Is Using Condoms or Birth Control a Sin? The Catholic Church Says Yes, Most Protestants No

The Bible never mentions condoms or other birth control, and the churches answer the question differently. The Catholic Church teaches that contraception in marriage is wrong in itself and allows natural family planning; most Protestant churches leave the choice to the couple’s conscience. The Russian Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church in America forbid methods that end a conceived life.

Yet every one of them begins in the same place, with a psalm: “Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward” (Psalm 127:3). Where they part is over whether a husband and wife may use a method that prevents conception, and which methods. For Catholics the answer turns on what the marriage act is; for most Protestants it turns on the couple’s reasons.

Church	Contraception in marriage	Source
Catholic	Wrong in itself; natural family planning allowed for just reasons	Humanae Vitae 14 and 16 (1968); Catechism 2370
Russian Orthodox	Methods that end a conceived life forbidden; others not equal to abortion, but refusing children selfishly is a sin	Bases of the Social Concept XII.3 (2000)
Orthodox Church in America	Allowed if the method does not harm a child already conceived	Synodal Affirmations (1992)
Anglican	Allowed; the couple decide before God	Lambeth Conference 1930, Resolution 15; 1958, Resolution 115
United Methodist	Supports access to contraception; rejects abortion as birth control	Social Principles
Southern Baptist	No resolution on married couples’ use; “presumably” left to conscience	Article from its Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission
Latter-day Saints	Left to the couple and the Lord	General Handbook 38.6.4

No verse names a method, so Christians reason from what Scripture says about children, about marriage, and from one family’s dark story. The first blessing God speaks over man and woman is “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Genesis 1:28). Everyone agrees the verse blesses children. The disagreement is over what it asks of each couple, and even the Southern Baptist ethics commission lists it among the questions a couple should weigh: “Does the ‘procreation mandate’ (Gen. 1:28) prohibit all forms of contraception?”

Paul writes that husband and wife belong to each other, and that they should abstain only by agreement and for a time: “Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency” (1 Corinthians 7:5). The Russian Orthodox Church turns to this verse when it speaks of how a couple may space their children, and the Catholic practice of natural family planning also rests on abstaining for a time.

These are good questions to talk through before the wedding. Whom God Has Joined is a marriage-preparation course for engaged couples, and its lesson on children sets out what each tradition teaches about contraception.

What was the sin of Onan?

Genesis 38 is the one story many Christians have read as being about birth control. Judah told his son Onan to marry his dead brother’s widow and “raise up seed to thy brother,” so that the dead man would have an heir. Onan “knew that the seed should not be his,” and he withdrew so that she would not conceive. “And the thing which he did displeased the Lord: wherefore he slew him also” (Genesis 38:8-10).

Christians have read it two ways. Augustine saw a judgment on the act itself, and Pope Pius XI quoted him in 1930: “Intercourse even with one’s legitimate wife is unlawful and wicked where the conception of the offspring is prevented. Onan, the son of Juda, did this and the Lord killed him for it” (Casti Connubii 55). John Calvin held both readings at once. In his commentary on Genesis he blamed the “malignity of Onan, who envied his brother this honor,” and he also condemned the act for destroying a child the family could have hoped for.

Others place Onan’s sin in his refusal to give his brother an heir, a duty later written into the law of Moses (Deuteronomy 25:5-6). The New American Bible, published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, reads it that way in its note on Genesis 38:8: “Onan’s violation of this law brought on him God’s punishment (vv. 9-10).” Defenders of the older reading, among them the Catholic writer John Kippley, answer from Deuteronomy 25:7-10, where a man who refused the duty was shamed before the elders, not put to death. Neither Humanae Vitae nor the Catechism cites the story. The Catholic case today rests on what the marriage act means.

Because it holds that the marriage act carries two meanings God has joined. It unites husband and wife, and it is open to new life. Pope Paul VI wrote in 1968 that the teaching rests on “the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act” (Humanae Vitae 12). Contraception keeps the first meaning and shuts out the second.

So the rule covers every method that works by blocking conception, condoms and the pill alike. Humanae Vitae excludes “any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means” (14). The Catechism calls such an action “intrinsically evil” (2370), and good reasons do not change the verdict: “Legitimate intentions on the part of the spouses do not justify recourse to morally unacceptable means (for example, direct sterilization or contraception)” (2399).

The Church does not ask couples to have as many children as they can. “For just reasons, spouses may wish to space the births of their children” (Catechism 2368). When they have well-grounded reasons, Humanae Vitae says, “married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile” (16). The aim is the same as with contraception, and Paul VI explained why the Church still judges the two differently. With natural methods, “the married couple rightly use a faculty provided them by nature”; with contraception they “obstruct the natural development of the generative process.” Catholic teaching on sex and natural family planning covers how the methods work and how many Catholics follow the teaching.

Is using a condom a mortal sin?

The Church treats contraception as grave matter. A 1997 guide for confessors from the Pontifical Council for the Family says that it “is gravely opposed to marital chastity.” Grave matter alone does not make a mortal sin, though. The Catechism asks for three things together: “Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent” (1857). It adds that “unintentional ignorance can diminish or even remove the imputability of a grave offense” (1860), and that while an act can be judged grave, “we must entrust judgment of persons to the justice and mercy of God” (1861).

If you are Catholic, have used contraception and regret it, the door of confession is open. The same guide tells priests that absolution “is not to be denied to those who, repentant after having gravely sinned against conjugal chastity, demonstrate the desire to strive to abstain from sinning again, notwithstanding relapses.” Relapses included.

