Lyvonne Briggs talks pleasure, sensuality, and decolonizing our faith

(Photo: © Bukunmi)

“I integrate this notion of ‘sensual faith’ as a framework that prods us to consider, affirm, and center the vantage points of Black women in order to revive our bodies and spirits to become more holistic beings, in Spirit and in truth,” writes Lyvonne Briggs in Sensual Faith: The Art of Coming Home to Your Body. 

Lyvonne, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants, was born in Queens, N.Y., and she is a speaker, author, and preacher whose work and teachings are body- and sex-positive. She is a pleasure activist and an African-centered womanist and Emmy Award winner. The book, which turns one this week, focuses on the connections between sexuality and spirituality. Throughout nine chapters and using various grounding exercises at the end of each, Lyvonne encourages readers to move away from the shame Black women are forced to internalize in Christian/religious spaces. 

Sensual Faith touches on the #MeToo movement, womanism, our bodies as “supernatural gifts from God,” Eurocentric beauty standards, and purity culture. Earlier this month Dwayne and I interviewed Lyvonne. We talked about sensuality, healing, the Caribbean, sex, and more. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. (Trigger warning for discussions of sexual harassment.) 

Olga: Sensual Faith: The Art of Coming Home to Your Body is authentic and vulnerable—you don’t shy away from talking about sex, our right to pleasure, self-hatred of our bodies, sexual trauma, and the role of Christianity/religion in all of this. It’s also funny, deeply embodying the theme that we have a right to feel good—that God wants our bodies to feel pleasure. Talk to us about your sensual faith movement. What is it? 

Lyvonne: When I was in seminary, I remember having a conversation with my forever Dean, Dean Emilie Townes, and I was like, “I wanna start something called stiletto theology.” And she was like, “Okay.” “I'm single. Okay, I'm fine. I'm fashionable. Like, what does God have to say about that?” And so I've always been thinking about how does God respond to me and the authenticity of my being? Rather than contort myself to fit these archaic, outdated white male—usually straight—colonized Christian lenses and boxes. How do I say no, God is indeed a reflection of a beautiful Black woman who is the daughter of Caribbean immigrants. In everything that I do, Black women and femmes are at the center. And so Sensual Faith came when I finally sat down to write—praise the Lord— and all the ideas came to me. It was a composite of all of the theological inquiries and academic exploration I had been doing.

But also saying here I am in my mid- to late-thirties, like, my life as a Christian woman does not look like what I thought. It was like, I thought I was gonna be married with children, right? Teaching. Okay, I'm divorced, still waiting on the babies through the uterus, right? I mother in the world in other ways. And, um, I don't identify as a Christian anymore. Like I'm Christian adjacent, you know? 'cause I was a cradle Christian. But sensual faith came to me because I realized that I and a lot of other Black women make up the majority of the Black church, which is my social location, I thought it was odd that even though we make up 85% of the congregations in traditional Black churches, we didn't make up 85% of Black church leadership. And that meant a lot of our stories, a lot of our groanings, our sorrows, our sufferings were not being systematically and ethically addressed from the pulpit. And as an African-centered womanist preacher, I said, I'm finna add my name to the litany of greats who've been doing this work. So that's where Sensual Faith came from, wanting to be at home in my body and still love God. 

Olga: I appreciated how Black, femme-centered the text is. You’re pushing back against the history, aftermath, and consequences of the chattel slavery industry in this country. We have internalized this idea that Black women always have to suffer, always have to bear the brunt of holding everything wrong in society. In Sensual Faith you write, no, God wants us to feel pleasure, to feel good, to be in touch with our sensuality. That felt so powerful—like permission to actually start that work, especially because this idea of sensuality can be really difficult to sit with. How do you define sensuality?

So a little bit of background. I was born and raised in a Caribbean Episcopal church. I was an acolyte, so I served at the altar. So I always had this great respect for rights and rituals. So even at a young age, I would smell the frankincense and myrrh. I would extinguish the candles and remember the scent of the smoke. Like, I was activating my senses as a very young child. I just didn't have the language or the toolkit for it. And so once I got to college and became a born-again Christian and was Pentecostal/evangelical, well, baby, all the sermons were talking about how I was going to hell for thinking about sex, let alone having any, right? 

I got this really strong message at a very formative time in my life while I was attending a Catholic university that said I had to fight everything about my body. And my body, particularly as women, like we have divine intelligence in our bodies that says, “Hey, pleasure is your birthright, right?” So we can talk about the clitoris, the anatomically correct term. Just talk about it scientifically, right? We gotta be able to name it before we can talk about what it does. So that was just what I wanted to do. 

