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A note before we begin: What you’re about to hear is a modern, scholarly reinterpretation of Alma 39, one that is well-supported by LDS researchers, Book of Mormon Central, and careful textual analysis. This is not the traditional reading most of us grew up with, and I want to be upfront about that. I’ve studied this interpretation, I find it compelling, and it aligns with what I believe about a God who is not trying to shame us into holiness. As with anything doctrinal, I encourage you to study it for yourself, pray about it, and come to your own conclusion. But my hope is that what I share today gives you a new lens for looking at your relationship with sex, especially within your marriage.

Where This Teaching Lives in Our Bones

Most people who grew up in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can tell you exactly what “the sin next to murder” means before you even finish the sentence. It means sex. Sexual sin. The idea that any sexual transgression, outside of marriage, and sometimes even questions that crept into marriage, ranks just below taking someone’s life on the ladder of seriousness.

This is part four of a five-part series on how our sexuality got shaped and how to start thinking about it differently. Episodes 428, 429, and 430 looked at the bigger picture — how LDS sexual culture got built over roughly a century, and what that accumulation looks like inside a person, inside a marriage. If you haven’t listened to those, I’d go back to them first, because they give the full landscape. Today we’re zooming in on one specific teaching within that landscape. One that has done more damage to more marriages than almost anything else I encounter in my coaching work.

I did touch on this briefly back in Episode 120, back in 2020 when this particular section of the Book of Mormon came up in Come Follow Me. I shared my initial thoughts there and encouraged people to study it out. And honestly, that episode has been sitting in the back of my mind for a few years now, because I always felt like the topic deserved a fuller treatment.

What finally pushed me to do it was that this subject came up twice in quick succession recently. Once in a Facebook group I’m part of, where someone brought it up and the conversation that followed made it clear just how much people are still wrestling with this. And once in an email I received from someone who had listened to Episode 120 and didn’t agree with my interpretation. They pushed back, thoughtfully, and I appreciated that. It reminded me that this isn’t a settled question for a lot of people, and that means it’s worth a full episode. So if you’ve heard Episode 120 and you’re in that camp of not being sure what to make of it, I’m glad you’re here. My hope isn’t to tell you what to believe. It’s to give you more to work with.

The Story: Alma and Corianton

The teaching — the idea that sexual sin is the sin next to murder — traces back to Alma chapter 39 in the Book of Mormon. Alma is speaking to his son Corianton, who had done something serious while on a mission to the Zoramites. He left his mission. He went to a place he had no business being. And he went after a woman named Isabel, who is referred to as a harlot.

Alma is not pleased. He lists several things Corianton did wrong. He boasted in his own strength and wisdom, he forsook his ministry, and he went after Isabel. Then in verse 5, Alma says: “Know ye not, my son, that these things are an abomination in the sight of the Lord; yea, most abominable above all sins save it be the shedding of innocent blood or denying the Holy Ghost?”

That verse became the foundation for one of the most weight-bearing teachings in Latter-day Saint culture around sex, the idea that sexual sin ranks just below taking a human life. And as we’re about to see, it didn’t stay in the scriptures. It moved into books, manuals, pulpits, and youth programs, and it shaped the inner lives of generations of members in ways that are still showing up in marriages today.

How It Became Official and Spread Through the Church

So where did it go from that one verse in the Book of Mormon to a teaching so embedded that married couples are still carrying it into their bedrooms decades later? It didn’t happen by accident. It was codified and amplified through official Church channels across multiple generations.

As I talked about in Episodes 428, 429, and 430, Joseph F. Smith was the architect of much of what became standardized LDS sexual theology in the early twentieth century. I’m not going to reintroduce him here, because those episodes cover who he was and the broader pattern of his teachings on sexuality. But there’s one specific thing he put into print that became the seed for this entire teaching.

In a 1918 article in the Improvement Era, the Church’s official magazine at the time, Joseph F. Smith wrote: “We hold that sexual sin is second only to the shedding of innocent blood in the category of personal crimes.” That exact language then appeared in his book Gospel Doctrine, compiled from his sermons and writings and published the year he died. It was institutional. It was on the record. And it framed the conversation for everything that came after.

And here’s what I keep coming back to. Joseph F. Smith had almost no formal education. He left for his first mission at fifteen, before he had received any significant schooling. He had no training in scriptural analysis, no background in ancient languages or literary context, no tools for examining how a text is actually constructed. And when he read Alma 39:5, he did what a lot of people do — he read the piece he recognized and ran with it. Corianton went after Isabel, Alma called it an abomination next to murder, therefore sexual sin is next to murder. Done.

