A LinkedIn ministry called C-Suite for Christ published a piece this month called "Who Owns Your Bedroom." Its opening line sets the tone for everything that follows:

That sentence does a lot of work before the reader has had any chance to ask the only question that actually matters: on what authority is any of this being asserted? Not "is this a sincerely held belief," which nobody disputes. The question is whether anyone, including a LinkedIn ministry with a corporate sponsor and a merchandise page, has established the standing to tell consenting adults what belongs in their bedroom.

They have not. And the piece itself, for all its confidence, never actually tries.

An Old Trick in a New Suit

Strip away the business-world vocabulary, the talk of boardrooms and C-suites and leadership integrity, and the underlying argument is the same one this site has already spent three pieces dismantling. A set of ancient letters, Paul's in particular, assert that certain sexual conduct offends a God whose existence, attention and preferences have never been independently demonstrated. The piece quotes 1 Corinthians 6:18, Luke 9:23, Romans 12:2 and 1 John 1:9 as though quoting them settles anything. It does not. Those passages are claims made inside a document. A document asserting that God cares what two consenting adults do together is not evidence that God exists, that He cares, or that Paul's first-century opinion on the matter carries any binding force on anyone in 2026 who has not voluntarily joined that tradition.

The Bible saying something is a sin is not the same thing as it being one. That distinction is the entire argument, and this piece, like every piece like it, skips straight past it.

Nobody has to accept a premise just because it is stated with total confidence and a Scripture reference attached. The burden of establishing that a two-thousand-year-old letter carries binding moral authority over a stranger's private, consensual adult life sits entirely with the person making that claim. It has not been met here. It has not been attempted here.

Selective Obedience, Examined Honestly

The piece's own framing device is "selective obedience," the accusation that people pick the commandments that are convenient and discard the rest. It is worth taking that accusation seriously, because it applies with unusual precision to the piece itself.

Jesus, by the count of anyone who has actually read the Gospels closely, talks about wealth, greed and money with far more frequency and far more severity than he ever addresses sexual conduct. He tells a rich man to sell everything he owns and give it to the poor, then says it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a wealthy man to enter the kingdom of heaven. He tells his followers to lend expecting nothing back. He says plainly that nobody can serve both God and money. Paul's handful of sentences on sexual ethics, cited at length in the original piece, are vastly outnumbered by the Gospels' own repeated, blunt instruction to divest from wealth.

A ministry built specifically to reach business executives, sponsored in this instance by a hardware company, that builds an entire argument around sexual surrender while never once asking its C-suite readership to sell what they own and give it to the poor, is not confronting selective obedience. It is demonstrating it, in real time, in the very piece accusing everyone else of the sin.

Whose Body, Whose Authority

Set the hypocrisy aside for a moment, because the deeper problem would remain even if the piece applied its standard with perfect consistency. The question was never whether Paul's letters are internally consistent. The question is whether Paul's letters, or anyone's reading of them, grant authority over another adult's body.

They do not, for the same reason no sacred text grants that authority: a claim of ownership requires something more than assertion. A functioning, defensible sexual ethic for adults does not need an unverifiable supernatural claim behind it at all. Consent, honesty with partners, absence of coercion and genuine care for the wellbeing of everyone involved are sufficient, testable, and apply equally to everyone regardless of which, if any, ancient text they were raised on. That standard asks real things of people. It just does not ask them to subordinate their sexuality to the specific sexual preoccupations of a first-century rabbi's follower, on the strength of his say-so alone.

The Real Cost of This Kind of Surrender

This is not a purely abstract dispute either. "Surrender your bedroom" is not a neutral request with no downstream effects. It has been studied, and the findings are consistent.

A 2025 study in The Journal of Sexual Medicine found that people raised under purity-culture sexual teaching reported significantly more sexual shame than their peers, and that shame measurably interfered with both sexual function and sexual satisfaction later in life. A separate study in The Journal of Sex Research found that both childhood exposure to purity culture and adult acceptance of its beliefs independently predicted higher sexual shame, an effect that held even among survivors of sexual trauma, who are already carrying shame purity teaching tends to compound rather than relieve. Doctoral research out of the University of California similarly documented purity culture's association with sexual dysfunction, disembodiment and disordered eating among people raised inside it.

