What if Christian romance novels are worse for your soul than the secular ones?

I might get a little spicy on all that policing of women, sex, and desire

Nov 02, 2025

Fellow Pilgrims,

People pull me aside, concerned about women reading romance novels, wondering if I can speak into that situation. Those people are in good company.

After all, my good friend John Wesley listed “reading plays, romances, or books of humour” among those “fashionable diversions” he advised the “people called Methodist” to “abstain from.”

And the excellent Nathaniel Hawthorne complained about romance writers as, “a damned mob of scribbling women,” adding that he “should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash”

I’m not convinced.

And I worry that hand-wringing over romance novels covers over a great deal of more worrisome tropes in the Christian romantic imagination, including in Christian romance novels. I also suspect it covers over not a little bit of misogyny.

Here’s my case for the shape of a positive Christian romantic/sexual imagination using 11 measures.

I’m drawing on scripture and on the sexual ethics of the early church (which provide a helpful framework for differentiating the Christian imagination from that of the world—the world, for the early Church, being the Roman empire). Here’s my theological assessment of 11 categories and tropes found in romance novels:

Female virginity/male experience. Many romance stories value virginity for women vs. experience and skill for men. This trope prizes and even fetishizes female inexperience as opposed to male prowess. It’s a theological disaster. Christian faith values chastity and fidelity for both men and women. One of the most revolutionary things about Christian sexual ethics is that it is for men.
Power imbalance. Many stories build erotic feeling around an imbalance of power. In contrast, a Christian sexual imagination must look for mutuality and consent. “The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife” (1 Cor 7:4 NIV).
Sex positivity. The language of “sex positivity” is new and can hardly be applied to most of Christian history, but the early church certainly sees the marriage bed as one of the goods of creation. Against gnostic devaluation of the created world, scripture teaches that marriage and food are things “God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth” (1 Tim 4:3). More, “marriage should be honored by all…” (Heb 1:3). I believe a healthy Christian imagination is, in a certain sense at least, sex positive. (It’s complicated, since different people mean different things by “sex positive,” and some people mean “anything goes.”) But Christian thought is clear that sex is positive. It’s a created and redeemed good, a gift.
Forced relationships. This is a common trope in romance novels, but early Christians explicitly rejected forced relationship in favor of freedom in Christ.
Value of mutual enjoyment. Enjoyment is not the language of the early church, but mutuality certainly is (see #2).
Recounting of sexual details. Early church talk of sexuality does not trade on sharing intimate details. At the same time, the Song of Songs celebrates sexuality in a frank and bodily way. I believe a Christian sexual imagination should not be squeamish about the goods of the body, but it should also honor the privacy of intimate fidelity.
Employment of stereotyped gender roles. While many romances build stories around stereotyped roles, the Christian faith breaks down gendered stereotypes by opening up discipleship to men and women equally.
Eroticization of violence. Another common trope in romance stories, there’s no place for this in a Christian imagination which honors the Prince of Peace and treats sexual intimacy as a matter between persons of infinite dignity and worth as created in the divine image.
Expectation of male leadership/female submission. This trope does not belong in a Christian sexual imagination. Submission is a good in the sense that all of us are called to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ, but female only submission is not “biblical,” and it feeds into the above disasters all too easily. Same goes for stereotyped gender roles (#7).
Values vocation for both partners. A Christian romantic imagination values God’s calling for both partners. The point of Christian marriage is to support one another is seeking faithfulness to God’s call.
Possessiveness. As with the eroticization of violence, there is no place in a Christian romantic imagination for building erotic feeling around possessiveness. (And the presence of possessiveness is a red flag for the presence of violence and intimate partner abuse).

A chart:

Here’s my non-scientific assessment of the romantic imaginations of the Roman empire, contemporary pornography, early church sexual ethics, so-called purity culture, and good biblical theology on each of these 11 measures. If I’ve entered – it’s because the measure doesn’t fit well for the category or I don’t feel I can make a fair call.

Another chart:

And here are my assessments of two examples of Christian romance (Redeeming Love and the genre of Amish Romance), three “secular” romances (Pride & Prejudice, Great Big Beautiful Life, and The Rom-commers), and 50 Shades of Grey.

If you’ll allow me to take 50 Shades as my paradigm for what’s bad for our souls, the books on this chart that are most like it are the Christian romances.

Yes, this is a completely non-scientific chart, but the two contemporary romances here are emblematic of the kind of books selling like hot cakes. (There’s a sexy fairy genre out there, “Romantasy,” which I haven’t really looked at, but what I hear about it suggests some of it is more Shades-like and some of it more Austen-like. Here’s the inimitable Christina Bieber Lake reading Jane Austen and popular Romantasy on the same day.)

It’s the “Christian” romance novels that are fetishizing female virginity against male experience (often accomplishing this by the making the hero a reformed sinner or a widower). It’s the Christian romance novels that are building excitement around imbalance of power and danger.

Romance by and for women

Much of our anxiety about romance novels centers on the fact that these books are usually written by and for women. I expect a fair amount of our disdain for the genre hovers around this fact as well. After all, patriarchy is a hallmark of a world of sin.

Contemporary romance author Katherine Center (author of The Rom-Commers, featured in my second chart). says:

I don’t need to tell you that as a culture we regard romance novels as the lowest category in fiction, do I? You already know it, the way we all do. And yet, I just keep thinking we’re wrong….
When we read love stories, we get to see kindness in action. And human compassion. And connection made visible. And people choosing to be the best versions of themselves in the face of it all. Love stories show us people getting better at love—in real time…..
….And so I just keep coming back to this question: If we didn’t insist that romantic love was more ridiculous than zombies . . . would we be better at it?

When the whole 50 Shades of Grey Phenomenon was selling millions of books, I wrote, for the Christian Century that

…I see is a misogynist fantasy, born of a misogynist world, giving rise to misogynist commentary. Women learn to ask “what’s wrong with women.” Men ask “what’s wrong with women” to keep from asking what’s wrong with a world that glamorizes and romanticizes violence against women.

Shades gives us a relationship predicated on exaggerated inequality: just like too much of what is published as Christian romance. And unlike a lot of the popular secular books out there.

I’ve talked to a lot of Christian undergraduates about sex over the years. This wasn’t a vocation I particularly wanted, but I might have known it would be my lot when I started writing about theology and the body. And here’s the thing: Christians aren’t just messed up about sex in porny ways. A lot of us, especially women, have a really difficult time imagining sex as healthy and holy and happy and good and beautiful and joyful and fun.

I don’t think the two contemporary secular romances in my chart are great books, though they’re entertaining. But if we want to imagine sex positive, mutually supportive relationships, they’re a far better place to turn than are most Christian romance novels.

If some of the many young women I’ve talked to over the years felt free to read a few slightly spicy books, especially if those books are about happy, mutual relationships, well… I can imagine worse things.

Worse things like reading a lot of the “Christian romance” that’s out there.