But the verse doesn’t say that. Alma says “these things” — plural. Not this thing. These things. He’s pointing at a cluster of behaviors across the preceding verses, not isolating sexual sin and elevating it above everything else. A person with training in textual analysis would likely have caught that. Joseph F. Smith, through no fault of his own, didn’t have that training. He had authority, he had conviction, and he had a platform. And that was enough for a misreading to become doctrine.

The 1942 First Presidency message that formally declared this as Church doctrine essentially amplified what Joseph F. Smith had already put into print. Signed by President Heber J. Grant, J. Reuben Clark Jr., and David O. McKay, it stated: “The doctrine of this Church is that sexual sin — the illicit sexual relations of men and women — stands, in its enormity, next to murder. The Lord has drawn no essential distinctions between fornication, adultery, and harlotry or prostitution. Each has fallen under His solemn and awful condemnation.”

That alone would be significant. But the message went further. It addressed anyone who might suggest that sexual desire is simply a normal human drive — and it called them out directly: “They who would palliate this crime and say that such indulgence is but a sinless gratification of a normal desire, like appeasing hunger and thirst, speak filthiness with their lips. Their counsel leads to destruction; their wisdom comes from the Father of Lies.”

Let that land for a moment. Anyone who suggested that sexual desire might be a normal part of being human was being called an instrument of Satan. That is not a mild caution. That is a declaration that closed off any possibility of nuance, compassion, or even basic acknowledgment of how human beings are made. And it came with the full weight of the First Presidency behind it. From there, it became the kind of thing you taught in seminary without questioning it.

Then came the book I mentioned in those earlier episodes, The Miracle of Forgiveness, written by Spencer W. Kimball in 1969 while he was still an apostle. I need to come back to it because of what it specifically did to this teaching. The book sold over 1.6 million copies and for years was handed directly to missionaries preparing to serve, to engaged couples preparing for marriage, and to members who had gone to their bishop for discipline. It was the book the Church pointed people toward when they needed to understand repentance. President Ezra Taft Benson urged all members to read and reread it. Elder Richard G. Scott called it a “masterly work” as recently as 2004 General Conference. That is a remarkable amount of institutional weight for one book to carry.

And Chapter Five of that book is literally titled “The Sin Next to Murder.” Not a suggestion. Not a nuanced theological exploration. A chapter heading. Kimball wrote: “Next to the crime of murder comes the sin of sexual impurity as expressed in its many manifestations: adultery, fornication, homosexuality and related transgressions.” He didn’t limit it to a specific act or context. He swept all of it — every sexual behavior outside of marriage in any form — into a single category just below killing someone.

The book also included this line, quoting President David O. McKay: “Your virtue is worth more than your life. Please, young folk, preserve your virtue even if you lose your lives.” That language went out to over a million people. We’ll come back to what it did.

On rape and sexual assault, Kimball wrote: “Also far-reaching is the effect of the loss of chastity. Once given or taken or stolen it can never be regained. It is better to die in defending one’s virtue than to live having lost it without a struggle.” That passage was in a widely distributed, officially endorsed book for decades. Abuse survivors were reading it and measuring themselves against it.

On repentance, Kimball was equally severe. He wrote that forgiveness “is not granted merely for the asking. There must be works — many works — and an all-out, total surrender.” He also taught that sin operates like a slippery slope — that masturbation leads to homosexuality, which can lead to worse — a framework that is not only factually wrong but is the classic slippery slope fallacy. And it completely negates agency. It treats people as though they have no capacity to make choices, to stop, to redirect — as though one misstep puts you on a conveyor belt toward destruction with no way off. That is not a theology of agency. That is a theology of inevitability.

A retired BYU psychologist and past president of the Association of Mormon Counselors and Psychotherapists said the useful parts of the book were “overshadowed by a host of negatives and also outdated policies that the church itself doesn’t even endorse any more.” That assessment didn’t come from a critic. It came from someone inside the faith community who watched the damage up close.

This is what 1.6 million copies of a book can do.

The messaging kept coming from the pulpit too. Apostle Mark E. Petersen said at General Conference in 1956 that “in the category of crime, God says sex sin is next to murder.” Elder Boyd K. Packer was still referencing the idea in General Conference as recently as 2011. Seminary manuals included it. For the Strength of Youth reinforced it. Lesson after lesson in Sunday School, Young Women, and Aaronic Priesthood programs picked it up and passed it along.