I realized, in these conversations, that whenever I would talk about pleasure, people automatically assumed that I was talking about fucking. No, no, no, sensuality and sexuality are two different things. They’re interrelated, and they inform each other, but they’re different. So I see sexuality as anything that has to do with your genitalia, your loins, your tingliness, your expression of that. In happy, healthy, safe, consensual ways. 

I define sensuality as the ultimate practice in mindfulness. It's taking a deep cleansing breath. We couldn't do that in public for three and a half years. Right? The way that your breath centers you, the way that the sacred text of the Christian tradition, the Bible talks about breath as being God's life force, the way that we ground ourselves and say, “have I eaten?” “Am I dehydrated?” “Like, do I need a nap?” “Did I take my meds?” “Do I need to call my person?” “Do I need to rub one out?” We tend to stop right before we get to the sexual part of it. But sensuality is simply being present in the experience of the moment and saying, “what do I need?” Which is not something that colonized Christianity taught us to do.

Dwayne: I'm really glad that you grounded us in the body and the awareness of the body, awareness of needs. A theme that you return to throughout the book is this theme of purity culture alienating, especially women from themselves. Can you expand on that, like the urgency of self-alienation as a problem?

Purity culture is inherently steeped in the illusion of white supremacy. To quote Sonya Renee Taylor, it is steeped in anti-blackness and misogyny/misogynoir. And so we didn't even identify it as purity culture. We call it being holy. Holiness is still right. And so the language was different, but the toxic ideology was the same: Your body is inherently evil and it's something that you need to control. If you have sex before marriage, you go to hell. Good girls don't give head, keep your legs closed, right? 

However, boys and men were not receiving the same teaching. And so for those of us who were engaging in heterosexual activity, we are taught that we need to shrink ourselves and to control our sexual urges. But then we meet these men who are like, “no, you know, it won't hurt. It's just if you really like me, whatever, whatever.” So for me, it wasn't just a physical thing about agency, it was also now a cultural conversation. Because how are we engaging in dating? How are we engaging in relationships? What does sexual agency look like in a marriage? Just because you're married to someone doesn't mean you have ownership of their body. So once you start pulling the thread, the whole thing just unraveled. 

And I was like, well, what are we doing? So what I started to do was figure out, well, who taught me this? And why? Where did this come from? Okay, you're saying it came from the Bible; who wrote this and why?  I want to know what the Bible is saying. Once I started to learn about the African genesis of Christianity, once I learned about the whitewashing of the original Christianity, I said, “well let me deconstruct this.” 

And once I started to decolonize my Christianity, it led me to start to reclaim my African spiritual heritage. My mom’s from Barbados, my dad’s from Guyana. If you go back to the continent, we’re from Sierra Leone on my mom’s side, and Angola on my dad’s side. I started to look at, what did my ancestors believe about our bodies—not what the colonizers trained me to believe about my body. Once I started to see that my foremothers would bare their breasts at the sun, they would shake their asses in worship, which showed me that twerking ain’t new, whining ain’t new—it’s just we are in a hypersexualized context. That helped me to break free of all the habituating that had happened in the church. That was the real clincher for me: This is not where my faith journey starts. 

Dwayne: Your audience and subject matter are Black women and femmes and their lives. But there is this sort of sketching of the lives of men and boys, where men are socialized into essentially being like moral parasites on women, right? Like, “You cover up so that I can be good or charitable.” We see this carryover effect, right? Where I, as a man, have all this power, but I don't have agency. 

Could you speak more on this? I was very much reading this as a man, and reading your description of the cultural norms, where at once I am absolved of responsibility and also given so much power.

People also often ask me: can I read it if I'm not a Black woman? Absolutely. I'm saying the medicine is here because what gets Black women free is gonna get everybody free. And so I love it when brothers know that their liberation is inextricably linked to our liberation, right? We cannot have a movement about liberation that does not include—and let me just park right here and say that to me, liberation is when every Black woman, femme, and girl feels, on a cellular level, free and safe and soft. That is my definition of liberation. And so Sensual Faith is a vehicle for that because I'm calling Black women and femmes and some teens who are reading it, like with their moms and aunts and sisters, to think through how false church teachings have caused us to shrink. And to pull back and to withdraw. 

