Sex before marriage

Sexual love is one of God’s great gifts, and the Bible speaks of it with delight. If you are asking because you love someone, or because you carry guilt or fear about your past, you deserve a gentle and truthful answer, and Scripture offers one: what makes sex holy or harmful is the love, faithfulness, and care between two people. Most denominations, including most mainline churches, still officially name marriage as the setting for sex, and the biblical reading below goes further than that official teaching.

Sex is never a small matter. Sex that lies, pressures, exploits, betrays a promise, or treats another person as an object is sin whether the couple is married or not. Sex that gives and receives love faithfully can be a holy thing.

What does the Bible say about sex before marriage?

The Hebrew Bible has two laws about a man who has sex with an unmarried woman. Neither law treats the act as a crime against God to be punished. Both laws treat it as a financial loss to the young woman’s father, who expected a bride-price when she married.

The first law, in Exodus 22:16–17, says that a man who “entices a virgin who isn’t pledged to be married” and sleeps with her must pay a dowry and marry her. If her father refuses the marriage, the man still pays the dowry of a virgin.

The second law, in Deuteronomy 22:28–29, describes a man who “grabs her and lies with her,” which is rape. Its remedy is fifty shekels of silver paid to her father and a marriage the man may never end. No church today would tell a woman to marry the man who assaulted her.

The same chapter orders that a bride found not to be a virgin be stoned (Deuteronomy 22:20–21), and no law demands virginity of a man. The biblical scholar Michael Coogan notes that in ancient Israel an unmarried woman was expected to be a virgin until her father contracted her marriage, while a man faced far fewer limits. These laws protected a family’s property and a father’s bride-price, and the church has never kept them as written or taken them as its sexual ethic.

The New Testament speaks more broadly. Paul tells the Christians in Corinth, “Flee sexual immorality!” (1 Corinthians 6:18), and he advises unmarried people who cannot stay celibate to marry, “For it’s better to marry than to burn with passion” (1 Corinthians 7:9). Paul clearly expected Christians to keep sex within marriage. Paul also said that his advice on marriage was given “by way of concession, not of commandment” (1 Corinthians 7:6), that he had “no commandment from the Lord” about unmarried people (1 Corinthians 7:25), and that he expected “the mode of this world” to pass away soon (1 Corinthians 7:29–31).

Are the lovers in the Song of Songs married?

The Song of Songs, a collection of love poems in the Old Testament, is the Bible’s fullest celebration of sexual love, and its lovers do not appear to be married. The woman wishes she could kiss her beloved in public and bring him home:

O that you were like a brother to me, who nursed at my mother’s breast! If I met you outside, I would kiss you, and no one would despise me. I would lead you and bring you into my mother’s house and into the chamber of the one who bore me.

Song of Songs 8:1–2, NRSVUE

Michael V. Fox, a Hebrew Bible scholar at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, writes that the lovers “are not married, though they certainly intend to be.” Fox explains that the man’s name for the woman, “my bride” (Song of Songs 4:9), is a term of endearment expressing a hope. Michael Coogan likewise describes the Song as a dialogue between an unmarried man and woman.

Jewish and Christian readers have long read the Song as an allegory of God’s love for Israel or Christ’s love for the church, and Rabbi Akiva called it “the holy of holies” among the Writings (Mishnah Yadayim 3:5). The allegorical reading leaves the literal sense of the poems in place. The book Akiva called the holiest of the Writings describes unmarried desire with delight and without condemnation, and it declares that “love is strong as death” (Song of Songs 8:6).

What does the Greek word porneia mean?

The New Testament word usually translated “sexual immorality” is porneia (literally “prostitution”). The historian Kyle Harper showed in the Journal of Biblical Literature in 2012 that in classical Greek the word meant selling sexual access to one’s body, and that Jewish and Christian writers widened it to cover a range of sexual wrongdoing. Paul uses porneia in 1 Corinthians 5:1 for a man who “has his father’s wife.”

