The problem is not that we talk about sex. The problem is how we talk about sex.
How do you convince a room full of teenagers to chant “sex is great” while simultaneously signing abstinence pledge cards? According to Christine Joy Gardner, by making chastity sexy. Gardner attended numerous purity events hosted by groups such as Pure Freedom, Silver Ring Thing, and True Love Waits, and conducted over sixty interviews with the leaders and attendees. She notes how modern evangelical purity culture borrowed strategies from pop culture to make the message of abstinence more winsome. She writes, “Silver Ring Thing events have been described as part rave, part Saturday Night Live, and part Saturday night revival.”1
The promise of sex in marriage was the carrot dangled in front of teenagers to get them to commit to abstinence. And while this sexy carrot may have convinced youth to chant, clap, and sign pledge cards, it ultimately made sex less about the union between two self-giving, embodied souls in marriage and more about a future reward for sexual restraint.
And it made promises it couldn’t keep. Sara Moslener, author of Virgin Nation, says that early purity reformers taught that men who practiced sexual self-control were “promised health, happiness, and a wholesome (i.e., married) life.”2 The modern purity movement made similar promises, accompanied by strobe lights and the music of Usher. One young man admitted to Gardner that he had committed to sexual abstinence in order to give himself the gift of “future happiness in marriage.” Purity advocates hoped that the promise of healthy, satisfying marriages would “curb sexual temptation” in adolescents. However, Gardner points out that this goal changed the motivation for sexual abstinence from “pleasing God to pleasing oneself.”3
Like many young stars, Justin Bieber got caught up in immorality and partying. But more recently, Bieber has been attending Hillsong Church in New York City. Not only that, but he decided to practice celibacy with his fiancée, Hailey, before their wedding day. He talked about his decision with Vogue magazine, explaining:
[God] doesn’t ask us not to have sex for him because he wants rules and stuff. . . . He’s like, I’m trying to protect you from hurt and pain. I think sex can cause a lot of pain. Sometimes people have sex because they don’t feel good enough. Because they lack self-worth. Women do that, and guys do that. I wanted to rededicate myself to God in that way because I really felt it was better for the condition of my soul. And I believe that God blessed me with Hailey as a result. There are perks. You get rewarded for good behavior.4
I appreciate Bieber’s commitment to chastity before marriage, but I am concerned with his motivation. I don’t blame him—this is what we have been teaching for years. But what happens when adolescents are taught that good sexual behavior is always rewarded with timely marriage and amazing sex, and these promises fail to materialize or live up to the hype? They might wonder what else the church is lying about.
In purity rhetoric, married sex is the prize. Rebecca St. James imagines, with a romantic flourish, the honeymoon of a couple who waited for marriage to have sex, while Gresh recounts her own wedding night, sharing how it surpassed her and her husband’s expectations.5 Over and over again in the books of my youth, the promise was repeated that saving sex for marriage is “worth the wait.”6 In I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Harris says that a commitment to sexual purity in singleness is like “delaying our gratification” and “storing up passion” that will make married sex more meaningful.7 And Arterburn and Stoeker talk in Every Man’s Battle about the “physically gratifying pay off that comes from obedience to God’s sexual standards.”8
One woman, Marta, told me she was taught that if she saved sex for marriage, she would “have an amazing sex life with no problems at all.” Sarah added that marriage between two virgins was portrayed as “mind-blowing” and “effortlessly fantastic.” By emphasizing the joy and pleasure of sex in marriage, purity culture was able to rightly assure young men and women that there is a God-honoring context for sex. It also challenged religious arguments about procreation being the only purpose for sex in marriage. I praise God for this. But somewhere along the line modern purity culture turned married sex from a blessing into a trophy. And God never treats sex this way.
Sex is not a reward for good behavior. If it were, all the godly, chaste men and women we know would be married right now, having fantastic sex and making lots of beautiful babies without any struggles with illness or infertility. If sex is something you earn by pure behavior, then our friends who sleep with their boyfriends and girlfriends outside of marriage would all be impotent or having terrible sex. Obviously this is not the case.
The reality is that one of my closest friends has been faithful to God’s sexual ethic her entire life. She spends her time teaching at-risk children how to read. She is a foster parent. She babysits for her married friends on the weekends so they can have date nights. She paints beautifully and sings while she cooks. She loves her local church and studies the Scriptures diligently. She is beautiful, warm, and kind—and she is still unmarried.
