Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 06:2 (Fall 2024)
Article: "Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Reading This"
Author: Shane Morris

Eikon 6.2 (Fall 2024) p. 142

Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Reading This

Shane Morris

Shane Morris is a senior writer at the Colson Center and host of the Upstream podcast.

Lina AbuJamra. Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Reading This: A Christian Doctor’s Thoughts on Sex, Shame, and Other Troublesome Issues. Forefront Books, 2023.

Eikon 6.2 (Fall 2024) p. 143

What If It Is About The Nail?

I love “It’s Not About the Nail,” a short comedy sketch about the eccentricities of men and women that has made the rounds online for years.1 In it, a woman with a nail embedded in her forehead persistently rebuffs the efforts of a well-meaning husband or boyfriend to remove it. “It is not about the nail!” she insists. “Are you sure?” he asks. “Because I bet if we got that out of there…” “Stop trying to fix it!” she snaps. Eventually, he learns that what she really wants is for him to empathize with her pain, even if that means pushing the nail deeper.

I was reminded of this sketch while reading Lina Abujamra’s Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Reading This: A Christian Doctor’s Thoughts on Sex, Shame, and Other Troublesome Topics. The book is largely a confession of lifelong struggles with

Eikon 6.2 (Fall 2024) p. 144

sexual temptation, and an elaboration on how painful unfulfilled desires can be. Abujamra, a self-proclaimed “50-year-old virgin,” has seen and treated a lot of physical trauma in her career as an ER doctor. She knows how to fix bodies. Yet when it comes to spiritual and emotional wounds, self-inflicted or otherwise, she seems strangely reluctant to prescribe practical treatments. Instead, she urges readers to open up as she has, to confess their failures and temptations, and to prioritize the process of falling in love with Jesus over moral change. The result is a book containing much honesty and insight, an evident affection for God and a desire to please him, but little in the way of prescriptions for sexual flourishing, much less holiness.

Like most “real talk” evangelical or ex-evangelical books on sex, this one is deeply critical of the church and so-called “purity culture,” and how both have treated topics like lust, dating, masturbation, premarital sex, and even marriage. Abujamra correctly identifies the numerous and highly public ways in which Christian leaders and pastors have failed sexually in recent years, pointing specifically to the sins of men like Ravi Zaharias, sex abuse cover ups in the Southern Baptist Convention, and the apostasy of authors like Joshua Harris (I Kis...