We have torn sexuality away from spirituality and both have become distorted.
In contemporary culture, sexuality is treated as central to identity yet detached from moral meaning. Spirituality, meanwhile, is reduced to private feeling, disconnected from reality. The result is predictable: desire without direction, and religion without relevance.
But this separation is neither coherent nor true. Within the Christian tradition, sexuality and spirituality are integrated at the level of the human person.
Defining the Terms
Sexuality refers to the human capacity for sexual desire and union. Spirituality refers to the interior orientation of the person toward ultimate truth and God. Or according to the online Cambridge dictionary, sexuality is defined as “attitudes and activities relating to sex”, or “someone's ability to experience or show sexual feelings.” and spirituality, as “the quality that involves deep feelings and beliefs of a religious nature, rather than the physical parts of life.”
These are not separate compartments of life. Both concern the same subject: the human person.
Christian anthropology insists that the person is a unity of body and soul. The body is not an accessory to the self; it is expressive of the self. Therefore, what one does sexually is never merely physical — it is personal and spiritual.
From these definitions, it is clear that sexuality and spirituality are deeply connected. Major religions have developed specific interpretive views on sexuality, and the historical Christian perspective has been to avoid adopting non-Christian (pagan) approaches to sexuality, since these were often regarded as immoral. As the early Church decreed:
“It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us… that you abstain from… unchastity.” (Acts 15:28–29, RSVCE)
The concern is not arbitrary restriction. It is coherence: sexual conduct reveals what one believes about the person and about God.
Sexuality as Self-Gift
Within Christianity, sexuality is ordered toward communion — a mutual and total self-gift between husband and wife.
Authentic spirituality, Scripture teaches, is not ritual performance but moral integrity and generosity:
“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God… is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” (James 1:27)
True religion is self-giving and morally ordered. So is authentic sexuality.
When sexuality flows from love, it affirms the dignity of the other. It says not “I use,” but “I give.” It seeks communion rather than consumption.
This reflects the original unity described in Genesis: the man and woman were “naked and not ashamed.” Their bodies were not instruments of control but signs of mutual trust and transparency. Desire existed, yet it was integrated within love.
As St. Thomas Aquinas explains, love properly understood is “to will the good of the other.”¹ Sexuality ordered by such love becomes an embodied act of willing the other’s good.
When Desire Is Severed from Love
The biblical account of Amnon and Tamar makes the opposite dynamic visible.
Amnon is described as “being in love” with Tamar. Yet after forcing her, the narrative shifts abruptly:
“Then Amnon hated her with very great hatred, so that the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love with which he had loved her. And Amnon said to her, ‘Get up, and be gone!’” (2 Samuel 13:15)
The transformation is immediate and revealing.
What was called love collapses into revulsion after sex.
St. John Paul II observed that when sensual concupiscence achieves its aim, all interest in the object disappears, “As soon as [sensual concupiscence] achieves its ends, its attitude to the object changes completely, all ‘interest’ in it disappears.”²
The distinction must be precise:
Lust consumes. Love gives.
Lust seeks possession. Love seeks communion.
Lust reduces the other person to an object of satisfaction. Love affirms the other as a subject worthy of sacrifice and commitment.
Where sexuality is driven solely by appetite, communion cannot endure. Desire, when detached from self-gift, exhausts itself.
Why This Matters
When sexuality is severed from authentic spirituality (aka pure religion), two distortions emerge:
Desire becomes self-justifying.
The body becomes a tool of expression rather than a sign of covenant and committed love.
Yet appetite cannot sustain communion. A culture that absolutizes desire inevitably produces relational instability and loneliness, because consumption cannot generate permanence.
Authentic spirituality does not repress desire; it orders it. It asks:
Does this act embody self-giving love?
Does it affirm the dignity of the other?
Does it build lasting communion?
These are not merely religious concerns. They are community building ones.
Recovering Integration
When sexuality is integrated within authentic spirituality, intimacy becomes covenantal rather than consumptive. The body becomes ones’ language of self-gift rather than a vehicle for personal appetite.
Sexuality within the prism of authentic spirituality, by contrast, elevates the partner rather than denigrating or humiliating them. It is generous, since it flows from love and self-giving to the other. It opens the door to deeper communion, with openness to welcome new life—a child—arising from this union. Love, by its nature, is fruitful. Seen through this lens, sexuality embodies the Christian religious values of charity, holiness, and unity.
Here the coherence of the Christian vision becomes evident:
Sexuality finds its truth in self-giving love.
Spirituality finds its credibility and relevance when it embraces embodied reality.
Separated, both are distorted.
United, both are clarified.
Conclusion
The crisis of modern sexuality is not that desire is too strong.
It is that sexual desire has been detached from order and, hence its meaning.
Sexuality without authentic spirituality becomes self-centered appetite.
The body is not the enemy of the soul. It is the soul made visible.
Sexuality, when lived as self-gift, becomes a path to the couple communion, while spirituality ensures that sexuality is purified of lust and directed toward love.t.
Notes
¹ St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II, q. 26, a. 4.
² Karol Wojtyła (St. John Paul II), Love and Responsibility.
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