What is it about the French? They’re an exhilarating paradox.
Also exasperating. A blend of northern and Mediterranean Europe; faith and atheism; romance, passion, and reason. And France itself is unique: a land of great saints (Louis IX, Thérèse of Lisieux), great artists (Gauguin, Monet), great murderers (Robespierre), great writers (Claudel, Bernanos, Péguy), great warriors (Jeanne d’Arc, Bonaparte), great scholars (Pascal, Descartes, and, yes, Tocqueville), great Churchmen (Jean-Marie Lustiger), and great libertines (de Sade).
The French have a genius for grasping the heart of a new idea or historical moment early, then driving it to its logical, and sometimes unpleasant, conclusion. What begins at the Bastille ends at the guillotine.
All of which might be interesting for another book. But what’s it got to do with us? Just this: France has produced some of the sharpest critics of the globalized culture Europeans and Americans now share. And among the most skilled of those critics is Pascal Bruckner—penetrating, funny, and thoroughly cynical. Bruckner is no friend of Christianity. Just the opposite. He’s happy to blame Christians for “[overdramatizing] our existence by subjecting it to the alternative between hell and paradise. The life of a believer is a trial that takes place entirely before the divine Judge … The hope of redemption is thus inseparable from a fundamental worry.”
Christian faith (in Bruckner’s view) can be summed up in a single question: “Why should we cling to a few instants of joy on Earth at the risk of frying forever in Satan’s realm?”1
And so on. Nothing new there.
But what sets Bruckner apart is this: He’s just as fierce in describing the contradictions and self-indulgence of modern secular life. A few samples:
On the 1960s, and the generation of Peter Pan fathers and mothers they fostered: “Beer-bellied, balding and near-sighted, the children of the baby-boom, often having become well-established and cleaned up, remain riveted to their dreams; little hellions until the day they die, side by side with decrepit young people who age prematurely, aware that their parents, by refusing to grow up, stole their youth from them.”
On “It’s all about me”: “[Today’s] individualism … swings like a metronome” between two extremes, “a proclamation of self-sufficiency … and the giddiness of total plagiarism that makes each person into a weather vane.”
On “I deserve it”: “No concept is richer and more likely to get us on our feet than the ‘right to’ something … The relationship between infantilism and victimization resides in this: Both are founded on the same ideas of rejecting obligations, denying duty and feeling certain of having an infinite amount of credit with one’s contemporaries.”
On our biggest legal narcotic: Television demands of the viewer “only one act of courage—but one that is superhuman—that is, to turn it off … TV is the continuation of apathy by other means.”
On today’s victim culture and its “holy family of victims”: “If all it takes to win [disputes or concessions] is to be recognized as a victim, then … being a victim will become a vocation, a full time job.”2
Finally, and most usefully for our purposes here and now, on Eros:
Eros has the peculiarity of making love calculable and subjecting it to the power of mathematics; in the seclusion of the bedroom, [today’s] lovers take the exam of happiness and ask themselves: Are we up to snuff? It is from their sexuality, that new oracle, that they are asking tangible proofs of their passion. Combinations of the academic and gastronomic models: following a good recipe gets a good grade. From caresses to positions, from perversions to thrills, they test their marriage or their relationship, draw up balance sheets of orgasm, compete with other couples in noisy demonstrations, exhibitionist confessions, give themselves prizes or honorable mentions, and try in this way to reassure themselves as to the state of their feelings. Erotic pleasure is not only an old audacity that the liberalization of mores has transformed into a commonplace … it is the only thing on which people can count and that allows them to convert into memorable quantities the fleeting emotions passing through them. Thus they use the magic of numbers to evaluate the harmony of their relationships and check to be sure that the yield in pleasure is adequate.3
Bruckner’s countryman Michel Houellebecq captures the hollowed-out shell of a person that results from this kind of hypersexualized life in his novel Platform. It’s the portrait of a man for whom sex has gone from casual to compulsive to the bored scratching of a physical itch.4
But of course, we Americans are much more sensible than the French. Much more grounded and pragmatic. The French have always been slightly unhinged on matters involving sex. And everybody knows that Europeans are past their prime and wallowing in decadence. On our side of the Atlantic, we’re still pretty religious. On our side of the Atlantic, we do things differently. Or so we like to think. And it’s a happy thought, because it confirms how much healthier we are than everybody else. Except we’re not.
