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SCP0010.1177/0037768620901664Social CompassBeekers and Schrijvers: Religion, sexual ethics, and the politics of belonging

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Social Compass
2020, Vol. 67(1) 137­–156
Religion, sexual ethics, and © The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0037768620901664

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Daan BEEKERS
The University of Edinburgh, UK

Lieke L SCHRIJVERS
Utrecht University, The Netherlands; Ghent University, Belgium

Abstract
This article offers a comparative study of everyday sexual ethics among Dutch Sunni
Muslim and evangelical Christian young adults, both those born into religious families
and those converted later in life. In European public debates, the sexual values of
observant Christians and – especially – observant Muslims, are commonly understood to
deviate from progressive norms. Particularly for Muslims, this has become a ground for
questioning their belonging to the moral nation. Our ethnographic analysis complicates
these conventional representations, which are partly reflected in quantitative survey
research. We argue that the sexual ethics of the young Muslims and Christians we
studied are multi-layered, situational, and dialogical. Discussing the convergences and
divergences between these groups, we point to a paradox: while Muslims tend to be set
apart as sexually ‘other’, the young Christians we worked with – and to a lesser extent
the converted Muslims – put strikingly more effort into distinguishing themselves from,
and criticising, dominant sexual norms.

Keywords
Christianity, comparison, Islam, sexuality, the Netherlands, young adults

Corresponding author:
Lieke Schrijvers, Utrecht University, Janskerkhof 13, 3512 BL Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Email: [email protected]
138 Social Compass 67(1)

Résumé
Cet article présente une étude comparative de l'éthique sexuelle chez les jeunes adultes
musulmans sunnites et évangéliques chrétiens néerlandais, qu'ils soient nés dans des
familles religieuses ou qu'ils se soient convertis plus tard dans la vie. Dans les débats
publics européens, les valeurs sexuelles des chrétiens pratiquants et – en particulier –
des musulmans pratiquants, sont généralement comprises comme s'écartant des normes
progressistes. Pour les musulmans en particulier, cette situation est devenue un motif de
remise en question de leur appartenance à une conception morale de la nation. Notre
analyse ethnographique complexifie ces représentations conventionnelles, qui sont en
partie relayées par les enquêtes quantitatives. Nous soutenons que l'éthique sexuelle
des jeunes musulmans et chrétiens que nous avons étudiés est à la fois multiscalaire,
situationnelle et dialogique. En discutant des convergences et des divergences entre
ces groupes, nous relevons un paradoxe: alors que les musulmans ont tendance à être
considérés comme sexuellement « différents », ce sont ici les jeunes chrétiens – et dans
une moindre mesure les musulmans convertis – qui ont fait le plus d’efforts pour se
distinguer des normes sexuelles dominantes et les critiquer.

Mots-clés
Christianisme, comparaison, Islam, jeunes adultes, Pays-Bas, sexualité

Introduction
Public debates about religion in Western Europe have increasingly centred on questions of
sexuality, sexual emancipation, and gender relations. Issues such as the social position of
women, sexual freedom, and homosexuality time and again feed controversies about
religious groups. These debates are often based on binaries between a liberal-progressive
stance towards sexuality – taken to be the secular norm – and a restrictive-conservative
stance, associated with religion in general and orthodox religious communities in
particular (Bracke, 2012; Mepschen et al., 2010). In the process, sexuality and gender
have come to constitute not only dominant fields in which the relation between religious
and secular positions are negotiated and redefined (Cady and Fessenden, 2013), but also
major fault-lines in what sociologists have described as the ‘culturalisation of citizenship’:

a process by which culture (emotions, feelings, norms and values, and symbols and traditions,
including religion) has come to play a central role in the debate on what it means to be a citizen,
either as an alternative or in addition to political, judicial and social citizenship. (Duyvendak
et al., 2016: 3)

In the Netherlands, this emphasis on sexuality in debates about citizenship and belonging
is related to the country’s marked secular character. Protestant and Roman Catholic religion
played a central role in politics, culture, and morality until the 1960s. The subsequent
cultural – and perhaps before all sexual – revolution, the process of de-churching and the
unhinging of religious institutions from a range of social domains, have contributed to a
prevailing self-image of the Dutch as progressive, secular, and sexually liberated
Beekers and Schrijvers: Religion, sexual ethics, and the politics of belonging 139

(Duyvendak et al., 2016: 9–10). Religious morals are now often perceived to violate Dutch
progressive sexual norms. For Muslims particularly, such perceived sexual deviancy has
increasingly become a ground for questioning their integration in – and belonging to – the
moral nation (Mepschen et al., 2010; cf. Rahman, 2014).
While much work has been done on critically deconstructing this mobilisation of
sexuality as a tool of exclusion (e.g. Mepschen et al., 2010; Puar, 2007; Scott, 2017), less
attention has been given to the question what the everyday sexual ethics of religious
practitioners can tell us about these normative discourses. In this article, we focus on this
question through a comparative ethnographic study of young Sunni Muslims and
evangelical Christians in the Netherlands. We look at young adults aged between 18 and
28: a life phase in which questions of sexual practice and romantic relationships play an
important role and in which personal convictions about sexuality become strongly
defined (Yip and Page, 2013). We look at what we call ‘born’ Muslims and Christians
(those born and raised in Muslim or Christian families, respectively) as well as those
who converted later in their lives.
By concentrating not just on post-migrant Muslims, but analysing them alongside
Christians of white Dutch descent, we cast a critical light on the tendency to conflate
conservative sexual ethics among Muslims with a lack of integration or belonging. We
show that young white Christians, whose ‘Dutchness’ generally goes unquestioned,
share much common ground with their Muslim counterparts when it comes to the
everyday articulation and negotiation of sexual values, notwithstanding significant
distinctions between them. One of the most striking differences is that the young
Christians with whom we conducted research expressed a particularly explicit social
critique of liberal sexuality. They shared this explicitly voiced critique to some extent
with white Dutch converts to Islam but less so with post-migrant, ‘born’ Muslims.
These findings suggest that the analysis of the culturalisation of citizenship should
include not only religion but also conceptualisations of ethnicity and race (Balkenhol
et al., 2016). In relation to this, we point to the crucial role of positionality in how our
Muslim and Christian interlocutors relate, in divergent ways, to dominant sexual norms.
In part, then, our ethnographic analysis demonstrates that the study of everyday sexual
ethics in religious life asks for an intersectional approach. For another – related – part,
our discussion shows that these everyday ethics are articulated through processes of
moral reasoning (Lambek, 2010) that are situational, dialogical, and often characterised
by ambivalence. These ethics did not simply entail the application of a universal,
religiously informed, ethical blueprint to the choices our interlocutors made in their
everyday lives. While authorised religious discourses informed their personal moral
reflection, for the religious actors we studied, norms were negotiated and ethics were
lived out in various ways. We can only offer a fragment of this broad field of experience
here, focusing on particular dimensions of sexuality.
Studies of sexuality have emphasised the differences between sexual practices and
representations of sexuality (e.g. Bajos and Bozon, 2012). Based on survey research in
France, Maudet (2017), for example, argues that observant Muslims differ from the non-
religious population in terms of both attitudes towards sexuality and sexual practices,
while Catholics do so more in terms of attitudes than in terms of practices. In relation to
this, a recurrent question in research on sexuality is whether what people say about their
140 Social Compass 67(1)

