How "Sex" Became The Biggest Sin For Christians

The Strange Link Between Belief in Hell and Sexual Behavior.

New findings complicate everything the church taught us about purity.

What if I told you I could make a reasonably good guess about the number of sexual partners you’ve had based on your beliefs about heaven and hell?

Would that surprise you?

It sounds like a ridiculous claim. What could your beliefs about the afterlife possibly reveal about your sex life?

Quite a lot, apparently.

I wonder, what were you taught about sex growing up in the church?

Perhaps you were told it was a beautiful gift from God, but only within marriage. Perhaps you signed a purity pledge, wore a purity ring or listened to the familiar illustrations about chewed gum and sticky tape. Or perhaps, like me, you were left with the distinct impression that sexual desire was dangerous — and that acting on it could have eternal consequences.

I can still remember one particular sermon.

I was sitting in church listening to a preacher talk about sexual sin. I don’t remember the Bible passage he used or exactly how he got there, but I remember the warning clearly enough. If we gave in to our sexual desires — if we slept with someone before marriage, fooled around or crossed one of the many lines the church had drawn around our bodies — we were placing our eternal souls in danger.

The preacher knew exactly which button to press. Teenage hormones were powerful, but so was the fear of being set on fire forever. He didn’t need to help us understand sex. He only needed to make sure that whenever sex entered our imagination, hell arrived with it.

As a young man with a functioning imagination and all the hormones one would expect, I found the message terrifying. Every sexual thought suddenly felt loaded with eternal significance. One reckless evening, one moment of weakness, one lapse in judgement — and I might spend forever paying for it.

That was how the church tried to keep us sexually pure.

And it worked.

At least, it worked if the goal was to frighten us into sexual restraint.

And now, remarkably, there is research suggesting that I was far from the only person for whom the fear of hell proved to be a powerful sexual deterrent.

Apparently, Hell Works

A new study published in the American Psychological Association journal

Psychology of Religion and Spirituality

examined the relationship between belief in the afterlife and people’s romantic and sexual behaviour.

The researchers were particularly interested in whether belief in heaven and belief in hell affected people differently. Does the promise of eternal reward shape our behaviour, or are we more strongly influenced by the threat of eternal punishment?

To find out, they analysed data from tens of thousands of people across 27 countries, comparing rates of belief in heaven and hell with attitudes towards casual sex, reported sexual behaviour and infidelity. They also accounted for factors such as wealth, unemployment, income inequality and gender equality.

The results were striking. In countries where belief in hell was more common, people reported fewer casual sexual encounters, lower acceptance of casual sex and less infidelity. Belief in heaven, by contrast, showed a much weaker relationship with sexual restraint once those socioeconomic factors were considered.

In other words, the threat of punishment appeared to be more effective than the promise of reward.

Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us. Human beings tend to be highly motivated by fear, especially when the threatened consequence is unimaginably severe. The possibility of heaven may give people something to look forward to, but the possibility of being tortured forever gives them something they desperately want to avoid.

Hell Didn’t Remove the Desire

Perhaps the most revealing finding was that belief in hell did not appear to reduce people’s desire for casual sex. People living in societies where belief in hell was more common did not report significantly lower levels of sexual desire. They were simply less likely to report acting on it.

That distinction is important.

Hell may change behaviour without changing desire. It doesn’t necessarily make someone less interested in sex, more emotionally mature or better equipped to understand what is happening within them. It simply places an unimaginably severe consequence on the other side of the decision.

In that sense, hell functions as a kind of supernatural surveillance system. You may be able to hide your sexual behaviour from your parents, your pastor, your spouse or your church community, but you cannot hide it from God. Even when nobody else is watching, the threat remains.

And threats can be incredibly effective.

The researchers suggest that the fear of punishment may influence human behaviour more powerfully than the promise of reward. Heaven offers something good in the future, but hell threatens the loss of everything. When those are the stakes, suppressing a desire can feel like an act of survival.

But suppression is not the same as transformation.

A person can avoid casual sex while still feeling ashamed of their body, terrified of intimacy and completely unable to speak honestly about desire. They can follow every rule the church gives them without ever developing the emotional maturity needed to build a healthy sexual relationship.

This is where the study begins to raise a larger theological question. Is Christianity’s goal merely to prevent people from committing certain acts? Or is it supposed to form people who can understand their desires, exercise genuine self-control and relate to others with love, honesty and respect?

Fear may be able to keep someone out of bed.

It cannot teach them what love requires.

But It Didn’t Produce Happier Marriages Either

If belief in hell discourages casual sex and infidelity, we might reasonably expect it to produce stronger marriages. After all, this is often how conservative sexual teaching is presented. Follow God’s rules, save sex for marriage and your relationship will be healthier because of it.

But that isn’t what the researchers found.

Neither belief in heaven nor belief in hell reliably predicted marital satisfaction. Afterlife belief also did not reliably predict whether someone would divorce. People who believed in hell may have reported fewer sexual partners and more conservative attitudes, but they were not necessarily any happier in their marriages.