It’s helpful to remember that more than a million people took to the streets protesting “gay marriage” in Paris (2012), not in Washington. Americans marry more but also divorce more than do people in any European nation. Americans experience single parenthood and repartnering more frequently. In the United States, 10 percent of women will have had three husbands or live-in partners by the age of thirty-five. In France, the number is fewer than 2 percent.
Americans marry and cohabit at a younger age than in Europe. And their relationships are much more tenuous. More than half of cohabiting American couples will break up within five years, a much higher rate than in Europe. And one-fifth of all Americans who marry will divorce or separate in the same five-year time frame. That’s more than double the number in Europe. Children in the United States live through more parental breakups, and they have more new adults moving in with the biological parent who cares for them, than children in any Western European country. As a result, American family life involves more upheavals and transitions than anywhere in Western Europe, with negative impact on the young.5
Plenty of data confirm that Americans who actively practice their religious faith, and who attend religious services regularly, have more stable marriages and families. And as the social researcher Andrew Cherlin notes, it’s quite true that Americans are more religious than Europeans. But while American religion, shaped by the Reformation and its aftermath, has a communitarian surface, it also has a strongly individualist undercurrent. As Cherlin notes, this can actually encourage marriage breakup rather than slowing it down.6 It’s worth understanding why.
Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, romance had little to do with the choice of marital partner. Arranged marriages among the elite were common. For everyone else, reality set the demands. In agrarian societies like the early United States, farming needed two dependable workers, a husband and wife. It also needed children to help with the labor and pass along ownership. In the cities, families needed a reliable mother in the home to raise children and a reliable father in the work force to earn what the family required. Sexual attraction and emotional fulfillment were factors. They always have been. But for the serious work of marriage and family, they weren’t the main ingredients.
The movement of industry from the home to the factory during the industrial revolution reduced the need for large families. Educating young people to be economically competitive became more costly. Parents had fewer children. Thus, throughout the twentieth century, marriage shifted to a more “companionate” and individualized model. Romance, sexual satisfaction, and personal fulfillment took on greater importance.
American religion (with its individualist focus) inadvertently fueled the shift from marriage as an objective institution that serves the common good to a subjective relationship that pleases and rewards each of the partners. And this intensified a basic tension in the American character: a hunger for the moral ideal of marriage versus a right to pursue one’s individual happiness right now.
The point is this: Today’s pressures for sexual liberation didn’t happen in a vacuum. They fit comfortably with trends in American culture that go back many decades, even before the 1960s. As evidence, it’s useful to revisit Wilhelm Reich’s book from 1936, The Sexual Revolution. Reich, an Austrian psychoanalyst, argued that a really fundamental revolution in human affairs can only be made at the level of sexual freedom. And it needs to begin by wiping away institutions like marriage, family, and traditional sexual morality.
What’s interesting about Reich’s work is that, eighty years ago, he saw the United States as the most promising place for that kind of revolution to happen, despite its rigorous Puritan history.7 And again, the reason is simple. Americans have a deep streak of individualism, a distrust of authority, and a big appetite for self-invention. As religion loses its hold on people’s behavior, all of these instincts accelerate. The trouble is that the sexual revolution is not just about personal sexual morality or the sociological health of American family life—though it obviously impacts both. Rather, as Michael Hanby notes, “the sexual revolution is, at bottom, the technological revolution and its perpetual war against natural limits applied externally to the body, and internally to our self-understanding” (emphasis added).8
Just as modern feminism depends on the technological conquest of the female body—the suppression of fertility—so, too, Hanby argues, same-sex marriage depends on the technological mastery of procreation. Surrogacy and artificial reproductive technologies can now provide same-sex couples with the offspring to reinforce their claims of equality with natural marriage. And if the state recognizes the legal equality of same-sex and natural marriages, then denying the traditional financial and political privileges of marriage to same-sex unions is clearly a form of bigotry.
