Who Told You That You Were Naked?

“Who told you that you were naked?” 

Questions are curious things. They bring us into dialogue with others—this one, with Deity. 

This particular question is still one of the most important. This question is meant to save. Adam and Eve didn’t discover their nakedness on their own. Lucifer told them about it, and he reframed their relationship to their bodies. In that reframing, he also shifted their relationship to God. For the first time, they were ashamed of the very bodies God had given them. Their aprons of fig leaves represented a self-made identity—what Adam and Eve constructed when they accepted someone else’s story about who they were. But for Adam and Eve and for each of us, God’s question is not an accusation. It’s an invitation to examine whose story you are living in.

Someone handed you a story about your body, about what it means. You’ve been living inside that story ever since. You probably didn’t notice. Today, there are three stories about our bodies that tend to be prominent. The first is the oldest and, in many ways, the hardest to shake. It begins not with a question but with a verdict.

Cover Up: Self as Born Evil

Verdict One: You are born evil. What is it like to believe that? It must be exhausting. Every bodily appetite is a threat. Every desire is a battle. It starts with the belief that the physical world, which includes your body, is but a shadow of a truer reality. That better reality is the afterlife. Your body is a shadow that holds you back. This is where we get the idea of “mind over matter”: the mind is pure, but the body is deficient and requires mastery. The logic goes like this: if the body is unholy and you come into this world with a body, you must be born unholy and in sin. This sets the stage for infant baptism; you are born evil and need immediate redemption. (The scripture most often enlisted for this verdict, “the natural man is an enemy to God,” is not a bodily verdict; when read in full, Mosiah 3:19 is a call back to childlike faith, not a condemnation of the flesh.)

This story creates a schism between your mind and your body. You are not to trust your body. You, in fact, live in the enemy. So you are tempted to hate it. You wish it were different, or you wish it away. You certainly don’t trust it. You may start to think your body is “the enemy of God” or “the natural man.” And since your body is drawn physically to other bodies for comfort or connection, you become suspicious of other people, too. 

The restored gospel teaches precisely the opposite. Nearly three decades ago, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, cited the revelation that “the spirit and the body are the soul of man” and taught that the body is not the enemy of the soul; it is an essential part of the soul.

Viewing the body as the enemy creates an unhealthy relationship with yourself, your body, and others. You feel suspicious and wary of physical connection with others. You start to think of others as temptations. Statements like “She is the great temptress” and “He is just a pig” begin to feel normal. You simply don’t trust yourself or others, and the story gives you reasons for that: many have fallen into the pleasures of the body and found it hard to recover. The verdict hardens into some kind of lived certainty. Your body cannot be anything other than evil.

Your worship becomes marked by discontent with yourself and with others. That discontent creates suspicion in every relationship, including your relationship with God. When God places people in your path to nurture you, you may dismiss them because closeness feels dangerous. This is the path of loneliness. Your orientation toward God comes from a place of necessary shame. You reject the gift of mortality as inherently evil; the very instrument God gave you to experience life becomes, in this story, a weight pulling you under.

In this story, you externalize goodness and internalize evil. The downstream consequence is that you lose confidence in God’s presence. The short message is “Cover up; you’re shameful.”

And here is the thing about serious psychological damage: it also generates its opposite. When a story produces enough casualties—in this case, people who learned to hate their bodies and came to God already ashamed—a counterstory rises to correct it. The second story is that counter-story. For many people, it is the first time they feel free. And that’s exactly why it’s so persuasive and exactly why it’s worth examining carefully.

Nothing to Cover: Self as Born Good

Verdict Two: You are born good. Every person is essentially good and cannot be anything other than good. This is a revolutionary idea. And for people who grew up ashamed of their bodies, that verdict feels like a breath of fresh air. Think about it. Someone finally says, “The problem was never you.” Any guilt you may have felt was handed to you. In fact, you didn’t arrive broken; rather, you were made broken by the system, the institution, or anyone who wanted to make you manageable. Now, however, you stand taller. You stop apologizing for being you. That feeling matters more than anything else you have felt in a long time.

If you’ve ever been labeled “bad,” this story says the badness actually isn’t in you. Whatever “badness” exists comes from the outside, from societal ills imposed on you. What are those societal ills? Whenever groups of people, hierarchies, patriarchies, or institutions want you to act a certain way, this story says they are attempting to control you. Controlled behavior is inauthentic behavior. But because you are born good, whatever you want to do with your body, regardless of external pressures, is also good. As long as you’re free to be yourself, you’ll flourish. 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that society corrupts you. Karl Marx argued that your class position determines you. Herbert Marcuse said even your desires were manufactured by a system designed to keep you compliant. These three thinkers reached one conclusion: whatever is wrong with you comes from outside you. The self, in each case, is good—a kind of secular Eden—and the world is the serpent. It sounds like liberation to many. But it’s actually a secular metaphysic. You can’t verify it. You can’t falsify it. It simply reassigns original sin from the self to society, and, in doing so, removes the one thing that might actually change you: the possibility that you are, in any meaningful sense, responsible. So, when goodness is your birthright and corruption always comes from elsewhere, self-examination becomes optional. And the self, protected from critique, turns endlessly inward. Not liberated. Not free. Absorbed.

So who are you, truly? According to this story, you are whoever you choose to be. You are the source of good. Whatever you choose must also be good. That is the essence of the authentic self: the self that fully trusts itself to create its own identity. Because you are the ultimate authority on who you are, no one else will ever fully get you. The absurd end of this line of thinking is for billions of selves, each fundamentally different, to be fundamentally alone. Alone because no one else can ever fully be you. Your self is only truly comprehensible to yourself. This type of expressive individualism is sung from the rooftops with pop lyrics such as “I can buy myself flowers…I can love me better than you can.” But this is not so much a pop lyric as a philosophy of life.