The reality is that my husband and his first wife didn’t kiss until the altar. A year into their marriage, she got cancer and eventually got so sick that she couldn’t have sex. Before she died, she was told that the chemotherapy had made her infertile, dashing her dream of ever having children. They were obedient to God’s Word, pure and faithful, and they still suffered immensely in their marriage.
The reality is that I saved myself for my first husband. He was my first kiss, and I was a virgin on our wedding night. Then, almost five years into our marriage, he left the Christian faith and divorced me. I remember physically aching from the lack of touch and the bruise of abandonment. What do you do when you follow all the rules and find yourself divorced at age twenty-nine, childless, no longer a virgin, with a heavy load of trust issues slung over your shoulder?
The reality is that, despite being warned about guilt, STDs, and teen pregnancy, some of my peers have enjoyed numerous sexual experiences outside of marriage without any apparent consequences. Winner points out that the idea that “we will necessarily feel bad after premarital sex” forgets our sin nature.9 Our depravity is good at smothering our conscience. Sinful sex, Winner says, will make some people feel fantastic.
The moral of these stories is not that sexual purity isn’t worth it. But if our motivation for pursuing purity is personal fulfillment—the reward of married sex—then when the wedding never happens, our virginity is stolen from us, our marriage crumbles, our spouse dies, or sex fails to be nirvana, our conclusion will be that sexual purity isn’t worth it.
In Psalm 73, Asaph laments that the wicked seem “always at ease,” while his own obedience to God has not kept him from suffering:
All in vain have I kept my heart clean
and washed my hands in innocence. (Psalm 73:13 ESV)
He goes on to remember that the wicked will one day be “destroyed in a moment” (v. 19) and those who make God their refuge will ultimately be received to glory (v. 24). But he must grapple with the truth that we can’t exchange our obedience to God for earthly reward. In our struggle to obey God, we may witness the wicked thriving, enjoying various pleasures, riches, and security, and wonder: Is it worth it?
Ultimately, reserving sex for marriage is worth it but because God is worth obeying. It’s worth it because marriage is where sex belongs. Practicing sexual abstinence doesn’t guarantee anyone marriage or awesome sex any more than taking up our cross and following Christ guarantees us health, wealth, or happiness. When we obey God for personal gain, Ferguson says, “Christ himself ceases to be central and becomes a means to an end.”10 Maybe one reason people leave the church is because we tell them purity is about sex, when really it should be about God.
As a teenager, I read my fair share of Christian romance novels. They were full of dramatic plot lines, one-room schoolhouses, and Canadian Mounties. They were stories where the word sex was never even mentioned, yet I got the distinct impression that being wanted sexually was the height of love and the solution to insecurity and rejection, that sexual intimacy solves loneliness. Christian dating books communicated a similar message: sinful lust was just a byproduct of singleness, and once I was married, I would be so sexually satisfied that lust would become a nonissue. Sex would solve it. Sex would solve so many things.
As a teenager during the era of purity culture, I internalized the message that sex was the most important aspect of marriage. Bombarded by articles urging Christians to “get married young” so they wouldn’t explode from built-up passion, I began eagerly awaiting this promised happiness. I’ve since realized that, when we hold our joy captive until we get what we want, our discontentment looms larger and larger. Our idols grow taller. The imagination of the celibate is not challenged by the reality of sex—the reality that it is inconsistent and imperfect just like everything else after the fall—so the idea of sex can easily grow from a God-created good into a god of its own.
“I’m trying to think about how to articulate this,” Sarah told me. “Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe married friends when they tell me about the actual role sex plays in their marriage. Sex in marriage was emphasized so dang much that it ended up seeming like it was the thing that would make or break your marriage. I don’t remember hearing even half as many talks on healthy relationships as I did about sex.” Her experience resembles my own, and it was only after I was married that I realized that though sex is a part of the puzzle of marriage, it does not make up the whole picture.
For those who marry, the grand, all-consuming image of sex that purity culture paints for adolescents must reckon with the reality of sex in marriage. For some, this reckoning arrives the first night of their honeymoon. One man, Justin, told me that from everything he was taught growing up in evangelical purity culture, he was convinced his wife “would be some kind of sex goddess” and that sex in marriage would be the best experience of his life. However, the first night of their honeymoon “was filled with pain, discomfort, and tears.” “It was world shattering,” he said, “something we are still working through.”