Because the fact of the matter is, there's no scripture in the Bible that says fucking is great. But you could look at Song of Solomon, and you know, that book is not about Jesus and the church, okay? It's about two people hunching, all right? There's no scripture that says masturbate to free yourself. But when I put on my thinking cap, right? And I see, well, I have a clitoris, right? And clitoris got one job. It's not to get pregnant and birth babies. It's not to urinate or defecate. It's not to process food. It has one delicious soul function. So that tells me, because the church teaches us that we are created in the image and likeness of God, right? My clitoris is created in the image and likeness of God. That is revolutionary for some people to hear, but it's my body.

But if you can control women's sexuality, you can control how they show up in the world. The thing that's dangerous about not talking about bodies is that if we're not talking about bodies, we're not talking about sex. We're not talking about sex, we're not talking about getting tested regularly. We're not talking about mammograms and your prostate. We're not talking about miscarriages. We're not talking about pregnancy terminations. These are stories that we all know of, whether it's our college roommate, our line sister, our cousin, our friend, or whatever. These stories are also holy. These stories are also sacred. When you have a patriarchal society, the religion is going to mirror that. But when you call for a more matriarchal lens, you inherently have to reintegrate Black women and femmes’ stories. And so when we decenter men—which a lot of 'em don't like—we become the center. And I believe that's how we get closer to God.

Olga:​​ You are really challenging us to push back against this institutional white man's Christianity that really wants us to be small and wants us to be disconnected from our bodies. I've been reading and writing on Audre Lorde for the last few weeks, and I've been sitting with the essay on the erotic for about a year or so, and it never fully clicked for me. A lot of the language felt heavy for me. Then I started reading your book. I find it so encouraging how, one, you define sensuality, and two, how you also talk about being Christian-adjacent and how you're being called to our ancestral African spiritual traditions. Can you talk a little bit more about the connections you're making in the book between sensuality, African cosmology, and this decolonization of our Christianity? In chapter eight, you talk about the shift that you have between decolonizing and using the term liberating. So can you first talk about that shift? 

I started talking publicly about Black women's spiritual journeys as it pertains to their bodies in 2017. And of course, we had the uprising of the Me Too women shout out to Tarana Burke. And then that Hollywood lady who tweeted whatever, right? But, there came a point after a year where I was so supremely burnt out because I was talking about trauma every fucking day. I heard women saying “thank you” and hugging me and you know, “you told my story better than I could,” and thank you so much. We're getting healed, but I'm drained. So I started talking about pleasure because that was what I was really excited to talk about. 

I realized that the speed bumps to pleasure were gonna come up anyway. And I found that a lot of Black women and femmes didn't want to feel what they were feeling because so much of what Jason Craige Harris calls “unmetabolized trauma” was just there. And a lot of times we go to these church services, and we have this like opioid-adjacent experience that makes us feel good for the rest of Sunday afternoon through brunch. But then come Wednesday night, you in bed crying cause you don't wanna go to Bible study ‘cause you're triggered. So a part of it is empowering women to know that you can feel your feelings and God will still love you. God is big enough for your emotions. Your crying, your cussing, your wailing, your disbelief. 

And this, to jump to the second part, is where the idea of African cosmology comes into play. Because in our belief system, we believe that before you break the time and space continuum, you sign a soul contract, you get a view of what you gonna go through, and you like, all right, but it's for the destiny, it's for the bloodline, it's for the culture, right? Ancestrally. And so everything that I've gone through for better or for worse, for joy or for pain, good, bad, indifferent, I said yes to that shit. That is mind-boggling to me. Because when you think about my life's journey and everything that I've gone through, people are always like, you're so resilient. I don't wanna be resilient anymore. Okay? Tired of being resilient, I just wanna be. God is with me, my ancestors are with me, my community got my back. There's a future version of myself that's already holding space for my current version of myself. Like I can do this. And so those tiny shifts help to make gigantic waves in the earthly realm. 

My good sibling, Dr. Crystal Jones and I meet for tea, and she tells me your cells hear everything you say. And she's like, when we're talking about decolonizing, we're still centering colonization even in the use of that language. But if I say I am liberating, I'm saying the same thing, but I'm calling us to the good work, right? To the holy manifestation of what we wanna see. And that's what I am so grateful for with this. What hip-hop womanist scholar, EbonyJanice Moore, calls this fourth wave of womanism, where Black women scholars, ethicists, theologians, we're saying, I'm not about to be fighting against the illusion of white supremacy no more. I'm going to take a nap. Like the revolution and the resistance is in removing our gifts and our presence from the systems that feed off of us. Imagine what would happen in the year of our Lord and Beyonce, 2024, if every Black woman and femme, instead of clocking in, showing up to class, showing up for work, lay down and took a nap, collectively. You know how much shit will be out of order? 

