Sexuality and the Need for Moral Guidance

When I told my Dad I was writing a book about contraception, his first question (after a beat) was, “But what am I going to tell my friends?”

His next question: “How much is there to say about a condom?”

I understand. Talking about sex can be awkward, especially when you’re a Christian who would prefer to talk about almost anything else. Our culture is hyper-saturated with sex. It’s in our faces all the time, from movies to books to music to fast food ads and everything in-between. “Modest is hottest” is still one of my favorite sayings, and as I am now the mother of two daughters (and two sons!), I think saying it a lot will be part of my not-too-distant future. 

In​ an essay for First Things, Carl Trueman ​said that we exist today in “a battle for the body.” “The status of the body as it relates to us as human persons,” Trueman says, “seems to be the issue that lies, often unseen, behind many of the other more prominent debates of our age.” As such, talking about sex and thinking through a more robust theological anthropology is crucial in an age that makes a golden calf of sex. And the church would be neglecting its duty if it refused to talk about it.

Haley Baumeister bravely took up the mantle when she wrote a thoughtful and provocative “Case Against Vasectomies,” which has garnered a fair amount of attention. Kirsten Sanders wrote a thought-provoking reply, “Desiderata for a Protestant Theology of the Body,” in which she opines about what a distinctly Protestant theology of the body might look like, while gently pushing back on the impulse to want an ironclad prohibition of contraception. While I agreed with some of Kirsten’s response, I took issue with her admonition to speak of sex less, and with her assumption that discussions about “theology of the body” are inherently Catholic in nature.   

It’s immodest for Christians to refrain from talking about sex.

Kirsten says, “I try to speak of sex in accordance with Scripture, which is to say not very often and with little clarity.” That seems curious to me, since a number of theological doctrines are rarely (if ever!) spoken of in Scripture, and many of them are “clear” enough to have needed church councils to decide upon them. 

For example, it is Christian doctrine that Jesus Christ is fully man and fully divine, having two distinct natures in his one person. But you won’t find the phrase “hypostatic union” in Scripture, and it isn’t terribly easy to describe to a five-year-old. The Council of Chalcedon convened in 451 AD to address a number of heresies that had cropped up surrounding the person of Jesus Christ, which had begun jeopardizing Christian understanding of salvation.

Or consider the doctrine of the Trinity. Again, you may be surprised to know that the word “Trinity” is not found in Scripture at all. But the first Council of Nicea (which is celebrating its 1700th anniversary this year) decided it was in accordance with Scripture and key to Christian understanding that there is one God who exists eternally in three co-equal persons. Don’t try to explain it to a five year old at all, lest you commit heresy.

There are a number of Christian doctrines necessary to orthodox Christian belief and practice, which are in accordance with Scripture but spoken of rarely and with little clarity. Why, then, would speaking of sex — a topic which actually does occur a surprising amount in Scripture! — be different?

Sex is instantiated in Genesis with the command to “be fruitful and multiply,” and reinforced in Genesis 4 when “Adam had sexual relations with his wife Eve and she conceived.” Onan is killed by God in Genesis 38 for having repeated sexual encounters with his brother’s widow, Tamar, with no intent to impregnate her. Sex is one of a select group of topics referenced in the ten commandments when God commands his people not to commit adultery. The Song of Solomon is an entire book dedicated to the topic, and is enough to make even the most brazen among us blush. In the New Testament, Jesus condemns all forms of sexual immorality, going so far as to say that lustful thoughts are tantamount to adultery. 

The church has also spoken about issues of sex and celibacy for millennia. More on that later. But even the Puritans, who get a bad rap for being anti-sex, had rules about how often husbands and wives should be having sex. If a husband or wife deprived his or her spouse for more than three months, there could be consequences from the church! How’s that for puritanical?

As I mentioned before, and it pretty much goes without saying, our culture is inundated with sex. Its understanding of the human person is depraved. And the church has not been immune to these misunderstandings. If Arianism and Monophysitism were the heresies du jour of the 300s and 400s AD, sexual individualism/libertinism is the heresy du jour today. And it’s shredding our understanding of the doctrine of anthropology, of what it means to be a human person created in the image of God. 

To refuse to talk about our bodies is a denial of the incarnation. 

Kirsten makes a necessary point that “privacy and prudence should be closer friends.” Again: modest is hottest. Even and perhaps especially when you’re talking about sex. 

But while many think talking about sex is gross (“I would be fine to never hear about someone’s religious feelings in regard to their lovemaking [or their cervical fluid] ever again”), it does a disservice to women, to couples, and to the church to never talk about sex or our reproductive capacities. It also seems to ignore the fact that Jesus himself took on human flesh and had a reproductive system, just like the rest of us. He created it for a purpose, and it’s our job to discern, using Scripture, tradition, and nature, what that purpose is and how we should comport ourselves to it. 

The reason we haven’t had to think deeply about issues of sex, procreation, or the reproductive system for the past sixty-some-odd years (depending on how you count) is because hormonal birth control has rendered the female cycle invisible even to ourselves as women. And while technologies for birth control have continued to evolve, Christians have not kept up theologically. There is much to discuss here, including whether women have been lied to very deliberately (by medical associations like ACOG) about hormonal birth control’s capacity to cause an abortion. That deserves an article unto itself. 

