Sexuality: A Controversy Shaping Christianity
Andrew Ballitch
Christianity being shaped by controversy is nothing new. While many controversies are safely in the rear-view mirror, some are unfolding dynamically in the present. One battleground seems to be applying acute pressure on the church. As Christians, we are being forced to navigate the massive cultural and theological dividing lines regarding human sexuality.
To understand how we arrived at this cultural moment, we must connect it directly to theological liberalism. Modern revisions of sexuality did not emerge in a vacuum, but their foundations were laid over a century ago. The animating impulse of theological liberalism has always been survival through accommodation. It stems from a fear of being left behind by an advancing culture, a desire to remain relevant, and an anxiety over a shrinking institutional footprint.
“The animating impulse of theological liberalism has always been survival through accommodation.”
To achieve relevance, liberal hermeneutics operate on a moldable view of Scripture—massaging, adjusting, and bending texts to align with shifting societal norms. Though the motivation to speak intelligibly to the culture is understandable, the methodology compromises the authoritative foundation of the faith.
The primary question facing us is straightforward: How do we maintain a faithful, prophetically clear Christian witness in an increasingly hostile environment without losing our gospel reach?
General Revelation: Suppressing What We Know
General Revelation is our theological category for a simple, profound reality: there are some things that we cannot not know. By virtue of being created in the image of God and existing within the sphere of General Revelation, every human being possesses an intuitive, baseline understanding of objective reality. Fallen humanity can suppress this knowledge, ignore it, or rebel against it, but it cannot genuinely claim total ignorance of it.
Genesis 1:27 states, "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (ESV). While debates persist over the exact definition of “God’s image”—whether it is fundamentally rooted in human rationality, our capacity for creativity, the responsibility of the creation mandate, etc.—the Puritans offered a helpful synthesis highlighting the conscience. They defined the conscience as a distinct faculty of the soul. It is an internal muscle upon which revelation comes to bear.
Because we possess a conscience, we carry an inherent moral culpability that separates us from the rest of creation. When an animal acts aggressively toward another, it acts on raw instinct; it is not subject to moral guilt. But when a human being harms another human being, there is an internal recognition of moral transgression.
Romans 1:18–25 provides the definitive scriptural diagnosis of the human condition under General Revelation. The text demonstrates that the wrath of God is revealed against those who "by their unrighteousness suppress the truth."
God’s invisible attributes and eternal power are clearly perceived in the created order, leaving humanity without excuse. Throughout human history—from the cultic systems of Canaan to the secularism of Western civilization—we observe an explicit, tightly bound link between the suppression of the knowledge of God, the rise of systemic idolatry, and sexual perversion. When a culture rejects the Creator, God gives them over to the chaotic lusts of their hearts, fracturing divine design.
Through General Revelation, God’s structural ordering of creation is readily apparent to all. Here are two of the obvious principles:
Marriage and Procreation: The specific, singular pairing of man and woman designed to fulfill the mandate to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth.
Equality and Complementarity: A beautifully balanced ecosystem where men and women possess absolute equality, yet retain permanent differences that allow them to fit together as a unified whole.
This design is beautifully articulated in Genesis 2:24: "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." The language is purposefully singular: a man and his wife. This foundational blueprint is pre-fall. It is reality woven directly into human nature.
Every society has recognized that if a woman is one man's wife, she is not another’s. Laws, customs, and civil punishments throughout history have universally guarded this boundary. While aberrations like polygamy have developed, they have consistently functioned as rebellion against a design that everyone intuitively understands.
Special Revelation: God’s Design for Men and Women
Amplifying General Revelation, Scripture establishes absolute spiritual equality regarding human value, dignity, and the Holy Spirit’s distribution of gifts. Galatians 3:28 is frequently leveraged by egalitarian thinkers to argue that Christ effectively flatlined all distinctions between male and female. However, reading this text in its broader covenantal context reveals that Paul is defining equal access to salvation, not erasing creation roles.
Just as the phrase "neither slave nor free" did not instantly dissolve legal statuses within the Roman empire, and "neither Jew nor Greek" did not eradicate ethnic identities, "male and female" does not flatten the permanent design of creation. Men and women possess identical human worth, but operate within distinct, divinely ordered roles across two primary spheres.
Within the family unit, the Bible outlines a system of male headship. This headship is never an endorsement of authoritarian rule, but rather a mandate for sacrificial servant-leadership. The husband is called to model Christ as provider, protector, and guide.
Correspondingly, the wife is called to exercise her full equality within the boundary of godly submission, complementing her husband's leadership through active partnership and nurturing the next generation. This arrangement is localized. Scripture does not command a generalized submission of all women to all men but rather establishes a pattern for the home.
In the ecclesial realm, spiritual headship manifests through the office of the elder (used synonymously in the New Testament with pastor and overseer). This specific office of governing authority and teaching oversight is reserved exclusively for qualified men.