sexuality corresponds to what they actually do. In this respect, we agree with Fidolini
(2017: 7) that even if representations of sexuality differ from private practices to a
degree, they are nonetheless significant because they reflect social norms that are
constitutive of social interactions and self-presentations. Taking into account both sexual
practices and values, we look at how our interlocutors formed, articulated, and negotiated
their sexual ethics. We are particularly interested in how they did so in relation to
authorised religious norms and to alternative expressions of sexuality they encountered
in their everyday lives.

An ethnographic comparison of Muslim and Christian

sexual ethics
Most of the existing comparative literature on sexuality among Muslims and Christians,
in varied national contexts, is based on quantitative research (e.g. Adamczyk and Hayes,
2012; Koopmans, 2015; Roggemans et al., 2015). Many of these studies affirm the
opposition between secular progressive and Muslim conservative values, often assigning
Christians with a position in between these two. Likewise, Norris and Inglehart (2012)
conclude that the basic (sexual and other) values of Muslim migrants in Western societies
are located roughly in between the dominant (‘egalitarian’ and ‘liberal’) values of the
societies in which they live, and the (‘highly conservative’) values of their Islamic
countries of origin. Such results have the advantage that they can claim a measure of
representativeness, are straightforward, and amenable to policy-making. Yet, based on
respondents’ stated opinions with regard to often rather narrowly defined questions,
many of these studies – but not all (e.g. Maudet, 2017; Schnabel, 2016) – fall short of
accounting for the more complex and multi-layered ways in which sexual values are
experienced, mobilised, and expressed in everyday life (Schrijvers and Wiering, 2018).
Moreover, they often uncritically use broad social categories and thereby tend to reflect
and reproduce taken-for-granted ideas about ‘ethnic minorities as forming separate
groups that are sexually distinct’ (Krebbekx et al., 2017: 651).
Qualitative, especially ethnographic, research has the potential not only to complement
but also to add a critical perspective to this existing quantitative focus in the comparative
study of religion and sexuality. Yet comparative ethnographic work on Muslims and
Christians, not only on sexuality but also on other themes, has up to now been
underdeveloped. The qualitative study of contemporary religion continues to be
characterised by disciplinary boundaries between scholarship on different religious
communities, with limited theoretical exchange between these fields (Beekers, 2014;
Janson and Meyer, 2016).1
In what follows, we pursue an ethnographic, comparative line of inquiry by examining
discourses and experiences of sexual ethics in the everyday lives of Sunni Muslim and
evangelical Christian young adults in the Netherlands. We focus on particular themes
that played a significant role in our fields: (1) ethical discourses on sex and sexual
practice, (2) views on homosexuality, and (3) encounters with explicit sexuality in the
public sphere. In the following sections, we first offer an empirical overview of these
themes, before moving to a more conceptual discussion of our findings in terms of
situated moral reasoning and questions of positionality. Yet we first comment on our
research projects and the groups we worked with.
Beekers and Schrijvers: Religion, sexual ethics, and the politics of belonging 141

This article engages in a double comparison of sorts, as we juxtapose not only specific
groups of Muslims and Christians, but also converted and born religious subjects. This
approach is a fruit of our collaboration based on individual research projects. Daan
Beekers carried out ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands between 2009 and 2012
among Sunni Muslims (mostly, but not exclusively, of Moroccan descent) and Protestant
Christians (mostly of white Dutch descent). His interlocutors generally shared an
orientation towards revivalist movements, specifically Salafi Islam and evangelical
Christianity. They were between 18 and 28 years old, mostly born and raised in religious
families, and included equal numbers of men and women. Beekers conducted interviews
with 48 young Muslims and Christians, and undertook participant observation in a range
of activities within evangelical and Islamic student associations, including Bible study
groups and Islamic talks. Outside these student associations, he also conducted participant
observation during church services, Friday prayers, talks in mosques and in other settings
including religious conferences and festivals, as well as outreach and social activities.
His research did not focus on sexuality specifically but rather on the ways in which his
interlocutors pursued their religious aspirations under conditions of pluralism, moral
individualism, and high capitalism (Beekers, 2015). Issues of sexuality, romantic
relationships, and gender relations did however regularly come up in this regard.
In her research project on women’s conversion to Pentecostal Christianity, Sunni
Islam and (liberal and orthodox) Judaism, Lieke Schrijvers did explore the specific
themes of gender and sexuality. She conducted fieldwork in 2017 and 2018 among
Dutch women from all ages who decided to join a religious community later in life. The
majority, but not all, of her interlocutors were of white Dutch descent. Schrijvers
undertook participant observation in three Hillsong-affiliated Pentecostal churches
(partaking in church services, religious conferences, Bible study groups, and study
weekends) and attended meetings in Sunni mosques, such as lectures and study groups.
All were located in cities, mainly Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht. Schrijvers also
undertook in-depth interviews with 42 converted women and eight religious officials,
focusing on the conversion process and religion in daily life, as well as questions of
gender and sexuality. The women in the broader project had a variety of socio-economic
backgrounds, and were between 18 and 72 years old. For the purpose of comparison, we
limit ourselves here to Schrijvers’ interlocutors between 18 and 28 who – generally in
their late teens or early 20s – had converted to Pentecostalism or Sunni Islam. The latter
were, to varying degrees, oriented towards reformist Islamic trends (which included but
were not limited to Salafism).
While the comparison of material drawn from these individual projects on ‘born’
religious actors and converts, respectively, enriches our analysis, it also entails challenges
and limitations. These include, first, the differences between our research sites when it
comes to time, location, and the specific groups we worked with. Of particular importance
here is the difference between our Christian interlocutors: while they can all be typified
as ‘evangelicals’, those of Beekers hailed from Calvinist Protestant backgrounds, while
those of Schrijvers had recently converted to Pentecostal Christianity.2 Second, these
challenges pertain to our divergent subject positions as researchers, especially in terms
of gender and related to the fact that Beekers worked with both men and women, and
Schrijvers with women only.3 Third, they entail the different thematic emphases of our
142 Social Compass 67(1)

