The Challenging Goodness of a Sexual Counter-Culture
The following is an excerpt from an interview with pastor Sam Allberry on City to City’s How to Reach the West Again podcast. In this discussion, Allberry explores how even though Christianity’s sexual ethic seems like a challenge to both the church and broader culture, it holds fundamental good for our benefit and affirms our self-worth.
BRANDON J. O’BRIEN: In one section of How to Reach the West Again, Tim Keller discusses how the church needs what he calls a “category-defying social vision” and examines the unique social institution of the church in the first century. In particular, Tim mentions that the church should serve as a sexual counter-culture.
Sam, you've written extensively on sexuality and more recently on the body, which is related and bound up in questions about sexuality. How did this topic become significant for you, and how do you hope to contribute to the conversation as it develops in the church?
SAM ALLBERRY: Issues of sexuality have become increasingly relevant to me for two reasons. One was from a ministry point of view. While serving as a pastor in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I noticed cultural shifts began to impact ground-level ministry. I saw Christians beginning to wobble a lot more on a traditional Christian understanding of sexual ethics. I could sense people beginning to wonder if what they held as true was the right thing to think, whether it was good for people. Christian leaders started to change their minds a bit and become more revisionist, so sexuality was becoming more of an urgent issue simply from a pastoral ministry perspective.
The other reason was that, for many years, I had wrestled with same-sex attraction in my own life. That was part of my experience as I came to faith as a teenager and continues to be something I work through as a Christian in the years since. I never felt a particularly strong desire or need to speak about that, other than to a few close friends—it was a private, personal matter. But as I saw these cultural changes and the church weakening in a number of areas, losing confidence in what scripture says, I felt it was urgent to have someone speak into these issues from the inside. It is important to not only hear about LGBTQ+ issues from an outsider's perspective, but also to hear people speak about them from their own Christian testimony and experience.
In particular, I felt a burden for people to know that God's word to those in my situation was a good word. It can feel restrictive and difficult. It is restrictive. It is difficult. But it's fundamentally good. I hope to help the church be strengthened in its convictions around these things and to have the right kind of disposition and posture as we get into these conversations with the wider culture.
I felt a burden for people to know that God's word to those in my situation was a good word. It can feel restrictive and difficult. But it's fundamentally good.
It's hugely significant. I see that shift most clearly when I see Christians who are biblically convinced about an issue like Christian sexual morality, but they're not emotionally convinced. In other words, they are convinced it is what the Bible says and what they're supposed to believe, but they're not convinced at a heart level that it’s the right way to live or that it is good news for anyone.
My fear is that if you're biblically convinced but not emotionally convinced, you won't remain biblically convinced. I don't think people are going to care whether what we say is true if they don't think it's good, which is why some of the arguments we've used in previous generations to commend Christian sexual ethics are getting nowhere today. They're appealing to the wrong kind of moral intuitions. We've got a lot of work to do.
BJO: Along with some viewing the traditional biblical teaching on marriage and sexuality as restrictive, many of us also have complicated relationships with our bodies. How do you see complicated or conflicting notions of our bodies in Western culture?
SA: I think “conflicting” is a good word for it because I don't think we're very consistent. On one hand, we're far more self-conscious about our physicality than we have ever been. Twenty years ago, the men's grooming section of a supermarket was pretty slim. You'd have your shaving kit, maybe a brand of aftershave, and some deodorant, and that was about it. Now, it's a huge deal. That's neither a bad thing nor a good thing. It's just significant that many men are far more self-conscious about our appearance than we used to be. And across the board, that seems to be the case—in Western culture anyway—where the standards of beauty being presented to us are increasingly unrealistic and, in some cases, aren't even based on a real person's body, whether it's been Photoshopped or something else. My sense is we're all feeling less attractive and less presentable as a result. There are a lot of rising body image issues and anxieties.
At the same time, the prevailing worldview seems to be that your body doesn't actually mean anything; it's accidental or incidental. It's simply the lump of flesh you drag around with you. It doesn't tell you anything about who you are. It is simply the canvas on which you paint your real identity, which you find by looking within, not by looking at your physicality.
There's some inconsistency there. On one hand, we're making too much fuss over what our bodies look like, but we're also very much underplaying any significance our own particular bodies might have for understanding who we are.