Joy Pedrow Skarka writes that, in one of her premarital classes, the instructor asked: “Do you have a vagina? Does he have a penis? Then sex will work.” But after the elevator ride from their wedding reception to their hotel room, tears soon streaked her “wedding day make-up and forced [her] to whimper, ‘We need to stop.’” The painful sex continued long after her honeymoon. She says, “I felt alone, with no one to turn to. So I turned to research. I searched everywhere for answers. And I discovered this: nearly three out of four women have pain during intercourse at some time during their lives. For some women, the pain lasts only for a time; for twenty to fifty percent of these women, the pain remains over time. Knowing this, I finally felt some peace. I decided to consult a doctor.”11
Multiple women have told me about their struggles with vaginismus, a condition “characterized by involuntary contractions of the pelvic floor muscles that tighten the vaginal entrance, causing pain, penetration problems and inability to have intercourse.”12 But there are many causes of painful sex for women. One woman, Hannah, shared with me how her illness has affected her marriage, especially in regard to sexual intimacy:
I have some level of pain every day. Some days I can ignore it, but some days it hurts even to be gently touched, even to put clothes on, and on those days, sex is impossible. Other days, I may not be in as much pain but the pain I do have has exhausted me. And since most of my pain is in my abdomen, I have lost a great deal of strength in my core muscles, so any sexual activity usually is pretty low on the “active” side, for me.
Understandably, this has all been disappointing for my husband. But until a recent conversation, I had assumed that it was not just disappointing but devastating. Years ago, in a less healthy time in our marriage, my husband had told me that sex was the only way he received love from me. Though we’ve both grown since that time, the messages of purity culture allowed me to accept his claim without question and to hold onto it through the past year of my illness.
And yes, it’s been a year of not very much sex. I agonized over this fact as if it were an indictment on my character. If sex was vital to men in general, and if sex was the only way my husband could receive love from me, it meant he had gone a year receiving very little love from his wife, and this was unforgivable. I had projected disaster on to his simple disappointment and assumed that his less verbally expressive personality meant that he was holding on to deep bitterness and anger at me for withholding something he desperately needed.
Painful sex is not the only unaddressed reality in purity books and conferences. Many developed exaggerated expectations as to the frequency of sex within marriage. Men were promised that they could have sex any time they wanted once married, and women were told that their husbands would want to have sex every time they caught a glimpse of their bare skin.
Years ago, I was chaperoning a senior trip, riding in a fifteen-passenger van with some of my female students. One of them spoke up: “May I ask you a personal question?” “Of course,” I replied, hoping to be the cool teacher who was willing to talk about anything. “How many times a week do you and your husband have sex?” I immediately felt my face flush. I didn’t want to tell her. When I was her age, I had been given an exaggerated version of sex in marriage. But married sex had proven to be like the rest of life, with its own ebb and flow, affected by things like going to work, paying bills, studying, getting colds and headaches, grading papers, helping at church, and keeping up with friends and family.
At the time she asked, I was still working through reality versus my unrealistic expectations, and I felt ashamed to respond. If asked this same question today, I would say: it’s not about how often. It’s not about keeping up with other couples. I’m not going to tell you a number, but rather this: that sex is about unity, not quantity.
In addition to the pressure placed on frequency, sex—and especially female virginity—was repeatedly portrayed in Christian books and at purity conferences as the greatest gift you could give your spouse. I thought sex would be my magical wifely power, able to comfort and cure anything that ailed my husband. Because I was told that he would want sex constantly, I experienced deep and unnecessary rejection when he wasn’t in the mood. Men had been painted as sex machines, not human beings who experience tiredness, sickness, and stress, just like everyone else. Treating sex as the barometer for the health of one’s marriage also neglects all the other intimacies and beauties beyond intercourse, like laughing together, teasing each other, supporting one another, taking one another’s dirty dishes to the sink, talking late into the night about dreams and goals, and loving one another through words.
While the world might want sex to be unexpected, even reckless, Winner says that it is “the stability of marriage that allows sex to be what it is.”13 Sex is meant to take place in the context of commitment—lifelong commitment. Sometimes this means familiarity more than excitement, or security over the thrill of the unknown. Married sex can be many things: fun, disappointing, comforting, wild and passionate, or quiet and slow. Sometimes achieving intimacy in marriage feels effortless. Other times, it takes patience and a willingness to keep learning about one another.
When sex is the goal of marriage, it becomes easy to idolize. This idolatry is destructive to unity between husband and wife, reducing the beauty and mystery of a lifelong, whole-self union to just one aspect. And when sex is presented to singles as the reward for their purity, it can lead to frustration, depression, and bitterness. For years, it was dangled like a carrot above our heads, and many of us are still working to overturn the idol of sex in our lives.