The Church quietly allowed The Miracle of Forgiveness to go out of print in 2015 without any public explanation. No announcement. No correction. No “we’ve reconsidered this.” Just a gradual disappearance from Deseret Book shelves. Kimball’s own son, Edward Kimball, noted in a 2005 biography of his father that Kimball “later seemed to wish he had adopted a gentler tone,” that the book was “more on sin and repentance than on forgiveness,” and that the tough tone didn’t fully reflect the way Kimball actually counseled people one-on-one. That’s a quiet but meaningful acknowledgment that something was off.

And here’s a concept that helps explain how all of this happened, how a teaching that originated with one man’s strict interpretation became woven into the entire fabric of how the Church talked about sex for more than half a century. It’s called institutional momentum. Institutional momentum is what happens when a belief or a teaching gets embedded deeply enough into the structures of an organization, its curriculum, its publications, its training, its culture, that it starts to perpetuate itself independently of whether anyone is actively championing it. Nobody has to keep deciding to teach it. It just gets taught, because it’s in the manual, because the leader before you taught it, because it’s what everyone assumes is true. The original source gets forgotten. The original context gets lost. What remains is the teaching, stripped of nuance, repeated to each new generation as settled fact.

This is exactly what happened here. Joseph F. Smith made a declaration. The First Presidency formalized it. Kimball amplified it. Conference talks repeated it. And then institutional momentum took over. Each successive generation of teachers, bishops, Young Women leaders, and parents passed it along, not because they had studied Alma 39 carefully and reached this conclusion themselves, but because it was what they had been taught. The machinery of the institution carried it forward. Letting a book go out of print doesn’t undo what it already built inside people.

And here’s where I want to say something carefully, because I mean it with full respect for the faith of everyone listening. We have been through this before as a Church. The restriction on Black members receiving the priesthood and temple ordinances was taught from the pulpit for over a century by multiple Church presidents and apostles. It was called doctrine. It was defended with scripture. It was presented as the will of God. And then in 1978, it was lifted, and the Church has since acknowledged in its Gospel Topics Essays that the restriction was based in racial prejudice and the attitudes of the time, not in revelation. That is a significant thing to acknowledge.

And it’s not the only example. There are teachings that were declared doctrine, repeated across multiple administrations, and have since been quietly walked back, revised, or simply stopped being taught. The Church’s understanding of things like the nature of God, eternal progression, the Adam-God theory, blood atonement, who can receive exaltation — these have shifted over time, sometimes significantly. That’s not a reason to lose faith. It’s actually a feature of a living Church that continues to receive light. But it does mean something important: being declared doctrine by Church leaders, even repeatedly, does not automatically make something eternal truth. It means we owe it to ourselves — and to the people we teach and raise — to evaluate carefully, to pray, to study, and to hold things thoughtfully rather than simply inheriting them wholesale.

I’m not asking anyone to abandon their testimony or their trust in Church leadership. I’m asking us to hold space for the possibility that on this particular question, sex as the sin next to murder, we may be looking at another instance of a teaching that came from men shaped by their era, carried forward by institutional momentum, and deserves a second look. We are allowed, as covenant members with our own access to the Spirit, to study it out, pray about it, and come to a different understanding.

What Happens When We Believe It

Shane came to me about two years into his marriage to Chloe. He was frustrated and confused. He wanted to have a healthy, connected sex life with his wife, but every time he brought it up, Chloe shut down. She knew logically that sex in marriage was not only allowed but good. But knowing something in your head and feeling it in your body are two very different things. Somewhere underneath the logic, it still felt wrong.

She’d had a sexual experience before her mission that had sent her to her bishop, through the repentance process, and into years of believing that her sexuality was inherently dangerous. She’d done everything right. She’d repented. She’d been told she was forgiven. But the feeling remained that her sexual desire was something to be managed, controlled, and kept at arm’s length. Even now, married in the temple, building a life with someone she loved, she couldn’t shake the sense that wanting sex made her a person who needed to be careful.

That’s specifically what the sin-next-to-murder teaching does when it’s applied without nuance. It puts a price tag on forgiveness that the Atonement was never meant to carry. If something is nearly as serious as murder, then repentance feels like it should cost more. There’s always a lingering sense that full restoration hasn’t happened, that the debt is still there.