research projects. Throughout the article, we address these challenges by reflecting on

the ways in which they may have impacted our findings. We hold that there is sufficient
common ground in our research projects for a unified analysis of Dutch evangelical and
Sunni young adults, which pays explicit attention to the differences between born and
converted religious actors.
The young people on whom this study is based, all of whom living in urban areas, were
enrolled in – or had already completed – higher education. While their social backgrounds
varied, with many of the born Muslims coming from socially disadvantaged families, their
high level of education prepares them for the higher echelons of the job market. So, while
class can play a (complicated) role in the articulation of sexual values and sexual tolerance
(e.g. Tissot, 2014), the socio-economic differences between the groups we worked with do
not seem substantial enough to explain the variation in sexual ethics between them.
Although not all of Schrijvers’ interlocutors identified as heterosexual, the young adults
included in this article did. Beekers did not explicitly address this question, but most of his
interlocutors expressed heteronormative discourses whenever issues of sexuality and
relationships were discussed. Furthermore, while the majority of Beekers’ interlocutors
were not converts, they had commonly experienced a process of self-conscious religious
revitalisation (Beekers, 2014). The young Muslims and Christians in both projects aspired
to live a pious life, characterised by prayer, contemplation, and a strong personal relationship
with God. Issues of sexuality played an important role in this regard.

Ethical discourses on sex and sexual practice

In the mosque classes and public talks we attended among Muslim young adults, marriage
and proper relationships between men and women were much discussed. Yet, issues like
homosexuality, pornography, or masturbation were very rarely addressed. In Beekers’
interviews, too, these latter topics – except, in some cases, homosexuality – were hardly
discussed explicitly. His young male interlocutors did regularly refer to sexual attraction
and feelings of lust as their most difficult temptations in daily life. Topics of (sexual)
embodiment related to ritual practice, such as the rules of ritual purification after a wet
dream, were more openly talked about by both religious leaders and some of the
interviewees. In Schrijvers’ interviews, sexuality was often more explicitly discussed.
For many of the converts, their turn to Islam implied a change in their experience,
understanding, and moral assessment of sexuality. This sometimes resulted in a sharp
distinction with the ways they acted or thought about sex before converting. This entailed
carefully reconsidering their sexual ethics with regard to such topics as pre-marital sex,
proper dress styles for women, and homosexuality. For others, Islamic sexual ethics
provided a clear frame in which to express their personal views of sexuality, or their
discomfort with sexual norms and practices in the broader society.
Our Muslim interlocutors and their religious leaders generally held that men and
women should only interact intimately in the context of marriage. Sex was not only
considered to be important for procreation, but was also given personal, relational, and
spiritual significance. It was generally held that Islam did not oppose sexual pleasure, as
long as it took place within the demarcated space of heterosexual marriage. These views
reflected normative Islamic discourses on sexuality (Ajouaou, 2016). Their implementation
Beekers and Schrijvers: Religion, sexual ethics, and the politics of belonging 143

was however somewhat more ambivalent. Most of our Muslim interlocutors agreed that it
was preferred not to have any sexual or romantic relations before marriage, but not all
strictly followed this norm (cf. Ajouaou, 2016). Many sought to find a balance between
their aspirations to live a life of Islamic piety on one hand, and to fulfil their romantic and
sexual desires on the other – that is, between what Schielke (2015: 83–104) terms different
‘moral registers’ with regard to sexuality. Those who did have a relationship before they
were married often stated that they ‘guarded their boundaries’, trying to avoid sexual
intercourse or any form of physical contact. Some of our interlocutors, both converts and
non-converts, did have a pre-marital relationship but decided to end it, or to get married,
after they became (more) religiously committed. As a 26-year-old convert put it, ‘Me and
my [Muslim] boyfriend also had a relationship before we got married. Yeah, we even
lived together. But when I converted, I felt the need to marry, because it didn’t feel right
anymore’.
Many converted women did have sexual relations before they became Muslim.
Despite the widespread belief that conversion entailed forgiveness of prior sins, these
past experiences fuelled doubts about their eligibility – as non-virgins – to marry a
Muslim partner.4 Interestingly, but beyond the scope of this article, Schrijvers only
observed such doubts among some of the young adults in her fieldwork, in contrast to the
older converted women she spoke with.
The question of avoiding any form of physical contact between men and women, in
particular, was a cause of negotiation. When it came to Islamic norms not to shake hands
of members of the opposite sex, our interlocutors often made concessions in their
interaction with non-Muslims. The pressure to do so is especially present in the
Netherlands, where not shaking hands with members of the opposite sex has become a
charged political issue allegedly denoting Muslims’ lack of ‘integration’ (Fadil, 2009).
Many of our interlocutors emphasised the notion of ‘intention’ in this regard. Some, for
example, regarded shaking the hand of a non-Muslim colleague as unproblematic when
it was part of general courtesy norms. Others struggled with this question, like a 23-year-
old student and converted Muslim whom Schrijvers interviewed:

Imagine that you’re going for a job interview and you are eager to get the job . . . and then a
male employer wouldn’t appreciate it if you reject his hand. So I’m like . . . what would I do in
that case? That’s quite difficult.

