07/10/2026
From our friend Richard Betteridge, the Naturist Pastor: -
As I was preparing my Daily Bible Study, a sentence spoke deeply to me and I thought I needed to share it with my Christian-Naturist brethren here. This morning, while looking at Revelation 18, this thought was implanted in my brain.
As Christians, as naturists, and as exiles, we recognise something deeply personal in Revelation’s call:
to live differently, desire differently, value differently.
To refuse Babylon’s glamour.
To resist her promises.
To step out of her imagination and into God’s.
Because for us, naturism has never been rebellion.
It has never been spectacle.
It has never been shock value.
It has been a quiet refusal of Babylon’s imagination.
Babylon teaches people to desire performance, image, status, curated bodies, curated lives, curated faith. But we have learned to desire presence, truth, ordinary embodiment, unmasked humanity.
Babylon teaches people to value power, hierarchy, and the illusion of control. But we have learned to value belonging, honesty, gentleness, and the unadorned self.
Babylon teaches people to live through fear — fear of exposure, fear of judgment, fear of not being enough. But we have learned to live through freedom — freedom from shame, freedom from pretense, freedom from the costumes Babylon demands.
So when Revelation says,
“Come out of her, my people,”
we hear it not as a warning, but as recognition.
We’ve already been doing it.
We’ve already stepped out of Babylon’s imagination.
We’ve already refused her glamour.
We’ve already resisted her promises.
We’ve already chosen a different way of living, desiring, valuing.
We didn’t leave the old systems because we stopped loving Jesus.
We left because we stopped believing Babylon’s imagination about Jesus.
We didn’t embrace naturism to shock anyone.
We embraced it to live without the fear Babylon taught us to carry.
We didn’t become exiles because we were angry.
We became exiles because we were honest.
Revelation — read through the eyes of the exile — finally gives us language for the journey we’ve been on.
It tells us that stepping out of Babylon’s imagination is not failure.
It’s faithfulness.
It’s freedom.
It’s healing.
And it’s the beginning of seeing the world — and ourselves — clearly again.
On Substack
Richard Betteridge
