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In 2022, pastor Jonathan Moynihan described entering what he called the “ ‘chop chop’ phase of life,” in which he and his buddies were “doing what is necessary to make sure we don’t keep having kids. … AKA, we’re all getting vasectomies.” Moynihan’s transparency is telling, as is his church’s willingness to broadcast his sterilization to the internet.
Vasectomies somehow became thoroughly mainstream inside evangelicalism without anyone either noticing or resisting. Even John Piper’s counsel about permanent sterilization is representative of many evangelicals’ central thesis: After strongly endorsing the goods of marriage and procreation, Piper does little more than caution against a vasectomy because of the future possibilities it cuts off.
It does not matter for Christian ethics whether one can marshal a Bible verse for or against vasectomies. Christian moral judgments must be shaped by the whole canonical witness; they are practical determinations that arise from a thick description of the reality of God’s creation and its end and goal in Jesus Christ. The advent of new medical and military technologies in the 20th century presented humanity with new moral questions that require more robust, stable answers than “It depends.”
Christian churches must develop those answers by carefully reflecting on the way the entire canonical witness to God’s revelation of his life shapes our understanding of what it means to be human. A Christian response to vasectomies will, in that way, be “biblical,” even if it makes use of no single Bible verse.
It is striking, in that light, that Piper’s response to vasectomies makes no mention of the body. Piper is by no means alone in this view. Many pastors’ default assumption in addressing vasectomies seems to be that their only distinguishing feature is permanence. There are certainly ways in which the moral questions vasectomies raise—and they do raise moral questions—are generally about contraception.
If nothing else, though, a vasectomy (or tubal ligation) is a more invasive intervention that impedes a healthy reproductive system from functioning. Other forms of contraceptives might do the same, but the surgical character of sterilization and the resulting need to heal makes the intrusion into the body’s organic functioning even more transparent. Effectively, a vasectomy takes what is healthy and breaks it for the sake of some social or communal end, and it does so without any medically indicated reason for the patient.
It is hard to see what grounds Christians might have for endorsing such a practice. There are, after all, less invasive ways of preventing conception. Evangelicals have long demanded schools teach “abstinence education” and have expressed outrage at the idea of distributing condoms in high schools. Yet when the moral question comes about sex within marriage, they have had few concerns about adopting contraceptives. The good of sexual congress has often been transformed within this context to a “need,” a position that has absolutely no scriptural warrant whatsoever. The only “need” that Scripture knows of regarding sex is the need that undergirds conception.
Christian medicine historically has been aimed at healing the body and caring for the dying when there was nothing left to be done. Sterilization serves neither of those ends. When pregnancy might threaten a wife’s life, a husband honors her body and nature by remaining abstinent—rather than surgically contravening her body so that they can continue to have the pleasures of sex without its potentially deadly fruits.
Fundamentally, the Christian imagination on vasectomies bottoms out in whether we think it possible for us to “possess our vessel in sanctification and honor,” to borrow from 1 Thessalonians 4:4 (KJV). There are two paths for the body: One path is that which Paul lays down here, namely, the cultivation of restraint and self-control from within so that our bodies might become a genuine gift in freedom to each other.
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Chastity is the freedom that comes from understanding and honoring the body’s intrinsic sexual powers by delighting in their use when the time permits and by cheerfully refraining when the season does not—even if that season is a permanent one for married couples. The path Paul offers involves not being held captive to our sexual passions because we have turned our lives and our bodies over to God.
The other path parodies this gracious self-possession of our bodies by allowing us to dominate them, turning them into instruments and tools for the gratification and pleasure of ourselves or others. On this path, the body with its organic functioning has no intrinsic authority to which we are responsible. It is instead subject to our modification, manipulation, or what has classically been called “mutilation”—of which sterilization remains a form.
The domination of the body enables us to transcend its immanent ends—not by seeking higher ones but by blocking or preventing certain aspects or dimensions of its lower ends while trying to hold on to the pleasures that accompany them. Vocationally celibate people make no use of their reproductive organs while devoting themselves to serving the church, but they also do not damage them; those who dominate their bodies attempt to have the pleasure without its fitting ends.
The Christian position on vasectomies is not especially complicated and, from the standpoint of Christian
history—including the Protestant Reformation and into the evangelical revival—not especially controversial. That it has become complicated among evangelicals is indicative of how far we have become detached from standard Christian convictions about the body and its ends and how willing we are to fight to protect the sexual gratification and pleasure we think is “necessary” within our own marriages while denying the same to everyone else.
Perhaps it is time for evangelicals to contemplate anew Paul’s radical and strange exhortation in 1 Corinthians 7:29–31 (ESV) that, in light of the eschaton, those who have wives might “live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.”
Matthew Lee Anderson is an assistant research professor of ethics and theology at Baylor University’s honors program.
This article appeared in the May/June 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Circumstances Shouldn't Determine Our Ethics".
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