When we talk about the “right to life” for the unborn or for refugees, we are talking about their right to breath, food, water, and safe shelter. We are talking about the things that people need in order to survive. When sex is portrayed as a physical necessity, it suddenly joins rank with air, food, and water as a human right. An extreme but logically consistent manifestation of this thinking are “Incels,” the “involuntarily celibate” men who blame women “for denying them their right to sexual intercourse.”14 But while popular culture might equate sex with our need for breath, and purity culture might talk about married sex as a future promise, the biblical truth is that God does not owe any of us sex.
For men who read books like Every Man’s Battle, sex in marriage might seem more like a physiological need than a physical desire. This turns the gift of sex that married couples get to give one another into a debt that they owe each other. And these teachings fail to recognize that sex in marriage is about selfless giving and receiving, not selfish demanding.
Many in the purity movement were assured that married sex would solve their struggles with sinful lust. When it didn’t, some found it easier to blame their spouse rather than question the promise or admit that they were still dealing with sexual temptation. The idea of married sex as a lust antidote likely comes from 1 Corinthians 7, which tells husbands and wives “do not deprive each other” of sexual relations “so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control” (v. 5) and which bids the unmarried and widows to marry “if they cannot control themselves . . . for it is better to marry than to burn with passion” (v. 9). If we fail to read passages like these beside the whole counsel of Scripture, we will walk away believing that sex becomes a right within marriage. But alongside calling spouses to give to one another sexually, Paul calls husbands to love their wives “just as Christ loved the church” and “gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). Can sacrificial, Christlike love include demanding sex or taking it by force? This cannot be what is meant by “conjugal rights” in 1 Corinthians 7:3 (ESV), when love and sacrifice are held up in Scripture as our highest Christian calling.
Lack of sex in marriage, whether due to sin, sickness, or distance, is never an excuse to seek sexual fulfillment elsewhere or demand it from one’s spouse. A woman named Jennifer recently shared with me that her husband coerced her into performing sexual acts and raped her multiple times. He began seeing a Christian counselor, but instead of being rebuked for his sin against her, the counselor told him that he had biblical grounds to divorce her because she had “defrauded him of sex.” In his mind, sex in marriage was his right —something he could take from his wife anytime he wanted, with or without her consent—which turned her from a precious gift into a sexual object, there to do his bidding. This is not what God desires for sex or marriage.
Dealing with these messages in marriage was one thing, but after my divorce I had to grapple with what it meant in a new season of singleness. Before my first marriage, I had desired sex as a virgin. Now I was single with the experience and memories of sexual intimacy with someone. If marriage flips a switch that turns sex into a physiological need, what are the divorced and widowed to do? The truth is, I don’t believe in such a “switch.” My desire for sex as a divorced single differed from my desire for sex as a single virgin, but I was asking the same question in both seasons: What do I do with all this longing?
One single woman I interviewed told me that in purity culture she always heard one’s sex drive compared to hunger for food. “If sex was sustenance, then I was starving to death, and God was still telling me that I couldn’t steal the hoagie from the shop window.” She says she felt entitled to marriage and sex because she had faithfully practiced sexual purity, and she was “angry and confused” when neither showed up. But her story didn’t end there. She went on to talk about her crisis of faith and the messages she had to question and grapple with in her singleness:
It wasn’t until I decided to imagine a good life for myself without a husband and accepted the possibility that I might never be married or have sex that I actually began to heal. I am now a 33-year-old virgin. I’m not lonely, angry, or confused anymore. I still struggle with lust, but it doesn’t feel like my future is a desert because I don’t have sex or romance. Now that I am no longer trying to manipulate Providence with my virtue, my relationship with God is vibrant and wonderful. I may get married one day, or maybe I won’t—but I’m not putting my life on hold waiting anymore. I’m also still planning to stay a virgin until and unless I do get married.
In pointing out that sex is not a biblical right or a life-and-death need, I don’t mean to downplay the significance of sexual desire. In her book, Party of One: Truth, Longing, and the Subtle Art of Singleness, Joy Beth Smith admits that “it’s crushing to live under the constant weight of unmet desires.”15 Instead of continuing to promise future married sex to singles, Smith goes on to urge them to “actively cling to promises that are in Scripture; promises that God will never leave us, promises of his control in all things, promises of his goodness, promises that the trials of this world pale in comparison to the glory of what is to come.”16 I love that Smith uses the word trials here, because unmet sexual desires—whether in singleness or marriage—can be some of the heaviest burdens we carry. We can acknowledge this. We should acknowledge this, to ourselves, to God, and to others.
