A Brief History of Sex and Marriage

This is part of an ongoing series called “A Brief History,” exploring how certain ideas evolved into the evangelical world many of us were born into. Today we dive into the history of sex and marriage

A Brief History of Sex and Marriage

This post is part of an ongoing series called “A Brief History.” The idea is not to give a full academic history of each subject, but to give an overview — a true but readable story — of how these ideas evolved into the evangelical world many of us were born into between the 1980s and early 2000s.

Warning: This content may be triggering for some. I do not take joy in discussing how women were treated in antiquity, and I will also address issues of physical and sexual abuse within marriage. If you're not ready for that today, it's okay to skip this one.

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The World We Were Handed

If you grew up evangelical in the late 20th century, there was a script you were handed before you even knew you were reading one.

Save sex for marriage.
Get a purity ring.
Sign a pledge.
Guard your heart.
Marry young.
Start a godly family.
Raise up children in the way they should go.
Vote for "family values" candidates.
Defend the sanctity of marriage at all costs.

From I Kissed Dating Goodbye to Focus on the Family, the message was clear:
This is the biblical way. This is the way it has always been.

Except... it wasn’t.

Not even close.

The story we were handed about sex, marriage, and family wasn’t just a little off — it was built on centuries of shifting interpretations, cultural adaptations, and theological patchwork.

So let’s go back to the beginning.

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The Original "Family Values" — Property, Polygamy, and Power

When we open the Bible to its earliest stories, we don’t find purity oaths or nuclear families. We find arranged marriages. Sister-wives. Sex slaves — politely translated in most Bibles as "concubines." Daughters traded like bargaining chips.

Family wasn’t built on love or equality.
It was about survival, land, bloodlines, and power.

And it was always, only about men.

Marriage was a business deal between two men — the father and the husband.
Sex was something a man did to claim or secure ownership.

In the original Hebrew, there weren't even words for "husband" and "wife."
Just "man" and "his woman."
Sometimes, the word for husband was literally "master."

And women?
Women were property.
First under their fathers, then under their husbands.
They weren’t even seen as full people in most cases — just parts of a man’s household inventory.

And when it came to "saving sex for marriage," that expectation only applied to women.
For men, sex was just another way to display dominance, ownership, and status.

Victorious armies didn’t just kill their enemies — they raped the soldiers’ wives and daughters.
And then they raped the defeated soldiers themselves.
It wasn’t about attraction or orientation.

Sex was about domination. Submission. Power.

And that is exactly what it was about in marriage as well.

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The Sex Lives of Bible Heroes

When we read the Bible’s greatest hits, it’s easy to miss how much brokenness was baked into the system.

Take Jacob — the man whose name would become Israel.
His story wasn’t some grand love story.
It was a train wreck.

Jacob didn’t marry for love, at least not at first.
He was tricked into marrying Leah — the wrong sister — by her father Laban, who was also Jacob’s uncle. (You know, just classic family dynamics.)

Then Jacob worked another seven years to finally marry Rachel — the sister he actually loved. As part of the deal, Laban threw in two sex slaves, Bilhah and Zilpah, to sweeten the arrangement.

So now you’ve got one man, two wives (who are sisters), and two sex slaves — and a tangle of jealousy and resentment.
And Jacob only loved one of them — Rachel — the one who, for many years, couldn’t give him children.

This was the birth story of the God’s people, the nation of Israel.

The twelve tribes were born from that mess:
Rivalry. Bargaining. Betrayal.
Power plays involving actual human lives.

And Jacob wasn’t an exception.
Nearly every Old Testament "hero" had multiple wives or sex slaves — including the biggies: Abraham and Moses.

And if you want the ultimate example of how far the system went?
David’s son Solomon — the "wisest man who ever lived" — had 1,000 women.
Seven hundred wives. Three hundred sex slaves.

This was the world they knew.
Marriage wasn’t sacred romance.
It was survival, bargaining, domination, and property.

David — "a man after God's own heart" — had multiple wives and at least ten known sex slaves. And nobody blinked.

When David slept with Bathsheba, the prophet Nathan didn’t frame it as a violation of Bathsheba’s dignity. The sin wasn’t that David slept with someone who wasn’t his wife — he did that nightly. The sin was that he slept with someone who belonged to another man.

Nathan told a parable about a rich man stealing a poor man’s lamb.
Because in their world, that’s what it was.
Theft.
Not sexual violence.
Not betrayal of marriage vows.
Theft of property.

It’s worth pausing here.

Think about every sermon you ever heard about David and Bathsheba growing up.
How many of them framed the sin as "giving in to sexual temptation"?
How many warned you about the dangers of lust or the need to guard your heart?