As I have told many, there are more women in my (Protestant) church asking to meet with me to discuss the ethics of contraception and the basics of Natural Family Planning than I have time to meet with. Young Protestant women, and young women in general, are rejecting hormonal birth control in droves. But many within evangelicalism (most publishers included) seem to agree with Kirsten that we shouldn’t talk about sex, contraception, or our reproductive cycles. Why?

I was well-catechized by my Southern Baptist forebears that Scripture bears upon every aspect of our lives. They’re right. And that includes every part of our bodies, even the parts that are the most private to us. 

Theologies of the Body, Sex, and Fertility are not inherently a dogwhistle for Roman Catholicism.

The main thrust of Kirsten’s reply is that Protestantism’s lack of an ironclad magisterium is good, actually — a feature, not a bug. But Haley’s piece doesn’t talk about Rome’s magisterium at all. Haley doesn’t go out of her way to praise the Catholics, and she doesn’t lament the state of Protestantism. She just writes about how strange it is that evangelicals talk so nonchalantly about sterilization (which she rightly characterizes as a type of bodily mutilation, a surgical procedure done not to heal but to circumvent normal, healthy bodily function… something that can also be said of hormonal contraception, incidentally). In fact, Haley even says “you shouldn’t need to swim the Tiber if you care about these things”! 

Perhaps Kirsten is making a broader critique of those in the “Protestant theology of the body” movement. This would be fair, given that many of the Protestants thinking about theology of the body do make the kind of pro-magesterial move Kirsten is warning against. But it is important to note: Haley doesn’t, and you do not have to! Talking about theology of the body / theology of sex / bringing your faith to bear on your fertility are not a trojan horse for importing Catholicism into Protestantism.

In an article I wrote recently for First Things Magazine, I report on several Protestant women who have chosen to forego contraceptives for various medical and theological reasons. We talk about the ways in which that decision has impacted their faith. As a part of that project, I interviewed the most fascinating Protestant voice I have found on this side of the Tiber: Ben Jefferies, an Anglican priest in the ACNA. 

Many do not realize that for almost two-thousand years of Christian history, contraception was considered anathema. (Yes, forms of contraception have been around for more than two-thousand years.) Many think prohibitions against contraception are “a Catholic thing.” But as I have written elsewhere, 

“Augustine says that “intercourse even with one’s legitimate wife is unlawful and wicked where the conception of the offspring is prevented. Onan, the son of Juda, did this and the Lord killed him for it.” Likewise, Calvin declared Onan’s sin as “wickedness … condemned by the Spirit,” saying that contraceptive acts were “rightly seen as an unforgivable crime.” Luther also considered contraceptive sex a “most disgraceful sin … far more atrocious than incest and adultery … a Sodomitic sin.””

Protestant thinking with regard to contraception didn’t change until quite recently, considering the scale of Christian history which rejected it. At the 1931 Lambeth Conference, a decadal gathering of Anglican bishops, the church broke with historic Christian teaching on sex for the first time, allowing for the use of contraceptives in marriage (ironically, arguments both for and against contraception were made on eugenic grounds). As someone recently told me, if you had twenty people in a line representing 2,000 years of Christian history, and you asked them to raise their hands if they believed contraception was licit, only one of them would raise their hand. This should make us pause! We 21st century Christians are liberal on the issue of contraception with respect to the great cloud of witnesses who have come before us! We should at the very least have a strong moral argument for why we are okay with flouting 1,930 years of Christian belief and practice. 

But where most Anglicans read the 1931 Lambeth provision as a blanket allowance for contraceptives, Rev. Jefferies reads it as only allowing for the use of condoms (as it’s the only contraceptive that existed at the time), and only when both provisions listed are met: “where there is clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood,” and “where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence.” He says that the primary means of avoidance when there is a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood is abstinence (natural family planning or fertility awareness based methods would be licit here). 

Interestingly, when I talked with him earlier this spring, he said he thinks that the Protestant lack of a magisterium is a feature, not a bug (the opposite of what many Protestants in this space tend to think). He said that of Catholics, something like 97% do not observe the church’s teaching on contraception, and he worries about the ways in which the teaching binds people’s consciences when they’re clearly not willing to follow it. For Catholics, every contraceptive act of any kind is a mortal sin! 

On the other hand, he thinks his “evangelical” approach has won over more than 3% of those he’s spoken with about it. He also thinks that a pastoral approach is preferable given the dual purpose of sex: procreation and unity. Especially in cases where there is a grave medical reason to avoid conception (such as while on chemo, or when pregnancy could endanger the life of the mother or child), he thinks that the use of a barrier method could help preserve the unity of the marriage. (I gave a lecture to this effect at the Protestant Theology of the Body Conference held in Washington, D.C. in 2023.)

You should read Jefferies in his own words. It’s the best engagement I’ve read on the ethics of contraception from a Protestant point of view. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, Protestant Christians in 2025 are the odd ones out with regard to our understanding of sex, and we should talk about that. If we refuse to talk about our created bodies and how God created them to function, we risk trivializing the God who became incarnate on our behalf and we do a disservice to the women whose bodies bear the effects of hormonal birth control, pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing. And talking about sex and fertility and “theology of the body” is not inherently Catholic, nor must we aim for it to be. 

My desire is not for every Protestant church to ban their members from using contraception, but for contraceptive sex within marriage to be a moral category with which we contend. Why should it be licit for me as a 21st century American Christian to participate in a practice that almost two-thousand years-worth of Christians abhorred?