If you grew up Christian and you have complicated feelings about sex, I want you to hear something: you probably didn’t get those feelings from the Bible. You inherited them from history.
As a marriage coach working with Christian couples, I spend a lot of time helping people untangle what Scripture actually teaches from what their grandmother, their youth pastor, and the Victorian era taught them. Those are not the same thing. Knowing the difference is genuinely freeing.
The short version: Christian attitudes toward sex have swung wildly across two thousand years—from early thinkers who treated marriage as damage control against sin, to Puritans who considered marital sex a genuine duty and delight, to Victorians who prized female passivity, to a modern purity movement that taught chastity through fear. Meanwhile, our supposedly liberated culture is actually having less sex than previous generations. Understanding this history helps you see which of your instincts about sex came from God and which came from a particular century.
Where the shame came from
Some influential early Christian thinkers set a tone that still echoes. Saint Jerome, reading Paul’s letters, landed on the view that marriage and sexuality were essentially a safety net—a concession to keep people from worse sin (Wren, 2013). Others treated sex as a necessary evil: tolerable for producing children, but certainly not something to celebrate.
Sit with that for a second, because it’s the headwater of a lot of Christian anxiety about desire. If sex is fundamentally a concession to human weakness, then enjoying it too much is suspicious. That idea got into the water supply early, and it never fully left.
The Puritan plot twist
Here’s where history surprises almost everyone.
We use “puritanical” as a synonym for sexually repressed—but the actual Puritans held a notably warm view of marital sex. They understood it as more than procreation: it was a conjugal duty, something a husband and wife genuinely owed each other. How seriously did they take it? There’s a documented case of a man, James Matlock, facing church discipline for withholding sex from his wife for two years (Beeke, 2014).
Read that again. He was disciplined by the church for not having sex with his wife. That is not the stereotype—and it’s a lot closer to what Paul actually wrote to the Corinthians about spouses not depriving each other.
The Victorians and the purity movement
The Victorian era pushed hard the other way: chaperones, elaborate propriety, and an expectation that women be passive in romance and desire. Much of what people think of as “traditional Christian modesty” is really Victorian social convention wearing a Sunday hat.
Then, from the late 1990s onward, conservative Christian communities produced the purity movement. Its goals were good and protective—guarding young people from disease, heartbreak, unplanned pregnancy, and sin. But the method leaned heavily on fear rather than values (Morgante, 2024). And the fruit of fear-based teaching shows up in the research: purity culture beliefs have been associated with higher rates of sexual pain among women, along with lower marital and sexual satisfaction (Sawatsky et al., 2025).
That’s the tragedy of it. The underlying biblical value—that sex is sacred and belongs in marriage—is sound. The fear-soaked delivery wounded a generation of the very people it meant to protect. I unpack that distinction fully in what the Bible actually says about sex.
The great irony: we’re having less sex, not more
Now for the finding that should stop everyone cold.
Our culture is more sexually permissive than any in living memory. And yet sexual frequency among American adults has been declining, generation after generation. Analysis of national survey data found the Silent Generation (born in the 1930s) had the highest sexual frequency, with each subsequent generation reporting less (Twenge et al., 2017). Among young adults the drop is steepest: the share of young men reporting no sexual activity in the past year climbed from roughly 18% in 2000 to about 30% by 2018 (Ueda et al., 2020).
The sexual revolution promised liberation and delivered a drought. Why? A leading theory ties it to declining marriage rates and weakening commitment. Which is to say: the context that culture spent fifty years dismissing as a cage turns out to be the trellis the whole thing grows on.
Attitudes shift—which is exactly why they’re a bad compass
Look at how fast the ground moves. In the early 1970s, only 29% of Americans thought premarital sex was wrong; acceptance is now dramatically higher (Twenge et al., 2015). Public acceptance of same-sex relationships went from a small minority to majority support, with the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015. And here’s a curious wrinkle from the same research: even as premarital sex became broadly accepted, disapproval of infidelity actually increased (Twenge et al., 2015).
People still want faithfulness. They still ache for someone to belong to. The instinct survived the revolution.
My point isn’t to litigate any single shift—it’s this: if the culture’s convictions swing this violently in fifty years, cultural consensus is a terrible foundation for your personal sexual ethic. Whatever you build on it, you build on sand.
Your family of origin is part of this story too
History isn’t only the big cultural sweep—it’s also the small one that happened in your house. The family you grew up in shaped what you consider normal, shameful, or sacred about sex, and that shows up in your marriage whether you invited it or not.
