The views of the various different religions and religious believers regarding human sexuality range widely among and within them, from giving sex and sexuality a rather negative connotation to believing that sex is the highest expression of the divine. Some religions distinguish between human sexual activities that are practised for biological reproduction (sometimes allowed only when in formal marital status and at a certain age) and those practised only for sexual pleasure in evaluating relative morality.
Sexual morality has varied greatly over time and between cultures. A society's sexual norms—standards of sexual conduct—can be linked to religious beliefs, or social and environmental conditions, or all of these. Sexuality and reproduction are fundamental elements in human interaction and societies worldwide. Furthermore, "sexual restriction" is one of the universals of culture peculiar to all human societies.George P. Murdock. "On the universals of culture". In: Linton (ed), The Science of Man in the World Crisis (1945).Alice Ann Cleaveland, Jean Craven, Maryanne Danfelser. Universals of Culture. Center for Global Perspectives, 1979.
Accordingly, most religions have seen a need to address the question of a "proper" role for sexuality. Religions have differing codes of sexual morality, which regulate sexual activity or assign normative values to certain sexually charged actions or ideas. Each major religion has developed a moral code covering issues of human sexuality, morality, and ethics. These moral codes seek to regulate the situations that can give rise to sexual interest and to influence people's sexual activities and practices.
Abrahamic religions Abrahamic religions (namely Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, the Baháʼí Faith, and Islam) have traditionally affirmed and endorsed a patriarchal and heteronormative approach towards human sexuality.
Catholicism in particular favours exclusively penetrative vaginal intercourse between men and women within the boundaries of marriage over all other forms of human sexual activity, including autoeroticism, masturbation, anal sex, oral sex, non-penetrative and non-heterosexual sexual intercourse (all of which have been labeled as "sodomy" at various times), believing and teaching that such behaviors are forbidden and considered sinful, and further compared to or derived from the alleged behavior of the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah. However, the status of LGBT people in early Christianity and early Islam is debated.
Baháʼí Faith
In the Baháʼí Faith, sexual relationships are permitted only between a husband and wife, and marriage is emphasized in the faith. Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Baháʼí Faith, forbade any sexual intercourse outside a heterosexual marriage in his book of laws; the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. Homosexual sexual relationships and same-sex marriages continue to be prohibited.
Christianity
The Old Testament and Christianity have historically affirmed and endorsed a patriarchal and heteronormative approach toward human sexuality, favouring exclusively penetrative vaginal intercourse between men and women within the boundaries of marriage over all other forms of human sexual activity, including autoeroticism, masturbation, anal sex, oral sex, non-penetrative and non-heterosexual sexual intercourse (all of which have been labeled as "sodomy" at various times), believing and teaching that such behaviors are forbidden because they're considered sinful, and further compared to or derived from the sexual behavior alleged to have taken place in Sodom and Gomorrah.
In the New Testament, Jesus discussed little about sex, and most of the information about sex comes from the Old Testament and Paul's writings, and some are controversial today.
Sexuality carried out between different sexes, between two people (Monogamy, although polygamy is not forbidden) and in particular procreation, is generally understood as the ideal state.Tuovinen, Liisa (Sexuality in Different Cultures, 2008), p. 15.
New Testament
Paul the Apostle stated in 1 Corinthians "To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practising self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion." Importantly, Paul's view of sex is also that it is actually unnecessary for those with certain gifts (presumably "celibacy"). Jennifer Wright Knust says Paul framed desire a force Christians gained control over whereas non-Christians were "enslaved" by it. Further, Paul says the bodies of Christians were members of Christ's body and thus sexual desire must be eschewed.
New Testament scholar N. T. Wright asserts that Paul absolutely forbade fornication, irrespective of a new Christian's former cultural practices. Wright notes "If a Corinthian were to say, 'Because I'm a Corinthian, I have always had a string of girl-friends I sleep with, that's part of our culture,' Paul would respond, 'Not now you're a Christian you don't.'... When someone disagreed with Paul's clear rules on immorality or angry disputes, the matters he deals with in Colossians 3.5–10, he is... firm, as we see dramatically in 1 Corinthians 5 and 6. There is no place in the Christian fellowship for such practices and for such a person."
Some have suggested that Paul's treatment of sex was influenced by his conviction that the end of the world was imminent. Under this view, Paul, believing that the world would soon end, took it as a corollary that all earthly concerns, including sex, should hold little interest for Christians. Paul's letters show far greater concern with sexual issues than the gospel writers attributed to Jesus, since Paul was building Christian communities over decades and responding to various issues that arose.
Early Christianity In early Christianity, reflection on scriptural texts introduced an eschatological hermeneutic to the reading of the Book of Genesis. The Garden of Eden was seen as a normative ideal state to which Christians were to strive; writers linked the future enjoyment of Heaven to the original blessedness of Adam and Eve in their reflections.