Not that cheating is good — but that wasn’t the sin Nathan called out.

The sin was stealing.
Taking something that didn’t belong to you.
Nathan even said God would have given David even more women — as long as they weren’t already claimed by another man.

Imagine the world we’d live in if every preacher who chose this passage had preached a sermon like this instead:

"The sin of David wasn’t adultery. It was theft.
But the deeper sin — even if the writers didn’t see it, even if Nathan didn’t see it, even if David didn’t see it, even if “God “ didn’t see it —
was that a woman was treated as property to be owned and stolen."

And, for what it’s worth —
that’s what a deconstructed preacher sounds like.

And that’s why we need more of them.

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From Exile to Jesus and Paul

In the days of Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon, marriage wasn’t primarily about love. It was about survival, power, and property.

Polygamy was everywhere.
Sex was a tool for expanding bloodlines, securing alliances, and displaying wealth.
Marriage was an economic strategy, not a spiritual one.

But after the Babylonian Exile — around 586 BCE, when Jerusalem fell and the First Temple was destroyed — everything changed.
The old tribal structures collapsed.
The Jews who returned home weren’t kings or conquerors.
They were survivors.

And survival demanded a different kind of family.

Without kings to flaunt their power through wives and concubines, marriage shifted.
It became about faithfulness. Stability. Community survival.

By the time Jesus was born, polygamy technically still existed in Jewish culture — but it had mostly disappeared from everyday life.
Monogamy had become the norm for ordinary people.
One man. One woman. One fragile household trying to make it in a hard world.

You might wonder: Did Jesus talk about marriage? Divorce? Sex?

A little. But maybe not the way we were taught to expect.

He said marriage wouldn’t last into the next life.
He pointed back to the Genesis idea of "two becoming one flesh."
He taught against easy divorce — but he never made marriage the centerpiece of a godly life.

If anything, he de-centered family altogether.
"Who are my mother and brothers?" he asked.
"Those who do the will of my Father."

He never mentioned homosexuality.
He never talked about gender identity.
He didn’t lay out a blueprint for family structure.
He didn’t preach about purity culture or courtship rules.

Marriage wasn’t condemned.
It just wasn’t the point anymore.

Marriage stayed part of the social fabric.
But for Jesus and Paul, urgency mattered more than family.

Jesus said marriage wouldn’t even exist in the resurrection.
Paul pushed it even further.
Marriage was a concession, not a goal.
A distraction from the real work: preparing for the coming Kingdom.

Better to stay single if you could, Paul said.
Time was short.
The end was near.
Why tie yourself down?

Sex wasn’t evil, so much as it was a distraction.
Marriage wasn’t evil either.
But neither mattered much when the world was about to be dramatically reset by God.

In Paul’s world, urgency superseded family.
Mission outweighed marriage.
Devotion to God took precedence over devotion to building a "godly household."

But didn’t Jesus “Focus on the Family”?

Nope.

If anything, he devalued the family unit because he was building a new one — one meant for the eschaton (final days) and the new heaven and new earth.

Marriage Becomes Sacramental and Institutional

The early Christians lived on borrowed time.
Any day now, they thought.
Any hour.
Jesus would return, set the world right, end the story.

But decades passed. Then centuries.

Jesus didn’t part the clouds with a trumpet blast as they had been so sure would happen.

The Church had to adapt.
It wasn’t just a waiting room anymore.
It was an institution.

When Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, the shift was locked in.
The Church wasn’t just a people movement now.
It was a government-backed system.
And like any good empire, it needed order.

Marriage had always been a business transaction between two men — the father and the groom.
It was about property, heirs, and alliances.
It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t sacred.
It was business.

By the time Constantine rose to power, Christians had largely abandoned it.
One man. One woman. Not out of sudden morality — but because Roman law and Christian practice agreed: monogamy built stronger households.

Still, marriage wasn’t "holy."
Not yet.

The phrase “holy matrimony” didn’t mean much before the institutional Church existed.
It wasn’t ancient language.
It was branding.

As Christianity grew, marriage wasn’t just a private agreement anymore.
It became spiritual territory.

Blessings were added.
Rules were written.
Approvals were needed.

And by the 12th century, at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, marriage was declared one of the Seven Sacraments — as sacred as baptism or communion.

Marriage wasn’t just a civil contract anymore.
It was a divine act.
Performed by priests.
Blessed by God.
Policed by the Church.

And once marriage belonged to the Church, so did everything connected to it.

