How Important is Sexual Morality?

Obsessed with Sex?

The contemporary Church is way too obsessed with sexual morality.  It wastes so much time and energy preaching an extreme, prudish standard of sexual ethics, rather than focusing on more important ethical issues.  Obviously, justice is much more important than chastity.  Insisting on the extreme, traditional standards of Christian sexual ethics does not do anyone any good.  Instead, it is just a distraction from the really important ethical issues of social and economic justice.  If it really wants to serve God, the contemporary Church should stop obsessing so much over sexual ethics.

Or, so we are repeatedly told.  But is this really the case?  

The fact is, large portions of the modern Western Church have essentially completely abandoned any commitment to traditional Christian sexual ethics.  At this point, in most mainline denominations, pretty much anything goes regarding Christians’ sexual behavior.  In these denominations, sexual ethics has not just been de-emphasized; it has been abandoned.  

But Evangelical churches still hold to traditional Christian sexual ethics, and they are way too obsessed with it, aren’t they?  Actually, after attending Evangelical churches on a weekly basis for thirty years, I can count on one hand the number of times I recall hearing a sermon in which sexual ethics was a central topic.  Contemporary Evangelical churches simply do not talk about sexual ethics all that often.  And alarming studies show that there is virtually no difference between the behavior of young American Christians and young American non-Christians regarding sexual ethics.^[1]See, for example, the data contained in Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity–And Why It Matters by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006).  Of course, if churches do not often speak about the standards of Christian sexual ethics, then it is no surprise that many young Christians would fail to understand those standards and apply them to their own lives.  

We are repeatedly told that the contemporary Church is way too obsessed with sexual ethics.  But in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.  The modern Western Church has actually become extremely lax in its teaching and practice regarding sexual morality.  On this issue, it stands in radical discontinuity with the entirety of the Christian tradition over the past 2,000 years.  

Scripture and Sexual Ethics

Many, many modern Western Christians would have us believe that sexual morality does not matter, and that all that really matters, morally speaking, is justice.  However, even a casual perusal of Scripture shows that this is not at all the case.

Jesus did often speak about issues pertaining to justice.  However, Jesus also very clearly affirmed the importance of sexual ethics.  Far from relaxing the high standards of sexual ethics taught in the Torah, Jesus heightened them.  While the Torah allowed divorce and remarriage, Jesus forbade this, equating it with adultery (Matt 5:31-32).  Furthermore, Jesus taught, “Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.  If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.  And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell” (Matt 5:28-30).  Here, Jesus teaches that even looking at someone lustfully is sinful, and He immediately follows this teaching with a dire warning to get rid of anything that might cause one to sin, lest it lead one to hell.  Clearly, Jesus did not believe that sexual sin was something minor; He believed that it was very serious, serious enough to cause a person’s damnation.  

When we look at the teachings of the apostles in the rest of the New Testament, we can see the same attitude towards sexual ethics.  When the apostle Paul lists the works of the flesh that disqualify people from inheritance in God’s Kingdom, he lists sexual immorality right along other kinds of sins such as economic sins, without any differentiation between them (I Cor 6:9-10; Gal 5:19-21; Eph 5:3-6).  There is no indication anywhere that Paul thought that sexual sins were unimportant in comparison to other sins such as injustice.  “Flee from sexual immorality,” he urged, “All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body.  Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies” (I Cor 6:18-20).  

Anyone who actually examines what Jesus and His apostles have to say about morality will clearly see that lust is a very serious sin and that chastity is a very important virtue.  The idea that social and economic justice is all that really matters is simply not true.  Sexual morality is important.

The Importance of Sexual Ethics

“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.  For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world.  The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever” (I John 2:15-17).  

Pride, greed, and lust.  These are the three forces by which “the world” (the realm of human existence in rebellion against God) operates.  It was true of the Roman Empire in the first century, and it is true of American society in the twenty-first century (One only needs to watch a single commercial break on television to see that this is true).  Pride, greed, and lust give rise to the sins of violence, injustice, and sexual immorality, which are rampant in contemporary American culture, just as they were rampant in the first-century Roman Empire.  

Christians are called to repent of these sins.  While the world operates on the basis of pride, greed, and lust, the Church is a community that instead operates on the basis of love, truth, and self-sacrifice.  Violence, injustice, and sexual immorality thus have no place in the Church.  It is the Church’s refusal to participate in these sins that visibly distinguishes the Church from the world as God’s holy covenant people.  

Beginning in the fourth century, the Church compromised on the issue of violence.  While the Church of the first three centuries held firmly to the clear teachings of Jesus and His apostles that violence is absolutely forbidden for Christians, the fourth-century Church began to turn away from these teachings in order to accommodate the new political-ecclesial status quo of Christianity becoming the established religion of the Roman Empire.  This shift towards unfaithfulness on the issue of violence has continued throughout the Middle Ages and the modern period, down to the present day.

In the modern period, the Church compromised on the issue of greed.  Lending at interest, universally condemned by the pre-modern Christian tradition as the sin of usury, has become completely accepted without question by the modern Church.  The spirit of capitalism has convinced modern Christians that greed is actually a good thing, and the accumulation of wealth has become perfectly acceptable to most modern Western Christians.  The vital importance of simplicity and generosity to genuine Christian life has been lost.  Modern Christians have become largely deaf to Jesus’s dire warnings about the spiritual dangers of wealth.  

Now, someone might object that there are many modern Christians who say that economic justice is important.  But what these Christians mean by “justice” is using the violent, coercive power of the nation-state to forcibly take other people’s money and give it to the poor.  They do not mean that Christians are actually supposed to repent of the sin of greed and live lives of radical simplicity and generosity.  Thus, the calls for “justice” these Christians make does nothing to refute my point that the modern Church has compromised on the issue of greed.  

Since the Church has compromised on the issues of violence and greed, sexual morality has become the last vestige of the Church holding to any sort of distinctive Christian morality, the last vestige of the Church being visibly distinct from the world.  And now the postmodern Church is well on its way to abandoning even that.  If the postmodern Church does fully abandon traditional Christian sexual ethics, it will represent the complete dissolution of the Church and its complete absorption into the world.  

This is why holding firmly to traditional Christian sexual morality is so important.  It is rather sad that sexual morality seems to be the one area of life in which the Church is still visibly distinct from the world.  It is rather absurd that many contemporary churches teach that sex outside of marriage is forbidden under any circumstances, but that it is acceptable to kill people as long as you have a good reason, in spite of Jesus commanding us to love our enemies.  But at least it is something.  We must strengthen what remains, and then work to reform and revive the Church, rather than giving up on being the Church altogether.  For, whether they realize it or not, that is what those Christians who are trying to get the Church to abandon traditional Christian sexual morality are working towards: the complete dissolution of the Church.  

We live in a society in which there is an epidemic of sexually-transmitted diseases, broken homes, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and sexual violence against women.  All of these societal problems are at root caused by lust.  Yet many contemporary Christians want to tell us that sexual morality is unimportant and that chastity does not matter.  This is utterly baffling.  By far the most common form of violence in our society today is abortion, and the reason most abortions occur is, ultimately, because of sexual immorality.  So it is absurd say that Christians should be opposed to violence and injustice, while at the same time trivializing sexual immorality.  Violence, injustice, and sexual immorality are all interconnected.  If we want to be faithful Christians, we must be opposed to all three.