BJO: It seems that one way our broader Western culture is conflicted about our bodies shows up in the difference in the way the body features in conversations about sexuality versus in other justice-oriented conversations, like race, specifically. There seems to be a strong emphasis on the degree to which your body determines your identity when it comes to race, but the opposite is true about determining your identity as it relates to gender or sexuality.
These conversations are often lumped together as justice issues, broadly speaking, but there seems to be a dividing of the body’s role in those two conversations. In light of that conflicted understanding of the body, what are some basic biblical convictions about it that would help us find some resolution in those conflicts?
SA: I think you're exactly right. I'm not nearly as conversant as I want to be with some of the discussions around race, but this point is interesting to me. Understandably, we are far more hesitant about things like trying to make your body look like someone of a different race or a different ethnicity than we would have been twenty or thirty years ago. Yet I can't help but wonder why making a body look like someone of a different biological sex is applauded.
When it comes to gender, the popular conceit is that it’s purely a matter of internal, psychological identity and expressing that in whatever way you feel led to by altering your body if needed. The body, by that logic, is catching up with the real you or the inner you. But we would never say the same about race—we see one’s given race as something inviolable, something you shouldn't want to change, something that would be unhealthy to change, and something that would be offensive if you tried to discard it and appropriate someone else’s.
There's a lot of work for us to do on this. Step one is trying to have a clear understanding in our minds of scripture’s truth. The second step is then finding ways to articulate that in various scenarios and any given conversation we might have with our culture.
In terms of our own understanding, I think the Bible does give us clarity on a lot of these things. It shows us that every single human being—irrespective of what they think about themselves or about the church or what they're doing to themselves—is someone of infinite worth and value and dignity, and we must respect that.
Step one is trying to have a clear understanding in our minds of scripture’s truth. The second step is then finding ways to articulate that in various scenarios and any given conversation we might have with our culture.
And there's this cultural understanding right now that says, “If you disagree with me, you must be morally inferior and I can completely disdain you.” We can't do that as Christians. We actually offend God if we do that. So we mustn't curse the image of God.
That's one of the most foundational things. In the very same part of scripture that we see the importance of this respect of others, Genesis 1, we also see that our sexual differentiation as male and female is significant to how we image God. It's not incidental. It doesn't say, “In the image of God He created them introverts and extroverts.” The significant distinction is not one’s personality type. It's not even ethnicity. It's maleness and femaleness.
Therefore, Christians can't have a plastic understanding of gender identity, or one that’s independent of the biological givenness of how we've been made. Our gender identity in the Bible comes from our physical givenness, not our psychological thinking.
That fact helps me because it shows me that, apart from anything else as a Christian man who has experienced same-sex attraction, my sexual identity in Genesis 1’s terms is not that I'm someone who is same-sex attracted. My sexual identity in biblical terms is that I'm male. That is my sexual identity. And that's part of my eternal identity. When I'm resurrected in the age to come, I will be resurrected as a man. I won't be resurrected with the same sexual feelings and temptations that I experience in this life—and I thank God that's the case. So I mustn't make my sexual feelings the foundation of my core identity—it's something that is temporal; it’s bound up with this age that is going to pass away. It's not part of my eternal identity in Christ.
I mustn't make my sexual feelings the foundation of my core identity—it's something that is temporal; it’s bound up with this age that is going to pass away.
This helps me know what to prioritize theologically, out of all the different ways to mark our identity that culture presents us. The big issue underlying all of this is contemporary cultural anthropology versus biblical anthropology. The concepts of how we know who we are and how we understand what it means to be a human being are vastly different to our culture. And our culture is already incredibly different than what it was even 20 years ago. Our view of identity has changed significantly.
As we try to engage in conversations about these things, we need to be aware that we're treading on sensitive terrain. It's not the time to be swashbuckling as believers, but to be aware that there are, in many cases, heightened emotions, heightened feelings, deep pains, and serious wounds. I think one of the most significant ways to engage is to show how the gospel treats all of us the same. That way, we're not saying something to another person in a way that sounds like we're setting ourselves above them, singling them out, or putting them in a category of their own.
BJO: You’ve noted in your written work that there are two things Christians need to do in order to be compelling witnesses. One is to be clear on our message about what the Bible teaches. The other is to be a community in which that clear message can be received as good news.
Many people who have experienced same-sex attraction may not join the church because they find or assume the Christian community to be an implausible space for them. It's not clear to them how they can be a part of it, continue to experience the attractions they experience, and live a meaningful life.