"Surrender your bedroom to an authority you cannot verify" is not a harmless rhetorical flourish. For a measurable number of the people who take it seriously, it is a documented path toward shame, dysfunction and worse sexual and mental health outcomes, not better ones.

A framework that produces that outcome in the people who follow it most faithfully is not entitled to a presumption of moral seriousness just because it invokes scripture. It is entitled to the same scrutiny anything else producing measurable harm would receive.

The Honest Counterargument

A fair response has to concede what is actually right in the original piece, because something is. Hypocrisy is a legitimate target. A business leader who preaches integrity while privately betraying his spouse, lying to his partners or exploiting people around him is a legitimate object of criticism, and consistency between stated values and private conduct is not an unreasonable thing to ask of anyone, religious or not. Private conduct can carry real moral weight, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

The failure in the original piece is not that it asks for integrity. It is that it smuggles in a specific, unproven theological claim, that a particular ancient text's sexual code carries divine authority over people who never agreed to it, and treats the demand for integrity as license to impose that specific code on everyone else. Asking someone to be honest with their spouse requires no supernatural premise. Asking them to surrender their sexuality to a first-century letter requires an enormous one, and that premise is exactly what never gets argued for. It only ever gets assumed.

My Opinion: This Is What They Would Do With Power

Here is where I will stop describing the argument and just say plainly what I think. Paul Neuberger and C-Suite for Christ are, for now, running a LinkedIn ministry. They can publish as many posts as they want telling consenting adults what belongs in their bedrooms, and readers remain free to scroll past, agree or ignore them entirely. Nobody is forced to obey a LinkedIn post. That is exactly why this particular piece is low stakes.

But the reasoning behind it is not low stakes, and it does not stay contained to LinkedIn. It is the same reasoning that drives the Christian nationalist and fundamentalist movements in this country: the belief that a two-thousand-year-old text, and one sect's reading of it, is not merely a personal conviction but a binding authority the rest of us are obligated to live under whether we agreed to it or not. "You cannot reserve your bedroom for Satan" and "America should be governed as a Christian nation" are the same sentence pointed at two different sized targets, a bedroom in one case, a country in the other.

Left to their own devices, I believe Christian nationalists and fundamentalists would not stop at persuasion. They would have the rest of us chained to their interpretation of their own two-thousand-year-old myth, enforced as law rather than offered as opinion.

That is not a slippery-slope fear invented for effect. It is the stated goal of a real and growing movement in this country, one that already has a state legislature mandating the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms and a real, measurable share of the electorate who want the Constitution itself subordinated to their reading of Scripture. A government built on that premise would not need to win the argument this piece just lost. It would only need the votes and the statute books, and it would use both exactly the way C-Suite for Christ uses a Bible verse now, as a conclusion nobody else is entitled to question.

Why This Matters

Nobody writing this needs you to stop believing whatever you sincerely believe about your own body, your own marriage or your own faith. That remains entirely yours to decide, and nothing here asks you to decide differently.

What deserves pushback is the move from personal conviction to public claim of ownership over someone else's private life, dressed up in the language of leadership and integrity and aimed, deliberately, at an audience with influence over other people's workplaces and institutions. A sentence like "you cannot reserve your bedroom for Satan" is not an argument. It is a conclusion wearing the clothes of one, and conclusions that skip the argument are not owed deference just because they arrive with a Bible verse attached. That holds whether the conclusion is aimed at a bedroom or, as I believe it eventually would be if its authors ever got the power to make it binding, at the rest of us.

Nobody owns your bedroom. Not Paul, not a LinkedIn ministry, not a text whose authority was never established in the first place. You do. And nobody owns the country on that same unproven authority either.