Once the genie is out of the bottle, sexual freedom goes in directions and takes on shapes that nobody imagined. And ultimately it leads to questions about who a person is and what it means to be human.
* * *
FOR ANYONE WANTING FOOD for thought in today’s “new normal,” we now live in an orchard of low-hanging fruit. A brief sampling of the menu:
Tinder and similar phone apps for young-adult sex hookups. High school mobile sexting. Websites for the married but adulterous (online dating for cheaters). The rapid rise of “postnups”—they’re like prenuptial agreements, but signed after the wedding, often after one of the spouses has already tripped up and been caught cheating (see adultery websites). Pet bereavement leave for (often childless) dog and cat owners. Cost-benefit sex on campus (sex yes, relationship no—negative yield on time and emotional investment).9 And so on. It’s a long list.
These bite-size nuggets of confusion are a meal for future anthropologists. But they’re more than curiosities. They’re expressions of sexual trending with deep implications. The advent of phenomena like same-sex marriage hasn’t ended the frictions of sexual politics. It’s kicked them into high gear. The debate over same-sex and transgender rights disguises a much more basic struggle over truth. The meaning of words like “mother” and “father” can’t be changed without also subtly changing the meaning of “child.” More specifically, is there any higher truth determining what a human person is, and how human beings should live, beyond what we ourselves make or choose to describe as human?
It’s an unwelcome question to ask. And anyone who poses it can expect blowback.
As the scholar Augusto Del Noce observed decades ago, the sexual revolution, for all its talk of freedom, has a distinctly totalitarian undercurrent. Classic virtues like modesty can’t be ignored; they must be recast as abnormal.10 If the goal is uprooting millennia of traditional sexual morality, a need exists for the means and the ruthlessness to enforce the uprooting. The process doesn’t need to be vulgar or brutish. But it does need to be thorough—and in an advanced media culture, that can be achieved by reshaping public perceptions. And so what we face now is what the Wall Street Journal described as “the new intolerance.” As the Journal editors note, “even as America has become more tolerant of gays, many activists and liberals have become ever more intolerant of anyone who might hold more traditional cultural or religious views.”11
This should surprise no one. Sex is profoundly connected to human identity. Same-sex activists can therefore never be satisfied with mere tolerance or acceptance. They need vindication—which means the hounding of contrary beliefs. And this is exactly the course of events in places where efforts to ensure religious liberty by law have been attacked as “anti-gay.” This is rich in irony. Sexual expression, which has no mention or standing in the Constitution, now routinely seems to trump religious practice and teaching, which are explicitly protected under the First Amendment.
The collapse of clear reasoning on same-sex unions has also fueled support for the far frontiers of gender ideology. Media coverage of transgender issues has been lavish and lopsidedly positive. It has also been based on science that is at best inadequate and at worst gravely flawed.12 An entire reporting franchise has sprung up around stories with titles like “Trans Rights Behind Bars,” “Helping the Young with Gender Transitions,” “Opening a Bathroom Door to Make All Feel Welcome,” and “Heather Has Two Genders.”13 This, too, should surprise no one. A new ideology of sex and gender needs new archetypes to shape the young and re-form public thought.
The “Heather Has Two Genders” story tracks a recent publishing boom in children’s books with transgender themes. As Meghan Cox Gurdon, the article’s author, notes:
“I have a girl brain but a boy body,” says a young child in I Am Jazz, a picture book by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings that came out [in 2014]. In Shelagh McNicholas’s sherbet-hued illustrations, Jazz looks like a typical girlie-girl who likes to dance and play princess dress-up with her friends. She is also genetically male … [We] are entering a miniboom in children’s books about a particular type of sexual identity, or misidentity. It will surprise no one that these books refrain from skepticism about the transgender condition, or … the appropriateness of adolescents undergoing genital surgeries and powerful hormone treatments.