You mentioned that many Christians aren’t as convicted about a biblical sexual ethic as they once were, but are there also tendencies within other Christian circles that result in same-sex attracted individuals believing the church isn’t the place for them?
SA: Russell Moore wrote a piece where he said that young people become secular not because they don't believe what the church teaches, but because they see the church doesn't believe what the church teaches. We can't just blame culture for the fact that we're losing so many young people. It's our fault as churches.
I see this play out in a number of fairly common ways, sadly. One is that it's very easy in some evangelical cultures to be more convicted about certain sexual sins than others. It's what the human heart does. We know the Spirit has come to convict us of sin, but many times we primarily get convicted about other people’s sin. It's always easier to be more concerned about someone else's sin than your own, which means a church may tend to condemn the sins of the minority more often than the sins of the majority. It may be easy to have churches where gay relationships are railed against, but no one talks about spousal abuse or adultery or pornography. Those may hit a bit too close to home, whereas the presumption may be that you can feel free to bash gay people because there aren't many of them in church anyway.
That's one dangerous place where we're not consistent. We're not reflecting the balance and proportion of scripture with how we talk about various types of sin. It is telling that whenever the New Testament mentions homosexuality, it mentions it in the context of other sins—greed, for example, or slander. Yet those may not get the air time in a pulpit that homosexuality does.
That’s the posture the Gospel would have each of us take—the sin that I'm going to be most concerned about is my own. I'm not going to be unconcerned about other people’s, but I'm going to be more convicted about my own sin than someone else’s.
I keep coming back to 1 Timothy, where Paul says, "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst." I don't think Paul was saying that he surveyed the entire first-century church and it turns out that he is objectively the worst of all sinners. Paul was simply showing us that when you really know how messed up your own heart is, it's hard to believe there's someone else out there who's more messed up than you.
That’s the posture the gospel would have each of us take—the sin that I'm going to be most concerned about is my own. I'm not going to be unconcerned about other people’s, but I'm going to be more convicted about my own sin than someone else’s.
Something else we need to watch out for is exalting marriage so much in our Christian culture that we imply you're spiritually immature if you've not yet married—or that you can't functionally do life in the Christian world. By assuming marriage to be the basic unit of how church life works, there is a lack of community for singles that comes about. The church could very well have a lack of plausibility, then, for anyone who might be thinking long-term singleness is in their future. They won’t find the healthy intimacy that the Bible says we all need within the church.
As the Catholic theologian Christopher West says, "Intimacy is like hunger. If your only choice is bad food or no food, you'll eat bad food because you've got to eat." If our churches only offer the options of no intimacy or unbiblical intimacy to singles, they'll take unbiblical intimacy. I've seen people leave churches because they've gotten into relationships that the Bible would prohibit, and it's very easy for a church in that context to go, “Well, that's terribly wrong and disobedient.” But part of me wants to say to the church, “Did you give them an alternative? Was there healthy, biblical intimacy on offer in this church? Or is that just not available to those who aren't married?”
The three things I think every church needs are, first, clarity; we're not serving anyone if we're muddled about what the Bible says. Second, compassion that we might recognize our own sexual fallenness and compassion for those whose experience of sexual fallenness is very different to our own. Third, community in which we actually embody a unity that makes singleness or other forms of home life viable and desirable, not just survivable, to be part of a local church.
BJO: In what ways are the Christian sexual ethic that we've been talking about offensive to the broader Western culture?
SA: The most obvious way is that much of our culture says sexual fulfillment is the key to living authentically, fully, and healthily—this is where the change has really kicked in. When I was at university 20 years ago, Christians and our sexual ethic were seen as quaint and old-fashioned. Now, people think it's dangerous and actually harmful to deny someone the kind of sexual fulfillment they want to have. The reason, again, has to do with anthropology. We foreground sexuality as one of the things that are core to who we are. Thinking is that if you're not experiencing sexual fulfillment, or it's not available to you, then you can't really be who you truly are.
It's become sort of axiomatic. When the church comes along and has boundaries around certain forms of sexual expression, it’s deeply offensive. It's a threat to the Pax Ramona of the Western world today. Given the sort of framework many of our secular friends will have, I understand the response—but I also want to say to them, “You guys aren't as consistent on this as you think you are.” There are still forms of sexual expression that you think should be prohibited. You can't say sexual fulfillment is axiomatic to being a whole and complete human being and then say things like pedophilia and incest are wrong. Obviously, we as Christians can say that those things are wrong, but I think we have a more consistent basis from which to claim that.
