“The Sexual Revolution brought the fresh air of honesty into religious communities and laid an axe to the root of the tree of medieval sexual values,” writes Raymond J. Lawrence, Jr. in Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom. The Sexual Revolution was a revolution in the truest sense, in that the social order was completely upended. It was a backlash against the sexual restrictions of the Christian church, both Catholic and Protestant. Other than the abolition of clerical celibacy, Protestantism largely continued the aversion to sex that characterized medieval Catholicism. The liberalizing attitudes of the Anabaptists (i.e. free love) were were crushed along with the Anabaptists themselves. The Pietists of the 18th century ignored Luther’s progressive legacy by discounting any compatibility between holiness and sexual pleasure. (John Wesley’s sad sexual life typified Pietistic attitudes.) Actually, Catholic cultures were less sexually repressed than Protestant ones. Prostitution has historically been tolerated in Catholic countries, as opposed to Protestant lands that outlaw the practice. Extramarital sex is also more accepted in cultures marked by Catholicism. (Lawrence attributes this to Catholicism’s hierarchical structure. Sexual probity was the special concern of clergy and religious. Protestantism’s “priesthood of all believers” imposed a uniform standard of conduct.) Sexual repression reached its apex in the Victorian era, when sexual desire was divorced from marital affection. (Not susrprisingly, prostitution flourished.) Convinced that a whole-grain diet could tame the sexual impulse, Rev. Sylvester Graham invented a cracker to depress carnal cravings.

There were exceptions. The Oneida Community in upstate New York in the mid-19th century practiced “complex marriage,” a form of free love. Everyone in the community was considered to be married to everyone else. Mormonism in its infancy famously practiced polygamy. But they were anomalies. “From Luther to 1950, nothing much changed.”

The Sexual Revolution changed everything, tearing asunder the bond between sex and heterosexual monogamy.  The forces behind the Sexual Revolution were varied and complex. Alfred Kinsey’s work played a role, as most certainly did the advent of “the pill.” (Lawrence goes so far as to assert that “the sex life of civil rights leader Martin Luther King helped push the sexual freedom movement forward.”) The churches? Not so much. “The leaders of the various Protestant churches had to be dragged, for the most part, kicking and screaming into the Sexual Revolution.” Unlike Catholicism’s hierarchical system, Protestantism’s more democratic structures had to account for the sweeping changes in attitudes and behaviors. Catholic dissent has tended to be suppressed by the Vatican. A French Dominican priest named Jacques Pohier was one such dissenter. “An increasing number of priests and religious of both sexes no longer feel that to abstain from all affective and sexual life, or repress it, is a privileged means of achieving the goal,” Pohier said regarding the backlash against the discipline of celibacy. He advocated for sex education that promoted the pleasures of sex. He accused the Church of stealing sexual pleasure from the faithful. He even proposed that open marriage was not incompatible for believers. This was too much for the Vatican. Pohier was the first theologian disciplined by Pope John Paul II.

Among Protestants, special note should be made of the “clinical pastoral movement,” which began in the 1920’s, which dramatically altered how religious leadership was trained. The good of the person, as opposed to doctrine, was emphasized. It took into account the insights of psychology, especially Freud. Practically, this meant more tolerance for forms of sexual behavior previously deemed aberrant. Anton Boisen’s contributions to this movement deserve particular attention. Lawrence warns that the achievements advanced by the clinical pastoral movement in the realm of sexuality need to be formalized, otherwise “Protestantism will remain in danger of reverting, if only by implication, to the safe harbor of sex-phobic medieval teaching.”

The Dark Ages were especially dark for sex, according to Raymond J. Lawrence in Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom. Pope Gregory the Great’s (reigned 590-604) vision of sexuality was even more austere than Augustine’s. A protégé of Benedict of Nursia, he condemned the pursuit of sexual pleasure even within the bounds of marriage (“…the pleasure itself can by no means be without sin”). Sex outside marriage warranted eternal damnation. Clergy in the West should be monasticized, he maintained, although it took until the Gregorian Reform of the 11th century for celibacy to be canonically imposed. The Venerable Bede agreed with Gregory that pleasure accompanying procreation was sinful. He maintained that persons should refrain from entering a church until having washed and waited a certain interval of time since intercourse. The “Penitentials,” manuals used for assigning penances during confession, were filled with sexual proscriptions. Sex was intended only for procreation. Even various sexual positions, such as retroposition (man behind woman) and the dorsal position (woman on top), were condemned.

In comparison, Muslim scholars were relatively liberated about sex as opposed to their Christian counterparts. By the second millennium, “the claim that the best people have the least amount of sexual pleasure, was fixed and remained dominant even into modern times, in both Catholic and Protestant cultures.” The Cathars took this obsession with sexual purity to extremes, forbidding intercourse even among married couples. (They denigrated the lax medieval church as ecclesia carnalis, “the church of the flesh.”) Crushed by church authorities, they bequeathed a legacy of spiritual otherworldliness and the notion of romantic love untainted by sexual desire (including the rituals surrounding weddings that persist to this day). The medieval mindset persisted to the time of the Reformation. Thomas More’s hairshirt, worn to quell the concupiscence of the flesh, is a fitting metaphor for the epoch.

Constantine’s cooptation of Christianity marked a turning point in the church’s view of sex, a definitive rejection of a Semitic appreciation for sexuality. Raymond J. Lawrence, Jr. makes this claim in Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom. Uniformity in belief and practice was imposed. Proponents of a more liberated perspective, such as Theodore of Mopsuestia, were condemned as heretics and silenced after the Council of Nicea in 325.

Before Constantine, the sin of idolatry–in particular offering sacrifice to the imperial cult–was the primary concern of Christian morality. After Constantine, Christian morality became obsessed with sexual purity. Lawrence attributes this to the Stoicism and Neoplatonism, which viewed sexual pleasure with suspicion, that dominated Roman thought at the time.

Two figures that stand out in the post-Constantinian church were Jerome and Augustine. Lawrence writes, “Among all the great personages of early Christendom few exerted as much influence and none is more fascinatingly kinky than Jerome.” Jerome believed sex was intrinsically impure; the only good to come out of marital intercourse was the birth of virgins. (He disapproved of baths for virgins lest they kindle lust in the bather.) Virginity and sexual abstinence were the hallmarks of Christian life. He condemned Clement of Alexandria for espousing the notion that Paul was married. “His dark, sex-phobic shadow casts itself across the church right into the present generation,” Lawrence concludes.

Augustine led a sexually licentious life during his youth. After his conversion to the “Catholic” faction, he became an obsessive celibate. His formulation of the doctrine of original sin, in which the human will is ineluctably tainted by dark impulses, can be interpreted as a psychological reaction to his former life. Original sin, as Augustine understood it, was inextricably linked to sex. “Ecce unde,” he wrote. “There it is.” The libido’s inability to be mastered by the will made it demonic. Arguably this derived from his philosophical training than biblical reflection. As Peter Brown wrote, “The loving cleaving of Israel to God would never be reenacted in the marriage beds of Western Christendom, only the sad shadow of Adam’s estrangement from the will of God.”