These new children’s books, says Cox, are designed to “nudge the needle of the culture.” And woe unto them who doubt the new orthodoxy. Writing in Britain’s Spectator magazine early in 2016, Melanie Phillips noted that
The enemy on this particular battlefield [of gender identity and fluidity] is anyone who maintains that there are men and there are women, and that the difference between them is fundamental. This “binary” distinction is accepted by the vast majority of the human race. No matter. It is now being categorized as a form of bigotry. Utterly bizarre? Scoff at your peril. It’s fast becoming an enforceable orthodoxy, with children and young people particularly in the frame for attitude adjustment … The intention is to break down children’s sense of what sex they are and also to wipe away from their minds any notion of gender norms.14
It’s worth pausing here for a moment to recognize that at least one good has emerged from today’s gender-identity wars. The disputes remind us that real persons and real families are struggling with a wide range of difficult sexual issues. Every man and woman dealing with same-sex or transgender impulses is a child of God. Each has an inherent dignity. That dignity demands our respect. It precludes any intentional mistreatment or unjust discrimination.
But all rights are also conditioned by simultaneous duties to the common good. And that’s where the battles get ugly. There’s an oddly fierce kind of moralizing in gender ideology. It’s a Puritanism without the religious baggage; a revolt against biology itself—and it’s not without its own peculiar form of bullying. It seeks to push liberation past any limits, whether people want it or not. And if details like the democratic process get in the way: too bad.
To recall just one example: Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt, along with ten other state attorneys general, sued the federal government in May 2016. The reason? The Education Department of the outgoing Obama White House issued a “Dear Colleague” letter. The letter insisted that students should be free to use bathrooms and similar facilities based on their self-chosen gender identity rather than biological sex. To the average person, the idea might have sounded invasive and outlandish. But not so in Washington. The implied price of not complying: loss of all federal funds should they violate federal regulations that ban sex-based discrimination.
As Pruitt wrote at the time, “People of good will may disagree about the course American society should take, but we should all agree that we decide that course through the democratic system, which starts at the local level and allows for communities to shape themselves in different ways.” It’s not for any remote authority “to decide this issue—or any issue—through a bureaucratic cram-down in the last days of [a] presidency.”15 Strong words and true. But of course, by 2016, we’d already had decades of the “democratic system” being evaded or overturned by courts, regulations, and executive action, along with plenty of mass media emotional conditioning.
We might assume that academic freedom ensures a more open and honest discussion of sex and gender issues on many Catholic-inspired campuses. And we can hope it’s so. But it’s also worth noting this, from the (tenured) professor of theology Mickey Mattox:
The new [higher education] gender regime rides on the strong currents of celebrity culture, while Washington’s “soft power” deters resistance. Grants or certification necessary to receive federal subsidies require conformity to the government’s priorities, which now include promoting the LGBTQ agenda. At [my university], a Title IX training program required for all employees includes warnings that the wrong kind of talk about sexual morality—meaning talk based on traditional moral judgments—should be avoided in the workplace if one does not want to face charges of harassment or discrimination. Thus the paradox: We are repeatedly warned against talking about sex, even though the rule-makers seem to talk of little else.
Resistance to this new regime seems futile—and likely to get you into trouble. Even tenured faculty members hesitate, worried about official repercussions, formal or informal.16
The takeaway is this: What’s at stake in current sex and gender-identity struggles is not just the ability of Catholic ministries and schools to serve unhampered in the public square. The freedom of Catholic families to raise their children according to Christian beliefs is also, in everyday practice, becoming more difficult. Most Catholic children attend public schools, whose curricula are often beyond parental control. The volume of noise advancing transgender and same-sex rights is strong at every level of our culture, and it distracts us from the most obvious and unsettling dimension of the gender-ideology debate.