This complicates the claim that stronger warnings and stricter sexual rules automatically produce healthier families. Avoiding casual sex may remove one possible source of relational difficulty, but it cannot create emotional intimacy, honest communication, mutual respect or sexual health. Nor can it teach two people how to navigate disappointment, repair conflict or remain connected as they change.

Not breaking the rules is a very low definition of relational success.

A marriage can remain technically intact while the people within it feel desperately lonely. Two people can avoid adultery without ever becoming emotionally intimate. They can remain married because divorce feels shameful or dangerous, not because their relationship is loving, safe or life-giving.

That does not mean belief in hell causes unhappy marriages. The study does not establish that, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. It simply gives us no reason to conclude that belief in eternal punishment improves the quality of a marriage.

Hell may help keep people from sleeping with the wrong person.

It cannot teach them how to love the person they married.

This Was the Logic Behind Purity Culture

This was essentially the logic behind purity culture.

Young Christians were rarely invited into an honest conversation about desire, intimacy and the complicated responsibility of sharing their bodies with another person. Instead, we were given warnings. Sexual activity outside marriage would damage our relationship with God, ruin our future marriage, diminish our value and potentially lead us towards spiritual destruction.

The illustrations were designed to stay with us. A person who had sex was compared to chewed gum, a flower with its petals torn away or a piece of sticky tape that lost its ability to bond after being attached to too many surfaces. The intended lesson was clear: every sexual experience outside marriage took something from you that could never be recovered.

For some people, this approach probably delayed sexual activity. If success is measured by how many teenagers remained technically virgins until their wedding day, purity culture may be able to point to some victories.

But it often left those same young people profoundly unprepared for what came next.

They had been taught how to avoid sex, but not how to talk about it. They knew the rules surrounding sexual purity, but had received little guidance about consent, mutual pleasure, emotional intimacy, communication or the complexities of desire. Many entered marriage knowing how to fear sex but not how to experience it without shame.

Those feelings didn’t simply disappear when people got married. While a wedding might put the stamp of approval on sex, but it couldn’t instantly undo years of being taught that their bodies were dangerous and their desires could not be trusted. The church expected people to move from “sex could ruin you” to “sex is a beautiful gift from God” overnight. For many, it wasn’t that simple.

Purity culture was often very good at teaching people not to have sex. It was far less successful at teaching them how to become honest, embodied and emotionally healthy sexual beings.

What Kind of Obedience Does Fear Produce?

It would be too easy to conclude that behaviour doesn’t matter because motives matter more. Christianity has never made that distinction. Choosing not to betray your partner is good, even if your reasons are imperfect. The person who resists temptation because they fear the consequences still avoids causing real harm.

For the most part, our moral education is a matter of consequences. A child is instructed not to hit long before he or she has the capacity to comprehend what another is feeling. The expectation is that with time the prohibition will take on greater meaning. What was once “I must not hurt people for fear of punishment” should in the end be replaced by a sense that one does not want to cause harm because those people matter.

The problem arises when that development never happens.

A person can spend decades avoiding sexual misconduct because they fear hell without ever developing a coherent sexual ethic. They may know which acts are forbidden while remaining unable to explain what makes sex loving, exploitative, faithful or harmful. Take away the punishment, and little remains to guide them.

When Jesus spoke about adultery, he didn’t allow those who had never technically cheated to congratulate themselves. He turned their attention to the way they looked at other people — the private habits of possession and objectification that could exist even when no physical boundary had been crossed.

That is a more demanding sexual ethic than simply avoiding casual sex. It asks whether our relationships are truthful, mutual and free from exploitation. It requires judgement, empathy and responsibility — qualities that cannot be reduced to fear of what God might do to us afterwards.

Belief in hell may therefore produce a kind of obedience. The study gives us some reason to think it does. What it cannot tell us is whether that obedience eventually becomes a mature ethic or remains permanently dependent upon the threat.

What the Numbers Cannot Tell Us

To this day, I have only had sex with one person: the woman who became my wife.

Viewed from the outside, that fact might look like a triumph of Christian sexual teaching. But it tells you almost nothing about whether I developed a healthy relationship with my body, understood my desires or learned how to approach sex without shame. It tells you how many sexual partners I have had. Nothing more.

That is also the limitation of this study. It can identify a relationship between belief in hell and fewer casual sexual encounters, but it cannot tell us what was happening inside the people whose behaviour it measured. It cannot tell us whether they acted from conviction or terror, whether they understood their choices or merely suppressed their desires, or whether their restraint helped them build healthier relationships.

Those questions are harder to measure, but they matter.

Churches have often treated sexual restraint as evidence of spiritual maturity. If someone remained within the approved boundaries, the teaching was considered successful. Little attention was given to whether that person carried fear into marriage, struggled to experience intimacy without guilt or had ever developed a sexual ethic deeper than “God will punish me if I cross the line.”

Perhaps belief in hell does reduce casual sex. The research gives us reason to consider that possibility.

But a lower number of sexual partners cannot tell us whether someone has become more loving, honest or whole. And surely those outcomes deserve to count as well.