In Lupe Fiasco’s song “The Cool,” the master storyteller lyrically weaves a tale about a hustler obsessed with a fast lifestyle of money and street fame. He’s developed all the right sensibilities, slang, and fashion to fit the part. Just one problem: He’s dead—a putrid, rotting corpse that climbed out of the grave with no living flesh left to defile. Lupe implies that the hustler died “chasing the cool,” pursuing fulfillment through materialism, peer validation, and self-indulgence. Even after death, he never realizes the moral of his own tragic story.
Christianity has never been without those seeking surface-level relevance and self-satisfaction (1 Cor. 6:12–20). And today, when the time comes to publicly uphold unpopular biblical principles, some Christians seem to be chasing the cool. Christian compassion and justice are widely admired. But when it comes to an uncool subject like the Christian sexual ethic—which holds that sex is for marriage between one man and one woman—too many of us become silent, turn theologically ambiguous, or wholly embrace unbiblical positions.
With sexual ethics in particular, recent history matters: Many American Christians are still trying to scrub off the stain of legalism, harshness, and hypocrisy widely associated with the Moral Majority wing of evangelicalism. A family-oriented Christian response to the moral decay of the sexual revolution was needed. But right-wing lovelessness toward hurting people was never necessary or Christlike, and Christians are right to want to push back on long-standing caricatures—not always as inaccurate as we’d wish—of Christians as haters who can’t carry the heavy burdens we place on others.
Decades of ridicule from pop culture and academia had a lasting effect on the American church because ridicule is powerful. As Saul Alinsky, the godfather of progressive activism, said, “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule.”
So, as US culture shifted leftward over the past few decades, Gen X and millennial Christians in particular paid for the sins of the Moral Majority. We were guilty by religious association and grew tired of being the butt of the joke. And beyond cultural self-defense, we also understood that the heartlessness of the religious right truly needed correction.
Unfortunately, many overcorrected, discarding our faith’s hard teachings about sex and the body altogether (1 Cor. 3:16–17). This may have felt compassionate. Likely it opened up new avenues of pleasure and was also the path of least resistance, especially in academia and activist spaces. That is no excuse.
I understand the appeal of fitting in, of course. I understand why many Christians have developed a social inferiority complex and started seeking validation from our secular peers. Plenty of adults, whether Christian or not, never graduate from high school mentalities. There’s always a cool kids’ table, and nobody wants to be the finger-wagging hall monitor. Fashioning exceptions to the rules seems to win more friends than urging others to uphold them.
And for Christians who want to evade the biblical sexual ethic, our culture provides plenty of support. More than a hundred years ago, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung added sexual repression to the list of cardinal sins, and in the decades since, sexual freedom has become an article of faith for secular progressivism. Mainline churches are dying a slow death trying to align with secular standards. And in the 2010s, Christian leaders popular among evangelicals, like Rob Bell, twisted the Bible in knots trying to follow suit.
More recently, in a sermon posted online, progressive pastor Delman Coates claimed the Bible’s sexual ethic has been misinterpreted for over 2,000 years. According to Coates, Scripture doesn’t actually bar premarital sex; rather, it more narrowly forbids sex with a prostitute. He argued that the Greek term porneia was used exclusively in reference to prostitution and that therefore Christians shouldn’t feel shame for premarital sex as long as all parties consent.
For those without itching ears, the claim is unserious on its face. We’d expect a justification for carnality from Playboy or Teen Vogue, not from a pulpit.
Coates’s assertion is in clear conflict with the overall biblical teaching of holiness and love as self-sacrifice not self-indulgence (Lev. 20:26; Rom. 12:1; 1 Pet. 1:15–16; 1 John 3:16). If anything, Jesus raised the standard for sexual morality. He certainly didn’t abolish it (Matt. 5:17, 27). It’s faith in him that washes away our shame, not justifications made with human hands (Luke 19:10, Heb. 9:14). Moreover, as urban apologists Damon Richardson and Michael Holloway meticulously prove as they dismantle Coates’s claims, porneia in the Bible does refer to sexual immorality generally.
The practical effects of disregarding God’s guidance for our sexuality are grave. Christians eager to wave away biblical prohibitions usually fail to mention the STIs ravaging the country, the crisis of fatherlessness, the mental health consequences of promiscuity, and sexual assaults where consent gets lost in an alcohol-induced memory fog.
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License for further sexual inhibition is the last thing our society needs to hear from the church. Disassembling a people’s family and sexual ethic is one of the most wicked things an enemy can do—let alone a pastor. Coates may be rejecting the Christian sexual ethic in an honest effort to be more compassionate, but good intentions aren’t penance.
I speak from painful personal experience here, not from my own righteousness. I philandered through college and early adulthood, partaking in all the debauchery enabled on America’s college campuses. The lies, broken hearts, and Plan B pills left me dead in sin. Finally, I repented and admitted that the Bible’s age-old truths were far more profitable than the “enlightened” teachings I received at an elite university.
My thinking about sexual ethics had to be redeemed as well. I once conveniently dismissed sexual morality as a white evangelical preoccupation. But that was intellectually dishonest. The African church father Saint Augustine was fighting against the British Pelagian heresy—which tried to “liberate” the faith from the concept of sin—centuries before the American religious right stepped onto the scene.
That lie also erases the legacies of Black Christian women like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Nannie Helen Burroughs, who used their public witness to promote (among other things) the dignity of biblical obedience and moral discipline.
And there’s nothing new or evolved about permissiveness. The early church distinguished itself as an alternative to the hedonism of Roman culture. The first Christians refused to chase the cool of ancient Rome and “pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality” (Jude 4). They stood in stark contrast.
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They knew what many in today’s church seem to have forgotten: that putting a Christian gloss on secular values is not Christianity, nor is it especially appealing. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently explained, “I think the persistent weakness of liberal forms of [religion] is that they are attractive to people on the way out of intense religious belief, but they don’t usually pull people in.”
The truth is that a religion telling broken people “Do what thou wilt” simply isn’t compelling. Those trying to resuscitate thin Christianity might find validation from secular society or temporarily clear their consciences. But Christianity that undermines the Word of God is dead. It does not deserve to bear the name of Christ. We need transformation, not an excuse for sin. We can love well without endorsing licentiousness. Faithful disciples lead with grace without letting go of the truth.
Justin Giboney is an ordained minister, an attorney, and the president of And Campaign, a Christian civic organization. He’s the author of the forthcoming book Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around: How the Black Church’s Public Witness Leads Us out of the Culture War.
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