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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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Precisely - Romans is immediately after Acts in the conventional order, so if (as @FlailingAce appears to be required to do) you teach the New Testatment from front-to-back, Romans 1 is the first Pauline epistle you get to. And if you want an unequivocal declaration that Jesus is not the hippie he appears to be based on some readings of the Gospels, Romans 1 works. But if you are trying to teach Christian sexual morality to people who are receptive to it but not familiar with it, "God curses people who deny him by turning their wives lesbian" isn't the best place to start.

Paul was writing for a society where the Christian ideas about marriage (the Christian idea of marriage is similar to, but not the same as, the pagan Roman idea of marriage) and the family were not countercultural, so he doesn't need to point to the centre of the thing he is pointing at before he can point to the edges. This is the Bible we are talking about, so all of Christian sexual morality is in there, and it forms an intellectually coherent whole. But the presentation was optimised for a time and a place. (Well, a set of places that Paul was writing to.)

But in a world where "marriage" as it was understood from the dawn of time to the 1960s is a somewhat-eldritch piece of lost technology, the logical sequence to teach the material is:

  1. God's plan for marriage and the family - both what it is and it's additional significance as e.g. a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and the Church.
  2. The role of sex and sexual attraction in same.
  3. Specific teachings on specific types of sexual immorality, of which the prohibition on male homosexuality is one of the most important.

"Christian sexual morality is basically normie-American sexual morality except we don't like gays" is not true, and empirically doesn't work as a seeker-sensitive white lie either.

The tradition in apostolic churches is to introduce the Christian teaching on marriage with John Chrysostom for that reason.

I know that Protestants do not do patristics to nearly the same extent. But before saying things like ‘Christian marriage was the norm in ancient Rome’ it’s probably worth looking at what ancient Christian preachers were criticizing in marriages.