In decoupling gender from biology and denying any given or “natural” meaning to male and female sexuality, gender ideology directly repudiates reality. People don’t need to be “religious” to notice that men and women are different. The evidence is obvious. And the only way to ignore it is through a kind of intellectual self-hypnosis. Gender ideology rejects any human experience or knowledge that conflicts with its own flawed premises; it’s the imperialism of bad science on steroids. For Christians, it also attacks the heart of our faith: the Creation (“male and female he created them”); the Incarnation—God taking the flesh of a man; and the Redemption—God dying on the cross and then rising in glorified bodily form. The Catholic faith, more than any of its Protestant cousins, is a religion not just of the mind and will but also of the bodily senses. And while the senses can make mistakes, when it comes to sexuality, they ground us firmly in the real.
The human body, complementary in its male and female forms, is precious, not simply as a pious ideal but as an organic reality. The body reveals who we are as human beings. Sexual difference expresses the manner in which we’re called to love in the world. Thus the body is our rootedness in nature. It’s a gift. It engages us with creation as part of creation. It has meaning. It’s integral to who we are and fundamental to the whole Christian message. But for American culture—in its exhibitionism, and in its endless appetite to reveal every intimate aspect and detour of human sexual behavior to a global audience—the body is now little more than animated modeling clay.
* * *
GEORGE ORWELL WAS THE better writer and thinker. But when it comes to “negative utopias,” Aldous Huxley was the shrewder prophet. Orwell’s novels Animal Farm and 1984, written in the turmoil of the 1940s, are still brilliantly scary. But in a postmodern world long on amnesia and short on historical curiosity, they seem dated. Implausible. Between mass marketing, the mass media, behavioral psychologists, and special interest lobbies, Orwell’s brutal Thought Police are out of a job—they were too heavy-handed.
Huxley’s Brave New World, written in 1932, is quite another matter. From state-run baby hatcheries that replace live births, to mood-lifting soma drugs, to ubiquitous sex, plenty of comforts and universal contraceptives, to mandatory happiness conditioning and “feelies” as entertainment: Yes, it’s science fiction. But increasingly, it’s more science than fiction. Rereading Brave New World can feel just a bit too familiar.
As noted earlier in these pages, those of us who were around in the 1960s will recall that the birth control pill was originally marketed as an aid to marriages and families. But detaching sex from fertility leads in unintended directions. One of them is artificial reproductive technology. It’s worth remembering that in Huxley’s novel, the words “mother” and “father” were vulgarisms—literally, dirty words. Today, in modern practice, babies have no necessary link to sexual intimacy and romance. They can be created in a lab almost as easily as the old-fashioned way.
But there are problems. Relocating conception from the embrace of a husband and wife to a petri dish—though it’s often innocently intended by couples desperate for a child—nonetheless alters the nature of the experience. The child is still beautiful. Still sacred. His or her inherent dignity is undiminished. But the process has been sterilized and commodified. In effect, the new life is manufactured. The natural conceiving and bearing of a child are marked by physical self-giving (each spouse to the other, in the presence of God), intimacy, and passion. The lab is marked by calculation, transaction, and control. Something human—about ourselves, not the child—is lost in the bringing forth of a new life.
Sexual intimacy, rightly understood, is about the total coming together of persons, body and spirit, two becoming one in a uniquely potent way. It’s a vulnerable act, physically and emotionally. It involves risk. Therefore it requires trust. But in giving ourselves totally to a spouse, we take part in God’s creative, deeply fertile love. This is the genesis of the family, the first human community. The nature of marital love is to bear fruit in new life. Obviously there are wonderful married couples who desire but can’t have children. Other couples, for various good reasons, must delay or refrain from bearing children. But these difficult cases aren’t the norm. Nor do they change the basic nature of marriage: a vocation of intimate unity and bringing new life into the world.
What happens when a resistance to bearing children takes hold of a culture? The result is always the same: a slow and subtle unraveling of bonds, an aging of the spirit, a fatigue with the world, and ultimately a loss of purpose and hope. The fertility of sexual intimacy is the seal and ennobler of male-female relationships. It creates the future. It orients the couple, and indirectly the whole community, toward the next generation.
