Why are Christians So Hung Up on Sex?

It offends our society. It's a common complaint among those who are Millennials or younger. The person who asked me, though, was fifty. "Why do Christians talk about sex so much when there are so many other sins they don't talk about?"

There are other ways we hear this expressed: "Why do Christians care so much what people do in their bedrooms?" "Why don't Christians want gays to love each other?" However they express it, people today are both perplexed and offended that Christianity opposes the sexual freedom considered a fundamental right in the modern western world. So how can we answer that?

The first thing I'd want to do is try to correct a misconception. "Why are Christians so hung up on sex?" We're really not. "Why do Christians talk about sex so much?" We really don't. I've been in church just about every Sunday since I was born. In my fifty years, I don't think I've ever heard a sermon on sex or any sexual issue. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I'm confident my experience is the norm: I think most people would rather not talk about it. I've heard sermons that addressed fornication or adultery or homosexuality, but the topic came up because it was the next passage in the book the pastor was preaching through.

Even in those cases, the passage and therefore the sermon presented the sexual sin as one sin in a list of sins. For example, when Jesus taught that it's not what goes into the body but what comes out of the heart that defiles: “For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly" (Mark 7:21-22). If you're teaching that passage, you have to mention sexual immorality, but if you don't set it beside theft, murder, greed, and envy, you're not doing justice to the passage.

But we do seem to talk about it a lot outside of church, so the second thing I'd want to say is that we didn't start this conversation. The sexual revolution brought things once spoken of only quietly and done only behind closed doors into our living rooms. Social "progressives" tried to normalize adultery and pre-marital sex first. People mostly still look down on adultery, at least in the US,¹ but fornication is considered normal and good now. As Ed Welch points out, cohabitation "has gone from shameful, to frowned upon, to 'better than the alternatives,' to accepted, to a necessary phase of every relationship that is to be celebrated"² in just a few decades.

After that, there seemed to be a coordinated effort by the entertainment industry to convince us homosexuality was normal and beautiful. Once same-sex marriage was declared a right by the Supreme Court, they switched their efforts to transgenderism, which was devastatingly effective.³

The culture war exists because the cultural left decided to push against what had been accepted moral standards, in every major religion, for millennia. If they'd tried to normalize theft or lying, the Christian response would have been basically the same. I'm too young to remember much about the early 80s, but I'm confident at least some pastors were preaching against the "greed is good" mantra many were embracing. Yes, there are certainly sins that Christians don't pay enough attention to. But when seemingly the entire culture is trying to throw a sin in our faces and normalize it, pushback is to be expected.

Which brings us to the third thing I'd say, which is Christians care about sex because God cares about sex. And he should. Ross Douthat explains it well:

If you assume that God doesn’t care about most people at all, that no individual life or relationship matters in the grand scheme of things, then sure, sex doesn’t matter, but it doesn’t matter because almost nothing else that we do matters either.

But once you accept that the universe was probably made with us in mind, that there is some cosmic purpose to human consciousness and human lives, then why wouldn’t God or the cosmos care about the most important way that human beings bond with one another, create the most intimate and the most sprawling intergenerational forms of community, and participate in the creation of new life?

It would be a strange God indeed who cared intensely about how we spend our money or what votes we cast or how we feel about ourselves, but somehow didn’t give a d--- about behaviors that might forge or shatter a marriage, create a life in good circumstances or terrible ones, form a lifelong bond or an addictive habit, bind someone to their own offspring or separate them permanently. To the extent that this God is assumed to be preparing us for a life that transcends earthly existence, it would be especially strange not to care about how people approach one of the strongest desires of the flesh, the most embodied form of passion, the kind of carnal impulse that humans are most likely to glory in and also most likely to feel as a form of bondage.⁴

"Why does God care what we do with our genitals?" Because God loves us. Sex, like so many other good things, is healthy only when used the way it was designed to be used. And God should know, because he made us. You trust the maker of a car to know what kind of fuel it needs. Trust that your Maker knows how sex is supposed to work and what can happen when it's used improperly.

"But you don't understand, people are born this way." Even if that's true, it doesn't matter. We are all born with desires that depart from God's design. Even our society still recognizes that some sexual desires are immoral to act upon. We are fallen creatures prone to perverting good things into bad things. It's long been observed that monogamy doesn't come naturally to most humans, but that is the way our Maker intended sex to be used, and any departure from that design is rebellion against our Creator and ultimately destructive because of that departure.

And because it is destructive and because of the results of that rebellion, Christianity requires not only that followers of Jesus obey but that we want good for our neighbors, which is for them to know the truth. It's loving to tell someone who's caught up in substance abuse you want them to stop. It's loving when a doctor tells someone whose cholesterol, A1C, and blood pressure are dangerously high that they need to change their lifestyle. It's loving to tell someone who's engaging in sexual behavior that violates their Creator's rules that they should not. It would not be loving to simply let people persist in destroying themselves. If you love people, you want them to know the truth.

So while Christians are not "hung up" on sex, we do care about it because God cares about it, and because we care about you.



1 The uniquely American panic over adultery

2 Sex and Christ Crucified

3 See Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

4 Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, page 168. Emphasis in original, but the censoring is mine.


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