Topic

Sexuality and Marriage

What marriage is, who may marry, and how churches should teach and practise on sexual ethics, especially same-sex relationships.

Two positions now define the debate. The Traditional Marriage Ethic holds that marriage is a lifelong union of one man and one woman and the only right setting for sex. Affirming Theology holds that faithful, committed same-sex relationships can be blessed and married in the church. Behind that headline dispute sit older questions the churches have never fully settled: what marriage is for, whether it is a sacrament, and when, if ever, it can end.

History

Roots

The church inherited its marriage texts from Israel and from Jesus. Genesis grounds marriage in creation: “a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). Jesus quoted that verse together with “male and female he created them” to forbid divorce, adding an exception for sexual immorality (Matthew 19:3–9). Paul treated marriage as a picture of Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:31–32), and also ranked celibacy above it for those who could live it (1 Corinthians 7:7–9). A handful of texts condemn same-sex intercourse: Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:26–27 and 1 Corinthians 6:9–11.

Augustine gave Western teaching its lasting shape. Against those who despised marriage, and against those who equated it with virginity, On the Good of Marriage (c. 401, CCEL; New Advent) argued that marriage is good but celibacy better. He named its goods as “faithfulness, offspring, and the Sacrament”: fidelity, children, and a bond that divorce cannot dissolve. Augustine’s suspicion of sexual desire, even inside marriage, shadowed Western teaching for a millennium. John Chrysostom read Romans 1 as condemning same-sex acts as against nature (Homily 4 on Romans), and Thomas Aquinas systematised the natural-law argument, classing such acts among the “unnatural vices” because they cannot produce children (Summa Theologiae II-II q.154).

Causes

The first great modern split was over the sacrament, not over sex. Medieval theology counted marriage among the seven Sacraments. The Reformation rejected that. Martin Luther called marriage “an outward, worldly thing” belonging to civil law (On Marriage Matters, 1530; English wording unverified), while praising it as a holy estate and marrying a former nun himself. John Calvin agreed it was no sacrament. Both allowed divorce for adultery and desertion. The Council of Trent answered in its 24th session (1563) by defining marriage as a true sacrament, declaring the bond indissoluble, and requiring weddings before a priest and witnesses (canons and decree). Thomas Cranmer’s 1549 prayer book gave Anglicans three purposes for marriage: children, “a remedie agaynst sinne,” and “the mutuall societie, helpe, and coumfort, that the one oughte to have of thother” (1549 marriage service). The Westminster Confession set out the Reformed view in chapter 24.

The twentieth century reopened the purposes of sex. The 1930 Lambeth Conference (Resolution 15) cautiously allowed contraception within marriage, the first major church to do so. Rome went the other way: Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae (1968) held that every marital act must stay open to life. Once most Protestants accepted that sex could be separated from procreation, the traditional argument against same-sex relations lost one of its supports, and both sides of the later debate noticed.

The same-sex question itself emerged after the Second World War. Derrick Sherwin Bailey’s Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (1955, Archive.org) argued that the Sodom story was about inhospitality and that the church had built its condemnation on weak exegesis. It influenced the Wolfenden Report and the debate over decriminalisation in Britain. John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980, Archive.org) went further, claiming the early and medieval church had been far more tolerant than later centuries. Rome restated its teaching in Persona Humana (1975) and the 1986 Letter on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, which called the inclination itself “objectively disordered.”

Influence

The decisive breaks came in the mainline Protestant churches, and they followed denominational lines. Resolution I.10 of the Lambeth Conference 1998 declared homosexual practice “incompatible with Scripture,” while committing bishops to listen to gay and lesbian people (text). The Episcopal Church’s consecration of Gene Robinson, a partnered gay man, as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003 led conservative provinces, mostly in the Global South, to form GAFCON and issue the Jerusalem Declaration (2008). The Episcopal Church authorised same-sex marriage rites in 2015; the Church of England’s Living in Love and Faith process produced Prayers of Love and Faith (2023), blessings for same-sex couples that stop short of marriage.

Elsewhere the ELCA (2009) and the PC(USA) (2014–15) opened ordination and then marriage. For Methodists, decades of conflict ended in the United Methodist Split: more than 7,600 US congregations left between 2019 and 2023, and the 2024 General Conference removed the ban on “self-avowed practicing homosexual” clergy by 692 to 51 (UM News). The US Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges (2015, opinion) made civil same-sex marriage national and widened the gap between civil and church marriage.

The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, most Evangelical bodies and the Oriental churches kept traditional teaching. In 2023 the Vatican’s Fiducia Supplicans allowed brief, non-liturgical blessings of couples in irregular situations, same-sex couples included, while restating that marriage is between a man and a woman. Several African bishops’ conferences declined to apply it.

