Many Black churches go quiet about sex for two connected reasons. One is shame. The other is fear: a pastor worries that any honest word about sex, and especially about protection, will sound like permission. Pastor John Faison, who leads Watson Grove Baptist Church in Nashville, argues that the quiet has not made anyone holier. It sent people elsewhere for information. It kept HIV hidden until it was too late. And it taught people in the pews that the church could not be trusted with the truth about their lives. Faison keeps the moral standard. What he gives up is the silence.
That distinction is the center of this question. The silence is often defended as a form of conviction, as if not talking about sex were a way of honoring the biblical standard. Faison’s experience points the other way. The standard and the silence are separate things, and the silence has been working against the standard for a long time.
What exactly is being kept quiet?
It helps to be precise, because the claim that the Black church never talks about sex can sound like a stereotype. Sex does come up from the pulpit. It usually comes up as a prohibition, and then the subject changes. What goes unsaid is everything after the prohibition: how married couples are actually doing, who in the congregation is sexually active, who is living with HIV, and who learned what they know about sex through abuse.
Faison is careful about how far he takes the point. He came to Watson Grove in 2012 and began noticing problems that surfaced in counseling and prayer but never in public teaching. He says it is not only his church, and not only predominantly African American churches. It is true of “every church period.” He describes the silence from inside his own tradition, and he does not treat it as a Black failing that other churches have outgrown.
His first response was a sermon series called Therapy in the Sanctuary, a month of Sundays on issues the church avoided. HIV and AIDS was one of them. He describes the response as overwhelming. People had relatives living with HIV. They had buried friends who died of AIDS. Nobody at church had ever said a word about it.
A secret kept by families and repeated by the church
Faison’s account of the shame starts in families. He had a relative who died of HIV, and he did not learn the cause until years later because the family never spoke of it. In his words, “the stigma is so great that nobody wanted to talk about it or even have it mentioned and associated with their families.” The fear he describes is not mainly about one person’s private sin. It is about what a diagnosis would say about a family’s name.
The church is where that fear gets ratified in public. Faison has preached eulogies where the family said the person died of pneumonia or cancer when the cause was AIDS. A funeral is one of the most public things a congregation does, and in those services the cover story was the one spoken from the pulpit. The church did not invent the family’s secret, but it gave the secret a respectable form and kept it. That is how a private shame becomes an institutional habit: each funeral that names the wrong illness tells the next family that the right one cannot be said in that room.
Part of what made the secret so heavy was the belief that HIV belonged only to gay men. In a congregation where same-sex attraction itself carried deep stigma, a diagnosis exposed a family to two judgments at once. Faison rejects the premise outright. “It is not a gay disease,” he says. Some Christians have gone further and called the virus a punishment from God, and he answers with people that explanation cannot account for: a woman infected by her husband, and a baby born with the virus. The punishment story, applied to them, is “downright hurtful for those persons who are infected by and affected by it.”
He also takes on an assumption people rarely say aloud. Faison cited figures he dated to 2012, showing Black Americans at roughly 12 to 13 percent of the population but around 43 to 46 percent of new HIV infections. Those numbers are his and should be checked against current data. His reading of them is the point: “Black people are not having sex more than anybody else.” He points instead to “what we call social determinants of health,” including mass incarceration, homelessness, concentrated poverty, lack of access to healthcare, and stigma.
Stigma is on that list for a reason. It connects the church’s silence directly to the medical outcome. Faison says Black patients die at higher rates because they learn their status late, and “by the time we find out it’s too late.” People who fear being found out put off testing. When a church adds to that fear, it becomes part of the delay.
Isn’t silence just a way of guarding the standard?
This is the strongest objection, and Lisa Fields puts it fairly. Many pastors hesitate to talk about sex, or about safer sex, because protection seems to give someone the okay to do what the church calls sin. She states the conviction and the problem in one sentence: “we believe as the church that sex is reserved for marriage, but we know that people in the church are having it.”
Faison’s answer does not lower the standard. It asks the church to admit what is already happening. Churches “preach abstinence, but the Saints ain’t listening,” he says, and he counts himself among them. He married at eighteen, and his wife was pregnant when she walked down the aisle. He does not tell that story to excuse anything. He tells it to make a demand of himself and other church leaders: “You gotta stop lying and stop acting like these things are not occurring.”