In addition, some converted women preferred not to socialise with male friends anymore,
and equally expected their partners not to have female friends. Beekers’ interviews with
Muslim students often took place in rooms at a university. Some of his female interlocutors
told him that it was religiously forbidden to be in a room alone with a man outside of
their family circle (mahram). Nevertheless, they felt that their participation in the
interview was justified by the academic purpose of the meeting.

***

Unlike the Muslim settings in which we conducted fieldwork, issues such as pre-marital
sex, pornography, and homosexuality were often explicitly addressed in the evangelical
144 Social Compass 67(1)

student associations and church groups in which we participated (cf. Derks et al., 2014). In
the bi-weekly Bible study group (kring) that Beekers attended at an evangelical student
association in Rotterdam, for example, one of the standard set of questions with regard to
lifestyle and sins that the group members could choose to answer was:

Have you committed sins in the field of sexuality? Have you exposed yourself to any kind of
explicit sexual content or have you allowed your thoughts to dwell on sexual phantasies? In
what way does God continue to lead you towards a holy life and a pure heart in this regard?

While the participants usually appeared to avoid answering this set of questions, it
demonstrates how these Christian young adults were stimulated to share their experiences
in matters of sexuality. Likewise, during a weekend for newcomers to a Pentecostal
church that Schrijvers attended, participants joined in a ritual to redeem their sins. The
list of possible sins provided to all participants included – but was not limited to –
lustfulness, masturbation, flirting, pornography, adultery, prostitution, and dreaming of
sexual intercourse with someone other than your husband or wife. At the same church,
the services of a full month were dedicated to the topic of marriage.
Sexual temptation was also addressed in many of our one-to-one conversations and
interviews with Christian young adults. Several (non-converted) young men talked about
their struggles with watching pornography on the Internet. A member of an evangelical
student association in Rotterdam was troubled that he sometimes watched ‘videos’
online, because he could not ‘share this with God’ and it ‘made him dirty’. He found it
difficult to ask God for forgiveness after watching sexually explicit videos, but when he
once did so right away, he said, it had felt ‘really fantastic’, ‘as if a fresh wind of the
Spirit blew right through me’. In Christian talks, such encounters with explicit sexual
content were often mentioned as opportunities to ‘choose for one’s faith’, as opposed to
giving in to temptation.
Our Christian interlocutors neither sought to maintain a general segregation between
men and women, nor did they have problems with giving a handshake or hug to someone
of the opposite sex. At the same time, interactions between men and women were based
on assumptions of heteronormativity and directed towards marriage. The female converts
to Pentecostal Christianity often talked about following God’s path as a woman and
striving to build a family life. All sexual relations not directed towards these aims were
generally seen as deviating from God’s path and were therefore regarded as sinful. In
practice, however, both our born and converted Christian interlocutors were ambivalent
about pre-marital sex. Some told us that they had sex with their partners to whom they
were not married, sometimes arguing that this was proper because they were already
(planning to be) engaged. Some emphasised that pre-marital sex was acceptable as long
as it was based on spiritual love and trust between partners. Many others explicitly
rejected pre-marital sex, but differed from one another in what this entailed. A student
from Rotterdam told Beekers that he and his girlfriend consciously chose not to have sex
before they were married. Yet, they wrestled with the question where they should draw
the line: ‘Uhm, no sex before being married, that’s very simple, that’s about sexual
intercourse (geslachtsgemeenschap). But what is excluded? That’s something I have
never heard a straightforward answer to’. For this couple having no sexual contact meant,
Beekers and Schrijvers: Religion, sexual ethics, and the politics of belonging 145

as they phrased it themselves (in English): ‘no hands in the pants’. This kind of moral
deliberation about proper pre-marital sexual acts was common among our Christian
interlocutors involved in romantic relationships.
Most of the women who did have sexual relations before their conversion to
Pentecostal Christianity were, unlike some of the younger Muslim converts, not troubled
by this. Some said they simply ‘didn’t know any better’ at the time. Or as a single woman
put it, ‘I used to do that too, flirting, being with guys. I just didn’t know that there was
something else to fill that emptiness inside of me, so I turned to men’. Because conversion
was understood to entail the redemption of previous sexual sins, these prior sexual
relations were not perceived as problematic. Moreover, in Hillsong churches, everyone
is expected to redeem sins, and changes in sexual behaviour (from, for example ‘having
multiple partners’ to ‘being in Christ’) could even be celebrated as examples of true
conversion. In contrast with some of our Muslim interlocutors, virginity itself seemed
less of an issue: the emphasis was put on one’s intention and ‘cleanness’ of heart and
spirit before marriage.

Ambivalent stances on homosexuality

While homosexuality was rarely a topic of discussion in the public settings our Muslim
interlocutors attended, the topic did occasionally come up in our interviews. Several of
our interviewees pointed out that they were regularly confronted with this topic by non-
Muslims. Particularly Schrijvers’ converted interviewees addressed homosexuality at
length, often raising the issue themselves. These women were generally raised in non-
religious environments in which, in their recollection, explicit rejection of homosexual
acts was rare. Conversion often prompted their non-Muslim family members and friends
to question whether they had ‘turned against’ homosexuality – a particularly striking
illustration of the way ‘sexular’ thinking, in which homophobia is linked with Islam, can
become ‘part and parcel of “lived worlds”’ (Verkaaik and Spronk, 2011: 84). Some
converts had indeed changed their ideas about homosexuality. A female university
graduate said,

My views [on homosexuality] changed quite a lot. I considered it to be normal before, but now
I do view it as something which to me, in my view, is not right. Because I just believe that a
man and woman are made for one another, and not a man and man, or woman and woman.