Key ideas and contributors

Marriage is grounded in creation. The traditional case starts from Genesis 1–2 and Jesus’ use of it: male and female were made for each other, and their union is the pattern for marriage everywhere. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§§2357–2359) teaches that homosexual acts “are contrary to the natural law” because they “close the sexual act to the gift of life,” and calls people with that orientation to chastity while forbidding “unjust discrimination.” John Paul II’s audiences on the “theology of the body” (1979–84, Archive.org) gave this a personalist rather than purely natural-law form: the body itself speaks a language of self-gift between man and woman.

Marriage has several goods, not one. Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes (§§48–50) described marriage as a “community of love” without ranking procreation above mutual love, a shift from older manuals. Protestant teaching since Cranmer has also stressed companionship. Affirming theologians argue that this shift makes room for same-sex couples; traditionalists answer that the goods belong together and sexual difference is not optional.

The biblical texts concern something else. The affirming case rests on rereading the prohibitions. James Brownson’s Bible, Gender, Sexuality (Eerdmans, 2013) argued that Paul condemned excess and lust in a culture that knew nothing of committed, equal same-sex partnerships, and that “one flesh” means kinship, not anatomical complementarity. Matthew Vines’s God and the Gay Christian (2014, Archive.org) brought the argument to an evangelical audience. Richard Hays’s The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996, Archive.org) was for a generation the most cited scholarly defence of the traditional reading; in The Widening of God’s Mercy (Yale, 2024), written with his son Christopher, he changed his view.

The texts mean what they say. Robert Gagnon’s The Bible and Homosexual Practice (2001) became the standard traditionalist reply, arguing that Paul knew of loving same-sex relationships and condemned the acts themselves as contrary to creation. The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood’s Nashville Statement (2017), from the same circle as the Danvers Statement, gave evangelical traditionalists a confessional summary, including on gender identity.

Marriage, sacrament and mystery. The Orthodox churches frame marriage as a mystery that is “crowned” and points to the kingdom, and they permit a second and third marriage after divorce as an act of oikonomia (pastoral mercy), with a penitential rite. The 2016 Holy and Great Council restated that marriage is between a man and a woman and that the church cannot bless any other union (The Sacrament of Marriage and its Impediments).

Key controversies

Same-sex marriage and blessing. This is the dispute that has broken communions. Affirming writers argue from the fruit of faithful gay relationships, from the harm done by enforced celibacy for people who did not choose it, and from precedent: the church changed its mind on slavery, on usury and (for many) on women’s ordination. Traditionalists reply that those changes followed lines already in Scripture, while every text on same-sex intercourse points one way, and that the church’s Authority does not extend to redefining a creation ordinance. Underneath sits the question of how Scripture binds: a church that reads Scripture through tradition and conscience can move where a church committed to its plain teaching cannot.

Unity and discipline. In the Anglican and Methodist cases the fight became one about structure. Can a province or a conference act alone, or must the whole body move together? GAFCON held that the Episcopal Church broke communion by acting against Lambeth I.10; the Episcopal Church held that provinces are autonomous. The United Methodists, with a single global rulebook, could not find a local option that both sides would accept, and split instead.

Divorce and remarriage. Catholics forbid remarriage after a valid sacramental marriage, while allowing annulment where no valid marriage existed. Orthodox permit it by oikonomia; most Protestants permit it for adultery or desertion, and many now more broadly. Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia (2016), in a footnote (n. 351), opened a cautious path for some divorced and remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments. Four cardinals publicly asked him to clarify it (the dubia), and he did not answer them directly.

Contraception. The gap between Humanae Vitae and Catholic practice is wide, and the encyclical’s reception remains contested inside the Catholic Church. Most Protestants dropped the question after 1930, though some evangelicals have revived it.

What counts as discrimination. Churches that keep the traditional ethic increasingly meet civil law that treats it as discrimination, in employment, adoption agencies and wedding services. Churches that affirm same-sex marriage meet the opposite charge from their own global partners: that they have bent doctrine to Western culture.

What remains unresolved

The deepest disagreement is about what sexual difference means. If being male and female is part of what marriage is, the traditional ethic follows. If it is incidental and the core of marriage is covenant faithfulness, the affirming view follows. Each side’s strongest point names the other’s cost. Traditional churches ask gay members for lifelong celibacy that most heterosexual Christians are not asked to bear. Affirming churches reverse a teaching held by every Christian tradition until the late twentieth century, and have lost members and fellowship over it.