On a recent Sunday afternoon, Nadia Bolz-Weber, a forty-nine-year-old Lutheran pastor, visited the New Museum, in Manhattan, with her eighteen-year-old son, Judah, and her twenty-year-old daughter, Harper. They were there to see “Au Naturel,” an exhibition by the English artist Sarah Lucas, and they wandered among Lucas’s plaster casts of penises standing at all manner of attention, and her sculptures of what looked like either potatoes or people, fashioned out of panty hose. “ ‘Bush is just another word for cunt,’ ” Bolz-Weber read from the wall text. On a film in the next room, the artist massaged her partner’s naked body with raw eggs. In the stairwell that led up to the next floor, Bolz-Weber passed a sculpture of a disembodied arm in the middle of masturbating, set inside a mirrored box. The viewer, by observing, was implicated in the act. “I’m so glad we took the stairs,” she said. “We would’ve missed this.”

It was almost a too-perfect backdrop for Bolz-Weber, whose forearms are covered in tattoos of Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, and an image of the women who stayed with Jesus during the crucifixion—unlike the disciples, who were conspicuously absent. (“They’re the only ones who fucking showed up,” she said, of the women.) She could have leaned against the wall beneath Lucas’s “Christ You Know It Ain’t Easy”—a sculpture of Jesus on the cross made out of Marlboro Lights—and become part of the show. “I wonder how much those cigarettes cost,” Judah, wearing a baseball hat that read “Pride,” mused.

Bolz-Weber had flown in from her home in Denver to promote her book “Shameless,” which was published last week. In it, she calls for a sexual reformation within Christianity, modelled on the arguments of Martin Luther, the theologian who launched the Protestant Reformation by nailing ninety-five theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, in the sixteenth century. (One of the slogans of the church that Bolz-Weber founded in Denver, House for All Sinners and Saints, is “Nailing shit to the church door since 1517.”) Luther rebelled against the legalism that pervaded the Church during the Middle Ages, arguing that the focus on sinful conduct was unnecessary, because people were already redeemed through Christ’s sacrifice. “Luther saw the harm that the teachings of the Church were doing in the lives of those in his care,” Bolz-Weber told me. “He decided to be less loyal to the teachings than to their well-being.” For all of his faults—among them, rabid anti-Semitism—Luther’s theology centered on real life. “He talked about farting and drinking and he was kind of like Nadia,” the bishop Jim Gonia, who heads the Rocky Mountain Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, told me. Gonia summed up Luther’s idea like this: “Now that we don’t need to worry that we’re good enough for God, how do we direct our attention to our neighbor?”

Bolz-Weber argues that this idea should be extended to sex. For millennia, the Church has taught Christians to deny their physical selves, and to consider carnal urges sinful. “We keep looking for a set of laws that will save us,” Bolz-Weber told me. “Relying on grace can feel shaky. If it’s free it must be worthless.” As a result, both men and women lead fractured lives, believing that their sexuality is at odds with their spirituality. “This idea that salvation comes through sexual repression,” Bolz-Weber said, “that shit comes out sideways.” In “Shameless,” she sets out to build a sexual ethic around human flourishing rather than around rules encoded by men centuries ago. This begins by recognizing that with sex, as with everything else, “it’s not about being good—it’s about grace.” This, she argues, is actually just the natural extension of classical Lutheranism. “She’s the most classical Lutheran preacher you’ll ever meet,” Gonia said, adding that the reformation she’s calling for is long overdue. “We have so intellectualized our faith—there’s a need to bring head, heart, and body into the forefront of our lives, for the future of the Christian tradition.”

In 2007, Bolz-Weber started her church with eight people in her living room, and it has since grown to include six hundred members. Last July, Bolz-Weber left the organization. She wanted to avoid “founder’s syndrome,” she told me, so that the church could flourish without her. “It’s awful,” she said. She misses her church, especially on Sundays, when she feels rootless. Yet she also wanted to pursue life as a public theologian. Last May, she put out a video of a mini-sermon about forgiveness that has been viewed nearly forty million times, and she often shares stages with figures like Lance Armstrong, whom she interviewed at a conference on Nantucket, in 2018. “I see from my notes you took drugs you weren’t supposed to and then you lied about it,” she recalled starting her interview with Armstrong. “Oh, my God, I did that shit so many times.”

Bolz-Weber loathes what she sees as the holier-than-thou attitude prevalent among Christians. “Self-righteousness feels good for a moment, but only in the way that peeing your pants feels warm for a moment,” she said. In all of her work, she attempts to skewer sanctimoniousness on both the right and the left. In “Shameless,” she takes aim at everything from Augustine of Hippo, the fourth-century theologian, who taught that Christians should deny the urges of the flesh—“he basically took a dump and the Church encased it in amber,” she writes—to the evangelical purity culture of the past several decades, which holds that women, in particular, must remain virgins before marriage. The hypocrisy of purity culture, she argues, has recently been exposed through the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, as survivors of sexual violence within the Church speak out about abuse. “Purity culture equals rape culture,” she told me, by placing the onus on women. “It says to young women that your bodies aren’t your own and you can’t be a sexual being until you are the property of your future husband.” Disconnecting women from their sexuality leads to a fundamental fracturing of the self. “You can’t just flick that switch on your wedding night,” she went on.

For Bolz-Weber, the harm caused by purity culture is personal. She was raised in Colorado Springs, in a conservative evangelical sect called the Church of Christ. When she was twelve and thirteen, she underwent instruction in a weekly Christian charm class—of which, as a loud and “mannish” girl, she was in particular need. Femininity, she was taught, consisted primarily of keeping your mouth shut, a skill she has consistently failed to develop. In her teens, she rebelled against the Church, and began drinking heavily. When she was twenty, she joined Vox Femina, a feminist performance-art group whose acts, she told me, weren’t so different from Lucas’s egg massage. Her comfort with being raw onstage led her into a brief career as a standup comic. In 1991, at twenty-two, she stopped drinking, and the misery that had driven her humor began to drain out of her system. Three years later, while newly sober and attempting an unsuccessful career as a call-center psychic, she got pregnant. She decided that she had no choice but to have an abortion. “I was making two hundred dollars a week and hadn’t seen a dentist in six years,” she told me. “There was no way I could afford a child.” Although Bolz-Weber had been raised in a church that saw abortion as evil, she no longer holds to such teachings. “I was devastated, but not because I felt I’d done something evil or even wrong,” she went on. “I was destroyed by the sadness of my life situation.” She had to borrow three hundred dollars from a friend to pay for the procedure.