The emphasis put here on one’s personal ‘view’ is characteristic for the way the Muslim
converts spoke about topics like this. They were often careful to stress that they expressed
their personal views and did not necessarily represent the broader community.
Many of our interlocutors shared a multi-layered argument with respect to
homosexuality. On one hand, they said that everyone should determine for themselves
how they want to live their lives. As a, Muslim born, female student whom Beekers
interviewed in Rotterdam put it, ‘they should do whatever makes them feel good’. On the
other hand, they did point out that homosexuality was not permissible in Islam. The same
student mentioned that if one of her Muslim friends would be homosexual, she would
remind her of ‘the rules of the religion’. For her, these rules implied that although one
146 Social Compass 67(1)

may fall in love with someone of the same sex, one should not ‘act’ on these feelings, that
is, engage in sexual practices. Falling in love with someone of the same sex, she thought,
is a test of God. This distinction between feelings and practices was more widely shared
among our interlocutors. Again, this was mainly directed at fellow Muslims. While this
rejection of homosexual practices reflects normative Islamic discourses (Rahman, 2014),
it seems that our interlocutors adhered to these primarily with regard to fellow believers,
while articulating other normative registers (such as tolerance for sexual diversity) in
relation to non-Muslims.
This affected how converts responded to LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender,
and queer) people in their direct environment. A student from Rotterdam who became a
Muslim at the age of 15, for example, noted that while the lesbian relationship of her
mother is not allowed ‘according to Islam’, she personally rejected neither her mother
nor her partner. She emphasised that one of the most important Islamic values is to
respect and care for other people, one’s parents in particular. To her, this implied accepting
different perspectives on homosexuality. Here we see how moral deliberation might
involve negotiation not only between religious and other kinds of normative registers but
also between different norms drawn from Islam. This outcome relieved the mother, who
had worried that her daughter would no longer accept her relationship after she had
become a Muslim. When young Muslims had questions about this issue, they often
searched out online discussion platforms or individual Muslim friends, but more rarely
brought up the topic during public events.

***

During our fieldwork among Christian young adults, the theme of homosexuality was
regularly addressed. In the evangelical student association in Rotterdam, for example,
people often brought up the question how one could follow God’s will as a homosexual
Christian. Similar to the Muslim young adults, homosexuality was often perceived as a
test of God: our Christian interlocutors generally made a distinction between the feelings
one has for someone of the same sex and how one decides to act on those feelings. A
commonly shared view was that homosexuality should not be ‘practiced’. Accordingly,
and echoing statements of several orthodox Protestant theologians on the issue (Derks
et al., 2014: 48), some of our interlocutors expressed their appreciation for Christian
homosexuals in their social circles who consciously chose a single and celibate life.
In the Pentecostal churches attended by Schrijvers, homosexuality – in contrast to
themes such as sexuality within marriage, masturbation, flirting, and pornography – was
rarely discussed in public. It was mainly addressed implicitly by advocating sexual
contact only between married, heterosexual couples. A possible explanation could be that
the explicit rejection of homosexuality is by and large off-limits in the Dutch urban
spaces in which these churches are located. Some of the pastors told Schrijvers that while
newcomers in church often raise questions about homosexuality, ‘sensitive topics’ like
this could be better addressed in personal conversations and smaller Bible study group
than in the services. In these more intimate contexts, a discourse circulated in which
homosexual behaviour was rejected because it did not align with the heteronormative,
procreation-based sexual ethics of the church. For the converts, this could imply a
Beekers and Schrijvers: Religion, sexual ethics, and the politics of belonging 147

difficult change in perspective. In one Bible study group with young women that
Schrijvers attended, for example, a converted young woman asked about the church’s
view on homosexuality, noting that she personally thought that ‘God loves everyone, and
I can’t imagine that God didn’t mean for a loving relationship to happen. It’s not a disease
or something’. The group leader, a 23-year-old Pentecostal woman, agreed that ‘God
loves everyone’, but continued,

But if you take a look at the Bible, it very clearly states that homosexuality is a sin. And it very
clearly states that God loves the sinner, but hates the sin. And I also think that, yeah, you know,
it’s not a disease of course, so healing [genezing] is not the right term . . . but I do think it can
be remedied [verholpen].

The convert thought this was ‘quite harsh’ and pointed out that homosexuality is not a
choice. Noting that this is ‘a difficult subject’, the group leader said, ‘I see this quite plain
and simple actually: something is a sin or something isn’t. [. . .] But that doesn’t mean
He doesn’t love people, because God loves all sinners, and all people are with sin’.
On one hand, this exchange exposes a rather uncompromising view on homosexuality
among Pentecostal church leaders (that differed from the discourses in the evangelical
settings Beekers studied). On the other hand, the discussion demonstrates that the views
on homosexuality varied among individual converts. Furthermore, there might be Bible
group leaders who individually disagreed with this perspective but refrained from
questioning the views of the pastors while speaking to church members.

Encountering explicit sexuality in the public sphere

Muslim young adults often brought up their struggles with the presence of explicit
sexuality in the public sphere. Especially the young men (in Beekers’ research) talked
about their constant confrontation with explicit sexual images shown on, for instance,
public advertorials. Thus, one student from Rotterdam recounted that when he arrived on
Amsterdam Airport after conducting a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, the first thing
he saw was a billboard displaying women in lingerie. Having barely arrived from these
holy Islamic places, this was ‘quite a shock’ for him. It made him realise he had to
‘re-adjust’ to being back in the Netherlands. A student in Islamic spiritual care from
Amsterdam talked about similar struggles and explained how prayer helped him to deal
with these:

You see a lot of nudity on the streets, on billboards too you know, lingerie advertisements, those
kinds of things. [. . .] And at some point, when you are outdoors for a long time, you’ve done
so many of those things that you feel very heavy and dirty. Then you long for prayer to become
clean again, to take it off of you again. You see. And then you really feel very good again.