The valuation of virginity in the ancient church brought into relief a tension between the Genesis injunction to "be fruitful and multiply" with its understood contextual implication of marriage as a social institution, and the interpretation of the superiority of virginity over marriage, sexual activity and family formation from the Gospel texts Matt 19:11-12, Matt 19:29. One way patristic thinkers tried to harmonize the texts was through the position that there had actually been no sexual intercourse in Eden: on this reading, sex happened after the fall of man and the expulsion from Eden, thus preserving virginity as the perfect state both in the historical Paradise and the anticipated Heaven. John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Justin Martyr, Epiphanius of Salamis, and Irenaeus of Lyons all espoused this view: Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, 12 "He did not yet judge of what was lovely by taste or sight; he found in the Lord alone all that was sweet; and he used the helpmeet given him only for this delight, as Scripture signifies when it said that 'he knew her not' till he was driven forth from the garden, and till she, for the sin which she was decoyed into committing, was sentenced to the pangs of childbirth. We, then, who in our first ancestor were thus ejected, are allowed to return to our earliest state of blessedness by the very same stages by which we lost Paradise. What are they? Pleasure, craftily offered, began the Fall, and there followed after pleasure shame, and fear, even to remain longer in the sight of their Creator, so that they hid themselves in leaves and shade; and after that they covered themselves with the skins of dead animals; and then were sent forth into this pestilential and exacting land where, as the compensation for having to die, marriage was instituted".St. Gregory of Nyssa, "," trans. by William Moore & Henry Austin Wilson, in Philip Schaff & Henry Wace, eds., Nicene & Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series № 5 (Buffalo, N.Y.: Christian Literature Publishing, 1893) [revised & edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight (2017), "Church Fathers: On Virginity," accessed 2019‑10‑07]. John Chrysostom, On Virginity, 14.3 "When the whole world had been completed and all had been readied for our repose and use, God fashioned man for whom he made the world... Man did need a helper, and she came into being; not even then did marriage seem necessary... Desire for sexual intercourse, conception, labor, childbirth, and every form of corruption had been banished from their souls. As a clear river shooting forth from a pure source, so they were in that place adorned by virginity." 15.2 "Why did marriage not appear before the treachery? Why was there no intercourse in paradise? Why not the pains of childbirth before the curse? Because at that time these things were superfluous.". Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 3, ch 22:4 "But Eve was disobedient; for she did not obey when as yet she was a virgin. And even as she, having indeed a husband, Adam, but being nevertheless as yet a virgin (for in Paradise they were both naked, and were not ashamed, inasmuch as they, having been created a short time previously, had no understanding of the procreation of children: for it was necessary that they should first come to adult age, and then multiply from that time onward), having become disobedient, was made the cause of death, both to herself and to the entire human race..." Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion, 78.17–19 "And as in paradise Eve, still a virgin, fell into the sin of disobedience, once more through the Virgin [Mary] came the obedience of grace." Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, ch 100 "For Eve, who was a virgin and undefiled, having conceived the word of the serpent, brought forth disobedience and death. But the Virgin Mary received faith and joy, when the angel Gabriel announced the good tidings to her..."
Prof. John Noonan suggests that "if one asks... where the Christian Fathers derived their notions on marital intercourse – notions which have no express biblical basis – the answer must be, chiefly from the Stoics". He uses texts from Musonius Rufus, Seneca the Younger, and Ocellus Lucanus, tracing works of Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Jerome to the works of these earlier thinkers, particularly as pertaining to the permissible use of the sexual act, which in the Stoic model must be subdued, dispassionate, and justified by its procreative intent.
Augustine of Hippo had a different challenge: to respond to the errors of Manichaeism. The Manichees, according to Augustine, were "opposed to marriage, because they are opposed to procreation which is the purpose of marriage". "The method of contraception practised by these Manichees whom Augustine knew is the use of the sterile period as determined by Greek medicine", which Augustine condemns (this stands in contrast to the contemporarily permitted Catholic use of Natural family planning). Elaine Pagels says, "By the beginning of the fifth century, Augustine had actually declared that spontaneous sexual desire is the proof of—and penalty for—universal original sin", though that this view goes against "most of his Christian predecessors".
As monastic communities developed, the sexual lives of monks came under scrutiny from two theologians, John Cassian and Caesarius of Arles, who commented on the "vices" of the solitary life. "Their concerns were not with the act of masturbation, but with the monks who vowed chastity. The monks' vow made masturbation an illicit act; the act itself was not considered sinful... In fact... prior to Cassian, masturbation was not considered a sexual offence for anyone."
Catholicism