I have worked with people who have been faithfully married for fifteen years, have never wavered since their repentance, and still don’t believe God has fully forgiven them. They served missions. They married in the temple. They’ve been faithful. And they still carry it. That’s not a faith problem. That’s what a ranked-sin framework does when it gets applied to sexual behavior.

Willow told Reed once that she felt more shame about wanting sex with her husband than she ever expected to feel as a married woman. She’d grown up with this idea so embedded that the moment she felt desire, a voice in her head would say, careful. Even in her own marriage, desire felt like something to be monitored. That internal policing never stops on its own. It just follows you into your marriage bed.

And for women especially, this teaching didn’t just create shame — it created a job. When you believe that sexual sin is catastrophic and inevitably escalating, someone has to stop it. That’s where women became the gatekeepers. If one wrong step leads to ruin, then women carry the responsibility for keeping everyone on the right side of the line. Dress modestly so you don’t cause men to stumble. Don’t be alone with boys. Manage how you move and how you look and what you communicate with your body — not for your own sake, but because male sexuality is a runaway train and you are standing at the switch. That is an enormous and completely unfair burden to put on a girl. And it came directly from the idea that sexual sin is catastrophic, inevitable once started, and leads to hell.

And sometimes it doesn’t stay internal. Sometimes a spouse uses this teaching, consciously or not, to shame their partner for expressing sexual desire within marriage. Pulling back from their partner’s desire, treating it as something to be managed rather than welcomed, without ever fully understanding why. “You think about that too much” carries a very different charge when one of you grew up believing that wanting sex made you someone to be afraid of.

The most devastating version of this is what it does to people who have experienced sexual abuse. When sexual sin is framed as nearly equivalent to murder, and when the official book the Church handed people said that your virtue is worth more than your life — abuse survivors absorb the shame of what was done to them as though it were theirs to carry. Elizabeth Smart has spoken publicly about how this teaching contributed to why she didn’t try to escape her abuser. She had been taught her virtue was worth more than her life. She believed she had already lost it. She had no reason to run. That is not a fringe outcome. That is what this teaching does to the most vulnerable people it reaches.

A Closer Look at the Text

Now here’s where it gets really interesting, and this is the part I want you to sit with.

Look at Alma 39:5 again. Alma says that “these things,” plural, are an abomination. Not this thing. “These things.” That word matters. Alma isn’t pointing at one action. He’s pointing at a cluster of behaviors, and he’s ranking the whole composite next to murder. So what are the things?

Go back to verses 2 and 3. Corianton had been boasting in his own strength and wisdom — that’s pride, elevating himself above his calling and his brothers. He forsook his ministry, walking away from the people he had a covenant responsibility to serve. He went after Isabel. And as a result — and this is what Alma comes back to again and again — the Zoramites saw what he did and they would not believe Alma’s words.

It’s also worth noting that whether sexual sin even occurred is actually debated by scholars. The word “harlot” in ancient scripture frequently carries a meaning of spiritual apostasy or false religion, not only sexual immorality. Isabel may have represented a seductive ideology or belief system that was pulling people away from God. Whether or not there was a physical sexual component, Alma’s focus throughout the chapter is not on the act. It’s on what the act cost the people watching.

Because Corianton was a missionary. He was there as a representative of God, called to bring the Zoramites to Christ. And when they saw his conduct, they turned away. Alma quotes this directly in verse 11: “Behold, O my son, how great iniquity ye brought upon the Zoramites; for when they saw your conduct they would not believe in my words.” That is the weight Alma is carrying. Not the act with Isabel. The people who were lost.

That’s spiritual murder. In a theological framework where this life matters and our choices affect where we end up, closing the door to God for people who were in your care is about as serious as it gets. And it’s consistent with how Alma uses the concept of murder elsewhere — in Alma 36:14, he describes his own past sins by saying he had “murdered many of his children,” meaning he had led them away from God. Physical death is not the only kind of murder Alma has in mind.

This also explains why the rest of the chapter says nothing about sexual sin. When Alma moves through chapters 39 through 42, he doesn’t mention it again. Not once. He pivots immediately to the unpardonable sin, the spirit world, resurrection, justice, and mercy. If sexual transgression were truly the thing so serious it nearly eclipses everything else, you would expect Alma to say more. You would expect him to circle back, explain it, warn against it with the same weight he gives everything else. Instead he drops it completely and spends four chapters on something else entirely. That silence tells us where his real concern was.