This quote shows not only that young Muslim men experienced confrontations with
explicit sexual images as an assault on their personal piety. It also demonstrates how such
confrontations stimulated them to invest in worship practices as a means of alleviating
the burden of perceived sins (cf. Beekers, 2015).
148 Social Compass 67(1)

While they talked about the temptations of other sources of explicit sexuality, such as
pop music, born Muslim women did not seem to worry about the public presence of
sexual images, including those depicting men, as much as the men did (it is however
possible that they did experience temptation but were taken aback to share this with
Beekers as a male researcher). Similar to the discourse on non-Muslim homosexuals,
some connected this to personal freedoms in a pluralist society. A female student from
Rotterdam told Beekers with regard to advertorials, ‘I may choose to walk around in a
headscarf, she may choose to wear her bikini’. With some exceptions, these women
hardly articulated a social critique of explicit sexuality in public. Neither did the non-
converted men, who mainly spoke about it as a source of personal temptation.
By contrast, the converted Muslim women regularly criticised the position of women’s
bodies in broader society. Many felt that in their non-religious urban environments,
sexuality has become a commodity and lost its spiritual significance. As a convert in her
late 20s put it,

Faith gives us guidelines on how things should be. But because we see [faith] as something
foreign in the Netherlands, we think such guidelines are strange. [. . .] You see, it’s not a
positive thing, to be looked at, to start feeling insecure, and to believe that everyone should be
naked all the time. It’s very misogynistic that you’re always seen as a sex object here! Because
that’s what men do, and women don’t even realise it!

Both the female converts and born Muslims described wearing loose clothing and a hijab
in terms of the protection and safeguarding of women’s bodies. The converts, however,
also more commonly framed wearing a hijab as a withdrawal from the sexualisation of
women. As a student from Rotterdam remarked ‘Not to play along with the sexualisation,
I think that’s quite a feminist act, don’t you think?’
A reason for this more explicit political position among the converted women may be
that their conversion generally entailed acquiring a sexual ethics that partly conflicts
with the morals they were raised with. Another reason may be that some did have sexual
partners and wore revealing clothing before their turn to Islam, or might have felt
uncomfortable with the gender norms and expectations they were raised with. As their
conversion was accompanied by a modest dress code, they were often confronted with
critical questions from their non-Muslim friends and family, on top of their own self-
reflections. By framing Islamic dress as a feminist act, they countered the idea that their
embrace of Islam implied forsaking the benefits of women’s emancipation.5 Apart from
such discursive strategies, however, their social criticism was also motivated by a
spiritual desire to define womanhood in ways not determined by the sexualisation and
commodification of female bodies, but in ways protected by religious codes and
guidelines.

***

Like the young Muslims, our Christian interlocutors talked about their recurrent
confrontations with explicit sexuality in the public sphere, including public advertorials,
music videos, movies, literature, and TV-series. They generally sought to avoid input
Beekers and Schrijvers: Religion, sexual ethics, and the politics of belonging 149

that would potentially invoke sexual feelings and thereby move them away from what
they regarded as God’s intentions. This particularly concerned content that, in their view,
objectified women or promoted sexual permissiveness. The converted women felt
particularly exposed to sinful seductions because of their non-religious social circles and
their personal experiences before converting, which they often characterised as more
sexually permissive, or ‘loose’.
We were struck by the ways in which these young Christians set out to very explicitly
distinguish themselves from the sexual ethics they associated with mainstream culture.
For instance, the members of the evangelical student association in Rotterdam distanced
themselves emphatically from secular fraternities by emphasising their own more
cautious engagement with sex. Secular fraternities, they sometimes pointed out, were
worlds of ‘one-night stands’. The converted Christians similarly voiced strong objections
to brief sexual relations and (non-Christian) dating apps.
By making these moral distinctions, these young Christians did not only seek to
buttress their personal piety but also formulated an explicit critique of what they regarded
as mainstream sexual ethics. One of the standard questions in Beekers’ interviews was,
‘Are there any things in our society that, based on your convictions, you really have
difficulties with?’ A large majority of his Christian interlocutors answered by referring to
sexuality, or what they called ‘the sexualisation of our society’. A young, female Christian
nurse from Rotterdam, for instance, responded by saying,

Sexualisation, I think. That, uhm, there is so much focus on free sex and such things [. . .]. I do
also see this as something that can destroy society, to put it that way. If there are no more stable
families, of love and fidelity, and if everyone is getting divorced and so on (I’m just exaggerating
for a moment here), than society will become very unstable.

To compare, almost none of Beekers’ Muslim interlocutors gave a similar answer to the
same question. In their replies, they mainly referred to the intolerance they encountered
as Muslims in Dutch society.
In the light of today’s negative political climate regarding Islam, it is not surprising
that Muslims worry more about intolerance than about sexual permissiveness. It is
however striking that, compared to our Christian interlocutors, these (non-converted)
Muslim young adults only rarely voiced an explicit social critique of sexual norms in
broader society. They seemed to be mostly concerned with the way the temptations
evoked by explicit expressions of sexuality endangered their personal piety. While our
Christian interlocutors worried about temptation as well, they also articulated an explicit
social critique of (what they considered to be) dominant sexual morals.

Everyday sexual ethics compared

The young Muslims and Christians with whom we worked all faced, and often grappled
with, questions of sex and sexuality. Yet, even though their moral views on intimate and
sensitive issues around sexuality broadly converged, the young Christians tended to
discuss them more openly than the young Muslims. The converted Muslims were located
somewhere in between these two positions, since these kinds of topics were rarely
150 Social Compass 67(1)

