Faith, Spice, and the Things I’m Still Untangling

This was a bitch to write without crying.

Actually, the Instagram post was a bitch to write without crying. Sitting down to write this has somehow been worse, because the post let me hide behind six pretty graphics and a finite amount of space. There was only so much I could say before the font became microscopic and everyone collectively decided they had better things to do with their afternoon. A blog doesn’t give me that excuse.

I almost didn’t post it at all. I’ve become very careful about how much of myself I put on the internet, and there are reasons for that that I’ll get to eventually. But I had been watching conversations in the book world about Jesus, faith, sexuality, purity, modesty, and what Christian women should or shouldn’t be creating, and they were affecting me far more deeply than I expected. I kept scrolling past them and telling myself they had nothing to do with me. Then I started realizing I was carrying them around after I put my phone down.

Before I say anything else, there is something I want to make very clear because nuance tends to die a spectacular death on the internet: I love seeing people find Jesus. I love watching someone discover faith for the first time, and I love watching someone find her way back to a faith she thought she had lost. My own relationship with Jesus has never been a straight line. I’ve loved Him, been furious with Him, walked away, explored other faiths and no faith at all, found Him again, lost Him again, questioned things I once thought I knew, and changed my mind about things I once believed with absolute certainty. Today, I can stand in church with my hands raised during worship and feel completely, utterly at home.

So when an author says she found Jesus and it changed her, I understand that more than some people might expect me to.

Sometimes faith changes what we want our lives to look like. Sometimes it changes what we wear or consume, the relationships we have, the boundaries we set, or the things we create. If an author finds Jesus and decides she no longer wants to write explicit sex, I respect that. If she looks at something she wrote five years ago and realizes it no longer represents who she is or what she believes, I respect her right to change it. If she never wants to write another sex scene again because she genuinely believes that is what God is asking of her, that decision belongs to her.

Where I begin to struggle is when a personal conviction stops being presented as personal. “God asked this of me” is very different from “God requires this of women.” “I no longer feel comfortable writing this” is very different from “Christian women shouldn’t write this.” One is a woman telling me about her relationship with God. The other can very quickly become a standard by which another woman’s relationship with God is judged.

I know that language intimately because I grew up in purity culture.

I learned very young that my body could be a problem. My shoulders could be immodest. My skirt could be too short. Something I wore could cause a man to stumble, and if he did, there always seemed to be some question about what I had done to contribute to it. What was I wearing? Had I been too friendly? Was I flirting? Had I made myself too noticeable? There was so much emphasis on girls preventing men from stumbling that the responsibility for a man’s thoughts could somehow find its way onto a girl’s shoulders.

Those lessons don’t stay confined to clothes. When you hear them young enough and often enough, they become part of how you understand yourself. Sexuality becomes something dangerous. Desire becomes suspicious. Your own body becomes something you learn to view from the outside, through the imagined eyes of everyone who might see it. You start asking whether you are too much, whether wanting something makes you dirty, whether a good woman would do this, whether a good Christian woman would even think about it.

Eventually, nobody has to stand over you enforcing those rules anymore. You learn to do it yourself.

That is one of the most insidious things purity culture did to me. It taught shame how to use my own voice. And if I’m not careful, that voice can still sound an awful lot like God.

Conviction or conditioning?

That question has been sitting heavily with me lately. When I feel guilt about something, where is it actually coming from? Is this conviction? Is this something God is asking me to examine? Or am I hearing an old lesson I absorbed so deeply that it still knows exactly which buttons to press?

I don’t ask that question because I want an excuse to dismiss anything uncomfortable as religious trauma. Sometimes conviction is uncomfortable. Sometimes faith requires us to look at ourselves and admit that something we want isn’t good for us or that something we are doing no longer aligns with who we believe we are called to be. I have no interest in constructing a Christianity where God conveniently agrees with Lila Grey on every subject. At that point I’m not following God; I’ve just given myself a divine sock puppet.

But I also don’t believe every feeling of guilt, fear, or shame automatically comes from Him.

There is a difference between realizing something no longer feels right for me and believing I am dirty for ever wanting it. There is a difference between feeling called to change and being terrified that God will reject me unless I become smaller, quieter, cleaner, less sexual, less complicated. I know what that second place feels like. I know where it took me. Some of those beliefs followed me into adulthood and into some very dark places, and I refuse to pretend there isn’t real trauma buried beneath that language for me.

That is why some of the conversations happening lately have hit harder than I expected. Words like purity, modesty, appropriate, and clean don't arrive in my head without history attached to them. Hearing familiar ideas presented again has stirred up old shame and old insecurities I genuinely thought I had worked through. I’ve had to pay attention to what that was doing to me and remind myself that another person’s conviction does not automatically become an instruction for my life.

