What the Body Positivity Movement Gets Wrong

The grass has turned a brilliant shade of green, the birds are aflutter outside my window, and the bathing suit ads are proliferating my social media timelines. Some viral Instagram post is circulating showing a mom and her 2.5 kids wading knee deep in the ocean, Mom’s love handles spilling slightly over her bikini bottom, her breasts rounding out her top, and the silver threads of stretched skin across her belly. “This body has birthed 2.5 kids and that’s what makes it so beautiful!” she’s saying in her caption. 

In mommy blogs and other online spaces, we see similar trends and conversations. In a post from Risen Motherhood on the beauty of a woman’s postpartum body, Lauren Washer writes, “The changes in our bodies after having babies may make us feel physically broken and undesirable.” Blogger Tim Challies responded to the piece by writing, “A loving husband gazes at his wife’s body and sees reminders of their shared life—reminders that only her body has recorded.” Challies' point is that the story of making and then birthing babies together makes his wife’s body more beautiful to him. 

He’s right: We were not made to live lives independent of others. “It is not good,” God said, “for man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). The physical scars that come from those shared lives are worth celebrating, and the body positivity movement reminds us of that simple truth. As the sweet church ladies say, “God didn’t make no junk.” But as someone who was unmarried until age 34 and who’s had numerous pregnancy losses since then, I worry about the implication that motherhood or marriage—or at the very least, being found attractive by men—is what gives a woman’s body value. 

I worry even more that we’re finding consolation with our bodies mostly if they have borne babies or been unified with a spouse or undergone some transformative experience that deems our bodies as good. In other words, the body positivity movement leans too often on women’s extrinsic value and not on their intrinsic value. Even in spaces where non-moms are celebrating their bodies, they seem to be celebrating them because they’re #fatpositive or Before and Afters of extreme weight loss due to exercise or diet. Regardless, rather than finding our worth in God’s love, we look to external voices or experiences to validate these earthen vessels (2 Cor. 4:7). 

External voices and experiences do form us as humans. All around us, we see women whose bodies have faced trauma and suffering for a whole host of reasons. There are those who were abandoned or abused whose bodies bear the scars of personal wars; those who fell victim to dieting from a young age whose bodies bear evidence of too many gains and losses; those who lost pregnancy after pregnancy whose bodies bears hormonal brokenness; those who are the descendants of slaves who still carry the altered genetics of that trauma; and those whose bodies simply grow old and frail without the love of a partner.  

These women and so many more may have what the poet Jane Kenyon called “a difficult friendship” with their physical selves. Most of us do. From Genesis 3 on, we’ve been ashamed of our nakedness, the marks we bear on our bodies, and the features we cannot control. But the body of a man or a woman can not be beautiful because of what they have done or left undone with it. All bodies are aging, failing, faltering, and breaking; that’s what happens to all created matter. We bear on our bodies the marks of all our yesterdays, and no one comes out unscathed.  

In that context, there must be something more profound happening that makes us beautiful or valuable than the story we have lived or the story that’s been thrust on us. It must be more than having had babies or sharing a story with a spouse. It must be more than the sum of our experiences—even the non-maternal ones. What is it, then?  

Before Adam and Eve covered themselves with flora and foliage, before they tasted the fruit that started the fall, they were created by God and blessed with the very first, “Very good” (Gen. 1:31). Everything else God made was simply good, but for man and woman he said “very good.” This was before our first parents shared a story, before any children had been born to them, before they had received the creation mandate, or named the animals, or had a vocation. Just as they were, God found them to be good.

This is what made the first human bodies beautiful: God’s love for his creation. In the popular Jesus Storybook Bible, Sally Lloyd Jones writes of Adam and Eve, “They were lovely because [God] loved them.” This is what the body positivity movement or mom-bod posts can get wrong. We are not lovely because of what we’ve done with our bodies but because of who made our bodies. 

Sadly we live in a post-Christian world where God’s love is no longer central to most people’s lives. And because many do not know or feel the love of God, but still know and feel an intrinsic need for goodness, we view our bodies as replacements for our souls. In other words—we think of our core identities too strictly in terms of our physical experiences, and suddenly self-determination becomes the definition by which we measure ourselves. What good have I produced? What fruit have I borne? What is my legacy? What am I leaving behind me? How will I be remembered?  

It's common in many of the social media posts I cite above to see comments like, “I want to be remembered as the mom who had fun this summer.” This is the heart of this misguided message: because we do not see our bodies with intrinsic worth because of who made them and who loves them, we measure our bodies by who sees them and how.  

This is not a new problem, though the Body Positivity may be a new iteration of it. Immediately after tasting the fruit that would render death for the human race, the nakedness of Adam and Eve was revealed to them and they hid. They sensed with alarming clarity that something was amiss with their bodies now and God would now see them differently.  

The struggle for the Christian today is the same: does God still love us, marred as we are by the weights and sin that so easily entangle us? Does he still find value and beauty in a crumbling creation? We know the answer is yes, but we’re still grasping at fig leaves to cover and defend the nakedness we feel. Perhaps we’re not covering our actual nakedness, but we are covering our vulnerable spaces, excusing our stretch marks and soft skin by the proof of children, proving the worth of our bodies by their societal acceptance or the Before and After photo we keep on our fridge. But God doesn’t need our excuses and he’s doesn’t want them. He wants us to simply say, “I am afraid and so I keep on hiding.”

 Maybe we’re not hiding our bikini clad body, but we’re still hiding behind the story of the babies it grew or the husband who loves it. Or we’re hiding behind the story we’ve lived with our bodies, hoping to be found worthy within them. We’re still looking for reasons to be loved and found lovely.

 All of our bodies are crumbling, they’re just taking different routes to get there. But all our bodies are good, beautiful, and valuable, because God made them. “We are lovely because God loves us,” that’s it. That’s the truest and most positive message for all our bodies.