The Curriculum of Shame

On growing up inside a system that called desire the enemy. And what it cost.

I was six years old the first time my parents took me to Northwoods.

If you know the name, you already feel something. If you don't, I'll explain. Northwoods was a conference center in Michigan run by Bill Gothard's organization, the Institute in Basic Life Principles. IBLP. Thousands of families cycled through those retreats over the decades. Mine was one of them.

I don't remember much from that first visit. I remember the buildings being enormous. I remember the quiet. I remember the way the adults carried themselves. Straight-backed. Certain. Like people who had been given the answers to a test the rest of the world was still failing.

My parents were not extreme people. They were earnest. They loved God. They loved us. They wanted to raise their children with conviction in a world that felt increasingly hostile to the things they believed. And Gothard's system offered something irresistible to parents like mine. A framework. A set of rules that promised, if you followed them closely enough, your family would be safe.

I understand that now. I did not understand it then. Then, I just absorbed it.

The rules

The rules were everywhere. They governed music. Clothing. Friendships. Authority structures. The way you spoke to your father. The way you looked at a girl.

And underneath all of it, threaded through every seminar and every workbook and every family devotional that borrowed from Gothard's material, was a single, unspoken conviction:

The body is dangerous. Desire is the enemy. If you feel something stirring inside you, that is not God. That is the fall.

I went to Victory Christian Academy growing up. The theology there was different in the details but identical in the posture. Control the body. Suppress the wanting. Earn your goodness through obedience. The system did not need to be cruel to be damaging. It just needed to be thorough.

And it was thorough.

By the time I was a teenager, I had internalized a version of faith where holiness meant absence. The holiest version of me was the one who wanted nothing. Who felt nothing. Who moved through the world like a clean, empty room.

That is what I carried into my marriage.

What it costs

I watched the Shiny Happy People documentary last night. All of it. And I sat on the couch afterward for a long time, not saying anything.

Maren asked if I was okay. I told her I was. That was not entirely true.

Because here is what the documentary gets right, and what most people on the outside will never fully understand: the damage is not just in the scandals. The scandals are the visible rot. The damage that lasts is quieter. It lives in the bodies of the people who grew up inside the system and then tried to build intimate lives with the tools they were given.

And the tools we were given were broken.

I did not know how to want my wife without guilt. Not at first. I knew how to perform. I knew how to be dutiful. I knew how to show up. But wanting her. Wanting her with my whole body, freely, without a voice in the back of my head whispering that this hunger was something to manage rather than something to celebrate. That took years.

It took years because the curriculum of my childhood taught me that desire was a test I was always on the verge of failing. That the body was a liability. That even inside marriage, even inside the one place the church said desire was "allowed," there was still something suspicious about enjoying it too much.

Nobody said that out loud. They didn't have to. The architecture of the system said it for them.

What I want you to hear

I am not writing this to condemn my parents. My parents did what they believed was right with the information they had. They were trying to protect us. I believe that. I hold that belief and my anger in the same hands, and most days I can carry both without dropping either one.

I am not writing this to condemn the church. The church gave me language for grace and beauty and sacrifice that I still use every day. The church also handed me a theology of the body that nearly wrecked the most important relationship of my life. Both things are true.

I am writing this because I know I am not the only one.

I know there are men sitting in living rooms right now, watching that documentary, feeling something crack open that they sealed shut a long time ago. Men who grew up in the same air I did. Who went to the same camps. Who sat through the same seminars. Who were handed the same quiet, devastating message: your desire is the problem.

And I want to say this clearly, because someone should:

Your desire is not the problem.

Your body is not the enemy.

The wanting you feel for the person you married is not something to be managed or minimized or repented of. It is one of the most sacred things you will ever carry.

Why this matters for Remember Eden

People sometimes ask me why we started this. Why art. Why intimacy. Why a whole platform built around the idea that married couples should pursue each other with more honesty and less shame.

This is why.

Because I grew up in a world that taught me to be afraid of the very thing that makes marriage beautiful. And I spent the first years of my own marriage trying to unlearn that fear while pretending I had never learned it in the first place.

Maren was patient. More patient than I deserved. She did not understand at first why I could be present and distant at the same time. Why I could hold her and still feel like I was apologizing for something. It took a long time and a lot of honest, painful conversations before I could name what was happening.

The shame was not mine. It was inherited. And inherited shame is the hardest kind to see, because it feels like conscience. It feels like wisdom. It feels like the voice of God.

It is not.

What I believe now

I believe the body is good. Not tolerated. Not permitted. Good.

I believe desire between a husband and wife is not a concession God made to human weakness. It is a gift. Full stop. No asterisk. No footnote about moderation.

I believe the Song of Solomon is not an allegory. It is a love poem. Written by people who understood that the sacred and the sensual are not opposites. They are the same fire.

I believe that the system I grew up in. The seminars. The workbooks. The retreats at Northwoods. The quiet, confident men who stood at podiums and told families how to be holy. I believe that system was afraid of beauty. And afraid people build cages and call them cathedrals.

I believe my parents deserved better theology. And so did I. And so do you.

Where I am now

I am forty-seven years old. I have been married for over twenty years. I am still unlearning things I was taught before I had the language to question them.

Some nights I reach for Maren and there is no voice in my head at all. Just her. Just us. Just the quiet, holy ordinary of two people who have chosen each other again.

Those nights are the proof that the system was wrong.

And this. All of this. The writing. The art. The guided nights. The conversations we are trying to start. This is what it looks like when someone who grew up inside the machine decides to build something different.

Not angry. Not reactive. Just honest.

The body is good. Desire is good. The story of intimacy is a long and winding one, full of seasons.

We are here for all of them.

Very good.

Beckett