Is Masturbation a Sin? The Bible Is Silent, and Churches Differ

The Bible never mentions masturbation, and Christians answer the question differently. The Catholic Church teaches that it is gravely wrong, the Orthodox Church in America calls it sinful, and evangelical teachers are divided over whether it can ever honour God. On lust and pornography, though, there is no such disagreement.

If you are asking because of a habit you have tried to break, perhaps many times, you are not the first. Paul knew that kind of struggle from the inside: “For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I” (Romans 7:15). He was writing about sin and the law rather than about this sin, but anyone who has fought one knows his words, and his cry too: “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” The answer comes in the next breath: “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 7:24–25).

No verse names it, and GotQuestions.org, an evangelical question-and-answer ministry, begins its own answer there: “The Bible does not mention masturbation, self-gratification, or ‘solo sex,’ as it’s sometimes called.” Greg Boyd, who writes at ReKnew, finds the silence striking, “since the Bible addresses just about every other aspect of sex.”

The nearest the law of Moses comes is a rule about ritual cleanness: “If any man’s seed of copulation go out from him, then he shall wash all his flesh in water, and be unclean until the even” (Leviticus 15:16). The same rule covered a husband and wife after they had been together: “they shall both bathe themselves in water, and be unclean until the even” (Leviticus 15:18). A bath and the evening ended it, and no offering for sin was asked. Since married love made a couple unclean in exactly the same way, this uncleanness cannot mean sin.

The old word “onanism” comes from him, but his story is about something else. When his brother Er died, leaving his wife Tamar a childless widow, Onan’s father Judah told him to marry her “and raise up seed to thy brother.” Onan took her as his wife and refused the duty: “when he went in unto his brother’s wife, … he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother. And the thing which he did displeased the LORD: wherefore he slew him also” (Genesis 38:8–10).

Onan was with his wife, so what he did was not masturbation. The same ministry and Boyd both read his sin as his refusal to give his brother an heir: “God condemned Onan not for ‘spilling his seed’ but for his rebellion.” Older Christian readers saw more in the verse, and John Calvin wrote in his commentary on Genesis, “It is a horrible thing to pour out seed besides the intercourse of man and woman.”

The Catholic Church teaches that masturbation is gravely wrong in itself. Its Catechism defines it as “the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure” and says that the Church has “firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.” The reason it gives is that sexual pleasure belongs to “the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved” (paragraph 2352).

The same paragraph asks for care in judging a person’s guilt, and it names “the affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety, or other psychological or social factors that lessen or even extenuate moral culpability.” So the Church judges the act gravely and the person gently, taking immaturity, habit and anxiety into account. Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval teacher, counted it among the sins “against nature”, which he judged the gravest kind of lust, though within that group he gave it “the lowest place”.

The Orthodox Church in America answers in a few lines: “Masturbation is self-directed. As such, is a distortion of human sexuality.” Because it cannot express “love and concern for an other person,” and “misses the mark” of the gift of sexuality, “it is considered sinful. This is especially so in cases in which masturbation becomes an addiction.”

Among evangelicals, the question-and-answer ministry draws on Paul’s words to husbands and wives, “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), and concludes, “it is doubtful that masturbation can be a God-honoring activity.” Others, Greg Boyd among them, take the other side, and Boyd writes that “Many notable Christian authorities” agree with him. He rules out the way most people masturbate, “escaping into their own fantasy world,” but thinks it can be permissible for a single person who pictures only married love, and he warns against letting it become a habit.

On lust the traditions all agree, because Jesus said, “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matthew 5:27–28). When he goes on to say that if the right hand causes us to sin, we should cut it off (Matthew 5:30), he is speaking of how seriously to take sin. The same ministry thinks it “unlikely that Jesus was alluding to masturbation in this passage.”

Paul gives the positive side: “this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication: That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour” (1 Thessalonians 4:3–4). Pornography feeds the very lust Jesus warned about, and the Catechism calls it “a grave offense” (paragraph 2354). The ministry also says where to start: “Many people struggle with guilt concerning masturbation when they would be better off repenting of the sins that lead them to masturbate.” There is more on that fight in how to overcome lust as a Christian.

For Catholics and Orthodox it is, just as it is for the unmarried. Paul tells husbands and wives, “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” (1 Corinthians 7:5). In marriage, desire is meant to draw two people toward each other. Even Boyd, who allows more freedom to single people, asks married people to refrain “except perhaps in exceptional circumstances such as being separated from each other for long periods of time.”

A wet dream is not a sin. Leviticus 15:16 covers any emission of seed and treats it as an uncleanness, washed away by evening. Aquinas wrote that a nocturnal emission “has not the character of a sin,” because “during sleep reason has not a free judgment,” and what happens in sleep is not chosen.

Desire itself is good, a gift from the God who made us for one another. Three times the Song of Solomon gives the daughters of Jerusalem the same charge, “that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please” (Song of Solomon 2:7). Paul gave the unmarried a plain word too: “if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn” (1 Corinthians 7:9). Until then we guard what we look at and what we feed our minds, as Paul says: “Make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Romans 13:14). There is more on this in what the Bible says about sexuality for single Christians.

Begin with whatever feeds the habit, and if that is pornography, cutting it off is the first step. Paul’s rule for every habit is “I will not be brought under the power of any” (1 Corinthians 6:12), and the fruit of the Spirit includes “temperance”, self-control (Galatians 5:22–23), which grows slowly, the way fruit does.

And do not fight it alone. Tell a pastor, a priest or a trusted friend who will pray with you and ask how you are doing; many churches also offer confession, and if the habit has become compulsive, a Christian counsellor can help. Hold on to the promise: “God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape” (1 Corinthians 10:13). For the moments when words fail, there are prayers for this struggle.

We can bring them to God: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). The Psalmist knew how God looks at us when we fail: “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust” (Psalm 103:13–14).

Some guilt is the Spirit calling us to change, and some comes from rules Scripture never gave, such as the belief that Onan was struck down for masturbating. A rule like that is no part of the gospel, and we can set it down. Yet Paul warns, writing about food, that “whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (Romans 14:23). So while your conscience is unsettled, do not act against it, and talk with someone wise until it is settled by Scripture rather than by wishing.

Paul does not stop at his cry in Romans 7. He goes straight on into chapter 8, and so may we, every time we fall and every time we rise: “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, …” (Romans 8:1).

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• 12 prayers for masturbation
• How to overcome lust as a Christian
• How to stop watching porn as a Christian
• Sexuality for single Christians
• “Catholic guilt” explained