A second batch of options landed on my desk after the first four, and this one is a sharper turn than anything before it: What Nobody Told You About Sex — And Why God Is Not as Quiet About It as Your Church Was. It doesn’t just name the silence. It puts God on the opposite side of it.
Why that reversal matters
Most people who grew up in church absorbed, somewhere along the way, an assumption that God’s relative silence and the church’s actual silence were the same thing — that if nobody talked about it from the pulpit, it must not have mattered much to Him either. This subtitle directly contradicts that assumption, and it does it before the reader has even opened the book. God is not the quiet one here. The institution was. That’s a genuinely different claim than “the church didn’t teach you this,” and I think it’s the more theologically accurate one — Song of Solomon exists in the same book as everything else in Scripture, unhidden, un-euphemised, for anyone who actually goes looking.
What I like about naming the church directly
I’ve hesitated, in earlier drafts of this whole project, to name the institution as clearly as this subtitle does. But I don’t think it’s actually an accusation — the church, like a parent, can only teach what it was taught, and most pulpits inherited the same silence they later passed down. Naming that plainly isn’t unkind. It’s the first honest step toward not repeating it.
What gives me pause
I want a reader who’s currently in a hard relationship with the church to feel met, not recruited into resentment on my behalf. This subtitle walks close to that line — it names something true, and I want to make sure it reads as diagnosis, not as an invitation to write the whole church off over a silence most of it never chose on purpose.
The line I want you to keep
The silence you inherited from your church was never God’s position on the subject. It was just the church’s discomfort, standing in for something it never actually spoke.
Sacred, but Fully Known launches October 3rd. Subscribe below — more of these subtitle options are coming.
— 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.