Divorce? Forbidden.
Remarriage? Illicit.
Sex? Only inside marriage — and only the marriage the Church sanctioned.

Christian sexual ethics tightened around marriage like a vice.
Sex wasn’t about pleasure.
It was about duty.
Procreation.
Purity.
Obedience.

Marriage made society stable.
Marriage made believers obedient.
Marriage built the next generation of Christians — and the next.

And for women?

Marriage as a sacrament was a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it offered a little more protection.
A husband couldn’t easily abandon his wife anymore.
Consent started to matter — at least officially.
Widows couldn’t be forced into remarriage without their agreement.
In theory, a woman was honored as her husband’s partner.

But in practice?

The old power dynamics didn’t disappear.
They just put on a new robe.

A woman was still seen — legally, spiritually, socially — as part of her husband’s household, not her own person.
Her body was his domain.
Her sexuality was his right.
Her faithfulness was expected.
His authority was assumed.

Marriage became a softer cage.
But it was a cage nonetheless.

Holy matrimony didn’t set women free.
It sanctified their obedience.

By the 1200s, marriage had fully transformed —
from a civil business agreement between families to a divine covenant, performed by priests, binding souls together under God’s name.

The form had changed.
The function hadn’t.

Marriage still controlled sex, reproduction, loyalty, and power.
It just did it with candles and blessings now.

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The Reformation and the Reinvention of Marriage

For a thousand years, marriage belonged to the Church.
It was a sacrament.
A divine act.

Then the Protestants showed up.

Luther, Calvin, and the rest didn’t just break from Rome on theology.
They broke marriage loose too.

Marriage, they said, wasn’t a sacrament at all.
It wasn’t a mystical rite that bound souls in heaven.
It was a good thing — a godly thing — but still a civil thing.

Something for society.
Not for salvation.

Priests got married.
Monks and nuns abandoned celibacy.
Singleness stopped being the spiritual ideal.
Marriage became the new expectation — for everyone.

If you were a serious Christian, you didn’t retreat from the world anymore.
You built a home.
You raised a family.
You lived out your faith inside your own little kingdom.

The family became the "little church."
Husbands ruled.
Wives obeyed.
Children submitted.

And the hierarchy wasn’t just practical now.
It was theological.
The family structure mirrored the so-called divine structure:
God over Christ.
Christ over man.
Man over woman.
Woman over children.

Protestants still talked about love — mutual care, mutual respect.
But make no mistake:
Marriage was still about order.
Control.
Stability.

Sex stayed tightly fenced inside marriage.
Purity was still prized.
But now the point wasn’t avoiding sin to protect your personal soul —
it was building a moral society, house by house, child by child.

The Reformation didn’t erase the old control.
It just moved the chains closer to home.

Instead of priests and popes controlling marriage from above,
now husbands would control it from inside.

Marriage became ordinary.
Mandatory.
Expected.

Singleness, once seen as a spiritual virtue, became a problem to solve.
Marriage wasn’t just allowed anymore.
It was the expectation.
The mark of a faithful, mature Christian life.

And that shift — from holy sacrament to civil duty to sacred obligation inside the home — laid the foundation for everything that came next…

Puritans, American Myths, and the Policing of Sex

We grew up hearing the story.
The Pilgrims came to America for religious freedom.

And technically, that's true.
But not the way most people mean it.

They didn’t come looking for freedom to believe whatever they wanted.
They came looking for freedom to build a society where everyone believed exactly what they did.

In Puritan New England, “religious freedom” meant freedom to punish you for breaking God's rules.
The Church and the government were one and the same.
Civil law was biblical law.

And marriage?
Marriage was the backbone of the whole thing.

Everyone was expected to marry.
Marriage wasn’t just a personal decision.
It was a civic duty.
A spiritual obligation.
A political act.

Sex was only allowed inside marriage.
Period.
And even then, it had a job: make babies, not pleasure.

Adultery wasn’t just a sin.
It was a capital crime.
Punishable by death.

Fornication — sex before marriage — was punished too.
Heavy fines.
Public whipping.
Forced public confessions in front of the congregation.

Sex wasn’t private business.
It was a community concern.

Neighbors policed each other.
Courts tried sexual misconduct cases.
The church kept records of who confessed, who repented, who strayed.

The nuclear family became the engine of godly society.
Fathers ruled.
Wives obeyed.
Children submitted.
Everyone stayed in their lane — or else.

Marriage wasn’t just holy.
It was enforced.

And the founding myth — the idea that America was a land of religious freedom — quietly morphed into something else:

The freedom to impose sexual, marital, and moral conformity by force.

