Keller, who ministers mainly to single professionals in Manhattan, provides readers with general (hot) guidelines on married sex, such as this: “Each partner in a marriage is to be most concerned not with getting sexual pleasure but with giving it. …The greatest sexual pleasure should be the pleasure of seeing your spouse getting pleasure.”

Last week, Rick Warren sent this message to the nearly 500,000 people who follow him on Twitter: “Husbands & wives should satisfy each other’s sexual needs. 1 Cor 7:3”

His Twitter feed lit up with amens and retweets. “Oh gosh,” exclaimed one follower.

Evangelical Christians want to talk about sex. And not in the same old punitive way. They want to talk about hot sex — as long as it’s between a man and a woman who are husband and wife. That Warren, perhaps the nation’s most prominent evangelical pastor, would take up the cause only shows how much it matters to the people who listen to him.

Warren has a huggy-bear personal style that sometimes drifts toward over-sharing, and in another tweet he recently wrote: “Sex with 1 wife for Life ISNT like playing 1 record over&over but learning 1 instrument well for yrs of beautiful music!” (I can almost see his wife Kay, far more restrained and private than her husband, blushing.)

This sexual revolution is the inevitable result of a younger Christian generation rejecting outright the prudish “don’t do it because I said so” approach to sex and social morality of their grandfathers. According to a recent article in the Christian magazine, Relevant, 80 percent of self-identified Christians have sex before marriage, compared with 88 percent of the general population.

According to “UnChristian,” a 2008 book by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, 44 percent of bornhttps://web.archive.org/web/20230324185817/https://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/27/why-young-christians-arent-waiting-anymore/-again Christians ages 23 to 41 believe sex outside marriage is morally acceptable, compared with 23 percent of those who are older. Divorce rates among evangelicals are the same as those in the population at large.

The model Christian marriage, moreover, has traditionally been one in which the wife bows to the will of her husband the way a Christian does to God, but many evangelical women are in the midst of their own liberation movement. They are reinterpreting Scriptural verses requiring them to “submit” and “obey,” and they’re no longer content to “be known as the quiet, meek, pathetic group that doesn’t get to experience twenty-first century freedom,” as Jonalyn Fincher writes in the afterward to “UnChristian.”

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