Paul's statement that a husband's body belongs to his wife, just as hers belongs to him, was an extraordinary assertion of physical equality in marriage for its time. Most subsequent Christian theology, particularly in the East, actively spiritualized or ignored this radical concept.

Contrary to popular belief, Christianity's monogamy isn't rooted in Judaism, which practiced polygyny. Instead, it was a strategic adoption of the prevailing Greco-Roman norm, a move crucial for the new religion to be taken seriously and spread within that society.

A key transformative act of the Reformation was Martin Luther's push for clergy to marry. This dethroned the celibate monk as the pinnacle of Christian devotion and elevated the married pastor and his family as the new, accessible model for all believers to emulate.

Historically, marriage was a pragmatic institution for resource sharing, political alliances, and acquiring in-laws. The now-dominant concept of marrying for love and personal attraction is a relatively recent cultural development, primarily from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Once clergy were mandated to be celibate in the 12th century, the laity became the sole group sanctioned to practice sex. This logical division forced a theological shift, defining lay marriage primarily by its openness to procreation, a concept not central before this period.

The 'lie' of monogamy is not that it's a bad choice, but that culture has sanctified it as the only valid path. This framing turns non-monogamous people into villains and ignores that polygyny is the biological norm for most animals, including pre-agrarian humans.

Franklin translated the Puritan work ethic into secular, folksy maxims. By retaining the moral core of discipline and industry while stripping away specific religious doctrine, he created an accessible philosophy that allowed Americans to feel Christian-adjacent without engaging with complex theology, prefiguring modern wellness and self-help culture.

The roots of American sexual repression lie less with the Puritans and more with Anthony Comstock. His successful lobbying for the 1873 Comstock Act created a powerful federal mechanism to police morality, criminalizing everything from contraception information to art, and establishing a precedent for government oversight of personal lives.

In the 19th century, same-sex intimacy was common and did not define a person's core identity. The concepts and words for "gay" or "bisexual" did not exist. People could engage in what we now call queer behavior without being categorized, as the act was separate from a fixed personal identity.