The thing I often find myself pushing against with secular friends is that they’ve painted themselves as people of sexual liberation, and the church is a people of sexual restriction. But everyone has boundaries. It's just that we can account for our boundaries in a way that I don't think secular people can; they give with one hand what they then take away with the other. So that is where the gospel, I think, most immediately causes offense. And that exposes that our culture is not really coming clean about some gaping inconsistencies with that whole kind of anthropology.
BJO: Can you see places where a more robust Christian sexual ethic could be a positive leaven for the church, as well?
SA: I think so, yes. My mind is going to Paul's comments in Ephesians 5 about how marriage ultimately points to Christ and the church. If we really take that to heart, it helps us respect and revere marriage without idolizing it. It's actually saying that what marriage points to is ultimate, not the marriage itself. It is Christ and the church that is the reality here, and our earthly marriages are temporal models and signposts towards that. That gives us a way of actually being able to enjoy marriage but not making it the be-all and end-all.
The more you try to make marriage the thing that's going to fulfill you as a Christian, the more you're setting people up to fail. These poor folks are marrying someone thinking that person is going to fulfill them, which they won’t, and they can't. They were never put on this earth to do that. I think it would give us a healthier, more liberating view of marriage to bring it back into a healthy proportion.
Our understanding of the biblical vision for sex is significant too. Tim Keller's language in his book The Meaning of Marriage has helped me on this. He talks about how sex is meant to be a form of self-donation. We've turned it into self-expression or a means to self-gratification or self-fulfillment, but sex is meant to be about the giving of yourself to someone.
In the language of 1 Corinthians 7, when you marry, your body doesn't belong to you now, it belongs to your spouse. It doesn't say your spouse's body belongs to you, so go ahead and take it. It says your body belongs to your spouse, so give it. We flip that over; we've made sex about taking. The porn industry is the most visceral expression of that. And in our saying that sex outside of marriage is sinful, I think we've sometimes implied that all sex within marriage is therefore okay. And we've overlooked the fact that there may well be huge amounts of selfish, coercive, abusive forms of sexual behavior going on within Christian marriages that is not being addressed.
I think WE HAVE a lot of good news, but we still need to find good ways to articulate to broader culture that it’s not solely about prohibitions—there’s positive truth set in place to protect and to help us.
When we take the idea that marriage is the icon of Christ in the church, it gives someone who's single like me something positive to do with their sexual energy, which is to allow that sexual energy and the frustration that can sometimes go with it not being fulfilled to help me realize that there's a deeper hunger that it points to—a deeper appetite, a greater consummation, which is found in the Lord Jesus.
We can actually give people a positive vision of human sexuality that doesn't require our sexual feelings to be gratified in order for us to be fulfilled. I find that liberating. I think we have a lot of good news, but we still need to find good ways to articulate to broader culture that it’s not solely about prohibitions—there’s positive truth set in place to protect and to help us.
BJO: If the church were an effective sexual counter-culture, in what ways do you think that could actually be appealing to culture?
SA: One of the ways has certainly got to be that there would be a culture of sexual dignity. Again, our secular culture, for all its professed claims to humaneness, is still about commodifying other people's bodies and their sexuality as a means of being gratified. The rampant use of pornography shows that to be the case.
I keep coming back to Matthew 5:27, where Jesus says, "Everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart"—and that’s not just rebuking the person looking lustfully. It’s establishing that the person being looked at has a sexual dignity that matters so much to Jesus that it mustn't be compromised even in the privacy of someone else's mind. There's a sexual dignity that Jesus gives us in his teaching.
If it turns out my sexual dignity is something that is not cheap but is actually precious and valuable, I'm going to be much more careful with how I use it and how I allow other people to use it. So I think part of what we want to convey in terms of a Christian sexual counter-culture is that we want to be a place where your sexuality is not going to be misused by other people; there is more to you than the sexual gratification of others. So many people have been demeaned, abused, and commodified. For them to know they have inherent dignity that comes from being created by God is a very fruitful starting point.
Recently, we've lived in a moralistic age where we’ve felt the need to show people they're sinners. Now, we're living in an anxious age where we need to show people that they have worth. A lot of people instinctively think they don't. And it's that very worth that then accounts for the seriousness of sin when we get to explaining that part, as well. Having a counter-culture includes being a church that creates a sense of safety for any kind of sinner to come and, in time, confess their sin and find their burdens lifted in Jesus.