Whether New Testament porneia includes every sexual act between unmarried people has been argued in print for decades; Bruce Malina and Joseph Jensen debated the question in the journal Novum Testamentum in 1972 and 1978. The King James Version renders the related word in 1 Corinthians 6:9 as “fornicators,” while the World English Bible, like many modern translations, has “the sexually immoral.” The English word “fornication” means sex between unmarried people, while the Greek porneia is wider and less exact.

What makes sex right or wrong?

Scripture gives Christians one test for every moral question, sexual ones included, and it is the test of love.

Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

Romans 13:10, NRSVUE

Augustine wrote in On Christian Teaching (1.36.40) that anyone whose reading of Scripture does not build up the love of God and neighbor has not yet understood Scripture. Applied to sex, the love of neighbor asks five questions. Is this relationship loving, seeking the other person’s good? Is it faithful, with no betrayal of another promise? Is it truthful about what each person wants and intends? Is there free and full consent? Does it care for the other person’s body, heart, and future, including protection from disease and unplanned pregnancy?

Paul’s own argument points the same way. He objects to sex with a prostitute because sex makes two people “one body” (1 Corinthians 6:15–16), so sex is never trivial. The Song of Songs adds a word of wisdom about timing, charging its hearers not to “stir up, nor awaken love, until it so desires” (Song of Songs 2:7). Marriage remains a great gift and the fullest shelter for sexual love, and 1 Corinthians 13 describes the patient, faithful love every couple should aim for. Many mainline clergy and theologians hold that the love, faithfulness, and truthfulness of two adults are what make their sexual love holy, whether or not they have yet had a wedding. For more on how to read the rules in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, see Should we read the Bible as literal fact?

What do the mainline churches teach?

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America adopted Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust in 2009, a social statement built around the idea of trust. It teaches that “degrees of physical intimacy should be carefully matched to degrees of growing affection and commitment,” and that the greatest intimacies, such as intercourse, are best sheltered by the binding commitment and legal protection of marriage. The ELCA opposes “non-monogamous, promiscuous, or casual sexual relationships of any kind.”

The Episcopal Church’s General Convention affirmed in 1991 that “physical sexual expression is appropriate only within the lifelong monogamous” union of marriage, and in the same resolution admitted a “discontinuity between this teaching and the experience of many members” (Resolution 1991-A104). In 2000 it acknowledged couples in the church living in lifelong committed relationships other than marriage, and said it expected such relationships to show “fidelity, monogamy, mutual affection and respect, careful, honest communication” (Resolution 2000-D039).

The United Methodist Church, in revisions its General Conference adopted in 2024, calls sexuality “a gift for all people” and asks candidates for ordained ministry for “faithful sexual intimacy expressed through fidelity, monogamy, commitment, mutual affection and respect.”

The United Church of Christ measures sexual ethics by love and justice, and its statement of principles for sexuality education does not mention marriage. Published with the church’s faith-based companion to the Our Whole Lives sexuality curriculum, the principles call sexuality “a God-given gift” whose purposes include expressing “love, commitment, delight, and pleasure.” They teach that “in judging whether behavior is ethical or unethical, the norms of mutuality, love, and justice are the central criteria,” and that sexuality is distorted by “violence, exploitation, infidelity, assertion of power, and the treatment of persons as objects.”

Many other Christians, including most evangelical and Orthodox churches, teach that sex belongs only within marriage, out of a conviction that sex joins two whole lives and should be protected by public vows. That conviction deserves respect, and many couples have found great joy in keeping it.

These churches hold that sex is holy, that it binds people together, and that casual and exploitative sex wounds people, and the reading of Scripture given above agrees. That reading parts from most of their official statements on one point: it looks for the holiness of sex in a couple’s love and faithfulness, whether or not they have yet stood at the altar. On that point it stands close to the United Church of Christ’s test of mutuality, love, and justice. If something in your past weighs on you, read What is sin? and Will God forgive me?

Whatever your story, your body and your longing to love and be loved are part of what God made and called good. Near its close, the Song of Songs says that “many waters can’t quench love, neither can floods drown it” (Song of Songs 8:7). The love of God for you is stronger still, and it meets you with mercy where you have failed and with blessing wherever you are trying to love well.