Contraceptive intimacy, in contrast, is finally not “intimacy” at all. It makes every sexual contact a disconnected point in time and an event without a future—two people using each other as instruments for their own relief. They may like each other a lot. They may be decent persons in a thousand other ways. But their sexual contact is neither intimate nor fertile, nor really mutual in any sense.
The consequences of today’s sexual confusion go well beyond individuals and couples. Sterilized of a future, reflecting whatever a nation of sovereign consumers wants right now, modern sexuality celebrates the individual and inevitably undermines the humility, fidelity, and sense of obligation that family life requires. Thus it’s no surprise that the health of our families and communities over the past fifty years has been in historic decline.
Consistent with the research of Andrew Cherlin, American children are less likely to be raised by their married, natural parents than at any time in our history. Whether it’s through single motherhood, divorce, or the growing cohort of same-sex parents, many children no longer receive the benefit of being raised in a stable, organic family.
In his groundbreaking book Coming Apart, the sociologist Charles Murray notes that young people, on average, do best when raised by their married, natural parents. “I know of no other set of important findings,” he writes, “that are as broadly accepted by social scientists … and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties.”17
Why the reluctance to focus on family breakdown? Some of it’s deliberate: glee from those on the cultural left who are delighted by the end of imagined boogeymen like patriarchy, hetero-normalcy, and sexually repressive institutions. But more common is a sense that we’ve reached a critical mass of broken families. We can’t speak candidly about this disaster for fear of hurting the collaterally damaged innocent or aggravating the guilt of culpable parties. In any small group, let alone a big room, it’s likely that at least one person has been wounded by family turmoil.
One activist who has publicly tackled “family fragmentation” is Mitch Pearlstein, a think tank founder in Minnesota. In his book on the issue, Broken Bonds, Pearlstein records his conversations with dozens of experts from several fields. A recurring theme in the book is the interplay between family dysfunction and broader social disintegration. The former trend is both a product and a driver of the latter. One of Pearlstein’s sources, a county judge in Minnesota who deals on a daily basis with the bitter debris of family breakdown, placed the blame on the idiosyncrasies of American democratic life: “We have a rugged individualistic society where self-interested people strive for personal fulfillment. We have a throwaway culture: Meet my needs, and if the product or person doesn’t, I’ll look elsewhere.”18
The term “throwaway culture” echoes Pope Francis, who uses the same words to describe advanced consumerist societies. The alternative, according to Francis, is a “culture of encounter”—that is, a culture where people meet and treat one another as full persons, not as means of personal advancement, political achievement, or economic efficiency. It’s a culture in which we get to know our neighbors (or our spouse) in such a way that we can authentically fulfill our duties in love to them.
The family is where such a culture must be nurtured. We first learn how to love our neighbor in the home. We learn how to go out into the world by first watching those closest to us. When the family is torn by divorce or deception, it becomes a victim of the throwaway culture rather than a counterweight. In Broken Bonds, a leader of the Minnesota Catholic Conference tells Pearlstein: “It is hard to develop a sense of solidarity when one parent [has] walked out of the family, or your parents have decided they would be happier if they went their separate ways. Children are forced to embrace a distorted, but understandable, sense of independence just to survive emotionally.”19
* * *
WHEN ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE toured America in the early nineteenth century, he saw that its social and political institutions forged a kind of solidarity. All classes were clearly felt to be dependent on one another.20 He noted that “in the United States the more opulent citizens take much care not to isolate themselves from the people; on the contrary, they constantly come close to them, they gladly listen to them and speak to them every day.”21 Tocqueville described this cross-class interaction largely in terms of mutual self-interest. But the intermingling also made fertile space for a culture of encounter.
The data-driven thesis of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, however, is quite different. As Murray sees it, American socioeconomic classes have been diverging culturally, economically, and geographically for the past fifty years. (Murray focuses on white Americans to avoid the confusion of confounding variables, but his analysis is also broadly applicable to Americans of color.) Murray identifies two archetypal neighborhoods: Boston’s upscale Belmont suburb stands in for college-educated professionals, and Philadelphia’s Fishtown area stands in for non-college-educated blue-collar workers. He then tracks five decades of relative stability in comfortable Belmont, and decline in less privileged Fishtown.