He extends the point to people no one expects. A friend in the NAACP’s health division told him about speaking at a nursing home, where residents dozed through her talk and then rushed for the box of condoms she left behind. Faison claims the largest recent increase in AIDS cases has been among people 55 and older, an assertion that needs checking. The story still makes its point. Assumptions about who is sexually active are often wrong, and a church that only warns teenagers is speaking to part of its congregation.
His deeper reply is theological. Pretending a problem is absent, he argues, damages Christian witness itself. He names the contradiction this way: “we say God has an answer for our eternal salvation, but God has nothing to say about issues that we deal with every day.” He calls that unhealthy. For Faison, theology has to reach the whole person, body and daily life as well as soul. A church that will speak about heaven but not about the body is not being careful. It is implying that God has no interest in half of human life.
What the silence has cost
Faison lists the cost directly: unhappy marriages, unhealthy sexual activity, teenage pregnancy, and high rates of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. He gives one cause for all of them: “Because we forced people to get their information elsewhere.” Young people do not stop learning about sex when the church is silent. They learn from sources with no stake in their wellbeing and no interest in the biblical vision of sex.
The second cost is trust. Faison has criticized the familiar pattern of a pastor preaching against homosexuality while the choir director is gay and never spoken to. He names the logic behind it: “The black church historically, has been very utilitarian.” In his description, a congregation has “a problem with gay people, unless they’re gifted,” because it needs the choir to sound right and the musician to play. He calls it hypocrisy at its root.
This shows the silence is not neutral. It is selective. A church that stays quiet about the people it needs and loud about the ones it doesn’t has not kept a standard. It has made the standard depend on who is useful. People who grow up watching that learn that the church’s sexual ethic is a tool for managing appearances, and they stop bringing their real questions to it. Lisa Fields adds that the courageous course is to speak to the actual person, perhaps privately, instead of preaching at them from a distance.
Does Scripture leave the church with nothing to say?
Faison’s complaint is that the church acts as if God has nothing to say about everyday life. On sex, the Bible itself contradicts that impression. In the creation narrative, the first couple are described this way: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25). Genesis 2 is narrative, not a rule for church programs, but it shows that shame is not part of the original design. In the next chapter, after the disobedience, the man and woman cover themselves and hide from God (Genesis 3:7-10). Hiding enters the story as a result of the fall, not as a form of holiness. A church that treats concealment as reverence has borrowed its posture from Genesis 3, not Genesis 2.
The New Testament keeps the boundary and the honor together in a single verse. “Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge” (Hebrews 13:4). “Undefiled” there means pure or unstained, the opposite of dirty. The writer names judgment on sex outside marriage plainly, and in the same breath calls the marriage bed honorable. Silence manages neither half. It does not teach the boundary clearly, because nothing is explained, and it does not teach the honor, because a subject no one will name sounds shameful. Teaching the standard plainly and without shame is the faithful course, and it is exactly what Faison is asking for.
Faison holds that standard himself. He says sexual activity outside marriage between husband and wife is sin, and “I believe marriage was instituted and ordained by God as an exclusive covenant between one man and one woman.” He also says, “I’m still evolving in my theology,” and he offers some readings of his own on Leviticus and on the Greek word porneia that most interpreters would not share. Those are separate debates. His case against the silence rests on what he saw in his congregation and his own family, and on a standard he still affirms.
Going first
Faison does not ask pastors to become experts. “I’m not a health professional. That’s not my calling, that’s not my gift,” he says. What he brings is simpler: “I do have compassion for people.” Community health workers and HIV counselors already want to work with churches, because a congregation gathers people who might never visit a clinic. “There are persons in your city who are dying to get connected to your church,” he says.
Then he describes his own practice. “We do testing at least once every year in our church.” He and his wife get tested in front of the congregation, because “we believe in going first to make it easier to break some of the stigma.” That practice shows the difference between silence and conviction. A pastor who gets tested publicly is not endorsing sin. He is making it ordinary to learn the truth about your own health, which is exactly what stigma prevents. It reverses the funeral pattern: instead of the pulpit repeating a family’s cover story, the leader stands in front of everyone and lets the truth be known.
Faison is skeptical of the church’s urge to fix people, as though it had earned that right. Lecturing has not changed the pews. His conviction is that “love sets the conditions for spirit-led transformation to occur,” and honest speech is part of that love. His starting point for any pastor is a plain fact about congregations: “whatever’s in your city is in your church.” The people with questions about sex, disease and shame are already in the building. The silence only decides whether they face those questions with their church or without it.