In the 2022 worldwide devotional “Choices for Eternity,” President Russell M. Nelson, then president of The Church of Jesus Christ, addressed these premises directly, teaching that your identity is not whoever you choose to be. He identified three enduring designations—child of God, child of the covenant, disciple of Jesus Christ—and taught “no identifier should displace, replace, or take priority” over them. 

And yet, if you scroll far enough, a counterorthodoxy appears: “No one gets to tell me who I am.” “Cut the toxic people out of your life.” “You are enough, just as you are.” “Your only obligation is to yourself.” These aren’t just slogans. They are popular expressions of a serious philosophical tradition. That’s precisely why they need to be answered seriously, not dismissed.

But this liberation is false, for one simple reason: it is lonely. In your desire to be free, you free yourself from everyone. You internalize goodness and externalize evil. You stop seeking to change. The short message is “There’s nothing to cover.” Notice what both stories share. One says you are broken; the other says you are complete. One says, “Trust nothing in yourself”; the other says, “Trust nothing outside yourself.” They are mirror images. They produce mirror outcomes: isolation dressed in different clothes. Those who hate their bodies and those who worship self-expression can end up in the same place: alone, with an identity that doesn’t quite fit. You wonder why neither shame nor self-worship has made you feel whole. That is the hinge. Both of these stories begin with a verdict. The third, however, begins before the verdict.

Clothed by Another: Self as Born Innocent

The third story is that the verdict is not out yet. The restored gospel of Jesus Christ teaches that you are born innocent. You have the potential to be both good and evil. You are neither fixed as good nor condemned as evil. You are open. That openness is the space where agency lives. This is not a revolutionary idea; it is a restorative one. From this perspective, your body is a gift from God, a temple, and an essential component of the plan of salvation. As with Adam and Eve, you begin making choices between good and evil after a period of innocence. You arrive in this world with no verdict against you, only a readiness to be in relationship. Mormon declared plainly, “Little children are whole, for they are not capable of committing sin,” condemning the notion that any child comes into the world under condemnation. Doctrine and Covenants 93 further declares, “Every spirit of man was innocent in the beginning.” 

You come into this world innocent but not settled. This life is the theater of the human condition. It is a stage where innocence gives way to a performance. It is where you swing the sword toward good or evil. You aren’t yet good or evil at birth, but you are oriented toward being known. This makes God’s covenants not a correction to something broken but a fulfillment of something latent.

Every person in your life shows you part of yourself. But no one shows you all of it. And what lies in the unseen parts is not always comfortable. A man who spent years in a Soviet prison camp put it better than most. In “The Gulag Archipelago,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the line between good and evil passing through every human heart:

Gradually, it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil. 

Here is why this matters to you right now: good and evil are not relative terms because a power outside you brings knowledge of both. As Mormon taught: 

The Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil; … every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ…But whatsoever thing persuadeth men to do evil, and believe not in Christ,…ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of the devil.’

This Light doesn’t just help you choose between good and evil. It also orients you toward the relationships through which your choices help you become most fully yourself. Emmanuel Levinas spent a career arguing that it is the face of another that calls you into responsibility. That call draws forth a self you couldn’t have assembled on your own. He was right about the structure, even if he didn’t have the full theology to complete it. You discover who you truly are in a covenant relationship with God, with a spouse, and with a community. That is your true identity. Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles taught that “the highest and deepest sense of belonging is obtained through keeping covenants with God.” Thus, the self is not found by looking inward but by being drawn outward into relationship.

Think of your best friend. Now imagine that person disappears from your life. You would grieve the loss of that friend, of course, but that’s not all you would lose. You would also lose a particular version of yourself that only that friend could bring out. You may have stood in front of a mirror trying to summon that version and found that it doesn’t work because this person is, in a very real sense, a partial owner of your personality. They have access to dimensions of you that you yourself cannot unlock, and that is precisely why you love your friend. You didn’t just love the person. You loved who you became in their presence. And that loss you just imagined—that’s not just grief for a person. It’s grief for a self.

Different people draw out different parts of you, some of which may genuinely surprise you or even frighten you. This is why surrounding yourself with a diverse group of people is one of the most powerful paths to self-knowledge, not because they tell you who you are but because in their presence, you discover who you are. You discover your possibilities for doing good and evil. But no human relationship, however rich, shows you the whole of what you are.

Consider what it means to be seen completely by Christ. Not just dimensions. All of it. The parts you perform for others, the parts you hide from yourself, the parts that haven’t emerged yet because you haven’t been in the right presence to call them out. If every human relationship reveals you partially, then complete self-knowledge requires a relationship with a being of complete knowledge. No human relationship, however deep, gives you back a complete self. Only one relationship does. That is why the covenant isn’t a transaction. It is the condition of your fullest becoming. And if that is true (if you are only fully yourself in His presence), then the question is no longer whether to surrender. It is only whether you are ready to do so. 

So what does innocence ask of you? It asks you to stop hiding. The fig leaves were never just about nakedness; they were about control—about managing what God and others were allowed to see. To receive the covering He offers, you have to release that control. You have to come out from behind the identity you constructed for yourself and stand where Adam and Eve stood: seen, vulnerable, and waiting. That is the surrender. His purpose has never been to expose or condemn, but, as He declared to Moses, “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”

So here is the question He is still asking—not as an accusation or as a test, but as an invitation. Who told you that you were naked? Whose story have you been living in, the one that says you are broken, or the one that says you need no one? Neither story is His. He has a different one. It begins with innocence. It moves through covenant. And it ends with you, clothed by Him.