Murray Bowen’s family systems work is useful here: your family-of-origin patterns strongly influence your maturity, flexibility, and adaptability as a spouse (Holman & Busby, 2011). Every newlywed couple has an adjustment period. How well you navigate it depends a great deal on what you absorbed before you ever met each other.
The spiritual layer: your view of God shapes your view of sex
This is the piece I find most important, and it’s the one almost nobody names.
Spiritual development unfolds in stages across a lifetime, much as psychological development does (Fowler, 1981). And spiritual maturity appears to expand our capacity to see the divine purpose in sexuality—to use this gift to connect deeply with a spouse rather than merely to consume or perform (Finlayson-Fife, 2025). The goal is integration: faith, sexuality, spirit, and body finally at peace with each other instead of at war.
Here’s the practical version. If you believe God is harsh and exacting, you will likely be rigid and anxious about sex—always scanning for the line you might have crossed. If you believe God is distant, aloof, or indifferent, sexuality drifts free of meaning and can slide toward the merely appetitive. But if you know God as genuinely loving and generous—a Father who gave you this gift on purpose—you can hold your sexuality with gratitude instead of fear.
Your picture of God is doing more work in your bedroom than you think.
Why this history matters for your marriage
When you can name where a belief came from—Jerome, the Victorians, a purity retreat in 1998, your parents’ silence—you can finally ask the better question: is that actually what God says? Usually it isn’t. And that’s where healing starts.
If you want to see how these forces are shaping your kids right now, I look at that in what today’s culture is teaching your kids about sex. And if you’re ready to do this untangling work in your own marriage, you can join our Next Level program or work privately with a coach.
Frequently Asked Questions
Because we inherited centuries of mixed messages. Some early church thinkers treated marriage as little more than a safeguard against sin, the Victorian era prized female passivity and propriety, and the modern purity movement often taught chastity through fear. Meanwhile, the Puritans — surprisingly — treated sex as a genuine marital duty and delight. The confusion is historical, not biblical.
They did, at least within marriage. Puritans understood marital intimacy as more than procreation — it was a conjugal duty owed to one’s spouse. There’s even a well-known case of a man facing church discipline for withholding sex from his wife for two years. That’s a long way from the prudish stereotype.
Yes, and it surprises people. Despite a culture that’s more sexually permissive than ever, sexual frequency among American adults has been declining generation by generation. Analyses of national survey data found the share of young men reporting no sexual activity in the past year rose sharply between 2000 and 2018. Permissiveness hasn’t produced more connection.
More than most people realize. If you see God as harsh and punishing, you may become rigid, anxious, or shame-bound about sex. If you see Him as distant or indifferent, sexuality can drift loose from meaning altogether. A view of God as loving and generous tends to support an integrated sexuality — where faith, body, and desire aren’t at war.
References
Beeke, J. (2014). The Puritan’s view of sex in marriage. Ligonier. https://learn.ligonier.org/articles/sex-in-marriage
Finlayson-Fife, J. (2025). That we might have joy. Faith Matters.
Fowler, J. W. (1981). Stages of faith: The psychology of human development and the quest for meaning. Harper & Row.
Holman, T. B., & Busby, D. M. (2011). Family-of-origin, differentiation of self and partner, and adult romantic relationship quality. Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, 10(1), 3–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/15332691.2010.539171
Morgante, C. (2024). Recovering from purity culture: Dismantle the myths, reject shame-based sexuality, and move forward in your faith. Baker Books.
Sawatsky, J., Lindenbach, R., Gregoire, S. W., & Gregoire, K. (2025). Sanctified sexism: Effects of purity culture tropes on White Christian women’s marital and sexual satisfaction and experience of sexual pain. Sociology of Religion, 86(4), 519–543. https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srae031
Twenge, J. M., Sherman, R. A., & Wells, B. E. (2015). Changes in American adults’ sexual behavior and attitudes, 1972–2012. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 44(8), 2273–2285. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-015-0540-2
Twenge, J. M., Sherman, R. A., & Wells, B. E. (2017). Declines in sexual frequency among American adults, 1989–2014. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 46(8), 2389–2401. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-017-0953-1
Ueda, P., Mercer, C. H., Ghaznavi, C., & Herbenick, D. (2020). Trends in frequency of sexual activity and number of sexual partners among adults aged 18 to 44 years in the US, 2000–2018. JAMA Network Open, 3(6), e203833. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.3833
Wren, C. M. (2013). Marriage, celibacy, and the hierarchy of merit in the Jovinian controversy. Southern Equip. https://equip.sbts.edu/article/marriage-celibacy-and-the-hierarchy-of-merit-in-the-jovinian-controversy/
