Christianity’s 2,000-year-old sexual ethic will not be normal within the contemporary West and hasn’t been for a while.
The notion that sex ought to be confined to the bounds of a lifelong covenant of marriage between one man and one woman will not be simply out of step with a culture reshaped by the sexual revolution and the LGBTQ movement. Many now consider our ethic to be something far worse than outmoded. It’s hateful, in response to the Southern Poverty Law Center; “dangerous,” per the Human Rights Campaign; and a source of “great harm,” says outstanding ethicist David Gushee.
Evangelical responses to those latest norms have varied. Some have doubled down on traditional beliefs as a matter of basic orthodoxy. Some have remained quietly traditional while avoiding public confrontation. And some have joined exvangelicals and mainline Christians to propose a theological revisionism that affirms LGBTQ relationships and sex outside of marriage.
Despite their differences, all three postures understandably have a foundational assumption in common: that our traditional sexual ethic is deeply unpopular. That, at best, it’s a matter of inauspicious but needed faithfulness, an obstacle to beat in evangelism and discipleship—or, worse, a significant reason behind dechurching, deconversion, and rejection of the gospel.
But is it possible that Scripture’s view of marriage and sexuality is seen by a small but growing crowd outside the church as a feature, not a bug?
It may be an excessive amount of to say the West is like G. K. Chesterton’s sailor who, having set off for adventure, found himself enchanted by the sunshine of his own residence shore. But I don’t think it’s too soon to say that the last decade of upheaval and alienation in our culture of sex and romance have made Christianity’s always-strange sexual ethic freshly attractive.
We’ve already seen this pattern with other elements of Christianity. Most famously, women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali shocked the world late last yr when she announced her conversion from atheism to Christianity (after previously deconverting from Islam). She embraced Christianity, she said, because she found the “desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition” to be the “only credible” choice to unite the West in opposition to “great-power authoritarianism,” “the rise of world Islamism,” and “the viral spread of woke ideology.”
Christianity, Hirsi Ali discovered, is the source of the rights and values she desires to defend, and where many progressives see our faith as repressive, she sees it as an awesome cultural asset. In this, she will not be alone. The New Atheist thinker Richard Dawkins expressed his enthusiasm for “cultural Christianity” this past spring. And creator Paul Kingsnorth, who moved from atheism to Buddhism to Christianity, similarly described his philosophical journey as one in all coming to value among the very elements of Christianity that modern Westerners are most certainly to reject.
“I grew up believing what all modern persons are taught: that freedom meant lack of constraint,” Kingsnorth wrote. But Christianity “taught me that this freedom was no freedom in any respect, but enslavement to the passions: a neat description of the primary thirty years of my life. True freedom, it seems, is to offer up your will and follow God’s.”
British journalist Louise Perry has not likewise announced her conversion, but she appears to be impressed, not repulsed, by Christianity’s sexual ethic. Her provocative 2022 book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, questions the merits of a sexual order based only on consent and begs for a greater ethic, “one which recognises other human beings as real people, invested with real value and dignity. It’s time for a sexual counter-revolution.”
Though she hasn’t embraced Christianity, Perry looks longingly on the very ethical teachings that many evangelicals see as burdens or liabilities. Here she is, writing in First Things last yr:
Whereas the Romans regarded male chastity as profoundly unhealthy, Christians prized it and insisted on it. Early converts were disproportionately female since the Christian valorization of weakness offered obvious advantages to the weaker sex, who could—for the primary time—demand sexual continence of men. Feminism will not be against Christianity: It is its descendant. …
What if … we understand the Christian era as a clearing in a forest? The forest is paganism: dark, wild, vigorous, and menacing, but additionally magical in its way. For two thousand years, Christians pushed the forest back, with burning and hacking, but additionally with pruning and cultivating, making a garden within the clearing with a view upward to heaven.
In recent a long time, Perry warns, the pagan forest is creeping back, crowding out that view.
This is just a group of anecdotes, in fact. Though recent polls show a slight decline in support for same-sex marriage and a similarly small reversal on sex and gender identity, the standard Christian ethic is clearly still a minority position. Yet this trend amongst thought leaders of fresh interest in Christianity as a positive cultural force is noteworthy—and maybe may trickle all the way down to most people.
What’s more, there could also be a lesson here for evangelicals: Rather than being defensive in regards to the countercultural facets of following Jesus, perhaps we are able to see anew that the very strangeness of Christian ethics will be inviting to those stuck within the thicket of cultural confusion.
This is the approach that theologian N. T. Wright took when asked in 2019 if he’s embarrassed by the Christian tackle sex and gender. “In the early Church, one in all the good attractions of Christianity was actually a sexual ethic. It is a world where kind of anything goes, where women and youngsters are exploited, and where slaves are exploited often in hideous and horrible ways,” he told The Atlantic. “So loads of people, particularly the ladies, found the Christian ideal of chastity amazingly refreshing.”
Wright was not naive. When his interviewer pushed back, arguing that a “restricted sexual ethic” that appealed “within the horrible world of ancient Christianity, where it was a terrible thing to be a girl,” won’t have the identical persuasive power today, Wright acknowledged the “constant difficulties”—but didn’t cede the purpose that the way in which Christians live will be attractive in our culture too.
Could our sexual ethic be a part of what Jesus had in mind when he urged his followers to “let your light shine before others, that they may even see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:16)? We aren’t accustomed to pondering of it that way. Yet we must do not forget that the Spirit “blows wherever it pleases” (John 3:8)—even toward the facets of Christianity that we’ve been conditioned to deemphasize in our desire to get a hearing in a hostile culture.
That’s to not conflate the cultural fruit of Christianity and the coherence of its worldview with the miracle of conversion itself. We should be wary of what theologian Carl Trueman rightly describes as “instrumentalizing” Christianity “within the service of a unique cultural campaign,” in addition to the tragedy of King Agrippa, who answered Paul’s articulation of the gospel by declaring himself “almost” persuaded (Acts 26:28, KJV). And as the author Andrew Menkis said in his appeal to the almost-persuaded creator Jordan Peterson, mere rules “cannot sate the hunger of our soul.”
Still, blessed are those “whose delight is within the law of the Lord” (Ps. 1:1–2), and we should always not be so surprised if people outside the church begin to see the blessing of Christian sexual ethics in a world bereft of meaning. Perhaps, like former skeptic C. S. Lewis, they’re realizing that the “hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”
Daniel Darling is the director of The Land Center for Cultural Engagement and the creator of several books including Agents of Grace, The Dignity Revolution, and the forthcoming In Defense of Christian Patriotism.
