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Part of the Questioning Faith. Series
It comes up in university common rooms, in office conversations, on social media threads, and in quiet private thoughts. And for a growing number of people — particularly young people exploring Christianity or hovering at its edges — it is not a peripheral question. It is a dealbreaker.
Why does God care who I sleep with? The question feels obvious to many people outside the church. They look at the Christian ethic of sex — reserved for marriage between a man and a woman — and they see something restrictive, outdated, and judgmental. Something that says no to love. Something that treats perfectly natural human desires as shameful. Something that makes Christianity not just old-fashioned but actively harmful.
Why Does God Care Who I Sleep With? by Sam Allberry is written for exactly those people — and for every Christian who loves them and wants to be able to explain what they believe and why. In characteristic fashion, Allberry does not dodge the difficulty of the question or retreat into defensive moralising. He engages it directly, warmly, and compellingly — and he offers something that most people critiquing the Christian sexual ethic have never properly encountered: not a list of rules, but a vision of love.
One of Allberry's great gifts as a communicator is his ability to reframe questions without dismissing them. He takes the questioner seriously — really seriously — while also gently showing that the question itself, as usually framed, is working with a set of assumptions about sex, freedom, identity, and love that deserve to be examined rather than simply accepted.
The assumption that sexual freedom is the same as human flourishing. The assumption that God's restrictions are arbitrary impositions on natural desires rather than the design principles of the one who made those desires. The assumption that love and commitment are separable — that genuine care for another person does not require the kind of binding, exclusive, permanent covenant that Christian marriage describes.
Allberry unpacks each of these assumptions with patience and clarity — not to score points but to genuinely help the reader think more carefully about what they actually want and what kind of world their assumptions are building.
At the heart of this book is a positive, compelling vision of what sex is for and why God's design for it is not an arbitrary restriction but a blueprint for genuine human flourishing.
Allberry shows that the Christian vision of sex — exclusive, permanent, covenant-shaped, other-person-centred — is not a diminished version of sexual freedom but a richer and more fully human one. It is the vision of two people giving themselves completely to each other in a way that mirrors and reflects the covenant love of God himself. Sex within this framework is not less than what culture promises. It is more — more honest, more whole, more deeply connected to what human beings are actually made for.
And at the foundation of it all is the character of God himself: God is love. His design for sex is not the imposition of a distant deity who distrusts human pleasure. It is the blueprint of a God who invented love, invented sex, invented human beings, and knows better than anyone what makes them flourish.
One of the most important things to note about this book is its design purpose: it is explicitly written as a resource to give away — to friends, family members, colleagues, and anyone for whom the Christian sexual ethic is a barrier to faith. It is short enough to read in a single sitting. It is honest enough to take the objections seriously. It is warm enough to feel like a conversation rather than a lecture. And it is clear enough to actually explain what Christianity believes and why.
Sam Allberry — who himself experiences same-sex attraction and writes with the personal authenticity that comes from having wrestled with these questions at the deepest level — is one of the most trusted and effective communicators on this subject in the evangelical world. His ability to combine genuine pastoral warmth with genuine biblical conviction makes him the ideal author for a book designed to reach people who are skeptical of both.
Sam Allberry is a pastor, author, and international speaker who serves as a teaching pastor at Immanuel Nashville and is a founding editor of The Gospel Coalition. He is one of the most trusted and widely-read evangelical voices on questions of sexuality, identity, and the Christian life, and his writing is known for combining careful biblical grounding with deep pastoral warmth and genuine personal authenticity. He is the author of several widely-read books including Is God Anti-Gay?, 7 Myths About Singleness, Why Bother With Church?, and What God Has to Say About Our Bodies. He himself experiences same-sex attraction and has written and spoken about this with a transparency and grace that has made him a uniquely trusted voice for people navigating the intersection of sexuality and Christian faith. His books are used in churches, evangelism programmes, and pastoral contexts around the world, including a growing readership in India and South Asia.
