CS Lewis on Sexual Morality

They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been hushed up. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think it is the other way round. I think the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess.

Modern people are always saying, "Sex is nothing to be ashamed of." They may mean two things: They may mean "There is nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that the human race reproduces itself in a certain way, nor in the fact that it gives pleasure." If they mean that, they are right. Christianity says the same.

It is not the thing, nor the pleasure, that is the trouble. The old Christian teachers said if man had never fallen, sexual pleasure, instead of being less than it is now, would actually have been greater. I know some muddle headed Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure were bad in themselves.

But they were wrong.

Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body - which believes matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty, and our energy.

Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians. If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once. But, of course, when people say, "Sex is nothing to be ashamed of", they may mean "the state into which the sexual instinct has now got is nothing be ashamed of".

I think it is everything to be ashamed of. There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food; there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives. there are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales resistance.