CHAPTER 9

Eros and the New Christian Counterculture

The opportunity to work is a gift from God that, when rightly employed, serves life and draws us back to Him. However, if work—or family, community, school, politics, or any other good thing—becomes an end in itself, it turns into an idol. It will eventually become a prison, a desert, even a graveyard of the spirit. These things serve the truth and human flourishing only if they are icons through which the light of Christ shines forth, making them a means by which the kingdom of God flourishes.

So it is with sex, a divine gift that, if cherished properly, becomes a source of joy, abundance, and flourishing—of the couple and their community. When bound to God’s purposes, sex unites a man and a woman physically and spiritually, and from that fertile union new life may come, creating a family.

But if we use sex in a disordered way, it can be one of the most destructive forces on earth. Look around you at the suffering of children brought up without fathers, the scourge of pornography destroying the imaginations of millions, the families broken by infidelity and abuse, and on and on.

For a Christian, there is only one right way to use the gift of sex: within marriage between one man and one woman. This is heresy to the modern world, and a hard saying upon which hearts, friendships, families, and even churches have been broken. There is no core teaching of the Christian faith that is less popular today, and perhaps none more important to obey.

It’s easy to get why secular people don’t understand the reasons for Christian sexual practices: many Christians today don’t understand them either. For generations, the church has allowed the culture to catechize its youth without putting up much of a fight. The Benedictine life offers a better way.

Why should Christians pay attention to teachings on sexuality of monastics, who live in chastity? Don’t they hate sex?

Of course they don’t, any more than they hate good food because they often fast, hate words because they live in great silence, hate families because they don’t marry, or hate material things because they live simply. We should listen to the monks on sexuality for the same reason we should listen to them on wealth and poverty: because their asceticism is a testimony to the goodness of those divine gifts.

Remember that all Christians are called to live with some degree of sexual abstinence. Benedictines commit themselves to a life of sexual purity as part of their radical discipleship. Their celibacy testifies to the sanctity of sex in the Christian cosmos as the property of the married state alone. And their example of bodily purity transforming the erotic instinct into spiritual passion demonstrates to laypersons that living within God-ordained bounds of sexuality, even in the most extreme circumstance, is not only possible but necessary to enjoy the fullest fruits of life in Christ. As Wendell Berry puts it, “The point about temperance, including sexual discipline, is not that it reduces pleasure, but that it safeguards abundance.”¹

The radical witness of Christian monks is a special grace to lay Christians in these times. There is no other area in which orthodox Christians will have to be as countercultural as in our sexual lives, and we are going to have to support each other in our unpopular stances. We have to understand the rich Christian view of sexuality, grasp how the Sexual Revolution undermines it, recognize our own culpability, and be prepared to fight to keep our children orthodox.

Sexual practices are so central to the Christian life that when believers cease to affirm orthodoxy on the matter, they often cease to be meaningfully Christian. It was the countercultural force of Christian sexuality that overturned the pagan world’s dehumanizing practices. Christianity taught that the body is sacred and that the dignity possessed by all humans as made in the image of God required treating it as such.

This is why the modern repaganization called the Sexual Revolution can never be reconciled with orthodox Christianity. Alas, that revolution has toppled the church’s authority in the broader culture and is now shaking the church itself to its foundations. Christians living the Benedict Option must commit themselves resolutely to resistance and to helping each other do the same.

Sex and the Incarnation

I once heard an Evangelical woman, in a group conversation about sexuality, blurt out, “Why do we have to get stuck on sex? Why can’t we just get back to talking about the Gospel?”

Christianity is not a disembodied faith but an incarnational one. God came to us in the form of a man, Jesus Christ, and redeems us body and soul. The way we treat our bodies (and indeed all of Creation) says something about the way we regard the One Who gave it to us and Whose presence fills all things. That’s the Gospel.

As the Benedictines teach, one of our tasks in life is to be a means by which God orders Creation, bringing it into harmony with His purposes. Sexuality is an inextricable part of that work.

