I do not claim to speak for the entire Christian church, nor even for all Protestants, but I think I am on pretty solid ground in saying that, all in all, Christianity is an anti-murder faith. It’s right there in Exodus 20: “You shall not murder.” While the debate about whether euthanasia and similar acts constitute murder can get fuzzy, everyone agrees that, if you can show that something is murder, then Christians should not do it.
Something else is right there in Exodus 20: “You shall not commit adultery.” American Christianity’s obsession with its congregants’ sex lives is proverbial. There is already a huge amount of literature explaining the Christian view of sex, and I would be happy to point you to it, but I will not parrot any of it here. I propose to answer a different question: why is extra-marital sex so important to churches, as opposed to murder? Both, after all, are considered bad. Both are grounds for the dismissal of a pastor. And it would seem that, if the church were to devote its energies to stamping out one sin, it could do more good by ending mob killings than by ending teenage handjobs.
(The history and sociology of sex in Christianity is complex, touching on issues of feminism and women’s rights, LGBT+ rights, and abortion, among many others. To avoid allowing this piece to balloon to several hundred pages, I will be considering only the issue of heterosexual sex between one consenting man and one consenting woman, both of whom were assigned those genders at birth. In short, I will consider only the sex that, within marriage, is accepted across almost all churches.)
The obvious answer is that murder is less common than extra-marital sex. A 2017 paper by Lindsay Labrecque and Mark Whisman at University of Colorado Boulder claims that 21% of men and 13% of women across the US have had sex outside of marriage, while murder is of course much rarer. While this holds up on one level, it works neither emotionally—even to the staunchest conservative, murder is viscerally more horrifying than sex—nor theologically. In Matthew 5, Jesus teaches that, since what really counts to determine a sin is not the action but the intent, getting really angry at someone is morally equivalent to killing them. If churches were simply doing damage control, trying to wipe out their worst or most pervasive sins, the expectation would be that they would become even more obsessed with non-physical sins such as wrath, or nauseating ones such as murder. Sex, done properly, is neither.
The cynics among us will view this as patriarchal, and there is some truth to this, but, again, the expected motivations do not match the actual results. Men who wished to control women would be more likely to start a general moral panic about “unfeminine behavior,” while those who wanted to get laid would, logically, be expected to downplay the wrongness of extra-marital sex and talk about the beauty of the act itself. Keeping sex and sex alone as the bogeyman does not work from either perspective.
Rather, I would argue that, to find the answer, we must go back to the fundamental difference in secular society between sex and murder: murder is a crime while sex is not. In terms of murder, the secular world stands together with the church; in terms of sex, the church and secular culture are very much at odds. The result is highly predictable: the church deploys most of its ideological resources in its most active ideological warzones, with the result that the argument over sex escalates and escalates while murder fades from the spotlight.
There is even evidence to show that, when extra-marital sex was more firmly frowned upon by society, church rules about sex were more flexible. During the 1800s, a time when the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 set penalties for adultery in British law that included a cuckolded husband’s right to claim compensation from the other man, huge percentages of European brides went to the altar pregnant. At certain points, these numbers reached 25% of brides in Flanders, 44% in some parts of Scotland, and over 50% in one town in Devon, according to a 2016 historiographical review by Jan Kok, Hilde Bras, and Paul Rotering. If more than half the members of a mainstream American church today believed that sleeping with one’s fiance was acceptable, the pastor would think himself to have a crisis on his hands. Cultural approval for premarital sex and ecclesiastical disapproval of it react to each other and, one might even say, feed on each other, with the church reacting to the sins of the new generation and the new generation rebelling against the norms of their grandfathers’ church.
My Christian readers will ask, at this point, if I believe that extra-marital sex should, in itself, be a crime. It should not. Sex acts should not damage body or property, and those are the things over which secular law has jurisdiction. They risk damaging only the soul, and, without breaking the separation of church and state, the law cannot but remain entirely silent on whether the soul even exists or not.
This sort of intellectual argument is all very well, but the fact remains that church attitudes to sex often do very real damage to people. (I am careful not to say “Christian attitudes,” as the cornerstones of the most damaging attitudes are self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and fear, and none of these are Christian.) Again, there is good existing literature on this and I will not parrot it here. Many argue that a de-escalation is in order, during which the church loses none of its zeal for God’s laws but is more careful to emphasize grace, forgiveness, and the fact that you are not forever dead to God if you are not a virgin until marriage. Sadly, this usually only leads to more shouting from both sides.
However, viewing sex as a uniquely non-criminal sin suggests a counterintuitive possibility: those people who would like the church to ease up on sex should themselves ease up on the church. Certainly, it is crucial to continue holding those church leaders who abuse their power to account, but I would argue that painting the organization as a whole as backward-looking and regressive on this issue does more harm than good. It only encourages church leaders, who almost all genuinely do believe in the truth of what they teach, to double down on what they feel is a truth that the world desperately needs to hear. As their enemies become louder, their tactics, justifiably from this perspective, become more extreme. Conversely, if we were to normalize not wanting sex, if we were to treat losing one’s virginity as a serious decision that might or might not, be best done in a marital context, then we could more easily broker a sort of peace.
Churches, of course, would not be satisfied with this peace, and would continue, as is their right, to preach the doctrines they believe. The difference would be that they would preach their doctrines in a more matter-of-fact way: less, “If you touch a member of the opposite sex you will get pregnant and die,” and more, “Here is how sex works realistically, here is why we believe you should wait until marriage, and here is the forgiveness of God for those who chose wrongly in the past.” Many, many churches already do teach like this, and, for those who do not, the shift would be an improvement: it would be more like the way Jesus teaches in the Bible, and it would probably lead to less extra-marital sex, not more, by eliminating the lure of the utterly freakish and taboo.
Sex, in general, is an issue in which people often fail to show grace. The church shames those who say people should do it; secular culture shames those who say people shouldn’t. On other issues, from petty theft and fraud to unseemly anger and, yes, murder, people both inside and outside the church agree on the definition of wrong, but here, they do not, and congregants are caught in the middle. I am not suggesting the pursuit of a lasting agreement between the sacred and the secular, nor do I believe that such an agreement would be possible, since as long as there are people who want to have sex, the church will continue to say they should not.
Rather, I suggest only the cessation of active hostilities against the church, and the trust that it will use that ceasefire not to entrench its worst aspects but to build up its best. I encourage the anti-ecclesiastical faction to make the radical move of loving their enemies. But I would not be surprised if only a few of them took me up on this suggestion: in their eyes, it didn’t go so well for the last guy who preached it.