addressed within their mosque communities but more commonly in private conversations.
Another notable difference was the stronger ideals of gender segregation and the
avoidance of physical and sexual contact between men and women among our Muslim
research participants, as compared to the Christians. If one focuses on these differences,
one could argue that these young Muslims took up a more conservative position than the
young Christians towards sexual values and conducts. This interpretation would confirm
the perception of Muslims as the prime exception to ‘mainstream’ sexual morality. Yet
the fuller story that emerges from our ethnographies complicates this picture.
In spite of the differences already mentioned, the reflections and ethics with regard to
sexuality among our Muslim and Christian interlocutors overlapped to a large extent.
Members of both groups opposed the – in their eyes – permissive and explicit expressions
of sexuality in the public domain. These were seen as both immoral and dangerously
tempting. Young men, in particular, talked about their daily struggles with seductive
sexual images. They felt that such confrontations moved them away from God. Yet, they
also saw these as opportunities to confirm and strengthen their piety by resisting
temptation, asking God for forgiveness, and investing in worship practices. Next to this,
both the young Muslims and Christians pursued a personal sexual ethics that entailed
restricting or avoiding sexual contact outside of marriage. Many of our Muslim
interlocutors even considered any kind of romantic relationship prior to marriage
inappropriate (although not all abstained from it).
Furthermore, the Christians and Muslims we met generally shared a disapproval of
homosexuality. While they commonly did not condemn people with homosexual desires,
many did reject sexual acts with someone of the same sex. A nuance that came out of our
data, which is often overlooked in quantitative studies, is that homosexual acts were
particularly condemned with regard to fellow believers rather than non-believers. As Bos
and Bouchtaoui (2010: 282) have remarked, this divergent moral evaluation may enhance
the acceptance of non-religious LGBTQ people but at the same time limit that of Christian
and Muslim LGBTQs. Be that as it may, this comparative finding suggests that it is
highly problematic to portray Muslims as the singular exception in an otherwise gay-
tolerant society, setting them apart as ‘flawed’ moral citizens.
On a more general level, the common ground between our Muslim and Christian
research participants also concerned the nature of their everyday sexual ethics. These
tended to be heterogeneous and situational, rather than stable and one-directional. Our
interlocutors’ ethical decisions were characterised by constant negotiations, for example,
when the young Muslims determined whether or not to shake hands, or the young
Christians set the limits of pre-marital sexual contact. These negotiations entailed moral
deliberations based on such factors as social context, personal intentions, divergent
moral expectations (of fellow believers and others), and distinctions between feelings
and practices (in the assessment of homosexuality, for instance).6 These deliberations
often also involved negotiating between different ‘moral registers’ (Schielke, 2015: 53),
such as the ideals of religious piety and those of romantic love. These negotiations may
be partly influenced by our interlocutors’ education within urban spaces, in which a
variety of moral views tend to come together.
Our interlocutors’ sexual ethics, then, involved ongoing acts of moral reasoning and
decision-making. In the expanding field of the anthropology of ethics, scholars have
Beekers and Schrijvers: Religion, sexual ethics, and the politics of belonging 151

highlighted ‘ordinary’ people’s capacity to make balanced judgements that suit the
immediate circumstances (e.g. Jouili, 2015; Lambek, 2010). In a similar vein, we argue
that while stated values such as those recorded in quantitative studies of religion and
sexuality tend to appear relatively unambiguous, the everyday sexual ethics articulated
by our interlocutors were rather characterised by ambivalence, negotiation, and contextual
assessment. Moreover, these sexual ethics were highly dialogical by nature: many of our
interlocutors’ discourses and practices regarding sexuality were formed in relation to the
conception of a ‘sexual otherwise’, particularly that of a more permissive, and allegedly
less moral, secular realm.

Social critique and moral distinction

It is with regard to this dialogical character of sexual ethics that we identified a striking
divergence between our born Muslim, converted Muslim, and Christian interlocutors.
Our born Muslim interlocutors primarily articulated their sexual ethics in the context of
their attempts at attaining a pious life and striving towards rightfulness and purity, both
as individuals and as a community. While this was important for our Christian
interlocutors too, they also approached sexual ethics as grounds of moral distinction and
social critique. Christian young adults tended to foreground issues of sexuality when
they talked about their faith, invoking their sexual values as a means to distinguish
themselves from secular peers and wider society. They also articulated explicit criticisms
of the predominance of explicit and permissive expressions of sexuality – or what they
often referred to as the ‘sexualisation of society’. While the born Muslims pursued a
sexual ethics that differed from the widespread norms of liberal sexuality, they seldom
explicitly emphasised this difference and rarely criticised wider society for its sexual
norms. Such critique was more commonly expressed among the converted Muslims,
albeit primarily in the individual conversations we had with them. In the light of public
discourses in which Muslims in particular are framed as deviating from dominant sexual
norms, it is remarkable that the young Christians with whom we worked, more than the
young Muslims, strove to emphatically distinguish themselves from the ‘mainstream’ in
terms of sexuality.
In part, this divergence between our Christian and (particularly born) Muslim
interlocutors may be explained by long-standing anxieties regarding sexual desire in
Christian traditions, probably expressed most strongly today by conservative evangelicals
(Kamitsuka, 2010). Yet, we suggest there is also a particular social dynamic at play
concerning our interlocutors’ position in wider Dutch society. Among the evangelical
and Pentecostal groups we worked with, we discerned an underlying, often implicit,
worry about the extent to which they were different from their secular peers when it came
to their moral conduct and outlook. In her study of evangelicals in London, Anna Strhan
(2015) similarly shows that these Christians recognise that they are ‘shaped by the same
moral currents as those they seek to be different from’. As a result, ‘the lines marking
them out as different are fragile’, encouraging them to ‘stake out symbolic moral
boundaries of distinctiveness’ (p. 169). For our Christian interlocutors, we argue,
sexuality provided a relatively clear-cut domain to set apart their views and behaviours
from those of their secular peers (cf. Schnabel, 2016).
152 Social Compass 67(1)

