Does God want married sex to be pleasurable? Yes. A faithful reading of scripture presents sex as God’s intentional gift for connection, pleasure, and becoming one—not a shameful necessity to tolerate. Far from being at odds, a deep faith and a thriving, joyful sex life are designed to belong together.
I’m Dan Purcell, a Christian marriage and intimacy coach, and for the first 35 years of my life I quietly assumed sexuality and spirituality were incompatible. Faith was holy; sex was, at best, a little embarrassing.
I was wrong. The deeper I dug into my own theology, the more I found a God who is creative, passionate, generous, and deeply personal—a God who designed pleasure on purpose.
This is the cornerstone of our complete guide to sex and faith in marriage. Below I’ll make the case—with help from a few wise voices who have shaped my thinking—that great sex isn’t a threat to your faith. It may be one of its most overlooked gifts.
Why do so many people of faith feel sex and God don’t mix?
For most of us, the silence started early. Growing up, the conversations we heard about sex were almost always about reproduction or about chastity—a steady ‘don’t,’ until the wedding day suddenly made it ‘do.’
My friend Francie Winslow describes it perfectly. You probably came from a loving home and an active church, she says, where talk about sex was mostly biology and warnings—and then you married and were left with a pile of questions nobody had prepared you for.
Ruth Buezis, author of Awaken Love, points out that silence is never neutral. When no one talks about sex, the silence itself teaches something: that it’s shameful, that it shouldn’t be enjoyed too much, or that if it doesn’t come naturally, something must be wrong with you.
Add the mixed messages from culture—sitcoms where the husband chases and the wife rolls her eyes, Christian books with a chapter on why sex matters to him and never one on why it matters to her—and it’s no wonder so many believers arrive at marriage convinced that wanting sex is a little bit worldly.
What does God’s design for sex actually include?
Here’s what changed everything for me: I started reading my own theology as if it meant what it said. It supports embodiment, sensuality, and sexuality in a strikingly positive way.
I’ve said it on the podcast and I’ll say it here—of all the world’s religions, ours ought to be the most sex-positive. We worship a God who invented the body, the nerve endings, and the very capacity for ecstasy, and then called His creation good.
Ruth Buezis found this same truth hiding in plain sight in the Song of Songs—a book of the Bible few of us study and fewer pastors preach. That book speaks to the heart more than the head, she told me, and it revealed how much intimacy God wanted her to have, both with Him and with her husband.
Francie Winslow puts language to the experience itself. When she and her husband would connect spiritually—talking, praying, repairing—and then bring their bodies together, it felt like ‘a thin place,’ an old Celtic phrase for the moments when heaven and earth overlap so closely you can feel it. ‘This is my design,’ she sensed God saying; ‘this is a little slice of heaven on earth.’ You can hear her whole story in our conversation on why Christians should be having the best sex.
Is pleasure really part of the plan, or just procreation?
If God only cared about reproduction, He could have made the whole thing purely functional. He didn’t. He wired pleasure—mutual pleasure—right into the design.
And mutual is the key word. Ruth Buezis tells a story I can’t forget. A woman in one of her classes said, ‘It feels like I’ve been serving my husband chocolate cake for thirty years, and I’ve never had a slice.’
That woman wasn’t asking permission to do less. She was waking up to the truth that the pleasure was meant for her, too. Sex was never designed to be one spouse’s duty and the other spouse’s dessert.
This is also where a lot of faithful people get tangled up about desire itself—is it lust, is it holy, is it even allowed? I untangle the difference between selfish lust and the God-honoring passion you’re meant to feel for your spouse in my piece on whether a marriage can be ‘lustful’.
Why does ‘normal’ Christian sex so often settle for mediocre?
Dr. Juli Slattery, a psychologist who helps Christian women embrace their sexuality, is refreshingly honest about her own story: painful sex starting on the honeymoon, a desire gap with her husband, and years of quietly assuming this was simply how it would always be.
As a clinician she heard everyone’s secrets, and it normalized her own struggle. Roughly 85 to 90 percent of couples have some mismatch in desire, she notes, and about three out of four don’t really know how to talk about sex at all.
But here’s the distinction that set her free, and set me free too: normal is not the same as healthy. It’s ‘normal’ in America to be overweight; that doesn’t make it the goal. Common struggles are an invitation to grow, not a ceiling to accept.
For years Slattery assumed, ‘I guess we’re just not one of the lucky couples.’ Then a mentor challenged her to stop settling—and everything began to change. That refusal to call mediocre ‘fine’ is available to every couple. She shares the framework that finally helped in our episode on taking intimacy from sub-optimal to first-rate.
How is sex meant to grow you spiritually?
Slattery asks a question I keep coming back to: would you rather have an easy sex life that demands nothing of you—or one God can actually use to make you more like Him?
Because that’s what an honest sexual relationship does. It surfaces your selfishness, your fears, your need for control, and your old wounds. Then it invites you to bring all of it into the light with the one person you’ve promised your life to.
Ruth Buezis frames it as a journey, not a destination. One husband in her class kept a journal of exactly what ‘worked,’ trying to crack the code—until his wife found it and told him, ‘You will never figure me out.’ She was right. Great sex isn’t a problem you solve once; it’s a lifetime of getting to know each other.
That’s why couples who take this seriously often find their intimacy deepening with the years rather than fading. The research even bears it out—faithful couples actually report more, and more satisfying, sex.
How do you build a faith-filled, genuinely pleasurable marriage?
Start by breaking the silence. Talk about sex—your history, your hopes, your hesitations—with the courage Ruth Buezis says it takes to let your spouse truly know you.
Connect spiritually and emotionally first, then physically. Francie and her husband built a habit they affectionately called their ‘pink couch’ time: sit down, get honest, invite God in, repair whatever feels off—and let that openness flow naturally into the bedroom.
Refuse to settle for mediocre, and pursue mutual pleasure as a shared project. Nobody should be serving chocolate cake they never get to taste.
And if the patterns feel too stuck to shift on your own, you don’t have to white-knuckle it. Our Next Level coaching program walks couples through exactly this—pairing a faith-friendly course with real coaching—and you can begin even if your spouse isn’t fully on board yet.
If you want to go deeper on the desire side of all this, our complete guide to sexual desire in marriage picks up right where this leaves off.
Frequently asked questions about faith and sex in marriage
No. Within marriage, sexual pleasure is presented in scripture as a good gift, not a guilty compromise. The Song of Songs openly celebrates desire and delight between spouses. Enjoying sex with your spouse honors God’s design rather than working against it.
No. Children are one purpose of sex, but scripture also presents it as a means of deep connection, comfort, and one-flesh union between spouses. Pleasure and bonding are woven into the design, not accidental side effects of reproduction.
It is extremely common. Most couples wrestle with mismatched desire and struggle to talk about sex. But common is not the same as healthy. A lackluster sex life is usually a signal to learn and grow together, not a permanent verdict on your marriage.
Yes. Many couples describe sexual intimacy, when paired with emotional and spiritual closeness, as profoundly connecting and even transcendent—a thin place where they feel especially close to each other and to God.
Begin gently and privately, naming that the silence many of us grew up with taught shame rather than truth. Share your hopes and hesitations a little at a time, listen without judgment, and treat it as an ongoing conversation rather than a single talk.
