As The Cut puts it, it’s tempting to look at the so-called “Great Asceticism” and see it as the achievement of people preaching biblical morality in a culture gone out of control.
But unfortunately, I don’t think that’s happening.
I believe that what we see today — the growing (and, on the surface, encouraging) trend toward abstinence — is just the other side of the same counterfeit coin: the siren call of the world and our own broken morality — the same voice that has told us that “sex is just sex,” that “there’s no harm in casual hookups,” and that “what’s wrong with consensual activity, with or without marriage?”
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Now, apparently many people are (ironically) choosing to abstain from sex, and I believe it’s for the same reasons they chose to Have sex Indiscriminately.
The Bible encourages abstinence outside of marriage because God commands us to keep the marriage bed “without defilement” (Hebrews 13:4-6). In the beginning, God revealed his plan for a man and woman to become “one flesh” in marriage (Genesis 2:24). These principles, a spiritual bond cemented by the sexual act, resonate throughout the biblical narrative. The apostle Paul even wrote to believers that a man who has dominion over his own body and carnal desires and has sex with a prostitute has become “one flesh” with her (1 Corinthians 6:12-20).
Sex is a gift from God that is intended to bring about a beautiful spiritual oneness that is expressed in the material world.
So what’s wrong with this burgeoning “great asceticism”? It’s not rooted in a failure to recognize how important and sacred sex is. Quite the opposite: it seems to be bound by the false belief that sex and its ultimate, tangible purpose — procreation — have no real value.
When people reject sex, they are rejecting the value of relationships, romance, and ultimately marriage.
Rather than finding fulfillment in marital relationships, young Americans are choosing self-sacrificial love over love. The Cut’s Kelsey Osgood writes that the next generation is “disdaining traditional romance. They’re not just choosing to shun marriage, many are actively arguing that marriage is no longer worth it.”
When it comes to sex, they choose to satisfy their desires in the same hedonistic ways that our broken world has always encouraged, just with a new twist. This isn’t all that surprising, given how our culture has long celebrated so-called “self-love.”
“The benefits of singlehood are endless – after all, it’s about self-improvement,” The Independent reported last year.
The social change towards asceticism is not a moral one, it is a selfish one.
For example, pornography use is skyrocketing. For background, see this article from Psychology Today:
Xvideos, the top-ranked porn site, has 700 million more total visits than Amazon, and 900 million, 1.1 billion, 1.3 billion, 1.5 billion, and 1.8 billion more visits than TikTok, OpenAI, LinkedIn, Netflix, and The Weather Channel, respectively.
There is also the irony that some see abstinence as just the next wave of “sexual liberation.”
Models like Julia Fox are choosing to abstain from sex as a means of “protest” against the constitutional changes. Roe v. WadeShe seems to be arguing that the Supreme Court has recently taken away, in her opinion, the right to abortion for birth control, which could lead to pregnancy, so she will be abstaining from sex altogether (shouldn’t this have been a consideration from the start? But I digress).
“I, Roe v. Wade“If they’re trying to take away our bodily rights, our reproductive rights, this is my way of taking them back,” she said, “and I feel like more women should be on board with this, because we have the power.”
What all of this is saying is that Satan and our own deceitful minds often work this way: they take the grain of truth—that abstinence is a good thing—and twist the motive into a sinful one.
If there is a silver lining here — and I believe there is always a gospel opportunity in any cultural dialogue — it is that trends like this could open the way for fruitful conversations about why abstinence is good, why God designed sexual expression to be enjoyed within certain limits, and why sex is a gift to be celebrated and that when it is enjoyed within God’s boundaries rather than destructive, it can bring profound redemption.
