Last Updated on 3 July, 2026 by Cara Sutra
Religious kink is a live and thriving corner of sexual expression, though you wouldn’t know it from mainstream culture, which prefers to pretend the whole thing is either edgelord shock content or the province of a few Very Serious Perverts writing pretentious essays about the eroticism of the crucifix. Neither picture is accurate.
The truth of it is that plenty of kinky people, particularly those who grew up inside religious frameworks that treated their bodies as suspect, find enormous erotic charge in the symbols, roles and taboos those systems taught them to revere. Corrupt the incorruptible, defile the sacred, turn the confessional into a scene: this is well-worn territory. It’s also territory that gets more attention twice a year, around Easter and Christmas, when the calendar itself pushes religious imagery into the foreground and the transgression of using it sexually feels a bit sharper than usual.
What follows is a piece I commissioned in 2016 from erotic author and lifelong deviant Zak Jane Keir, whose position on all religions is roughly the same as mine: contempt with a working knowledge of the Christian version She grew up in. Read Her take on why religious symbolism ends up in so many sex scenes, then stay for my own thoughts on how to bring it into play if you’re inclined.
Celebrating the RedErection and the Life, by Zak Jane Keir
Because religion is all about control and enforcing irrational taboos, particularly around sex, it’s not exactly surprising that subverting and perverting religious symbolism is a massive turn on for a lot of people. Sometimes we like to get off on the things we despise, or the things that we fear, whether that’s in a spirit of gleeful taboo-shattering or as a way of reclaiming our bodies and ourselves from a vicious, harmful mythology that has haunted us for most of our lives.
Probably time for a quick disclaimer here: while I hold all religions in equal contempt (your imaginary friend is not my problem, whatever you choose to call him/her) I’m British-born, white and over 50 so the tropes I grew up surrounded with are all broadly Christian and I don’t have the in-depth knowledge of the other myth systems necessary to give you any specific suggestions on how to fuck around with them.
Of course, just being female and sexually autonomous is blasphemous in itself: the root of pretty much every religion was finding or making up some special magic reason why human reproduction was the property, responsibility and choice of men rather than women, and that men should be in charge of it. Women choosing for themselves who they will have sex with and whether or not they will engage in PIV sex (the sort that potentially makes babies) infuriates the superstitious. Asserting your right to display your body, to go out seeking sex on your own terms, to take it up the arse or have a 69, to get busy with other women or with several men of your choice at once can have an extra thrill of transgressive pleasure if you have previously been taught that your body is evil or unworthy of attention and your libido a danger to you and everyone else.
Fetish and BDSM lovers can also find the trappings of power, control, transgression and punishment attached to religions very exciting. Many kinky people enjoy a dynamic which involves doing wrong, being punished and then forgiven or rewarded for enduring the punishment, although some of the more po-faced perverts can get really fucking tedious with regard to the ‘spiritual’ woo-bollocks elements of pleasure/pain. (Just for the record, there is no higher power you can connect with by getting your arse whacked or indeed by receiving a particularly good session of oral. If an atheist yells ‘Oh God’ at the moment of orgasm this is just a bit of learned vernacular, not a paranormal experience.) It’s not unheard of, either, to have a particular fetish for nuns/priests/monks, the idea of corrupting the incorruptible because you are so wickedly irresistible is exciting, as is the idea that the more righteous and chaste someone appears to be, the more desperately thirsty s/he is at heart.
Of course, it’s Easter, which is the Christian festival most associated with ‘fertility rituals’ and symbols that are not really that Christian at all, though there is still no agreement, let alone any proof, as to which specific ancient pagan feast inspired the annual celebration of eggs, bunnies, flowers and binging on chocolate. I wish you all joy and delight in the springtime, whether your bunnies are battery-powered or the sort that moan with joy when you wrap them up in rope, and if you want to mark the occasion by eating a Creme Egg off your favourite playmate’s naughty bits then go right ahead.
And yes, there really is such a thing as a Baby Jesus Buttplug. Whether it is more or less effective than a standard model is something I have yet to investigate, but I can see it serving a purpose as a conversation-opener in a swingers’ club, at the very least.
– Zak Jane Keir
My Take: Playing With Religious Taboo
The corrupting-the-incorruptible fantasy is one of the sharpest hooks in the whole religious-kink toolkit, and it belongs to the Domme side of the dynamic as much as the sub side. The sub fantasy is well documented: he is chaste, he is virtuous, he has taken vows, and yet She is going to make him betray everything. The Domme fantasy running parallel is less often spelled out but sits underneath a lot of nun/priest/novice scene work. I get to be the one who breaks him. I get to be the reason he falls. That is a very specific flavour of power and it’s worth naming out loud rather than pretending the appeal only runs one way.
If you want to run this in a scene, the useful trick is to lean into liturgy rather than costume. A nun outfit alone is a Halloween party. What tips it into kink is the language, the pace, the rules: confession structures, penance for imagined sins, ritualised undressing, chants used as cadence for whatever you’re doing to him. Religious systems are structured around repetition, hierarchy and prohibition, all of which is useful to a Domme who wants to build tension. Repetition, broken by variation, produces anticipation and dread. Hierarchy means you outrank him always. Prohibition means there is always a rule he can be seen to break, and therefore always a reason to punish.
For pairings, religious kink sits particularly well alongside candle wax play, because the candle itself carries the symbolic weight, and structured impact play or punishment scenes, because the punished-for-sinning trope is already written into the source material. Bondage using rope or restraints reads as martyrdom imagery whether you plan it that way or not. And if you’re inclined to bring anal into the scene, a straightforward quality butt plug and a confessional framing will do the job better than any novelty-shop religious kitsch.
The seasonal boost this piece gets around Easter and Christmas isn’t accidental. Both festivals concentrate religious imagery in mainstream visibility for weeks at a time, which pulls the underlying taboo material back into the foreground for anyone with a related kink. Easter tends to draw the resurrection/martyrdom/sacrifice cluster: bound bodies, wounds, endurance. Christmas draws the innocent/pure/waiting cluster: virgin symbolism, chastity themes, the corruption angle. If you’re building play around a seasonal window, the specific flavour of the season is worth leaning into rather than ignoring. My guides to Easter kink for couples and festive foreplay ideas both fold the calendar in without turning the whole thing into a novelty set piece.
The other reason this content works, and Zak nails it hard, is that plenty of the people getting off on religious kink are the same people who spent years being told their bodies were shameful, dangerous or evil by whichever tradition they grew up in. Turning that framework around, using its own iconography for pleasure, is a very effective way of taking back what was aimed at controlling you. Not everyone doing religious kink comes from that place. Some just find it hot. Both are fine. But if you’re one of the people using this territory to work through inherited shame, it can be more than a scene. It can be a slow rewriting of what your body means to you.
About Zak Jane Keir
Zak Jane Keir is an erotic author and long-standing kink writer who describes Herself as a maker of stuff, writer of rude words, drinker of much cider, feminist, deviant, atheist, book junkie and morris dancer. This piece was commissioned for the site, and Zak’s own writing on kink, sex and everything adjacent continues over at Dirty Sexy Words.