Beyond the textual argument, I’ll be honest — I find the whole idea of ranking sins to be theologically shaky in the first place. I’m not aware of other Christian denominations that teach a sin hierarchy this way. And when I go back to the scriptures, what I find is a consistent message that any sin, left unrepented of, keeps us from returning to God’s presence. James 2:10 says that whoever stumbles at one point of the law is guilty of all of it. We don’t typically hear people ranking gossip against coveting, or pride against greed, and saying this one is almost as bad as murder. So why does sexual sin get its own tier? What we know is that all sin, every last bit of it, requires the Atonement of Jesus Christ. That’s the whole point. Not some sins. Not the manageable ones. All of them. Which means the ranking isn’t really the operative question. The question is whether we’re turning to the Savior, and that question applies equally regardless of what we’ve done.

Now, none of this means that sexual sin is something to shrug at. The Law of Chastity is real. Faithfulness in marriage matters deeply. Choices have consequences. But there is a significant difference between taking those things seriously and teaching an entire culture that sexual desire itself, especially when misdirected, is nearly equivalent to taking a human life.

What This Means for Your Marriage

When Chloe started engaging with this reinterpretation, actually reading Alma 39 herself, looking at what Alma says “these things” are, sitting with the scholarship, she started to understand that the shame she’d been carrying wasn’t actually required by the text. That the God she believed in wasn’t ranking her teenage mistake alongside murder. That the teaching she’d absorbed had been filtered through a cultural and historical lens, and that a careful reading of the scripture itself told a more nuanced story.

That doesn’t mean her past choices stopped mattering. She wasn’t looking for a way to dismiss what she’d done. She still believed in the Law of Chastity. What changed was the scale she’d been measuring herself on. The weight lifted. Enough that she could start approaching sex in her marriage with something other than managed guilt.

She and Shane started doing what they hadn’t been able to do before, talking about it. Not with apology attached, not with shame driving the conversation, but as two people in a covenant relationship who genuinely wanted to connect. She started letting herself want it, which was new. And as she let herself want it, she started actually showing up to it, which was also new.

Reed and Willow had a similar experience. When Willow was able to separate the shame she’d been taught from the actual doctrine, she realized she’d been monitoring herself in her own marriage for no reason. The desire she’d been treating as dangerous was, in her marriage, exactly where it was supposed to be. That recalibration didn’t fix everything immediately, but it gave her permission to stop policing herself. And that matters more than people realize.

The God Behind the Teaching

One of the things I think about when I look at this reinterpretation is what it tells us about who God is.

A God who ranks the sexual desire of a teenage girl, or a young man on a mission who made a mistake, or even an adult who stumbled, a God who ranks any of that next to murder, that God is terrifying. Not in a holy-and-reverent way. Terrifying in a way that keeps people away from Him and away from healing.

The God I believe in is one who cares enormously about how we treat each other. About covenant faithfulness. About what we build in our marriages. He cares about the sanctity of life, including the spiritual lives of people who are vulnerable and looking to us for guidance. That’s exactly what the Corianton story is about. He abandoned people who needed him. He set an example that turned hearts away from God. That’s the weight of it.

Sexual sin has real consequences, and repentance matters. But the framing of sexual sin as a category so serious it nearly equals taking a human life has caused its own kind of harm. Harm to real people, in real marriages, who are trying to build something holy and can’t stop flinching long enough to get there.

If that’s you, or if that’s your spouse, I want you to know that studying this more carefully is worth your time. Read Alma 39 for yourself. I’ve linked to Book of Mormon Central’s episode about this passage and Michael Ash’s Sunstone article in the show notes — both are worth your time and both will give you more to bring to your study and your prayer.

The God you’ll meet there is not the one who ranked your desire next to murder. He is the one who grieved the people Corianton abandoned. And He cares about you and your marriage every bit as much.

Next week we’re finishing this series with something that I think is going to feel really freeing. We’re going to look at Mosiah 3:19 — “the natural man is an enemy to God” — and what that phrase actually means when you read it carefully. Because I don’t think it means what most of us were taught. And understanding it differently changes a lot about how you see yourself, your body, and your marriage.

Alright my friends, that’s all I have for you today. Remember, love is a journey, not a destination. Stay committed, stay passionate, and stay connected. I’ll see you next week…ba-bye.