Wendell Berry has written, “Sexual love is the heart of community life. Sexual love is the force that in our bodily life connects us most intimately to the Creation, to the fertility of the world, to farming and the care of animals. It brings us into the dance that holds the community together and joins it to its place.”²

This is more important to the survival of Christianity than most of us understand. When people decide that historically normative Christianity is wrong about sex, they typically don’t find a church that endorses their liberal views. They quit going to church altogether.

This raises critical questions: Is sex the linchpin of Christian cultural order? Is it really the case that to cast off Christian teaching on sex and sexuality is to remove the factor that gives—or gave—Christianity its power as a social force?

Though he might not have put it quite that way, Philip Rieff would probably have said yes. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, he analyzes what he calls the “deconversion” of the West from Christianity. Nearly everyone recognizes that this process has been under way since the Enlightenment, but Rieff showed that it had reached a more advanced stage than most people—least of all Christians—recognized.

Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the Sexual Revolution—though he did not use that term—as a leading indicator of Christianity’s demise. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture and redirecting the erotic instinct was intrinsic to Christian culture. Without Christianity, the West was reverting to its former state.³

It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to comprehend why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among the People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.

In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.

Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” Chastity—the rightly ordered use of the gift of sexuality—was the greatest distinction setting Christians of the early church apart from the pagan world.⁴

The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what a person does with their sexuality cannot be separated from what a person is. In a sense, moderns believe the same thing, but from a perspective entirely different from the early church’s.

In speaking of how men and women of the early Christian era saw their bodies, historian Peter Brown says the body

was embedded in a cosmic matrix in ways that made its perception of itself profoundly unlike our own. Ultimately, sex was not the expression of inner needs, lodged in the isolated body. Instead, it was seen as the pulsing, through the body, of the same energies as kept the stars alive. Whether this pulse of energy came from benevolent gods or from malevolent demons (as many radical Christians believed) sex could never be seen as a thing for the isolated human body alone.⁵

Early Christianity’s sexual teaching does not only come from the words of Christ and the Apostle Paul; more broadly, it emerges from the Bible’s anthropology. The human being bears the image of God, however tarnished by sin, and is the pinnacle of an order created and imbued with meaning by God.

In that order, man has a purpose. He is meant for something, to achieve certain ends. When Paul warned the Christians of Corinth that having sex with a prostitute meant that they were joining Jesus Christ to that prostitute, he was not speaking metaphorically. Because we belong to Christ as a unity of body, mind, and soul, how we use the body and the mind sexually is a very big deal.

Anything we do that falls short of perfect harmony with the will of God is sin. Sin is not merely rule breaking but failing to live in accord with the structure of reality itself.

The Christian who lives in reality will not join his body to another’s outside the order God gives us. That means no sex outside the covenant through which a man and a woman seal their love exclusively through Christ. In orthodox Christian teaching, the two really do become “one flesh” in a way that transcends the symbolic.

If sex is made holy through the marriage covenant, then sex within marriage is an icon of Christ’s relationship with His people, the church. It reveals the miraculous, life-giving power of spiritual communion, which occurs when a man and a woman—and only a man and a woman—give themselves to each other. That marriage could be unsexed is a total novelty in the Christian theological tradition.

“The significance of sexual difference has never before been contingent upon a creature’s preferences, or upon whether or not God gave it episodically to a particular creature to have certain preferences,” writes Catholic theologian Christopher Roberts. He goes on to say that for Christians, the meaning of sexuality has always depended on its relationship to the created order and to eschatology—the ultimate end of man. “As was particularly clear, perhaps for the first time in Luther, the fact of a sexually differentiated creation is reckoned to human beings as a piece of information from God about who and what it meant to be human,” writes Roberts.⁶

Contrary to modern gender theory, the question is not Are we men or women? but How are we to be male and female together? The legitimacy of our sexual desire is limited by the givenness of nature. The facts of our biology are not incidental to our personhood. Marriage has to be sexually complementary because only the male-female pair mirrors the generativity of the divine order. “Male and female he made them,” says Genesis, revealing that complementarity is written into the nature of reality.

