When a Feminist Discovers the Christian Sexual Ethic

The Roman Republic was born after a woman plunged a knife into her own chest. She’d been raped by the son of the Etruscan king, and she felt she should take her own life to maintain her honor, despite the fact that she hadn’t consented to sex. Lucretia’s story reminds us that, in some ways, modern culture has become more hospitable to women.

Louise Perry—British journalist and podcast host—would agree. But in her books, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, the self-proclaimed feminist rejects the “wisdom” of another, more modern philosophy wreaking havoc on women’s bodies: feminism. These books will seem pedestrian to most Christians, but they’re surprising admissions of many truths about sex that Christians have known all along.

Veteran Defection

The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, released in 2022, is a well-reasoned critique of modern-day feminism from a self-proclaimed feminist. Drawing on her work in a rape crisis center, Perry bravely questions feminist dogma that has become status quo in the West over the past several decades. She claims the sexual libertinism and personal autonomy held in high regard in our cultural moment are shackling women rather than freeing them, benefiting certain high-status men and leading some of the women they exploit—women like Marilyn Monroe—to suicide.

Perry’s invisible opponent, the modern-day feminist, may seem at times inscrutable to a Christian audience, rendering Perry’s arguments almost comically commonsensical. For example, Perry argues that most women are weaker than most men, and that—contra the common secular narrative—rape is primarily about sex instead of power. In another countercultural move, she defends the idea that pedophilia is bad for children. Elsewhere, she argues that prostitution is bad for women, that consent is flimsy and insufficient, and that violent sex (including sex that leads to the death of the woman who may or may not have consented to it) is wrong and should be legally punishable. The fact that modern feminism needs these correctives is a damning indictment.

In a paragraph that summarizes the book, Perry asserts,

We need to re-erect the social safeguards that have been torn down. . . . Sex must be taken seriously. Men and women are different. Not all desires are good. Consent is not enough. Violence is not love. Loveless sex is not empowering. People are not products. Marriage is good. Above all, listen to your mother. (189)

These ideas are commonplace in most Christian communities, yet they fly in the face of much of modern feminism.

Reaching a New Generation

A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century is nearly identical to Perry’s first book, though it’s been slightly reworked for teens and young adults. Shorter and snappier, A New Guide to Sex forgoes some of the more explicit language and examples from the first, despite its title that had me hiding the cover while reading in public.

Like her earlier book, this adaption is dedicated to “the women who learned it the hard way.” Perry offers motherly advice that modern feminism won’t give to young women: Avoid men you don’t know or who give you a bad feeling. Avoid violent or impulsive men. Don’t have casual sex. Don’t have sex with a man unless he’d make a good father. Get married. She says that a “truly feminist project would demand that . . . it should be men, not women, who adjust their sexual appetites” (68). She also calls for something akin to chivalry, though she argues that the word is “deeply unfashionable” (53).

Perry correctly diagnoses the problem and nearly prescribes the correct remedy. If “Christian sexual ethics” is on the far right of the sexual ethics horseshoe, feminism is at its apex, and Perry has come almost all the way back around from the other direction. The gap between Perry’s argument and the Christian sexual ethic is but a small leap: a leap of faith, if you will. Christianity is the missing link between the world as Perry sees it and the world as she wishes it to be.

Missing Link

The reason many of Perry’s arguments may seem familiar to the Christian reader is that Perry is quietly borrowing elements from the Christian sexual ethic that was once ascendent in Western culture. (This will come as no surprise to those who have read Tom Holland’s Dominion.) Her paradigm, while impressive, is less coherent and robust than the moral guardrails for sex taught by the church for centuries: sex between one man and one woman, for the purpose of procreation and unity, only within the confines of marriage.

The Christian approach to sex demands men curb their sexual appetites and not despise or disdain women but love, cherish, and protect them as the weaker sex (which many Christians recognize as a God-given reality, not an insult). Christianity prohibits rape, pedophilia, casual sex, pornography, sexual violence, prostitution, adultery, and divorce (except in the narrow cases outlined in Matthew 5 and 19). It requires husbands to “love [their] wives, as Christ loved the church” (Eph. 5:25), demands self-giving love that’s open to children should God allow it, and recognizes the dignity of each individual. It demands fidelity “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death,” as the centuries-old wedding vows go.

These Christian values, not always well taught or perfectly upheld, have nevertheless long been passed down to the men and women of the church. “Chivalry” is not entirely an unfashionable term in Christian circles. Indeed, aspects of it are regularly taught to young men and boys as the standard of conduct to uphold. And, as Perry admits, A New Guide to Sex isn’t a “new” guide at all. It’s millennia old (two, to be exact), dating back to Jesus Christ himself, that true upender of unjust social norms, that true restorer of humanity in all its gendered glory.

Return to Ancient Wisdom

If you’re a member of a Bible-believing church, you likely have little need for A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century or its elder companion, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. There are a few people, however, for whom the books could be helpful: a Christian parent whose child has been influenced by secular or feminist tenets of sexuality, a Christian college student who wishes to push back against certain teachings in a class on feminism or sexuality, or a pastor or layperson looking to better understand the arguments against modern feminism and secular understandings of sexuality.

Or perhaps, like me, you’re fascinated by the idea that non-Christians can arrive at a Christian ethic by way of the natural law. We know, even if they do not yet, that the universe’s grain is ordered toward God. He has fashioned a good and orderly world that makes the most sense when operating according to his laws.

Ultimately, Louise Perry is right: the secular, feminist understanding of sex and gender is deficient, even destructive. It’s most dangerous for women, the very people feminists (purportedly) seek to uplift. Perry has bravely revealed the holes in modern feminism from a feminist perspective.

But feminism itself (even a truer and better feminism, as Perry seems to be aiming for) cannot do what Christianity ultimately does. Since its beginning in the Roman Empire, Christianity demanded we affirm the dignity of women. It was and is the rival tradition that swallows and perfects pagan philosophies. It will swallow and perfect feminism as well.

A review of 'A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century' by Louise Perry, available wherever books are sold.

Katelyn Walls Shelton (Union University; Yale Divinity School) is a bioethics fellow at the Paul Ramsey Institute. She is a women’s health policy consultant who previously worked to promote the well-being of women and the unborn at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She and her husband, John, live with their three children in Washington, DC, and attend Church of the Resurrection.