Amelia Desalos ’27

Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies Illustrates a Radical Life Beyond the Church

The culture of the Christian Church perpetuates a strict moral framework that clearly defines right from wrong. This is most apparent in how the church, specifically the Baptist, African Methodist Episopal, Pentecostal, and Missionary Baptist churches, approaches female sexuality. As made clear with the purity culture movement of the nineties, female sexuality falls into that “wrong” category. This movement, led by the Southern Baptist Church, teaches that sexual purity is a primary measure of value for young women. In order to remain good in the eyes of the Lord, a woman must repress her natural sexuality. This ideology has permeated politics in the way sex is taught in public schools. Since the mid-1990s, the federal government has spent nearly $2 billion dollars on abstinence-only sex education (Fox). Like the purity movement, this initiative works to embed an almost evil connotation with sex throughout the country. More recently, church doctrines preoccupied with the morality of women’s sexuality have targeted the abortion debate. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the separation between Church and state is increasingly blurred. The Church’s morals are being embedded into American law, constraining individual choice.

Deesha Philyaw examines the impact of this rigid moral worldview in her short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020), where three stories center on Black women who are shaped by the Church’s doctrines. In “How to Make Love to a Physicist,” Lyra Jones, an art teacher, grapples with her own inhibitions as she attempts to open herself to a new relationship. “When Eddie Levert Comes” explores Daughter’s complicated relationship with her mother and challenges with romantic intimacy, shaped by Church teachings. In contrast, “Snowfall” follows Lele’s journey in embracing a queer relationship, free from traditional hetero-normative constraints. For the women in Philiyaw’s stories, the church is a fundamental part of their childhood, established through her maternal figures, agents of moral superiority, who ingrain a sense of duty to relinquish bodily and sexual autonomy over to the church in their daughters to protect them from being marked as unworthy. In order to gain a more holistic perspective and solid sense of self through exploring their sexuality, these women must relinquish their first sense of home and their connection with their mothers by putting space between themselves and their religion. This means intentionally distancing themselves from their old lives and relationships which ultimately opens the women up to step into their full potential.

The sense of right and wrong that Philyaw’s characters grew to live by is based on the culture and teachings of the Christian Church, because this is what was established in their families when growing up. When reflecting on Lele’s memories of home, in “Snowfall” Philyaw describes how going to church is as much a part of familial life as meals, asserting how central the church is in Lele’s upbringing (3). In “How to Make Love to a Physicist,” though descriptions of Lyra’s childhood are limited, her compulsory attendance at church with her mother every Sunday even as a forty-two year old woman establishes how fundamental it also was to her growing up. By observing how their church-devoted mothers act, Lele and Lyra’s learned sense of “goodness” has been limited to the strict moral framework of the church. After years of hearing that it is wrong to not wear a girdle or “suck in,” Lyra grows to understand that the way her body is naturally is not right (8). Similarly, Lele understands from an early age that the only viable relationship is that between a man and a woman and that exploring anything outside of this is wrong. In this way, both characters are taught that their natural state of being is wrong or even evil because of how it offends the church. To go further, these early teachings instilled in the women that the female body and sexuality comports a sense of evil Daughter in “When Eddie Levert Comes” has a different upbringing. Unlike Lyra and Lele who were never exposed to life outside the church, for Daughter’s first ten years, her mother did not adhere to church teachings. Instead, Daughter’s early years were spent observing her mother’s reliance on alcohol, playing her mother’s bartender on her Friday nights she spent in the house, and being forced to overhear her mother’s frequent sexual encounters. Still, Daughter grew up in the South where the culture is overwhelmingly shaped by church doctrine, so there is some understanding between Daughter and her siblings that Mama’s lifestyle is not considered moral. This is made evident when Philyaw reveals that Mama’s own mother abandoned her when Mama had children out of wedlock (7) Life after Mama is “saved” completely contrasts Daughter’s early years. Mama became attuned to self controlling habits like abstinence after attending church, and began correcting her daughter frequently like not allowing her daughter to play card games or have boys over (7). Through observing the habits Mama corrected after finding the church, Daughter’s understanding of morality is clarified to align with church teachings. Eventually Daughter observes her mother losing touch with her old friends who remained “in the world.” This sense of moral superiority is found in the mothers of all three of Philyaw’s stories and is a key contributor to the detrimental all encompassing effect following the church has.

The sense of moral superiority of the mothers in Philiyaw’s stories controls the women– mothers and daughters– through perpetuating a fear of being outcast. As Philyaw writes in “How to Make Love to a Physicist,” church ladies establish that being in the in-group means you are one of the select few that will be “allowed past the pearly gates” of heaven (6). Not living up to the moral expectations of the church means eternal damnation, something to be feared. Having grown up in similar cultures as their daughters, the maternal figures in Philyaw’s stories have only known this fear. They have passed the same fear down to their daughters in a despairing effort to protect them. This is a big reason Lyra is afraid to let go of the church and open herself up to not only other perspectives on the matter, but other ways of prioritizing life (one of the ten commandments is to not put false gods before the Christian god, meaning to prioritize God over everything else). Being outcast not only means going to hell, but being unable to interact with those who are “saved.” This explains why Mama in “When Eddie Levert Comes” drops her only friends in favor of church ladies, and also explains why Lele is so afraid of telling her mother about her relationship with Tonya in her adolescence. Tonya is Lele’s childhood friend-turned lover, and a subject of much internal turmoil for Lele. “Back then, I didn’t know if my mother would still love me if she knew that Tonya was more than just a friend. And I wasn’t trying to find out” (6). Lele understands that if she is open about her queer identity, she will relinquish her spot in the in-group and lose the only community she has ever known. For all three of Philyaw’s characters, the suffering they endure to remain a part of the church stems from their relinquishing of autonomy over their own bodies and sexuality.