Underneath the unified leadership of the elders, the entire congregation—men and women alike—is called to deploy their spiritual gifts. This order does not diminish the status of women. Rather, it protects the local body by ensuring its leadership conforms to the explicit patterns outlined in scripture.
Societal Rebellion
When a society actively abandons the permanent facts of creation, the resulting downward trajectory follows a highly predictable logic. Over the past half-century or so, American culture has systematically dismantled God’s good design through a series of progressive legal and philosophical shifts.
Second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s shifted the cultural focus from political equity (such as women’s suffrage) to an assertion that women must experience identical social opportunities as men. This required detaching the sexual act from the natural consequence of pregnancy.
The arrival of “the pill” in 1960 and the subsequent legalization of abortion in 1973 with Roe v. Wade accomplished this separation. The long-term fallout was immense: sex was re-engineered in the cultural imagination as a purely recreational, consequence-free pursuit, obscuring its procreative design.
This recreational view of human relationships naturally altered the legal definitions of marriage itself. In 1969, California became the first state to implement no-fault divorce laws—ironically signed by Ronald Reagan—and by 2010, the policy was universally adopted across all 50 states.
By eliminating the requirement of proving egregious breaches of the marriage vows (such as infidelity or abandonment), society reclassified marriage from a permanent, binding covenant before God into a fluid civil contract. Marriage became an arrangement valid only as long as it remained convenient and satisfying.
Once marriage was unmoored from permanency and sex was severed from childbearing, the cultural momentum moved toward the normalization of same-sex marriage, codified federally by the Supreme Court in 2015 with Obergefell v. Hodges.
This logic has culminated in total gender chaos with no end in sight. The expansion of the LGBTQIA2S+ acronym reflects a philosophy of radical subjectivism: mind over matter. It insists that the physical body, chromosomes, and anatomy have no bearing on true identity. Instead, internal emotion and self-conception are elevated as absolute reality, forcing language itself to shift by way of preferred pronouns to validate an ever-changing psychological landscape.
“The expansion of the LGBTQIA2S+ acronym reflects a philosophy of radical subjectivism: mind over matter.”
Denominational Capitulation
This societal slide has not remained outside the church doors; it has been mirrored in the trajectory of liberal denominations. A cursory look at history reveals a correlation between a church's view of women's ordination and its eventual endorsement of same-sex unions.
The data tells a clear theological story. The denominations that surrendered their hermeneutical integrity to second-wave feminism in the mid-20th century are the same institutions that formally affirmed same-sex unions in the wake of Obergefell.
The process is slow but steady: once a denomination surrenders the authority and sufficiency of Scripture on the altar of cultural relevance, it loses the capacity to resist subsequent waves of societal pressure. The United Methodist Church serves as a prime contemporary example; its long-delayed collapse was held back only by the faithful resistance of African bishops, culminating in a denominational split and the emergence of the Global Methodist Church.
Response: Repentance, Clarity, and Relationships
As followers of Jesus looking at this wreckage, our initial reaction is often a mix of alarm, fear, and defensiveness. But if we want to speak prophetically to a broken world, we must first conduct a thorough internal audit. Judgment begins in the house of God.
Conservative evangelicalism has quietly absorbed many of the foundational errors of the sexual revolution:
The Transgression of Divorce: Our divorce statistics are devastatingly close to the secular baseline, proving that we have frequently treated the marriage covenant with the same casual pragmatism as the world around us.
The Contraception Mentality: We have largely embraced a lifestyle-driven approach to family planning, treating children as an optional accessory to our retirement goals or vacation preferences rather than receiving them as an intrinsic blessing from the Lord.
We cannot expect the culture to take our defense of God’s good design seriously if we are compromised on the initial stages of the very path that led to its destruction. We must get our own house in order before we can offer a compelling alternative to the world.
How do we practically operate within this climate? When confronted with cultural flashpoints—such as whether a Christian should attend a same-sex wedding or utilize preferred pronouns—we must hold fast to the truth without losing our grip on charity.
Attending a wedding ceremony is an act of celebration, public witness, and validation; therefore, a Christian cannot in good conscience participate. Regarding pronouns, while there is room for wisdom concerning proper names, using preferred pronouns forces us to speak what is untrue, reinforcing a destructive delusion rather than offering true love.
Our primary stance toward those caught in the confusion of gender ideology must not be one of fearful hostility. Their world operates entirely on fluid emotion; it is an incredibly isolating, volatile, and prison-like existence. If our interaction with the culture is limited to shouting truths from behind an arm's-length barrier, we will accomplish little.
The world already has its caricatures of us firmly established; we are hateful, angry, and intolerant. We will not change that perception by merely repeating our positions louder. We must prove the stereotype wrong through the intentional cultivation of relationships.
We do this by being exceptional neighbors, forming real friendships, and practicing hospitality with those whose lifestyles we fundamentally oppose. We hold fast to the permanent realities of God's design, but we step directly into the cultural mess to pull people out. In a world that has completely lost its footing, our task is to beautifully model the goodness of God’s creation, confident that reality itself remains our constant ally.