Illustration: Shimeng Jiang/The Guardian
When Wendy Pfrenger’s children started high school in the town of Oxford, Mississippi, she had the choice to enroll them in abstinence-only or abstinence-plus sex ed.
Although the abstinence-plus option would include instruction on contraception, neither curriculum was required to provide medically accurate information. As a parent, she felt like the lessons her teens were receiving fell short of their reality.
“Our kids are on the internet, their peers are on the internet,” she said. “The things that are being shared on phones in that school, regardless of whatever protections are in place, are not at all addressed by the class.”
In her conversations with other parents, she learned that some were seeking additional sex education for their teens through online classes or at workshops led by a local pediatrician. But she wished there was free, comprehensive and inclusive sexuality education available to the whole community – that didn’t only discuss abstinence, but also consent; that could create trust between young people and the adults in their community.
In January, Pfrenger started offering the sexuality education she wished her children had access to – that taught accurate anatomy, talked about pregnancy options and the varied ways of building a family, and celebrated all gender identities and sexualities – at her church, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Oxford.
After the first meeting of the church’s chapter of the nationwide Our Whole Lives program, she said, parents and children – most of whom were not members of the church – seemed happy to have had access to the class. “It felt like people needed this opportunity to talk not just about their own families, but about where we are right now as a culture,” said Pfrenger, now the religious education coordinator at the church.
Sex education advocates in the US have long hoped that states would one day follow more comprehensive and inclusive guidelines for teaching sex ed to students in grades K-12. But in recent years, as attacks on public education, reproductive healthcare and LGBTQ+ rights have grown more pronounced in state legislatures, Miranda Estes, state policy action manager at Siecus: Sex Ed for Social Change, says advocates increasingly will settle for sex ed that is “medically accurate and age-appropriate at the very least”.
Sixteen US states do not require sex education or HIV/STI instruction to be age-appropriate or medically accurate, according to Siecus, which was formerly known as Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States when it was founded by a Planned Parenthood medical director in 1964. And even in the few states where comprehensive sexuality education is mandated, it’s not always funded. Three-fourths of all states currently have a C, D or F on the organization’s US sex ed report card.
“When these hostile state legislatures try to limit or erase sex education in schools, the information doesn’t just disappear. It has to move,” Estes said. “Community-based programs, including faith-based ones, are having to step in to fill the gap.” She points to examples like Heart to Grow, a Muslim sex education and advocacy program, and Our Whole Lives, the program Pfrenger trained in, designed by the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) and the United Church of Christ (UCC).
In the 1970s, 80s and 90s – as sex ed programs across the US developed in response to the growing HIV/Aids crisis, as did the emerging women’s health movement, pioneered by texts such as Our Bodies, Ourselves – the UUA and the UCC began offering sex education to their congregants. Both progressive faiths that had long emphasized LGBTQ rights and reproductive justice, the UUA and the UCC came together in 1999 with the goal of designing a curriculum that was medically accurate and developmentally appropriate. (While the UCC is a Christian denomination, Unitarian Universalism originated in Christianity, though many congregants no longer consider themselves Christians.)
“One of the reasons that this partnership works so well is that our faith values are so similar in terms of reproductive justice, social justice. Both of our faiths – even though we sometimes use different language – center love,” said Davis, the UUA program manager. “Our denominations are so committed to offering this gift, not only to our congregations, but anybody can use it.”
Protesters at a rally outside the UN headquarters in New York City on 8 June 2011. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
Originally designed for both children and adults – and expanded in 2019 to include a curriculum on sexuality and aging for older adults – Our Whole Lives is a secular curriculum that can be broadened to add faith-based materials.
“We’re not just a denomination that happens to offer sex ed,” said Amy Johnson, minister for sexuality education and justice for the UCC. “This is something that our faith believes in.”
Both Johnson and Davis realize that churches are not typically spaces that offer comprehensive sex ed.
Much of the state and national legislation working to restrict sex education across the US has been authored or backed by other Christian groups. In a report titled Exposing Hate: The Truth About Attacks on Our Kids, Schools and Diversity, Siecus identifies the members of a “regressive minority” organizing “against inclusive programs in public schools” as conservative or Christian organizations and billionaires like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Policy Alliance, the DeVos Family Foundation and the National Christian Foundation. Those organizations aim “to eliminate all comprehensive sexuality education and instead label any conversations about sexual orientation and gender identity as pornographic”, Estes said.
It’s “fair to think that sex ed in a Christian context in particular would be biased and non-inclusive because it so often is”, Johnson said. “There’s a lot of conversations about what Christianity is or isn’t in the greater ether of the United States of America.” She acknowledges that many Christian spaces have perpetuated shame and stigma around sexuality, particularly for LGBTQ people.
“Our Whole Lives is really about dismantling shame and stigma about bodies and relationships, and we know that shame and stigma can be fatal,” she said. “If we’re not doing this work in our faith communities, I feel like it’s a sin of omission.”
In recent years, those opposed to sex education in schools have cited “parents’ rights” to control what their children learn. In Our Whole Lives, “we support parents as their children’s primary sexuality educators”,Davis said. Parents are invited to attend orientations to the program, learn how to facilitate classes and encouraged to speak about the material with their children.
At the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Oxford, Pfrenger and other church leaders spent nearly a year building trust with parents and the community before offering any classes. In March 2025, after fundraising for the program, the congregation sent four members to a training to learn how to facilitate the course.
“We could have hit the ground running in August. But we spent months talking to adults, having information sessions, having Zoom sessions, having personal conversations in the grocery aisle,” Pfrenger said. The church hosted a sampler class for adults in the fall, and then an orientation for parents in early January, before starting its first program for children in grades 4-6. Next year, the church will expand its offering to grades 7-9.
“It’s essential that we move at the speed of trust,” said Rev. Sarah Osborne, the congregation’s minister. “While the curriculum itself is secular, I think it’s really important that we are offering this in a faith-based community that’s really explicit about what our values are. And we invite people to share those values with us, which I think are ones that are deeply needed in our time.”