It forbids some methods and leaves others to the couple. The Russian Orthodox Church set out its position in 2000, in section XII of its Bases of the Social Concept: “Some contraceptives have an abortive effect, interrupting artificially the life of the embryo on the very first stages of his life. Therefore, the same judgements are applicable to the use of them as to abortion. But other means, which do not involve interrupting an already conceived life, cannot be equated with abortion in the least.”

About those other methods it says only that “Christian spouses should remember that human reproduction is one of the principal purposes of the divinely established marital union,” and it warns that “the deliberate refusal of childbirth on egoistic grounds devalues marriage and is a definite sin.” When a couple space their children by abstaining for a time, “spouses should make such decisions mutually on the counsel of their spiritual father,” who is to weigh their age, health and circumstances. The Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America taught much the same in 1992: “Married couples may express their love in sexual union without always intending the conception of a child, but only those means of controlling conception within marriage are acceptable which do not harm a fetus already conceived.”

So the Orthodox stand with the Catholics against methods that end a life and against refusing children out of selfishness. They do not call every other method wrong in itself. The Orthodox churches govern themselves, and these are the statements of two of them.

Most Protestant churches today do not, though for most of Christian history the churches opposed contraception. In the fifth century Augustine of Hippo wrote of married people who “use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness” that, “although called by the name of spouses, are really not such” (On Marriage and Concupiscence, Book I, chapter 17). An article from the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, written after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, sums up the long view in one line: “Christians mostly avoided contraception until recently.”

The Anglican bishops turned around within ten years. In 1920 the bishops of the Lambeth Conference uttered “an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of conception.” In 1930, by 193 votes to 67, they kept abstinence as “the primary and obvious method” of limiting a family, but agreed that other methods “may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles,” when two things were true: “a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood,” and “a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence.” In the same breath they recorded their “strong condemnation of the use of any methods of conception control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience” (Resolution 15). By 1958 they had left the choice with the couple: “the responsibility for deciding upon the number and frequency of children has been laid by God upon the consciences of parents everywhere” (Resolution 115).

Other Protestant churches followed over the next decades, and by 1973, the Southern Baptist article says, American evangelical leaders had come to approve of birth control. The United Methodist Church’s Social Principles now “support the provision of comprehensive, age-appropriate education for sexual health, as well as access to consistent, effective, and affordable contraception,” while of abortion they say, “We unconditionally reject it as an acceptable means of birth control.” The Southern Baptist Convention has passed no resolution on married couples’ use at all: “whether or not married couples should use contraception is not mentioned at all, presumably because Southern Baptist have left that matter to Christian conscience.”

Among evangelicals the question is still alive. Methods that end a conceived life, the same article says, “are increasingly rejected by Christians,” and it asks evangelicals “to rethink their understanding of the relationship of marriage and procreation.”

Yes. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints leaves the decision to the couple. Its General Handbook says: “The decision about how many children to have and when to have them is extremely personal and private. It should be left between the couple and the Lord. Church members should not judge one another in this matter” (38.6.4). The handbook discourages surgical sterilization as an elective form of birth control, and leaves that decision, too, to the husband and wife.

Paul wrote that neither spouse belongs only to himself or herself: “The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife” (1 Corinthians 7:4). Several churches carry that into this decision. The Anglican bishops asked for planning “in such ways as are mutually acceptable to husband and wife in Christian conscience.” The Russian Orthodox Church asks that a decision to abstain for a time be made “mutually,” on a priest’s counsel. On surgical sterilization, the Latter-day Saints’ handbook asks couples to “counsel together in unity.” The choice belongs to two people, together, before God.

The Catholic Church has guidance for a Catholic whose spouse insists on contraception. The 1997 guide for confessors distinguishes a spouse who cooperates from one facing “violence or unjust imposition on the part of one of the spouses, which the other spouse in fact cannot resist,” and it sets out conditions under which cooperation “can be licit.” A priest can help apply those conditions to a particular marriage.

No. He spoke about one case outside marriage and changed no teaching. In the 2010 interview book Light of the World, Benedict XVI took as his example a prostitute using a condom to lower the risk of infection; the German and English editions spoke of a male prostitute and the Italian edition of a woman, NPR reported. He said that such a use, “with the intention of reducing the risk of infection, can be a first step in a movement towards a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality,” and also that condoms are not “the real or moral solution” to AIDS.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith explained the remarks in a note of 21 December 2010: “the Holy Father was talking neither about conjugal morality nor about the moral norm concerning contraception,” and “the idea that anyone could deduce from the words of Benedict XVI that it is somehow legitimate, in certain situations, to use condoms to avoid an unwanted pregnancy is completely arbitrary.” The note does not take up a married couple in which one spouse has HIV, a case some African church officials raised at the time.

Outside marriage, the real question is whether the sex itself is right. Paul’s word is short: “Flee fornication” (1 Corinthians 6:18). The Catechism calls sex between unmarried people “gravely contrary to the dignity of persons and of human sexuality” (2353), and the Latter-day Saints’ law of chastity requires “abstinence from sexual relations outside of a legal marriage between a man and a woman.” A condom does not change that answer. What the Bible says about sex before marriage covers the question in full.

Inside marriage, Christians still disagree about methods. About the gift itself they speak with one voice, the psalm’s: “children are an heritage of the Lord” (Psalm 127:3).

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• What Does the Catholic Church Teach About Sex? Marriage, Contraception and Chastity
• What does the Bible say about sex within marriage?
• What Does the Bible Say About Sex Before Marriage?
• Is Oral Sex a Sin? Before Marriage, Yes; in Marriage, Churches Differ
• Sexual immorality in the Bible
• Orthodox vs Catholic: How the Two Churches Differ and Why They Split