Half a century ago, people from Belmont and Fishtown lived in roughly similar neighborhoods. Their children went to the same kinds of schools and played in the same kinds of parks. But as Murray quotes the researcher Douglas Massey, “During the late 20th century … the well-educated and the affluent increasingly segmented themselves off from the rest of American society.”22 Along with this geographical separation came a cultural separation, especially in family life.
Based on every metric—marriage rates, divorce rates, nonmarital childbearing, happiness with marriages—the Fishtown cohort went from comparable to the Belmont cohort in 1960 to being radically deficient in comparison by 2010. We needn’t dwell on the numbers, but one set of figures may be useful.
In 1960, more than 95 percent of children in both Fishtown and Belmont lived with both natural parents when the mother was forty years old. In 2004, this was still true for 90 percent of the Belmont cohort. But in that same year, fewer than 30 percent of Fishtown children were living with both natural parents. Murray argues that the Fishtown figure “is so low that it calls into question the viability of white working-class communities as a place for socializing the next generation.”23
In Murray’s view, Americans are raising a wave of young citizens seriously unprepared for the demands of self-government. And most persons from the Belmont cohort who do continue to model family stability have abandoned the solidarity across class lines that previous generations saw as a duty.
Unsurprisingly, Murray sees a sharp drop in “social capital”—participation in community life through associations—in Fishtown, but not in Belmont (though the latter’s prosperity doesn’t necessarily translate into moral integrity).24 When the family is hurting, it gets very difficult for other communities to form properly. And when local communities can’t form, as Tocqueville notes and we’ve already seen, the state steps in to fill the void.
Successful democracy requires a delicate balance of social cohesion and personal liberation. The late distinguished sociologist Robert Nisbet, following Tocqueville, argued that when the forces of personal liberation are dominant in a culture, the result is not maximal liberty, but the absorption of liberty by government. In reflecting on the history of liberal democracy, he noted the importance of family and the flesh-and-blood bonds of kinship in shaping viable citizens. He wrote that in a genuinely free society, “freedom has rested neither upon release nor upon collectivization but upon the diversification and the decentralization of power” (emphasis Nisbet’s).25 Stable and fruitful families and associations—including and especially religious associations—form the substance of those competing poles of authority. Their decline is not a form of liberation for individuals, but exactly the opposite.
Again: The erosion of religious liberty in America is more than a misunderstanding about the importance of religious belief in public discourse. It’s the playing out of the Nisbet-Tocqueville theory: The disintegration of marriages, families, and communities (and the meaning of all three) leads to a less human, less forgiving, and less intimate form of authority filling the empty spaces they leave behind. It’s thus perfectly logical that the most acute threats to our religious freedom come not from some Orwellian gang of bullyboys in bad uniforms, but from gender theorists and sex-rights activists (and businesses happy to support them) who push “liberation” and who are very well suited to life in a brave new world.
* * *
TO BORROW A THOUGHT from C. S. Lewis, the human person is a kind of “amphibian”—a creature made by God for both this world and the next, a fusion of spirit and flesh that gives the body special dignity. The rightly ordered joy of our senses in this world—the scent of spring, warm rain in the summer, the music of Mozart or Beethoven, the face of a beloved—is a foretaste of the glory God made for all of us to share, when we one day stand in his presence.
The crime of the modern sexual regime is that it robs Eros of its meaning and love of its grandeur. It’s a lie. It’s a theft. It makes us small and ignoble. A young adult friend of mine complained recently that many of her age-cohort peers don’t have romances, passions, or lovers. They have relationships. Lewis’s devil Screwtape would probably feel her pain. He yearned for the taste of a really great adulterer—a Renaissance libertine of character and spirit, capable of sinning heroically—instead of the cramped souls of the modern age, almost too insubstantial and pathetic to be worth damning.
