What if Christian sexual ethics became a performance?

The 2000-year-old sexual ethics of Christianity are not normal in today’s West and have not been for some time.

The idea that sex should be limited to the boundaries of a lifelong marriage between a man and a woman is not simply incongruous with a culture reshaped by the sexual revolution and the LGBTQ movement. Many now consider our ethics to be something far worse than outdated. It is hateful, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “dangerous” according to the Human Rights Campaign, and a source of “great harm,” says noted ethicist David Gushee.

Evangelicals have responded to these new norms in a variety of ways. Some have clung even more closely to their traditional beliefs for purely orthodox reasons. Others have remained quietly faithful to their traditions and avoided public confrontation. And still others have joined ex-evangelicals and mainstream Christians in proposing a theological revisionism that supports LGBTQ relationships and sex outside of marriage.

Despite their differences, all three viewpoints understandably share a basic assumption: that our traditional sexual ethic is deeply unpopular. That it is, at best, a difficult but necessary issue of fidelity, an obstacle to overcome in evangelism and discipleship—or, worse, a major cause of church abandonment, conversion, and rejection of the gospel.

Yet is it possible that Scripture’s views on marriage and sexuality are viewed as unique rather than flawed by a small but growing group outside the Church?

It would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that the West is like GK Chesterton’s sailor who, setting off on an adventure, was enchanted by the light of his native shore. But I do not think it is too soon to say that the last decade of upheaval and alienation in our culture of sex and romance has made the always strange sexual ethic of Christianity attractive again.

We have seen this pattern before with other elements of Christianity. Most famously, women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali shocked the world late last year when she announced her conversion from atheism to Christianity (after previously converting from Islam). She embraced Christianity, she said, because she believed the “desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition” was the “only credible” way to unite the West in the fight against “great power authoritarianism,” the “rise of global Islamism,” and the “viral spread of woke ideology.”

Hirsi Ali has recognized that Christianity is the source of the rights and values ​​she seeks to defend. And while many progressives see our faith as repressive, she sees it as a great cultural asset. She is not alone in this. The neo-atheist thinker Richard Dawkins expressed his enthusiasm for “cultural Christianity” last spring. And the author Paul Kingsnorth, who moved from atheism to Buddhism to Christianity, has also described his philosophical journey as one in which he learned to appreciate some of the elements of Christianity that modern Westerners are most likely to reject.

“I grew up believing what all modern people learn: that freedom means freedom from constraint,” Kingsnorth wrote. But Christianity “taught me that this freedom was no freedom at all, but slavery to the passions: an apt description of the first thirty years of my life. True freedom, it turns out, consists in giving up your will and following the will of God.”

British journalist Louise Perry has not announced her conversion, but she seems impressed, not repelled, by Christianity’s sexual ethics. Her provocative 2022 book, The plea against the sexual revolutionquestions the virtues of a sexual order based only on consent and calls for a better ethic, “an ethic that recognizes other people as real people, endowed with real value and dignity. It is time for a sexual counter-revolution.”

Although she has not converted to Christianity, Perry looks longingly at precisely those ethical teachings that many evangelicals find a burden or a burden. Here she writes in The most important last year:

While the Romans viewed male chastity as profoundly unhealthy, Christians valued and insisted on it. The first converts were disproportionately female, as the Christian appreciation of weakness offered obvious advantages to the weaker sex, which could – for the first time – demand sexual abstinence from men. Feminism is not the opposite of Christianity: it is its offspring. …

What if we understood the Christian era as a clearing in a forest? The forest is paganism: dark, wild, powerful and threatening, but also magical in its own way. For two thousand years, Christians pushed back the forest by burning and cutting it down, but also pruning and cultivating it, creating a garden in the clearing with a view up to heaven.

Perry warns that the pagan forest has been spreading again in recent decades and is displacing this view.

This is, of course, just a collection of anecdotes. Although recent polls show a slight decline in support for same-sex marriage and a similarly small reversal on issues of sex and gender identity, the traditional Christian ethic is clearly still a minority position. Nevertheless, this trend is notable among opinion leaders who are once again interested in Christianity as a positive cultural force – and could perhaps spill over to the general public as well.

Moreover, there is a lesson for evangelicals here: instead of defending the countercultural aspects of following Jesus, we may be able to recognize anew that the real strangeness of Christian ethics inviting for those who are stuck in the thicket of cultural confusion.

This is the approach taken by theologian NT Wright when asked in 2019 whether he was embarrassed by Christian attitudes to sex and gender. “In the early church, one of the great attractions of Christianity was actually a sexual ethic. It is a world where more or less anything is possible, where women and children are exploited, and where slaves are often exploited in abhorrent and horrific ways,” he said. The Atlantic“Many people, especially women, found the Christian ideal of chastity surprisingly refreshing.”

Wright was not naive. When his interviewer contradicted him, arguing that a “restricted sexual ethic” that had been attractive “in the terrible world of ancient Christianity, where it was a terrible thing to be a woman” might not have the same persuasive power today, Wright acknowledged the “perpetual difficulties” – but did not concede that the Christian way of life can be attractive in our culture too.

Could our sexual ethic be part of what Jesus had in mind when he urged his followers to “let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16)? We are not used to thinking of it that way. But we must remember that the Spirit “blows where it wills” (John 3:8)—even toward those aspects of Christianity that we have learned to neglect in our desire to be heard in a hostile culture.

This is not to confuse the cultural fruits of Christianity and the coherence of its worldview with the miracle of conversion itself. We must beware of what theologian Carl Trueman rightly describes as the “instrumentalization” of Christianity “in the service of another cultural campaign,” as well as the tragedy of King Agrippa, who responded to Paul’s formulation of the gospel by declaring that he was “almost” convinced (Acts 26:28, KJV). And as writer Andrew Menkis said in his appeal to almost-convinced author Jordan Peterson, mere rules “cannot satisfy the hunger of our soul.”

Still, blessed are those who “delight in the law of the Lord” (Psalm 1:1-2), and we should not be too surprised if people outside the church begin to see the blessing of Christian sexual ethics in a world without meaning. Perhaps they will realize, like the former skeptic C.S. Lewis, that “the harshness of God is more kind than the gentleness of men, and his compulsion is our deliverance.”

Daniel Darling is director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement and author of several books, including Agents of Grace, The Revolution of Dignity, and the upcoming In defense of Christian patriotism.