Opinion | How Should Christians Have Sex?

In light of its damaging effects, several Christian leaders have recently suggested a more gracious sexual ethic. Joshua Harris, best known for his 1997 manifesto, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” in which he argued for a model of “courtship” supervised by parents, with no kissing before the wedding day, publicly apologized to people who were “misdirected or unhelpfully influenced by” his teachings. His thinking on sex and dating “has changed significantly in the past 20 years,” he wrote. He admitted that much of what he taught was not actually scriptural. The Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran pastor in Denver, has proposed a “sexual reformation” in light of purity culture’s traumatic effects. In “Shameless,” Pastor Bolz-Weber writes, “It is time for us to grab some matches and haul our antiquated and harmful ideas about sex and bodies and gender into the yard,” “burn it” and “start over.” She proposes a sexual ethic grounded in the goodness of bodies and of sexual expression based in consent, mutuality and care.

I am 34, unmarried and a committed Christian, and have, over time, not held to the purity standards I inherited from my faith community. One would think that Pastor Bolz-Weber’s shame-free ethic would be a tall glass of water for a grace-parched soul. Instead, I find myself left with a sense of loss. For amid the horrible teachings about women’s bodies and God’s anger over an exposed bra strap, the proponents of purity — or the best of them at least — were trying to offer us the gift of sex within marriage. As Christianity teaches that marriage is not simply a legal bind but a spiritual covenant, so married sex is a bodily expression that two people will be for each other, through all seasons.

As I continue to date with hopes of meeting a partner, I yearn for guidance on how to integrate faith and sexuality in ways that honor more than my own desires in a given moment. Here, the Christian teaching on sacramentality is helpful. All creation, including human bodies, by grace reveals deeper spiritual truth. In other words, matter matters. So when a person engages another person sexually, Christians would say, it’s not “just” bodies enacting natural evolutionary urges but also an encounter with another soul. To reassert this truth feels embarrassingly retrograde and precious by today’s standards. But even the nonreligious attest that in sex, something “more” is happening, however shrouded that more might be.

This is why a sexual ethic centered on consent, which is what those of us who’ve lost purity culture are left with, feels flimsy. To be sure, consent is a nonnegotiable baseline, one that Christian communities overlook. (I never once heard about consent in youth group.) But two people can consent to something that’s nonetheless damaging or selfish. Consent crucially protects against sexual assault and other forms of coercion. But it doesn’t necessarily protect against people using one another in quieter ways. I long for more robust categories of right and wrong besides consent — a baseline, but only that — and more than a general reminder not to be a jerk. I can get that from Dan Savage, but I also want to know what Jesus thinks.

Purity culture as it was taught to my generation hurt many people and kept them from knowing the loving, merciful God at the heart of Christian faith. Unfortunately, many churches still promote some version of purity culture, even as others have tried to disentangle it from the sexism and shame of its earlier iterations. Purity culture as it was modeled for evangelical teenagers in the 1990s is not the future of Christian sexual ethics. But neither is the progressive Christian approach that simply baptizes casual sex in the name of self-expression and divorces sex from covenant faithfulness and self-sacrificial love.