American history carries the unmistakable imprint of religion’s regulation of sexual behavior. Religious attention to sex and its many consequences has shaped American legal statutes, moral values, and worldviews in innumerable ways. Religious groups have long concerned themselves with upholding particular rules about marriage, reproduction, and leisure activity through ethical training and sometimes through political activism. Communities know, of course, that some in their midst – religious leaders no less than participants – may find such standards difficult to follow over a lifetime; what to do about various failures and transgressions, then, has been a significant source of discussion and debate. Just as fraught have been varied efforts to broaden or revise sexual regulations within religious traditions on the grounds that many such rules represent outdated customs and unjust cultural prejudices rather than divine and eternal truths. This essay traces the general trajectory of these protracted and overlapping religious struggles and the development of what many view as a full-blown culture war in the United States – a war for the authority to define sex and to control sexuality for the sake of the nation’s future.

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT

The long battles waged by Christians over sexuality offer a particularly bewildering set of paradoxes that have played themselves out in American culture no less than in other cultures on which the tradition has had a major influence. Consider, briefly, the biblical context from which Christians trace their tradition’s origins. Jesus, Christianity’s central figure and raison d’etre, who was believed to be born of a virgin, said very little about sex, although the gospel writers variously depict him as prohibiting divorce, forgiving an adulterous woman while cautioning his disciples against hypocritical judgments, raising the bar on adultery by cautioning against lustful looks, and praising those who make themselves “eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom” (Matthew 19:12).