From the beginning, American Christianity tied sexual behavior directly to public morality.
If sex was out of control, society was out of control.
Saving marriage meant saving the world.

That seed would grow.
Into Puritanical shame.
Into Victorian modesty.
Into the purity culture many of us were handed centuries later.

But it started here.
In the meetinghouses and courtrooms of early New England.
Where marriage wasn’t just sacred.
It was the hope of the world.

Even as the seeds of American democracy were being planted, two original sins grew alongside them: slavery and misogyny.
Freedom was never meant for everyone.
It was built by and for land-owning white men — while others were silenced, enslaved, or erased.

The great experiment of American freedom began with an ironic contradiction it would never escape.

Very few Americans were actually free.

So, we had a new America with a government, a system, and a religious culture that says white men rule — especially wealthier white men.
Women submit.
Children obey.
The worst sin is sexual sin (unless, of course, you have privilege).
Marriage is expected.
Singleness is odd.
Being gay is a problem.
Other races are inferior or secondary, even if we never say it clearly.

That’s the DNA of the new nation.

And I also just described a lot of the churches we grew up in.

The Birth of Modern Purity Culture

By the mid-1800s, America had a new obsession: sexual purity.

Victorian values took hold.
Sex became shameful — even inside marriage.
Pleasure was suspect.
Desire was dangerous.

A woman’s worth was her virginity.
A man's virtue was controlling his lust — or at least appearing to.
Public modesty became morality.
Clothing, speech, behavior — everything had rules.
Especially for women.

It wasn’t just cultural.
It was preached from pulpits.
Sanctified by scripture.
The family — one man, one woman, well-behaved children — became the center of Christian virtue.

As the 20th century began, Victorian strictness started to crack.
The Roaring Twenties flirted with rebellion.
But the church doubled down.

The looser the culture got, the tighter the church pulled.

After World War II, the 1950s hit like a reset button.
The American Dream.
The suburban ideal.
White picket fences and nuclear families.

Marriage wasn’t just personal.
It was patriotic.
It was Christian duty.

Women were pushed back into the home.
Men led.
Children obeyed.

Sex outside marriage wasn’t just a sin.
It was a threat — to your soul, your family, your country.

Then came the 1960s.

Birth control.
Feminism.
Civil rights.
Gay rights.
The Sexual Revolution.

The walls cracked wide open.

And evangelical America went to war.

The 1970s and 1980s birthed the modern culture wars.
“Family values” became a political weapon.
Saving marriage became saving the nation.

Purity culture wasn’t an accident.
It was a counterattack.

True Love Waits.
Purity rings.
Courtship pledges.
Modesty rules.

Saving yourself for marriage wasn’t just wisdom.
It was proof of your faith.
Your worth.
Your belonging.

By the time the 1990s rolled around, the story was locked in:

Marriage is God’s plan.
Sex is for marriage only.
Virginity is your gift to your future spouse.
Singleness is suspicious.
Queerness is rebellion.
Desire was allowed — but only if it remained inside Christian marriage.

So What Does This All Mean For Us?

It means a lot of us were born into a world where being human felt like being wrong.

1. Shame, Secrecy, and Guilt

Natural human things — like touching your own body — created shame so deep it stuck for decades.
Being gay wasn’t just different — it was framed as brokenness, rebellion, perversion.
We grew up hearing about “freedom in Christ,” but somehow freedom never quite reached our bodies.

Some learned to hide.
Some learned to hate themselves.
Some, desperate for air, rebelled completely —
"If sex with someone I love is wrong, maybe nothing matters."

Sometimes that led to real emptiness.
Sometimes it led to violence — against ourselves, against others.

And for many?
Even marriage didn’t fix it.
Even after the church-sanctioned wedding, sex still felt dirty.
Guilt doesn’t magically turn into joy just because you sign a paper.

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2. Non-Conformity Framed as Failure

Singleness wasn’t a life choice.
It was a problem to be solved.

Divorce wasn’t a hard reality.
It was a personal failing.

Queerness wasn’t love.
It was rebellion.

If you didn’t fit the mold, you weren’t just different.
You were less.

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3. Fighting Against Equality

We were taught that fighting for women’s equality wasn’t justice — it was rebellion against God.

Girls were taught they were second-class by design.
That their highest calling was submission.
That their bodies were dangerous.
That their value depended on staying pure, obedient, modest, small.

If a girl wore a skirt that was too short, or a shirt that showed too much shoulder,
she wasn’t just breaking a rule —
she was "causing the boys to stumble."
She was "asking for it."

Responsibility for boys’ thoughts and actions fell on girls’ bodies.
And shame became a daily inheritance.

