20wrote%20a%20Snow,she%27s%20always%20meant%20to%20be.