The lack of discussion about the trial of sexual thirst often leaves individuals to struggle alone. The subject of masturbation deserves a more nuanced discussion (which we’ll get to in chapter 9), but for some people the motivation for this act comes from the idea they have the right to satisfy their sexual thirst and achieve orgasm. For singles, masturbation—sometimes accompanied by pornography—can be a way to experience the physical pleasure of sex while maintaining their celibate status. But does masturbation merely act as a placeholder until God gives an individual marriage?
One woman I interviewed said that her husband was taught that “once he got married, he would never struggle with [masturbation] anymore because he could have sex whenever he had the desire to masturbate.” But a young, single man commented that his married friends have been surprised at how much they continue to struggle with lust, pornography, and masturbation in marriage. Masturbating or viewing pornography out of a conviction that sexual gratification is a human right makes sexual expression about one person: yourself. If this attitude toward sex continues into marriage, it can make the effort it takes to know another person sexually feel more like a burden than a joy.
Married sex is not about effortless self-fulfillment. It involves two people, which means learning. Communicating. Failing. Laughing. Crying. Years of practice. Studying one another and putting your spouse above yourself. Should you pursue orgasm in marriage? Absolutely. Get creative. Be patient with one another. Expect bodies to change and prepare yourself to get creative again and again. Learn your spouse. Care about their pleasure. Help them learn about yours. But do not make orgasm the goal of sex. God-designed, holy, married sex is about union, intimacy, self-giving, and joy. When sex is viewed as a right within marriage, it becomes more about selfish demanding than selfless love. And when sexual gratification is depicted as a physical need, it becomes much easier for all of us, single or married, to excuse sexual sin.
Rebecca Lemke agrees that “variations of a ‘prosperity gospel’ are a common theme in Purity Culture,” noting how this leaves individuals to deal with “mismanaged expectations.”17 We must acknowledge that, despite good intentions, false promises were made. Sex was used as a bargaining chip. And many of us went on to feel cheated and lied to as we watched those promises crumble or fail to ever materialize.
As a church, we must question any teachings that depict sex as a reward, a promise, or a need. We will not die from unmet sexual longings, and we can be sexually whole without being sexually gratified. Sex is a gift, not a right. It is temporary, not eternal (Matthew 22:30). Sex is both much more and much less than the idol we have created. And whether we’re having great sex, disappointing sex, or no sex at all, we will eventually arrive at the same conclusion: sex is not God. It cannot be. It is not even a god, despite its many worshipers.
And, beloved, sex is not necessary for a full, God-honoring Christian life. Sex can be a great blessing, but consider too the gift the apostle Paul spoke of: how singleness and celibacy freed him to focus on Christ and his ministry. Think about spiritual heroes like Amy Carmichael or Rich Mullins who never married yet their lives still echo the gospel, long after their deaths.
We must take time to remind ourselves that sex—and indeed all creation—is for the glory of God. Sex can feel like such a fragile thing, wrought with hurt, anxiety, hope, and brokenness. It is so difficult to hand sex over to God, especially when it involves releasing our grip on dreams and longings we have held for years. We live under the curse, and God’s good creation soon becomes twisted by our sin and selfishness. His gifts were never meant to be worshiped, but we exchange the truth about God for a lie and worship and serve the creation rather than the Creator (Romans 1:25). We need his mercy, his Word, and the local church as we wrestle with these truths, lies, and questions about sex. It takes courage to step out into the light.
1. Do you view sex as a need? Why or why not? What is your biblical basis for this belief?
2. How would Scripture speak, directly or indirectly, to sexual practices such as masturbation? Pornography?
3. What would you tell someone who says that rape cannot exist inside marriage? How does Scripture support your answer?
4. In what ways has sexual sin and lust affected your relationships or interactions with others? How has it affected your relationship with God?
5. What are some practical ways we can work toward bringing the subject of sex out of the darkness and into the light in our churches and communities?
6. How have your views and expectations about sex changed? What brought about these changes?
Create a list with two columns. On one side, write down any lies and unbiblical beliefs you had in the past about sex. On the other side, list as many biblical truths about sex that you can think of. Once you’ve completed both sides, find a partner or get into a small group and discuss the lies and truths you each recorded. After discussing your lists, spend some time praying for one another, asking God to transform your thinking, renew your minds, and plant his truth deep within your hearts.