By Oluwafunke Allen
Someone on my small marketing team sent me a line last week and said, simply, “What if this was the subtitle?” The Sex Talk Your Church, Your Parents, and Your Phone Never Gave You. I read it twice before I said anything back.
Why it stopped me
It isn’t clever for cleverness’s sake. It names three specific, recognisable sources of silence in a single breath the three places most of us actually expected to learn something and didn’t. Your church, because sacredness so often gets handled by simply not handling the subject at all. Your parents, because most of them were never taught either, and you cannot hand down what you were never given. And your phone which is the one that stops me every time, because it’s the only one of the three that actually did teach you something, just not anything true, and not anything that had your good in mind.
The part that makes me uncomfortable, in a useful way
I’ve spent fifteen years sitting across from adults who can tell me, in detail, what their phone taught them about sex before they were old enough to drive, and who go quiet, every single time, when I ask what their parents or their church taught them instead. The silence wasn’t neutral. It left a vacuum, and something always fills a vacuum. This subtitle doesn’t just describe that pattern it names the algorithm as a rival teacher, which is uncomfortable and also simply true.
What I like about it, and what gives me pause
I like that it’s specific rather than abstract “silence” as a concept doesn’t land the way three named sources do. What gives me pause is whether naming the phone alongside church and parents reads as blame rather than diagnosis. I don’t think phones are the villain here. I think they’re just the loudest voice in a room everyone else had already left. I want a subtitle that names that clearly without letting anyone including me off the hook for the leaving.
The line I want you to keep
You cannot out-silence an algorithm. If the people who love you don’t say something first, something else will say everything, and it will not be trying to love you while it does.
Sacred, but Fully Known launches October 3rd. Subscribe below to find out which one wins.
— Funke
Sacred, but Fully Known: A Faith-Rooted Companion to Intimacy in Marriage launches October 3rd, 2026. Subscribe above to follow the story, and to be first in line on launch day.
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