Forgive Me, Father, For I have Sexted
The pivotal experience of a high school student at a Catholic school is the annual religious retreat. Each follows the same formula: you take a bus into the woods and are put into individual cabins with no phones. Just you and the Holy Spirit randomly paired with your peers where you trauma dump and discuss your relationship with God. A memory that is forever embedded in my mind was my senior retreat, Kairos, comically called Kirkos in the film, Yes, God Yes. The film captures the purist and condemnatory atmosphere perfectly as it follows Alice, a Catholic school student, on her retreat having just had her sexual awakening moments before the trip, leaving her to come to terms with those sins surrounded by judgment.
The film closely parallels its source material of the original retreat Kairos with a raw authenticity in its rituals. They read letters from parents out loud, retreat leaders told stories ending with an emotional song that connected to their narrative, and had small group discussions on faith. The most scarily accurate aspect was the use of the cryptic phrase “live the fourth”. I’ll never forget seeing every retreat document ending with the letters LTF, leaving us consumed by curiosity. We would make guesses each day (live the faith was the most popular). It was a phrase meant to inspire us to carry forward the retreat’s teachings even past that fourth day. Having gone through this retreat myself, I couldn’t help but feel an immediate personal connection to the film. The accuracy of Alice’s journey, particularly relating to the tension between religion and the modern-day, is one of the film’s most striking qualities.
The film explores the pressure to adhere to Catholicism’s strict moral teachings while grappling with the natural process of sexual awakening. Alice’s curiosity is piqued after a seemingly harmless experience when an AOL chatroom became sexting. She not only was immediately thrown into an environment demanding purity and righteousness, but also highlighting the hypocrisy of those meant to embody moral authority. She catches retreat leaders making out, her priest watching porn, and false rumors spread among teachers and students about her. The revelation that these authority figures are not as pious as they portray themselves to be raises the question: is sexting on AOL truly that sinful? The film doesn’t moralize but instead invites the audience to question the rigid structures of religion.
In the one day sex-ed lecture taught by our religion teacher, we were told various statistics about the ineffectiveness of contraceptives. Of course, this all led back to the 100% effective form of contraception, abstinence. The phrase “abstinence is key” characterizes how sexual education is taught in Catholic schools. This leads to a blind curiosity when there are no open, honest conversations about sexuality. Alice is left to navigate this alone, with feelings of guilt and shame rising from natural human desires. This narrative challenges the broader cultural norms shaped by religion. While much of society is built upon religious foundations, fewer people are acting with the constant fear of damnation in the back of their minds. Yes, God, Yes explores this evolution within the mind of a teenage girl. She begins to question these beliefs she’s been raised with, reevaluating her moral compass. The film doesn’t simply critique Catholicism, it calls its basis into question. The principles of forgiveness, suspending judgment, and loving your neighbor are its foundation and often the ones least adhered to by its followers. As Alice reconciles with her guilt, she questions the nature of the guilt itself. If those around her are acting on their desires, why shouldn’t she? Alice’s story reminds us that self-discovery begins with doubt, and that’s not something to be feared but embraced.
Yes, God, Yes is not just a film about one girl’s experience with religion, it’s a story about the universal struggle to reconcile with personal identity with the world around us. In a society that often shames exploring sexuality, the film advocates for the importance of questioning those pillars of morality, to discover what we truly believe.