Dwayne: There's one piece that really resonates in the Me Too chapter. There is such moral clarity here: You really spell out this powerful moral choice that bystanders have to make. What does church or religious community, or community more broadly, look like when it does side with survivors? 

At Yale we would talk about how there isn't a hierarchy of oppression, right? But as a woman who is a survivor of multiple assaults, I am clear that there are some that are like, you know, this was majorly inconvenient to like, I don't know if I wanna be here anymore. That's important because I think we as a culture don't always honor the experiences of Black women and femmes because it's not like penetration, right? It wasn't a big to-do if he just made a comment about your body. Or like everybody else is “reverend” or “pastor,” and you get called “sweetheart.” It's a culture.  

Reverend Dr. Neichelle Guidry talks about rape culture and how it is not just about the acts, but it's about the discourse, the ideas that are exchanged. And so when we are talking about survivors who are Black women, first of all, the numbers are appalling: At least seven out of 10 Black girls are abused before they turn 18. These are the sorts of things that are seething just underneath in our religious spaces. 

Your religion should re-fasten you to God or rebind you to God. So the thing that makes you feel far from God is actually the sinful thing. And that's not religion. And a lot of us are indoctrinated, and we think we're religious, but we're not. We're just indoctrinated. And so your liberative context has to say, everything that I do say, invest in, that has to get people closer to God—myself first. And so when I'm thinking of survivors in particular, you have to start from a place of belief. You cannot tell me that the God of the Hebrew Bible split open a red sea and allowed the people safe passage only to close up and swallow up their enemies. But you don't believe Sister Johnson, right, when she comes forward. 

And I think that people do believe, but the responsibility of belief, either they're ill-equipped for it, or they're unwilling to hold that, because when you say this thing did happen, now it requires a response. And if you choose to be a bystander, you are essentially responding by saying you are in support of this. And so writ large the church, we can have our statements of beliefs. We can have our purple Sundays for DV. We can have our chapels about child abuse. But until it is condemned and denounced from the pulpit, until perpetrators in the congregations are held accountable, until survivors are centered, this shit is gonna keep happening. Because where there are people, there is power. Where there is power, there is abuse of power. 

And I will expose another part of my story, which I've posted about on social media. I was sexually harassed by this pastor in Memphis, Earl Fisher. He's a married dude, everybody loves him. I told a Greek sister who's very close with him. And her first response was, “well, he helped me through a dark time in my life.” So when the problem is so in your face, so concrete, so clear, and that is the response from another Black woman, as a Black woman, I lost hope for Black women for a second. I've since put the onus where it is and said, no, it's the Black church that has some problems. And there are some Black women who perpetuate the tomfoolery. But it's a collective thing. Yes. But it's also an individual thing. You cannot say that you love Black women. And your homeboy, line brother, cousin, favorite pastor, preacher, teacher is an abuser.

Olga: How did you navigate knowing that Black women and femmes deserve and need this book with the vulnerability it also required from you? Because these are really intimate and vulnerable things that you're sharing. How did you navigate knowing that the world and our community need this book, but also that you have to go and share things about your own journey that are not easy things to share publicly in a world that really hates and wants to exploit black women? 

Vulnerability is my superpower. It feels odd to not share these things. That's just the gift that I have, one of the gifts that I have in this lifetime. But that being said, I wrote the book for a former version of myself. I was like what did 15-year-old Lyvonne need to hear? What did 25-year-old Lyvonne need to hear? You know, as someone who is an ordained Pentecostal minister and a licensed Baptist preacher, and in a former life, I was an assistant pastor and a senior pastor of digital congregations. I was very pastoral with this text, right? So I knew that I was handholding Black women and femmes through very tender and sacred stories. Some stories they have not thought about in decades. Some stories, they've never uttered a word to another person. Some stories they've been repressing and suppressing and not realizing that it's blocking the most lavish life that God has for them. 

I really just wanted to offer a roadmap and say, “Hey, this is what worked for me. It might work for you.” Or maybe a handful of things will work for you and you come up with your own thing, whatever it is, just, here's the diving board, just jump off girl and see what feels good to you. So for me, I knew that, from my editor, every chapter was going to have a story, a lesson, and a practical application. And, you know, doing Baptist child things come in three. So I was like, well, why not use sacred text, the Bible that these Black, Christian, presumably women are already familiar with, but centralize it around their sensuality and their sensual nature so that they can see that the whole time the Bible was speaking to us.

In solidarity,

-Olga