BJO: Friends of ours in continental Europe are noticing that belonging to a Christian community often precedes believing—they have found that many people come in, are part of a small group, and attend services for some time before they begin to confess personal faith. In North America, we might be comfortable with that process if a heterosexual couple and their children came to the church and didn't cause major problems. But we might have a different reaction if that were a gay or lesbian couple. We might feel a certain obligation to make our convictions about their lifestyle clear before we let them participate in our community. How would you respond to that idea, pastorally and practically?
SA: I think that type of journey of faith is a reflection of the fact that people often need to not only hear gospel truth but also to see gospel reality being lived out around them. It takes time to know if a group of people really is safe—whether they really will love you, warts and all. So I think there is something to belonging before believing, but I'm hesitant to make that concept axiomatic in a way that suggests, "Fold everyone into church membership, and eventually they'll catch up." I want people to feel folded in, deeply loved, and, in one sense, accepted by the church. But I also want them to feel as though there is something they're missing out on—not in terms of relational perks that we're not extending to them, but in a sense where they feel, “You guys have something in Jesus that's animating all of this, and I need that in my life." I want people to come in close enough that they can see where they don't fit in and, in a healthy way, realize that they need Jesus.
People often need to not only hear gospel truth but also to see gospel reality being lived out around them.
I think hospitality is another key principle. I love Rosaria Butterfield's idea that hospitality in a secular world is going to be an essential part of how we do kingdom work. It's a wonderful way of reflecting the gospel notion that God comes to us when we’re far away from him. He draws us to himself, brings us into his family, and sits us at his table. When we do that to people who are far from Christ, we're actually showing the gospel to them.
And when it comes to people whose identities aren’t typical of what we're used to in church life, I've heard some Christians ask, "What about the danger to our kids if someone who's trans comes to church?'" And I want to say, "I don't think our kids' faith is that fragile." I'm more worried about the danger to the trans person if they don't come. Surely we want our kids to grow up in a church where people of all kinds of fallenness feel welcome.
As I touched on earlier, Jesus puts us all in the same boat. Just because many Christians haven't wrestled with gender identity and made that the expression of how they rebel against God, we've all rebelled against God in our own ways. And part of biblical hospitality is allowing ourselves to be made uncomfortable rather than the outsider. This includes not making them conform to our norms in order to simply come in and hear the gospel. Let's make ourselves uncomfortable by having them with us so that they can hear God’s truth.
BJO: What’s a final word of encouragement or advice you would give church leaders on this particular topic?
SA: I would say, "Taste and see that the Lord is good." That verse from Psalm 34 doesn't apply any less to these conversations in culturally difficult and sensitive areas. That's what we want people to do. We don’t want people to think Christians are far more reasonable than non-Christians—we just want them to think, "Jesus is better."
Ultimately, what's going to keep you and me from sin is wanting Jesus more than we want the sin, finding goodness and beauty in him that is more compelling than whatever counterfeit the sin is offering. And that's what we want in our churches. That's what we want our non-Christian friends and family and neighbors and colleagues to know. I say this while very mindful of the need to do as much work as we can to understand our culture and engage in those conversations, but we also want people to know you don't have to be able to do it perfectly to present a compelling and irresistible portrait of Jesus to people.
What's going to keep you and me from sin is wanting Jesus more than we want the sin, finding goodness and beauty in him that is more compelling than whatever counterfeit the sin is offering.
Sometimes God, in his confounding sovereignty and goodness, gets people through the doors of the church when we weren't even ready for them to get through. Maybe you’re not yet having these types of discussions. But many times God doesn't wait for us to be as ready as we should be before people start coming from some of these backgrounds. And somehow, through our very imperfect, incomplete, not-as-informed-as-they-should-be discussions, people end up coming to Christ. The gospel is that powerful. I guess the short way of saying that is, sometimes the harvest starts coming before we are ready for it.
We want to do as good a job as we can. I want us to pursue excellence in our cultural engagement whilst also recognizing that the gospel is so potent that sometimes people are saved through things they really shouldn't have been saved through—someone who was tone-deaf and making all the wrong assumptions and yet preaching Christ, and the message of Christ came through. So, let's keep longing for that to happen and rejoicing when it does.
About the Author
Sam Allberry is a pastor, apologist, author, and speaker. He is the author of a number of books, including Is God Anti-Gay?; What God Has to Say About Our Bodies; Why Does God Care Who I Sleep With?; and 7 Myths about Singleness.