The point of course is to be a great saint, to love greatly, rightly, and with passion, until we burn ourselves up in service to God and to others. Our wholeness, our integrity, depends on the health of our friendship with God. It was he who fashioned us from the dust. It was he who breathed his life into our bodies. So when we ignore God’s Word, we violate our own identity. Pornography, cohabiting, adultery—all these things push us away from God. They also inflict on us a kind of self-mutilation, as we sever what we do with our bodies from our true selves.
And what about chastity? It’s a basic truth of Christian discipleship. And it does not mean, “Sorry, no sex for you.” Rather, God asks us to live our sexuality virtuously according to our calling. For some this means celibacy, setting aside marriage for love of the larger family of the Church and a different form of fertility in service. For most people, though, in most times, it means sexual intimacy within marriage.
As the philosopher Roger Scruton puts it, “A society based on agape [selfless love] alone is all very well, but it will not reproduce itself: nor will it produce the crucial relation—that between parent and child—which is the basis on which we can begin to understand our relation to God. Hence, the redemption of the erotic lies at the heart of every viable social order.”26 Of course, very few couples—at least the ones I know—fall in love to redeem the erotic or build a viable social order. They have other motives. But the end result is the same: By its nature, human erotic love is ordered to creating and raising new life, and to the mutual joy and support of a man and woman vowed in a covenant of love.
But what do words like “vow” and “covenant of love” actually mean beyond routine expressions of piety?
Again, from Scruton: “[A] vow is a self-dedication, a gift of oneself”—open-ended in its commitment to a shared destiny between parties. “A vow of marriage creates an existential tie, not a set of specifiable obligations.” And it’s these irreversible ties, which can’t be revoked, that hold marriages, families, communities, and societies together over time. They’re the sinews of a genuinely human world, connecting the past with the present, and the present with the future. Thus they’re different in kind, not merely in degree, from a contract or a negotiated deal. “[The] world of vows is a world of sacred things, in which holy and indefeasible obligations stand athwart our lives and command us along certain paths,” whether we find it convenient at the moment or not.27
The paradox of Christian faith is this: It affirms the importance of every individual, no matter how weak or disabled. God loves each of us uniquely and infinitely. But our faith also binds us in a network of mutual obligations to others. God made us not just for ourselves. He also made us for others.
In this, our beliefs directly oppose a growing dimension of American economic life. The nature of that life, says the Lutheran theologian Daniel M. Bell Jr., may be disguised by its remaining biblical residue. But in practice, it “encourages us to view others in terms of how they can serve our self-interested projects.” Other people “become commodities themselves—mere bodies to be exploited and consumed, and then discarded”:
As a consequence, marriages are viewed as (short-term) contracts subject to a cost/benefit analysis, children become consumer goods or accessories, family bonds are weakened and our bodies are treated like so many raw materials to be mined and exploited for manufacture and pleasure. Those individuals rendered worthless as producers and commodities by obsolescence—the old and infirm—are discarded (warehoused or euthanized) and the nonproductive poor (the homeless, the unemployed, the irresponsible, the incompetent) are viewed as a threat.28
In current American experience, true to Bell’s words, marriage often resembles a real estate transaction. Two autonomous individuals enter into a limited liability partnership that can easily be dissolved. Children serve as the various shared properties. And in such a world, an unplanned, unwanted unborn child is clearly the most annoying kind of drain on the emotional profits.
A friend with a taste for the moral wisdom of fairy tales likes to remind me, these days, of H. G. Wells’s great fable The Time Machine. The story is simple. A man invents a time machine. He rides it eight hundred thousand years into the future. He finds an astonishing world of peace, plenty, and perfectly manicured luxury. The resident humans—the beautiful (if somewhat brainless) Eloi—spend their days in eating, chattering, playing, and having innocent sex.
When the sun goes down, a different agenda applies. From the tunnels under the earth come the once-human managers of this paradise, the Morlocks. They’re ugly. They’re hungry. And they have a special fondness for Eloi.
We can draw whatever lessons we like. It’s just a story. But what we do in the world, how we live and how we love (or misuse love)—these things always have consequences. And they always emerge from the past to pay a visit. Choices don’t stay buried.