On Sex, the Purity Culture, and God’s Grace

Recently, the infamous purity culture movement has been all over the internet and in book stores. Nadia Bolz-Weber released a book called Shameless, which I read. Katelyn Beaty responded in a New York Times article. In it she asks a question that I too have been pondering for several years, “What does Jesus think?”

Joshua Harris, the young man who taught a bunch of us to kiss dating good-bye has pretty much thrown in the towel to his Christianity and wants to start a podcast about it. Sex is the conversation of the hour. When has it not been? I’ve been wondering if I’d muster up the courage or the wherewithal to write about this and finally, after hemming and hawing and writing in my journal, I’ve decided to say a few things.

I’m almost forty-two years old. Divorced and remarried. I was a virgin on my wedding night when I was twenty-two years old, and believed that if I followed God and obeyed God, if I put all my eggs in Jesus’s basket, as my youth pastor put it, then my life would come together in a beautiful way. God would bless me for my purity and for my chastity and for my obedience etc … suffice it to say, you can all probably surmise, considering the outcome of my life, that things did not go as I expected. My purity was not a bullet-proof life vest that would keep me from harm. Sex is complicated and virgin-on-her-wedding-night did not simplify it.  

Several years ago, I went through a terrible faith crisis and wondered why I was following Jesus. Joke’s on me, I thought. I did everything God ever asked and I was still living through this world like a normal human being. I was exempt from nothing. So I questioned and wondered and asked hard questions. I read post-holocaust Jewish theologians who actually do have the corner market on suffering and faith, and walking with God in spite of hardship. I found they were helpful.

As far as I’m concerned what is happening in our American Christianity is that we’re finally growing up. We are a young nation and a young people, who is having to learn that the American Dream is not God’s dream. Turns out, at some point in the equation we have to decide whether or not we’ll follow God simply because God is God and not for the reward that our following gives us. At some point in our Christian faith we must decide if we follow Jesus simply because we love him. We must become adults in our faith and not remain immature children begging for the lollipop God promises to hand out if we’re good.

I have a great deal to say about the above, about integrity and goodness and about following God because we love God. I believe with all that I am that God is God’s own reward. However, because of Joshua Harris and Katelyn Beaty’s recent articles and all the others that are making the rounds, I’d like to say a few things about Christian sexual ethics. 

Standard Christian sexual ethics teaches that sex is best inside of marriage, and by marriage I am going to say publicly-vowed, committed relationships that are monogamous. I want to define marriage in such a way because we need to define our terms. 

I believe sex is best inside monogamous, committed, publicly-vowed relationships.

I don’t think marriage is simply making promises to one another. In my opinion there must be a community involved because sex is relational and because sex involves more than one person. Proper sexual ethics must include the community, not only the individuals. My monogamy is as much a gift to my partner as it is to myself, but it is also a gift to my community. (See Wendell Berry for more on this.)

That said, this ethic does not mean God is absent in pre-marital sex, or that God can’t redeem the sex we have outside of marriage. Nor does it mean that all sex inside of marriage is good and life-giving. 

Purity culture has made promises like, “If you wait to have sex until you get married, God will bless you with a good life.” That’s nothing more than a behavior management program. The goodness of God in Christ Jesus is that God blesses, period. That blessing is not contingent on my willingness to wait to have sex.    

Except, it’s tricky in the Bible. The Bible does speak of blessings that come from obedience and curses that come from disobedience, doesn’t it? We have the entire law of Moses that is all about blessings and curses. But we also have the prophets who interpret the law and call us to a social ethic that is bigger than a binary, narrow-minded philosophy of life. See Isaiah 58 for a simple taste, also Micah, Amos … etc

Then we have the wisdom literature that offers proverbial life help. It also tells us a story of a man who did all he was asked to do and God threw him under the bus to prove a point to Satan. In the wisdom literature we have sex poetry, and even a book that says it’s all pretty meaningless no matter how you look at it. 

Then jump forward to the New Testament and you have Jesus and his life-giving powerful words of hope, and his example. He welcomed all, shunned no one, and touched the untouchables. 

That is all to say, the goodness and grace of God says there is nothing that God won’t use to redeem, teach, challenge, and reveal God’s lovingkindness to you. Absolutely nothing. God will even use the sex you weren’t supposed to have to reveal God’s lovingkindness. 

The story of Ruth is all about God’s lovingkindness, about God’s hesed. Ruth laid at a man’s feet and pretty much said, “Love me, please.” and Boaz was like, “Don’t mind if I do.”

The story of Jonah is about a man who hated his enemies so much he didn’t want to preach to them because he knew that if they repented God would forgive. Jonah didn’t want God to forgive them. Jonah couldn’t stand the kindness of God. That Jonah knew God’s heart for love and grace and mercy and ran away from God because of it, should convict us about how we make our own blanket condemnations.

Abraham, the father of faith for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, is a man who slept with a slave woman because his wife told him to.

God doesn’t only use the pure, my friends. God doesn’t only hang out with those who kept their purity rings on and fulfilled the signed contracts. The Christian narrative reveals over and over that God lives with and hangs out with the humble and contrite of heart. Is. 66:2 

What we desperately need to understand is that Christianity is not a set of rules to obey but a long walk into deep relationship with God, with one another, and with the earth we stand on.

When I treat sex as only something pertaining to me, I lose the communal aspect of it. Sex is a big deal because it’s about life and pleasure and joy. It’s also a big deal because it’s about violence and harm, objectification and evil. By it we make babies, and by it we give one another gonorrhea, and suffer terrible pain.  

Should we have sex before we get married? I don’t think so. But many of us do, and God is with us even there. To reduce sex to good when we keep it inside of marriage and bad if we have sex outside of marriage is to be small. Sex is sometimes very bad in marriage and sex is sometimes very healing outside of marriage, with a whole range of possibilities every where in between, because sex is akin to life, and life is life everywhere you go.

But we still uphold a sexual ethic. We, as Christians, must have a sexual standard, just as we must have a standard for war and violence, for greed and generosity. To have no sexual standard is to confess that sex is unimportant or that sexual ethics is irrelevant to our faith. We believe that our bodies matter to God, and that all is sacred. We believe that all of life, even the mundane and ordinary, when properly offered to God, is sacramental.

To have no sexual ethic is to live a life enslaved to feelings and desire, and ultimately to fear and chance. Christians need an objective standard we can work together to uphold. Without it, we drift into a land of confusion.

However, just as I know God’s standard for community is that I would love my neighbor as myself, and I fail at that miserably, we also fail at our Christian sexual ethic miserably. I have used and I have been used. I have been harmed in sex, and I have done harm through sex.

The grace of God through Jesus Christ is always and only what covers me, not my own good works, and certainly not my purity ring.

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