Such needs of re-affirming one’s moral distinctiveness were less prominent among
our Muslim interlocutors, who tended to be always already perceived as ‘other’ in
widespread public discourses – and who themselves also regularly positioned Islam in
opposition to ‘Dutch culture’. Faced with prevalent perceptions of Muslims as sexually
deviating, they generally did not invest in foregrounding the differences between their
sexual ethics and those prevailing in the wider society. We suggest that this is connected
to what Margaretha van Es terms the ‘dynamics between stereotyping and self-
representation’ (2016: 5ff). Van Es has shown that Dutch and Norwegian women with a
Muslim background respond, for an important part, to stereotypical and exclusionary
representations by constructing alternative images of themselves that are aimed at
affirming their belonging to society, ‘trying to resist being construed as an Other and
negotiating the boundaries drawn between “us” and “them”’ (2016: 302). Likewise, in
the light of dominant discourses that single out Muslims as exceptions to the assumed
norm of progressive sexuality, our Muslim interlocutors seemed to opt for de-emphasising,
or even downplaying, the contrast between themselves and prevailing norms. We suggest
that this stance is informed by their position as young Muslims who were born and raised
in the Netherlands, but often did not feel accepted within wider society. The situation is
different for other groups of Muslims, such as converts to Islam or recent Muslim
immigrants, who may be less inclined to de-emphasise their sexual distinctiveness (cf.
Fidolini, 2017, on recent immigrants).
Conceptions of ethnicity/race play an important role in this regard. Because the Christians
were generally considered to be part of the white majority population, their digression from
dominant norms did usually not provoke questions about their belonging to the Dutch
nation. For our Muslim interlocutors, it did (cf. Beekers, 2014: 77). In this context, it was
less risky for the young Christians to foreground their sexual otherness. The converted
Muslims took up a complicated position in this regard. Those considered in this study were
young women of white Dutch descent and hence perceived to be part of the majority
population. Socialised in white, non-Muslim environments, they had not grown up
experiencing similar processes of othering as born Muslims. At the same time, after turning
to Islam, they often experienced exclusionary processes of ‘ethnicisation’ or ‘racialisation’,
whereby their Dutchness came to be questioned in public encounters. This is particularly the
case for female converts wearing a hijab (cf. Vroon-Najem, 2014). The effects of this on
their outspokenness regarding sexual issues could work two ways. That they seemed to
question prevalent sexual norms more explicitly than the born Muslims in our study may
suggest that they faced less uncertainty regarding their symbolic citizenship than the latter.
Personal circumstances of the converted Muslims in our study also played an important role:
they often felt the need to justify their religious choices to non-Muslim family and friends,
who worried that the young women gave up parts of their sexual freedom.
This article has, on one hand, complicated the picture of Muslims as the unequivocal
sexual ‘other’ to a progressive mainstream. It has done so by delineating the common
ground between our Muslim and Christian interlocutors with regard to sexual ethics and
by showing that such everyday ethics do not simply reflect religious blueprints but are
rather contextual and, often, ambivalent. On the other hand, it has shown the importance
of an intersectional analysis by taking into account sexuality, religion, and ethnicity/race
in an attempt to grasp the relations between sexual ethics and the politics of belonging.
Beekers and Schrijvers: Religion, sexual ethics, and the politics of belonging 153

Our reflection on these relations invites new comparative questions on the dynamics
between religious ethics, secular discourses, and the politics of representation.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Momin Rahman, Margaretha van Es, and two anonymous reviewers for
very helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Some sections of this article are based
on a previous publication in Dutch by Daan Beekers: ‘Vroomheid, seksualiteit en maatschappijkritiek:
geleefde waarden onder soennitische en gereformeerde jongvolwassenen in Nederland’, Religie &
Samenleving 11(2): 187–205.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: Both of our research projects were funded by the Netherlands
Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) (Beekers: 400-08-082, Schrijvers: 360-25-170) and
supported by Utrecht University. Beekers’ work on this article was also supported by a Postdoctoral
Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and by a Visiting
Fellowship at the Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World, both at the
University of Edinburgh.

Notes
1. Notable exceptions of qualitative comparative work on sexuality and gender among Muslims
and Christians in Europe include the work by Yip and Page (2013) and Nyhagen and Halsaa
(2016). In the Netherlands, some policy-oriented studies based on comparative qualitative
research look specifically at the acceptance of homosexuality and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, and queer) people (Huijnk, 2014; Keuzenkamp, 2010).
2. While an issue of scholarly debate, Pentecostalism is commonly categorised as part of the
broader evangelical movement (Klaver, 2011: 44–45).
3. We have not conducted the research that would enable us to make decisive conclusions
about the impact of our gender on the research findings, which would, for example, include
re-interviewing each other’s interviewees. Whenever we expect that our subject positions –
in terms of gender, our ethnicity/race (white), and age (late 20s at the time of the fieldwork)
– may have influenced our findings, we make this explicit.
4. Some women met their now-husband in the trajectory to conversion, but no one stated that
their partner was the primary motivation to convert. Most began to implement Islam in their
daily lives when they were not involved in a romantic relationship.
5. As Jouili (2015) and Van Es (2016) show, such reflections on feminism and Islam are shared
by non-converted Muslim women across Europe. There is a large body of research on the
alleged opposition between orthodox forms of religion (particularly Islam) and women’s
emancipation, critically addressing particularistic and exclusivist secular conceptions of
womanhood (cf. Bracke, 2008; Mahmood, 2005).
6. For similar analyses of situational moral assessments among Muslims, see Kloos (2018) and
Liberatore (2017).

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Authors’ biographies
Daan BEEKERS is a visiting fellow at the Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary
World, University of Edinburgh. He obtained his PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the
Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam) in 2015, based on a comparative ethnographic study of religious
156 Social Compass 67(1)

commitment among young Dutch Muslims and Christians. His monograph based on this work is
forthcoming with Bloomsbury. As a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University, Beekers has
studied the – often contested – reuse of religious spaces in the Netherlands. He has also been a
postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Edinburgh)
and he co-edited Straying from the Straight Path: How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion
(Berghahn).
Address: The Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World, University of
Edinburgh, 16 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, United Kingdom.
Email: [email protected]

Lieke L SCHRIJVERS is a cultural anthropologist and PhD candidate for a joint doctorate in religious
studies and gender studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht
University, and the Centre for Research on Culture and Gender at Ghent University. Her current
research concerns the intersections of religious conversion, gender, and sexuality among female
converts in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities in the Netherlands. In addition, she has
been working on transgender and lesbian, gay, bisexual/queer sexualities in relation to religion.
Address: Janskerkhof 13, 3512 BL Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Email: [email protected]