Easy divorce stretches the sacred bond of matrimony to the breaking point, but it does not deny complementarity. Gay marriage does. Similarly, transgenderism doesn’t merely bend but breaks the biological and metaphysical reality of male and female. Everything in this debate (and many others between traditional Christianity and modernity) turns on how we answer the question: Is the natural world and its limits a given, or are we free to do with it whatever we desire?

To be sure, there never was a golden age in which Christians all lived up to their sexual ideals. The church has been dealing with sexual immorality in its own ranks since the beginning—and let’s be honest, some of the measures it has taken to combat it have been cruel and unjust.

The point, however, is that to the premodern Christian imagination, sex was filled with cosmic meaning in a way it no longer is. Paul admonished the Corinthians to “flee sexual immorality” because the body was a “temple of the Holy Spirit” and warned them that “you are not your own.” He was telling them that their bodies are sacred vessels that belonged to God, who, in Christ, “all things hold together.” Sexual autonomy, seemingly the most prized possession of the modern person, is not only morally wrong but a metaphysical falsehood.

History’s Most Revolutionary Revolution

But our perception of that truth diminished long ago. Now we are on the far side of a Sexual Revolution that has been nothing short of catastrophic for Christianity. It struck near the core of biblical teaching on sex and the human person and has demolished the fundamental Christian conception of society, of families, and of the nature of human beings. There can be no peace between Christianity and the Sexual Revolution, because they are radically opposed. As the Sexual Revolution advances, Christianity must retreat—and it has, faster than most people would have thought possible.

In 1996, the Gallup polling organization conducted its first survey asking Americans what they thought of same-sex marriage. A whopping 68 percent opposed it. In 2015, just before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision proclaiming a constitutional right to gay marriage, Gallup’s poll revealed that 60 percent of Americans now support same-sex marriage.⁷ This number will rise steadily as older generations die and make way for younger generations, who overwhelmingly favor LGBT rights.

Research shows that Millennials, both secular and religious, favor gay rights by enormous majorities. Those who have disaffiliated from Christianity say that the faith’s negative attitudes toward homosexuality were a major factor. Strong majorities of Millennials who identify as Christian believe the church must change its views.

That being the case, you would think that churches that have liberalized their teachings on homosexuality, like Mainline Protestant denominations, or downplayed those teachings, like progressive Catholic parishes, would be booming. They’re not. If anything, they are cratering faster than the more orthodox.

Future historians will wonder how the sexual desires of only three to four percent of the population became the fulcrum on which an entire worldview was dislodged and overturned. A partial answer is that the media are to blame. Back in 1993, a cover story in the Nation identified the gay rights cause as the summit and keystone of the culture war:

All the crosscurrents of present-day liberation struggles are subsumed in the gay struggle. The gay moment is in some ways similar to the moment that other communities have experienced in the nation’s past, but it is also something more, because sexual identity is in crisis throughout the population, and gay people—at once the most conspicuous subjects and objects of the crisis—have been forced to invent a complete cosmology to grasp it. No one says the changes will come easily. But it’s just possible that a small and despised sexual minority will change America forever.⁸

They were right. Tying the gay rights cause to the civil rights movement was a strategic masterstroke. Though homosexuality and race are two very different phenomena, the media took the equivalence for granted and rarely if ever gave opposing voices a chance to be heard.

Though the unrelenting media campaign on behalf of same-sex marriage was critically important to its success, it wasn’t the most important thing. Americans accepted gay marriage so quickly because it resonated with what they had already come to believe about the meaning of heterosexual sex and marriage.

We have gay marriage because the straight majority came to see sexuality as something primarily for personal pleasure and self-expression and only secondarily for procreation. We have gay marriage because the straight majority, in turn, came to see marriage in the same way—and two generations of Americans have grown up with these nominalist values on sex and marriage as normative.

