If there’s a word that sums up this season of Love Island USA, the finale of which took place last night, it would be “lustful” – not because this year’s crop of contestants were hornier than usual, but rather that they could not stop talking about the sexiest deadly sin. Gabriel was shock-dumped from the villa for being too “lustful”, which led KC to exclaim in a confessional: “Are we not all lustful in this motherfucker?” Kenzie swore multiple times that she’s not lustful, while Love Island USA fans outside of the villa debated whether kissing multiple people is a sign of lust. “Can someone help me triangulate the use of lustful on Love Island this season…” editor Joan Summers wrote on X. “Where are they getting that word from?” Others on Reddit debated: “When did it become a crime to be ‘lustful’ on Love Island?” Both are valid questions to raise. 

Lust is not the only one of the seven deadly sins (a list devised by the early Christian church rather than coming directly from the Bible) that has made its way back into gen Z’s vocabulary in recent years. Albeit jokingly, young people have been posting “forgive my gluttony” for ordering too much food, or using the now-popular phrase “this is the greed they talk about in the Bible” to zoom in on their dog at mealtime or strangers grabbing free sandwiches. On TikTok, girls in athleisure post about rebuking the demons of “gluttony and slothfulness” (even the word rebuke has Biblical undertones). This attitude extends to some of gen Z’s biggest stars: in an interview with Dazed, fakemink singled out lust as the one emotion he didn’t trust, adding “you'll find out when you're older.”

There’s an entire section of the internet that uses those words in a religious context, talking about gluttony as a Christian and lust in the Bible, but talking about the seven deadly sins has now spread past #ChristianTok into popular culture. So, why is gen Z so obsessed with talking about “sinning”?

When I call progressive Christian pastor Paul Drees to ask that question, I first establish if he’s ever watched Love Island. “No, I can’t say I have,” he laughs. After I explain the “lustful” situation, Drees tells me what he’s been noticing when it comes to gen Z’s relationship with sin. “A lot of the more conservative Christian talking points, where most of the attitudes around sex and purity culture are around men controlling women, are being recycled outside of those Christian settings,” he says. “We’ve been divorced from historical precedents in a lot of our life, so I think we end up trying to invent a new structure, and [that’s] why so many people are clinging to this idea of sin.” This is especially true, says Drees, in a digital world defined by excess. 

While there has been much talk lately about young people returning to church, don’t let the aesthetic Catholic-core posts fool you – gen Z is still the least religious generation. As such, David Voas, an emeritus professor of social science at University College London, says the word “sin” clearly doesn’t have the connotations it did when western society was less secular. “In religious terms, a sin is an offence against God. That’s not how most people view it now,” he says. “We use it as a synonym for ‘vice’, or moral failing.” 

“We’ve been divorced from historical precedents in a lot of our life, so I think we end up trying to invent a new structure, and [that’s] why so many people are clinging to this idea of sin”

But gen Z’s rejection of organised religious institutions is only part of the story: the majority of young Americans today still describe themselves as at least somewhat “spiritual”. In many online spiritual spaces, you’ll find repackaged puritanical ideas around sin: like not having sex before marriage because it causes a “soul tie” or staying abstinent to potect your “divine feminine” energy. What is considered a “moral failing” reflects the culture we exist in. After the more inclusive, liberatory movements of the 2010s, which preached sex and body positivity, the pendulum has swung back towards more conservative ideas around both sex and beauty. The language we use to describe perceived moral failings has swung with it. 

Professor Cannon Roberts ,who teaches English at Tyler Junion College, has noticed conservative ideas around bodies and sex in the way his students discuss Halloween, in recent years increasingly shaming those who choose to wear sexy costumes. The root cause, he theorises, involves fear and uncertainty. “They don’t know if their degrees will be helpful. They fear they will never be able to pay off their student loans or own a home. So, they find stability in moral superiority,” he says. “There’s always someone to judge to make themselves feel better, and I don’t think this is their own personal failing, but a reaction to our society having consistently neglected multiple generations.”

The language of sin has long been used as a tool for control: of both ourselves and other people. That may be why talking about the seven deadly sins is so prevalent in the manosphere today, where young men are attempting to control their bodies and sexual appetite for the sake of so-called “personal mastery”. As President Donald Trump attacks reproductive freedom and women’s health and enacts anti-LGBTQ+ executive orders, conservative language has leaked into younger and more liberal spaces. “Sin becomes a really powerful identity marker, especially when you can point it at other people,” says Drees. “This is historically what people who have power have done to people who are marginalised: they say that they are inherently sinful.”

Gen Z is often described as a prudish generation, one that doesn’t have sex or go out. And while it’s true the generation has built its own relationship to purity culture, after growing increasingly frustrated with modern dating, puritanical ideas have been bleeding over into popular culture since the 1990s. Sara Moslener, a senior lecturer in religion at Central Michigan University, says that the mainstreaming of purity culture is not a new phenomenon, pointing to Disney stars talking about purity rings as a major example from the 2000s. It is, however, being much more politicised right now due to the resurgence of white Christian nationalism. “What purity culture does is say ‘sex is bad, purity is good’, and we can delineate clearly between what is pure and what is impure,” she says. “That kind of binary thinking is much more common in a more authoritarian political climate where people aren’t able to see the nuance.” 

“What purity culture does is say ‘sex is bad, purity is good’, and we can delineate clearly between what is pure and what is impure. That kind of binary thinking is much more common in a more authoritarian political climate where people aren’t able to see the nuance” 

Allow me to be the woke friend at the function for a moment longer, because I’ve always believed that once a word or idea hits Love Island, it’s truly hit the mainstream. The show’s eighth season generated 2.3 billion viewing minutes in its first two weeks and ranked as the No. 1 streaming series in the United States, according to preliminary Nielsen data. For the word “lust” to be continuously used on such a large stage is a reflection of how conservative rhetoric around morality is becoming more prominent.

Sure, people calling Gabe or Kenzie “lustful” on Love Island, or referring to strangers as “greedy”, may seem unrelated to US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth reposting a video of pastors saying women shouldn’t vote, but condemning others for being innately immoral has always been a slippery slope. It’s especially slippery during a time that Roberts refers to as “late-stage patriarchy”. “While late-stage capitalism is the pursuit of wealth and consumption at all costs, late-stage patriarchy is the protection of social hierarchies with no purpose or moral foundation,” he says. Even on Love Island, and even as a joke, the current obsession with sin is just another attempt to keep people in line.