It created deep insecurity.
Self-doubt.
Shame that lived inside the body and soul.
Girls were told they were essential — but only as helpers.
Only as supporters.
Only if they stayed in their place.

And it was cruel to boys too.

Boys were taught they were superior by design.
That they deserved obedience.
That their power was ordained.

That kind of entitlement poisons everything it touches.
It ruins marriages.
It isolates men emotionally.
It wrecks families.

Nobody wins in that system.
Not really.

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4. God Hates Divorce

"I hate divorce," says the Lord God of Israel. (Malachi 2:16)

It’s a line that got pulled out of context to shut down conversations, ignore suffering, and weaponize shame.

“Divorce is not an option.”
That was the mantra.

And sometimes, in a good marriage going through a hard season, it could be a helpful promise — a reminder to hold on, to fight for something worth saving.

But in abusive marriages?
It was a life sentence.
For battered women.
For abused children.

The church created spaces where physical and sexual abuse could fester.
Where pastors told women to stay — even when staying meant staying in danger.
Where appearances mattered more than people.
Where enduring harm was seen as faithfulness, not as suffering.

And when harm was exposed?

Forgiveness became another weapon.

Victims were told to forgive quickly.
To reconcile.
To submit.

Forgiveness wasn’t about healing.
It was about protecting reputations.
Protecting abusers.
Protecting institutions.

And remarriage?

Unless you had the "right" kind of divorce — biblical grounds, approved by leadership — you carried another layer of shame for daring to try again.

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5. Deep Distrust of Our Own Bodies (and Minds)

We were taught early:
You can’t trust your own body.
You can’t trust your own instincts.
You can’t trust your own desires.

And it wasn’t just warnings.
It was scripture.

"Surely I was sinful from birth," they said.
"The heart is deceitful above all things."

It wasn’t just that we might make bad choices.
It was that we were bad — from the inside out.

Desire itself was framed as dangerous.
Pleasure as suspicious.
Even love had to be tightly regulated.

Teaching kids going through puberty that thinking about sex or touching their own bodies is the ultimate sin?
It’s spiritual and emotional abuse.
It’s like telling a starving person that the worst thing they can do is think about their next meal.

And if that was you — if you were that kid?
You can forgive that child.

Because he or she didn’t do anything wrong.

And it wasn’t just our bodies we were taught to fear.
It was failure itself.

When you're raised to believe that one mistake defines your worth forever,
failure doesn’t just hurt.

It terrifies.

Trying new things becomes terrifying.
Taking risks becomes terrifying.
Messing up — even a little — feels like losing God's love.

If you grew up under this, moral perfectionism wasn’t a personality quirk for you.
It was the result of unfair expectations placed on you by systems that were born generations earlier.

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Marriage Can Be Beautiful

Marriage can be beautiful.
Monogamy can be wonderful.
It can create trust, friendship, real happiness.

I’ve been married for 30 of my 52 years.
To the same person.
Someone I love and trust.
Someone I like.

I wouldn’t change that part of my story for anything.

But I also know this:

We are lucky.

We like each other.
We are compatible.
We’ve grown together.

Have we had hard seasons?
Yes.
But way more good ones.
Enough good ones to fight through the hard ones — and believe even better ones were still ahead.

If it had been way more bad than good,
it wouldn’t have worked.

And it wouldn’t have been our failure.
It just would have been true.

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Finally…

You have your truth too.

I want to remind you that what I think or believe about marriage and sex has nothing to do with your actual life. What I want for you is to know that the black-and-white/good-and-evil world you inherited wasn’t how it always was. Generally speaking, it was pretty unhealthy.

If you’re queer or never married or divorced, I want you to see that there is no reason for you to ever see yourself as less than.

If you’re in an abusive or awful situation, I want you to know that it’s not a life sentence. You can do what you need to do to save yourself.

If you’re in a pretty good marriage in a rough season, I want you to know it’s probably worth fighting for — and it can be good again.

If you’re both miserable and have been for most of the time, it’s okay to put all the cards on the table. Divorce is an option. It always has been. Ironically, once some couples realize that, they often choose to stay together. Sometimes, they don’t. But you don’t have to be miserable forever. Talk about it.

If you’re lonely and want someone, I feel for you and hope you find the person you seek.

And I do hope all of you do the work to help women find full equality.

And overall, I hope you see that all of this is evolving, nuanced, and messy. You were born into a time and place that believed what it did for reasons.

Now, you can deconstruct those beliefs around who you really are — and build them back into a healthy view of sex and marriage that is true to you.