To be modern, as we have seen, is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition. As philosopher Charles Taylor writes, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).”⁹

Gay marriage and gender ideology signify the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because they deny Christian anthropology at its core and shatter the authority of the Bible. Rightly ordered sexuality is not at the core of Christianity, but as Rieff saw, it’s so near to the center that to lose the Bible’s clear teaching on this matter is to risk losing the fundamental integrity of the faith. This is why Christians who begin by rejecting sexual orthodoxy end either by rejecting Christianity themselves or by laying the groundwork for their children to do so.

“The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling,” Rieff writes. By that standard, Christianity in America is in mortal danger.

If a remnant wants to survive, it must resist the Sexual Revolution. But how?

Don’t Compromise to Keep the Young

Watering down or burying biblical truth on sexuality for the sake of keeping Millennials won’t work. Mainline Protestant churches have tried this strategy, and they remain in demographic collapse. True, orthodox Christian churches are also struggling, but throwing biblical teaching overboard in an attempt to keep the boat afloat on rough seas is not the answer.

Even making the traditional teaching on sexual integrity an optional matter—either explicitly or implicitly, by not talking about it, or by turning a blind eye—is a mistake. It is impossible to bracket out Christianity’s clear instruction on how to live a life of sexual integrity and separating it from the rest of the Christian life. It’s hypocritical.

“Indifference toward sexual issues is going to mean the end of Christian orthodoxy,” says an Evangelical friend, commenting on the attitude many Christians, even conservative ones, have.

True, a person can be completely chaste and still go to hell if his heart is cold. But that is not an argument for defying the Bible’s clear teaching. Whether we like it or not, sex is at the center of contemporary culture, and it is tearing the church apart. You cannot avoid the fight, either in your own church or in your own family. To avoid taking sides is to take a side—and not that of the Bible.

Besides, watering down the truth for the sake of preserving or expanding the congregation is to make an idol of community.

Affirm the Goodness of Sexuality

Andrew T. Walker, a Southern Baptist lay leader of the Millennial generation, says he grew up in a good church but never heard a single sermon about Christian anthropology (i.e., what is man?) or biblical sexuality beyond conservative platitudes.

“I don’t ever recall having a lesson about why my body is a good thing. No one ever explained to me why complementarity is important,” Walker tells me. “We’ve been so driven by a culture of entertainment, but if you told most congregations that for the next few weeks, we’re going to have a sermon series about biblical anthropology, the congregation wouldn’t greet the idea enthusiastically,” he continues. “This is wrong. That has to change if we’re going to survive and pass down the faith.

“Tragically, I fear that the average Christian in America is no different than the average American—we just want to be told what to do and how to feel. This doesn’t mean our churches need to be boring, but we’ll need to find creative ways to go deep on important issues.”

Walker is not alone in his experience. I have been attending church regularly for over twenty years, in both Catholic and Orthodox parishes around the country. I have yet to hear a sermon explaining in any depth what Christianity teaches about the human person and about the rightly ordered use of sex. For that matter, I recall only one sermon in all those years in which a priest endorsed the orthodox Christian view of sex.

Far too many pastors are scared to talk about sex. They need to get over it. It is hard to live chastely in this eroticized culture; pastors shouldn’t make it harder by denying their people the teaching and support they need to be faithful. Silence from the pulpit, and from the church’s ministers and teachers, conveys the message that sex and sexuality aren’t important and that the church has nothing to offer on the matter.

This is ludicrous, even cruel. The church’s teaching on the meaning of sex was liberating to me when I began to practice the faith as an adult. I had lived by the world’s standards and had made a mess of my life and hurt others. Finally, backed into the corner by my own disordered desires, I surrendered to Christ.

To a twenty-five-year-old American man living in a big city, in a secular, hedonistic milieu, choosing chastity out of fidelity to Jesus is taking on a heavy cross. I hated it, but I wanted Christ more than I wanted to follow my own will. It was five years before I would marry at the end of an ascetic trek across a dry desert—a journey that I did not know would end one day in marriage.

Now, though, it is clear to me that sexual renunciation in obedience to biblical standards was precisely what I needed to purify my own heart and to prepare myself for marriage. As hard as it was to practice chastity, it was harder than it had to be because I never had the backing of the parish churches of which I was a part.