In order to escape the limitations of the church’s expectations of women and reconnect to their bodies, women in the church risk separating themselves from their initial sense of home and motherhood. In “How to Make Love to a Physicist,” Lyra struggles for years to find satisfying love. As Mariam Williams asserts in her analysis of Philyaw’s work, “Personal Jesus,” it is only until Lyra realizes that her obstacle to love isn’t her body, but rather the small version of God her mother clings to that she is then able to fully embrace emotional and physical intimacy (1). Guided by her therapist, Lyra “[forgets] her home training” and “[ditches] the girdles” her mother taught her to wear. This allows her the courage to make the decision to never go to church again after her mom berrates her for coming to church unbound (Philyaw 8). In putting space between herself and her church, Lyra loses the formative closeness with her mother but opens herself up to love her body as-is and enjoy sex for the first time. Lele in “Snowfall” has a more explicit sense of loss. While Lyra’s repercussions of denying the church are not fully explored, Lele’s choice to move out of the South to live with her lover, Rhonda, results in her having almost no contact with her mother. Because of her mother’s devotion to the church, realizing her true identity means, in the eyes of her mother, Lele is part of the outcast-group and cannot be associated with. In order to explore her sexuality and live authentically, she has to give up her sense of home and motherhood entirely. Contrarily, “When Eddie Levert Comes” explores the consequences of never putting space between daughter, mother, and the church. Though she is open to having sex, Daughter’s inability to separate her identity from her mother results in her being unable to connect with her body personally. When having sex with Tony, Daughter struggles to stay in the moment, her thoughts always wandering to Mama (9). For years she observes her mother freely having sex only for her mother to later condemn it because it goes against church doctrine. Because of the contradicting messages she receives from her mother about sex growing up– from hearing her mother’s headboard banging to no boys being allowed in the house– Daughter’s understanding of the morality of sex is complicated and unclear. Out of fear of losing her mother, Daughter does not give herself the space from Mama; she cannot separate sex from its unclear morality. This results in her inability to take control of her body and fully enjoy the experience.

These women’s experiences of letting go of their past lives are not entirely marked by loss but also by transition to a more fulfilling life. By putting space between themselves, their mothers, and the church, the women in Philyaw’s stories step into the margins of their own communities. Bell hooks examines the uniquely transcendent space of marginality in her 1989 essay “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” describing this space as being identified as the “other” in your own community (19). Growing up in Southern, Black, church-going communities, Lele, Lyra, and Daughter all share a similar identity that cannot be taken away. No matter how rejected they are for stepping away from the church (and therefore their families), they are a part of a community. Their denouncing of the church only puts them in the margins of that group, making them the “other”. Instead of classifying this space as solely that of struggle, bell hooks explains how stepping into the margins changes one’s sense of home into a place that “enables and promotes varied and ever changing perspectives, a place where one discovers new ways of seeing reality…” (19). In the context of Philyaw’s three short stories, this means that by denouncing the church, Lele, Lyra, and partially Daughter have removed the stress to conform to the rigid rules on morality set forth by the church. In doing this, the women have lost the home they once knew but have granted themselves the freedom to be their authentic selves and to judge themselves on their own moral terms. Hooks goes on to frame the struggle of living on these margins as a place where pleasures can be experienced and enjoyed. By breaking away from their religious past the women in Philyaw’s stories are able to expand themselves to their true potential and finally experience the joys of life that were previously prohibited to them.

In her 2020 collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw explores the impact the Christian Church has on Black women. Three stories, “How to Make Love to a Physicist,” “Snowfall,” and “When Eddie Levert Comes,” illustrate how the culture of the church is embedded into everyday life for Black women because of how it is perpetrated within the family. Mothers specifically teach their daughters the sexist lessons that have been passed down through generations within this community. Though isolating themselves from this past religious life necessitates they grieve the loss of what they knew as home, Philyaw’s characters demonstrate the freedom that can come through self exploration only made possible by leaving home. The self actualization that is possible from leaving a life of limitation, as represented within these stories, leaves us to think about what other institutions might be placing unreasonable constraints on us– what else could be keeping us from fully realizing our potential.

Works Cited

Philyaw, Deesha. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Morgantown, West Virginia University Press, 2020. Cited pages reference student copies furnished by Professor Amy Beth Wright.

Fox, Ashley M et al. “Funding for Abstinence-Only Education and Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention: Does State Ideology Affect Outcomes?.” American journal of public health vol. 109,3 (2019): 497-504. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2018.304896

hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margin as a Space for Radical Openness.” The Journal of Cinema and Media, edited by Drake Stutesman, Wayne State University Press, 1989, 15-23

Williams, Mariam. “Personal Jesus.” Review of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, by Deesha Philyaw. Women’s Review of Books, Nov. 2020, p. 6-7.