A megachurch pastor said it to me over lunch, as we talked openly, like a man finally handing off a weight he’d carried alone too long. Early thirties, built like a swimsuit model, the kind of face that makes a congregation’s collective pulse spike the second the lights come up. Charisma dripping off him the way sweat drips off a runner. Women in his church lusting after him openly. His wife’s naiveté became a running joke among the staff, except it wasn’t a joke, not really. Eventually the affair came, then the fall, then the shame that most of these stories end in. Unfortunately, what he never managed to walk away from was the stage. Even after the wreckage, something kept pulling him back toward the lights.

Over that lunch, as we discussed what leading thousands of people into worship actually felt like, he used a phrase that’s never left me: mutual masturbation. Sometimes, he said, it felt exactly like that. Thousands of bodies, one collective climb, everybody arriving somewhere together, nobody daring (or knowing how) to name what had happened once the benediction was spoken.

I instantly knew the phenomenon. I just didn’t have his words for it until that day.

What I actually grew up inside

Appalachian Pentecostalism doesn’t do restraint. My father’s church filled with the shouting, the writhing on the floor, women dancing in the spirit hard enough that ushers kept sheets on hand for modesty, because dresses rode up over hips mid-ecstasy of course, the women’s bodies would cause the men to lust. Anointing oil got rubbed into foreheads, and necks and ears and shoulders by hands that lingered. The speaking in tongues came in waves with increasing fervor. Grown men and women collapsed, writhing, spent, semi-catatonic on a floor that had witnessed decades of collective release. Nobody called any of it what it resembled. Nobody was permitted to….nobody dared.

Writing my first book Sex, Lies & Religion, I went looking for the theology underneath what my body remembered, and Pentecostal tradition hands you the word without flinching: pathos. Emotion, in the oldest rhetorical sense, the feelings a speaker stirs in a room to move it past reason. The Holy Ghost, in that tradition, isn’t a doctrine. It’s a felt thing, deliberately cultivated, built by musicians who know exactly which chord progression keeps a crowd suspended, exactly how long to vamp before the room can’t stand it anymore and breaks. A worship service is, among other things, forty minutes of expert pacing toward release. I know, I excelled at making it happen for thirty years.

Holy anointing? Slain in the spirit? Manipulation? Ecstasy? Passion? The words all describe the same forty minutes.

The scene I’ve always wanted to write

Picture it. A sanctuary of a few thousand, worship building the way in the usual pattern, verse, chorus, hypnotically repeat, the band leaning into the swell. Smoke machines and stage lighting creating an atmosphere reminiscent of a rave party. Somewhere in the middle rows, a neglected woman married to a patriarchal man, a cute soccer mom in every visible way, arms raised, eyes closed, lost the way the whole room is led to get lost in the spirit. What nobody around her knows, god forbid her husband, is the small device tucked inside her panties, strategically placed, the wireless remote pressed quiet in her palm, thumb pressing the button as the bridge climbs toward its peak.

The worship crests. She lets it take her with it. The wall of sound and emotion around her, the rock concert volume, the singing and swaying and the collective abandon of a few thousand bodies giving themselves over at once swallows the screams and moans she can’t help but let slip. Nobody turns. Nobody notices. She opens her eyes a few seconds later, spent, radiant, certain in her heart that Jesus himself met her and pleasured her in that room the way no human ever had.

She felt she had experienced emotional, spiritual, and yes, sexual fulfillment. That first orgasm becomes a private liturgy after that. Her husband always wonders why she is so excited about worship… almost giddy. She goes looking for her fix again the following Sunday, and the Sunday after.

The uncomfortable center of it

Here’s the part no altar call ever mentions out loud: worship and arousal run through the identical nervous system. Same rising heart rate. Same flushed skin. Same loss of emotional control, the rational mind stepping back and letting the body take the wheel. Same afterglow, the euphoric, spent, wrung-out quiet that follows both release and revival. Pentecostalism didn’t invent this. It just built an entire doctrine around it and controlled the erotic aspects.

Which raises the actual question, the one my pastor friend was really asking me over that lunch, whether he knew it or not: when a worship leader and pastor stands on a stage and works a crowd toward that peak, deliberately, skillfully, Sunday after Sunday, service after service, is that different in any structural way from what a lover does?

There is a reason the movement is called Charismatic: mystery, eloquence, theatricality, fervency, vulnerability, uninhibitedness, saintliness. The elements read like Machiavellian stagecraft when applied to politics. Activate the same list in an evangelical worship service, and it feels like spiritual seduction, working an entire room at once instead of one body.

Mutual, his word carries real meaning, and it deserves to be kept rather than softened. The congregation isn’t only receiving. Every person in those pews is bringing years of repression, of a body told from childhood it was dangerous, of a longing that never found permission anywhere else, and handing all of that pent-up emotion forward to the charismatic leaders on the stage, who then hand ecstasy back, amplified, sanctified, safe to feel because a worship song is playing under it. The worship leader and pastor are not the only ones generating the electricity. The room of hungry people builds it with him. That’s what makes calling it exploitation too easy an answer, and calling it purely spiritual too convenient a dodge. It is much more complex.

Holy or exploited

If a body’s capacity for ecstasy is one of its most layered emotional triggers, then what happened to that soccer mom in the pew isn’t blasphemy. It’s living proof. Evidence that the wall religion built between the holy and the erotic was never spiritual in the first place. Her body blissfully exposed the lies of a sterile and lifeless manmade orthodoxy.

But evidence cuts both directions, and the honest essay has to let it. Us. Me too. The same system that let her find something true about her own body handed men like me and my pastor friend a stage that fed our own egos, fed a congregation’s collective arousal and explosive growth, and eventually exposed marriages and friendships that had gone quietly dead. It revealed mine.

What I actually believe, after four generations and one long walk away from the pulpit

Doctrine failed twice; first by building the wall between the holy and the erotic, then by refusing, when I finally started asking real questions, to let the wall come down. I sought help to understand. I got certainty in return, dogma standing in for an answer. And so I left the stage, and the church, on my own terms, before any affair, any divorce, ever touched my life. Renouncing the theology came after. What I didn’t know to verbalize, even then, was the question this essay is finally asking for me: what was actually happening in every body in that room, mine included, underneath doctrine I’d already left behind. I questioned first, then I left, then I renounced. The deeper questions took years longer to form.

The sin was never the sensation or the longing for something more. The sin was the doctrine around it; the refusal, generation after generation, to name what every writhing, weeping, shouting, pulsating body in a “sanctuary” already knew deep in their soul and body. Call it mutual masturbation. Call it sacrament and communion if that’s the truer words once the shame’s been stripped off them. The names are pointing at the same thing: a room full of people, starved of permission everywhere else in their lives, finally letting their bodies feel what their frigid theology would never allow.