I just finished watching the Ashley Madison docuseries and I have thoughts. A lot of them. Because while the surface-level story is about a cheating website getting hacked and millions of people being exposed, the deeper story is about something much more pervasive: the way religious communities handle — or rather, fail to handle — human sexuality.
Now, I want to be careful here because I am not interested in bashing anyone's faith. Religion provides genuine meaning, community, and comfort for billions of people. But what I am interested in is the specific way that certain religious frameworks create an environment where sexual shame thrives, and what happens when that shame collides with the reality of human desire.
The Purity Culture Pipeline
If you grew up in a conservative Christian environment, you probably know exactly what I am talking about. The purity rings. The abstinence pledges. The metaphors about chewed-up gum or tape that has lost its stickiness. The message, stated or implied, that your worth as a person — especially as a woman — is directly tied to your sexual purity.
What purity culture does is create a binary: you are either pure or you are ruined. There is no middle ground, no nuance, no room for the messy reality of being a sexual human being. And when you internalize that binary, any sexual thought, feeling, or desire that falls outside the very narrow window of "married, missionary, for procreation" becomes a source of deep, often debilitating shame.
What Ashley Madison Actually Revealed
The Ashley Madison hack exposed millions of users, and what was striking to many commentators was how many of those users came from deeply religious communities. Pastors, church leaders, people who publicly preached marital fidelity while privately seeking affairs. And the easy response is to call them hypocrites. But I think the reality is more complicated and more human than that.
When you grow up being told that your desires are wrong, you do not develop the tools to integrate your sexuality in a healthy way. You do not learn how to communicate your needs to a partner because those needs themselves feel shameful. You do not learn how to navigate desire within a relationship because desire itself has been coded as dangerous. So what happens? People find outlets in secret. Not because they are bad people, but because they were never given permission to be whole people.
The Shame Cycle
Here is how the shame cycle typically works in religiously conservative environments: You have a sexual desire. You feel guilty about it. You try to suppress it. The suppression eventually fails because you are a human being with a human body. You act on the desire in a secretive, often reckless way. You feel even more ashamed. And the cycle repeats, escalating each time.
This cycle does not just affect cheating. It shows up in pornography addiction, in sexual dysfunction within marriages, in the inability to experience pleasure without guilt, and in the deep disconnection many people feel from their own bodies. The shame does not prevent the behavior — it just makes the behavior more hidden and more harmful.
Healthy Faith and Healthy Sexuality Can Coexist
I want to be really clear: I do not think faith and sexuality are inherently incompatible. There are plenty of people who hold deep spiritual beliefs and also have thriving, healthy, joyful sex lives. The problem is not faith itself. The problem is a specific interpretation of faith that treats the body as the enemy and sexuality as something to be controlled rather than understood.
The religious communities that do this well are the ones that create space for honest conversation. They acknowledge that desire is a natural part of being human. They teach young people about consent, communication, and emotional intelligence rather than just saying "don't." They recognize that a married couple struggling with intimacy needs support, not sermons.
Moving Beyond the Guilt
If you are someone who has carried religious sexual guilt, I want you to know that healing is possible. It is not easy and it is not quick, but it is possible. It often starts with giving yourself permission to question the messages you received growing up. Not necessarily rejecting your faith, but examining which parts of what you were taught were genuinely spiritual and which parts were cultural shame disguised as doctrine.
Working with a therapist who understands religious trauma can be incredibly helpful. So can connecting with communities of people who share your faith but hold a more expansive view of sexuality. You do not have to choose between being a person of faith and being a sexual being. You are allowed to be both.
I go much deeper into this in my video review of the docuseries, and I share some specific observations that really struck me. Watch it, and let me know in the comments what your experience has been. This is a conversation that needs to happen in the open, not behind closed doors.