I can celebrate another woman finding Jesus without believing God is taking me down the exact same road. I can respect what she believes she has been called to give up without giving it up myself.

Because I love Jesus, too.

And I write sex.

Those two things are not fighting inside me anymore.

There was probably a time when I thought they needed to live in separate rooms: Christian Lila over here, romance-author Lila over there, and for the love of God nobody let them make eye contact. But the closer I’ve gotten to understanding my own faith, the less interested I am in carving myself into pieces that make other people comfortable. I don’t believe sex is inherently dirty. I don’t believe desire is inherently dirty. I don’t believe writing either of those things makes a woman less faithful, less moral, less worthy, or less loved by God.

That is my conviction.

Another Christian woman can come to a completely different conclusion, and I can respect hers without abandoning mine.

There are women who love Jesus and no longer want to write sex. There are women who love Jesus and absolutely still do. There is room for both of us.

And frankly, I’m exhausted by watching everyone try to police which one is allowed to exist.

I have seen people become genuinely angry at authors who say they found Jesus and no longer want to write smut. Not privately disappointed, not simply deciding those books aren’t for them anymore, but angry enough to leave nasty comments, mock them, question their motives, or talk about punishing their books with reviews. I understand disappointment. If your favorite author has spent ten years writing gloriously filthy books and announces tomorrow that she will only write closed-door romance from now on, you are completely entitled to sit on your couch and say, Well, fuck.

You can be disappointed. You can stop buying her books. You can unfollow her. You can mourn the tragic death of chapter twenty-seven with your group chat. What you cannot reasonably demand is that another human being continue creating sexual content she no longer feels comfortable creating because you preferred an earlier version of her.

An author does not owe us permanent access to the person she used to be.

And if I expect people to respect my choice to love Jesus and continue writing explicit romance, I have to extend that same respect to the woman who chooses to stop. Otherwise, I’m not actually advocating for women to have agency over their faith and their art. I’m just advocating for women to make the same choices I make.

The grace has to go both ways.

I’ve had people unfollow me since I posted about this on Instagram. And that’s okay. Truly. Nobody owes me a follow. Maybe they don’t want Jesus in their feed. Maybe they disagree with me about purity culture. Maybe they believe Christianity and explicit romance are fundamentally incompatible. Maybe they saw Jesus and smut in the same post and decided they had experienced quite enough Lila Grey for one lifetime.

They’re allowed.

What I’m not willing to do is anticipate every possible unfollow and start shaving pieces off myself before anyone gets the chance to dislike them.

I am my own person. I’m a romance author who writes extremely explicit books. I’m also a woman with a complicated history with faith who has wandered through belief, doubt, anger, other paths, and somehow found herself standing in church again. Those things belong to the same human being. I don’t want to perform whichever sanitized version of myself is most likely to keep everyone comfortable, because that version of me doesn’t exist.

And I am so fucking tired of the back-and-forth.

You found Jesus and decided you don’t want to write smut anymore? Fantastic. I hope following that conviction brings you peace.

You found Jesus and still want to write smut? Fantastic. Pull up a chair.

You don’t believe in Jesus and want to write the filthiest thing Kindle has ever been forced to process? Have fun.

You don’t believe in Jesus and never want to write a sex scene in your life? Also completely fine.

Why have we become so invested in policing everybody else’s personal lives?

We don’t have to share someone’s faith to respect that it belongs to them. We don’t have to share someone’s convictions to acknowledge that they belong to them. We don’t have to like an author, follow her, read her books, agree with her choices, or understand why she made them. There is a tremendous amount of space between disagreement and cruelty, and I wish we were more willing to live there.

Maybe part of why this exhausts me so much is because I already keep my personal life incredibly close.

That probably sounds strange coming from me. I’m loud online. I swear. I make jokes. I talk about sex in books. I talk about fictional men doing things that would make an HR department spontaneously combust. I can be chaotic and ridiculous and extremely open about certain things.

But being visible is not the same thing as being vulnerable.

I learned that distinction the hard way.

I’ve told people things in confidence and later had those things used against me. I’ve had vulnerable moments thrown back in my face. I’ve had personal information used as leverage, used to get something from me, or turned into drama because drama gets attention. It gets clicks. It gets follows. Sometimes it gets reads. Somewhere in that process, the fact that there is an actual human being attached to the juicy piece of information gets forgotten.

Experiences like that changed how I share myself. They made me careful. There are parts of my life that I keep behind locked doors now, not because I’m ashamed of them, but because they belong to me. Some things belong to my family. Some things belong to people I love. Some things are allowed to happen to a human being without becoming content.

I’ve had to learn that privacy is not dishonesty.

