Surviving the “Sexplosion”: Christianity Today and Evangelical Sexual Ethics in the Long 1960s

Aaron Pattillo-Lunt

doi:10.3390/rel12020112

Abstract

This paper examines how the editors and contributors to Christianity Today (CT) called for an evangelical sexual ethics in the 1960s. Editors and contributors alike were concerned that the supposed sexual immorality on college campuses, the liberalization of obscenity laws, the approval and sale of the birth control, and secular sex education programs threatened the United States’ social health. They believed that evangelicals needed to learn how to talk about sex, and this belief resulted in the development of conservative Protestant sex manuals by the middle of the 1970s. Overall, talk about sex in the pages of CT demonstrates that evangelicals are neither anti-sex nor traditionalists. They instead forged a new sexual ethic in response to the historical events and developments of the 1960s.

Highlights

Evangelicals talk about sex a lot, and scholars have tended to see religious conservatives’ talk about sex as reactionary and emblematic of “traditionalism” (Griffith 2017; Irvine 2002)
Conservative Protestants took to the polls and the streets to lobby for the sexual distinctiveness of men and women, male headship, heterosexuality, and monogamy
Decades of evangelical talk about how to combat a sex obsessed culture ironically produced an evangelicalism that is obsessed with sex and its sociocultural effects

Summary

Introduction

Evangelicals talk about sex a lot, and scholars have tended to see religious conservatives’ talk about sex as reactionary and emblematic of “traditionalism” (Griffith 2017; Irvine 2002). Religions 2021, 12, 112 and personal interpretation of the Bible sets them apart They usually avoid justifying or explaining their actions and beliefs using nonbiblical sources even though their understanding of the Bible is informed (to an extent so great that they rarely admit it) by their consumption of nonbiblical sources like conservative Protestant books, magazines, movies, radio, and television. When it came to talk about sex, a patriarchal reading of the Bible was the norm.

Before Evangelical Sex Manuals

Evangelicals and Sex Education

Conclusions