I can tell you something hurt me without telling you who did it. I can tell you I have scars without showing you exactly where they came from. I can talk about my relationship with God without providing the internet with a complete spiritual autobiography. I can let people see pieces of me without giving them ownership of the whole person.

Maybe that’s why the Instagram post scared me as much as it did. There wasn’t much distance between those words and me.

Fiction usually gives me that distance.

It lets me tell the truth sideways.

I can give a character a fear and never tell you why I understand it. I can write shame without explaining mine. I can write longing without identifying what I’ve lost. I can put something painfully real inside something completely imaginary and let the fiction hold it for me.

And then I created Josephine Sawyer.

Josie is a pastor’s daughter who loves God and music and has spent most of her life inside a world that feels familiar and safe. Then she moves to New Orleans and meets Charlie, a century-old vampire with a jazz club, a filthy mouth, entirely too much confidence, and absolutely no business being anywhere near a sheltered pastor’s daughter.

Naturally, I put them together.

When I started writing them, I wasn’t trying to make a statement about Christianity or sexuality. I wanted vampires. I wanted New Orleans jazz. I wanted a sweet pastor’s daughter staring at an immortal menace and thinking, in essence, This seems like a spectacularly bad idea.

Normal Lila things.

But stories are rude. Sometimes they figure out what they’re about before we do.

The deeper I got into Josie, the more important her faith became to me—not because she loses it, but because she doesn’t. Charlie does not rescue her from Christianity. Sex does not liberate her from God. She doesn’t discover desire and suddenly realize that everything she ever believed was stupid. Her story isn't about replacing one with the other.

She gets to keep Jesus.

She also gets to ask questions. She gets to experience desire and discover parts of herself she was taught to fear. She gets to examine which convictions actually belong to her and which were handed to her before she was old enough to question them. Her sexuality and her faith are allowed to exist inside the same woman without one being used to prove that the other isn't real.

And somewhere along the way, I realized I was giving Josie questions I have spent years asking myself.

Where does conviction end and conditioning begin? Can sexuality and devotion exist inside the same body without one corrupting the other? If I strip away all the voices telling me what a “good Christian woman” is supposed to look like, what do I actually believe God asks of me?

And maybe the hardest question of all: Can I come home to Jesus without going back to the places that hurt me?

That was the moment my fun little New Orleans vampire-jazz romance looked me directly in the face and went, Surprise, bitch. We're processing religious trauma.

Rude.

But here we are.

The story has slowly become about hunger and devotion existing in the same body. About sexuality and faith not having to destroy one another. About the difference between guilt and conviction, modesty and shame, choosing something because you believe it is right for you and choosing it because you are terrified of what it might mean if you don't.

And, increasingly, it has become a story about wandering and coming home.

There are words from Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing that have followed me through more than one version of myself: “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.”

I know what it is to wander. More than once.

I know what it is to wonder whether you've wandered too far. I also know the strange, overwhelming feeling of discovering that somehow you can still come home.

Maybe that's why Josie sings that hymn. Maybe that's why this ridiculous vampire romance started digging into places I thought I'd already healed. Maybe I needed to write about a woman discovering that coming home to God does not require her to return to every cage people once built around Him.

I don't entirely know yet.

I'm still writing.

There is no release date hiding at the bottom of this post. There isn't a preorder link or a cover reveal or even a proper announcement. I'm just quietly writing a vampire and a pastor's daughter in New Orleans, and apparently I'm putting a little more of myself between the pages than I expected.

Maybe that's what this story is becoming: somewhere for me to wrestle with hunger and devotion, faith and sexuality, shame and grace, conviction and conditioning, wandering and coming home.

And maybe some of you are carrying pieces of that too.

Maybe you're watching these same conversations and feeling wounds you thought had healed start aching again. Maybe you found Jesus and your life changed dramatically. Maybe you found Him and almost nothing about your outward life changed. Maybe you left Christianity and have no intention of coming back. Maybe you've never believed at all.

I don't need your answer to look like mine.

I think that's what I've been trying to say this entire time.

I don't want the woman who stops writing spice after finding Jesus to become somebody's cautionary tale about religion. I don't want the woman writing filthy romance after church on Sunday to become somebody's cautionary tale about Christianity done wrong. I don't want every deeply personal choice a woman makes about her faith, sexuality, body, art, or life turned into another opportunity for strangers to decide whether she's doing womanhood correctly.

We can disagree without making each other into villains.

We can change without demanding everyone change with us.

We can have convictions without turning them into weapons.

And we can let some things remain personal.

As for me, I'm still figuring out which things belong to my faith and which were put there by someone else. I'm still learning which voice is conviction and which one is old shame wearing familiar clothes. I'm still writing sex. I'm still going to church. I'm still asking questions.

And I'm still coming home.

xoxo,
Lila