What would have helped? For one, the church needed to raise its own flag every now and then. That is, it would have been a source of strength to me in my struggle to be obedient had the pastor signaled to the congregation that sexual discipline is an important part of the Christian life.

For another, parish churches could have hosted classes for adult singles to explore in depth Christian teaching about sex and strategies for living out its teaching. It might also have turned into a small community of believers who could rely on each other for mutual support.

But I was not without fault myself. There is no rule that says a layperson cannot start such a group himself within the parish. I waited on somebody else to do it. My own passivity as a twentysomething Christian was a fault I now regret.

That’s not the only way my passivity served me poorly. I did not try very hard to cultivate friendships with other orthodox Christians committed to walking the walk. In those days, I didn’t fully appreciate how difficult it is to stay on the path of fidelity to Christian sexual morality when you are navigating it alone. I should have taken better care of myself.

For all those faults, I walked the line because I knew from experience that I did not want to go back to that particular Egypt. And as an adult convert, I had educated myself about what Christ expects from His followers regarding sexual behavior and how sex is woven into the whole tapestry of Christian teaching.

Being self-taught on Catholic sexual ethics made me unusual among most of the Catholics of my generation whom I knew. They had never had the fullness of the church’s teaching on love and sexuality presented to them, if any sexual teaching was presented to them at all. It seemed to me that they had been formed—or rather, malformed—by priests and other adult Catholics who were ashamed of the church’s teaching on sexuality and who downplayed it, perhaps to avoid confronting the young with truths they would find difficult. Over the years, I’ve come to see that a feel-good, self-centered approach to catechesis serves less as a gateway to mature Christianity than as a vaccination against it.

“When the culture places more emphasis on the needs of the self and less on social rules, more relaxed attitudes toward sexuality are the almost inevitable result,” researcher Jean Twenge told the Los Angeles Times.¹⁰

There is an enormous disparity between Evangelical youth and Catholic youth on sexual matters. Surveys find that while Millennials as a group are much more liberal about sexual matters, Evangelicals are much more likely than Catholics to profess traditional Christian teachings. Indeed, Catholics are doing such a poor job forming their youth that Catholic Millennials are more likely to be sexual liberals than average Americans are.

Yet there is a growing movement within many churches to downplay or dismiss entirely the Bible’s teachings on sexuality and instead emphasize fighting poverty, racism, and other forms of social injustice. This is a false choice. Social justice activism is laudable, but it does not earn you indulgences for sexual sin. Youth pastors especially need to make this clear.

Moralism Is Not Enough

As we have seen, many Americans believe that being a Christian is chiefly about treating God as a cosmic therapist and being happy with oneself and nice to others. That’s a pseudo-Christianity. That said, a Christianity that reduces life in Christ to a moral and ethical code may be in one respect better than nothing—but it is not the Christian faith.

If the real challenge of the Sexual Revolution is cosmological, then a church that tries to meet it with middle-class moralism is bringing knives to a gunfight. The dry, brittle commands of moralism turn to ash in the face of the erotic drama revealed in the Bible.

Genesis tells us that from the very beginning, masculinity, femininity, and sex are created by God and bound to Creation. Man and woman become “one flesh,” though remaining fully themselves, because this is how God regards the nature of the bond between Himself and each person.

This was something radically new in the world. As Pope Benedict XVI has written, “God’s way of loving becomes the measure of human love. This close connection between eros and marriage in the Bible has practically no equivalent in extra-biblical literature.”¹¹

Throughout the Old Testament, its authors describe God’s covenantal relationship with Israel in terms of marriage and infidelity. God loves Israel personally and through their covenant will bring forth the birth of the Messiah, who will redeem fallen Creation. Only in fidelity to the Lord, receiving His love and returning it to Him, can Israel know herself.

Jesus, born of a Virgin, fulfilled the law in His life, then emptied Himself out on the Cross in an act of perfect love for the salvation of all. Though the New Testament contains plenty of strong admonitions against sexual immorality, chastity for its own sake is never a goal. Rather, as we have seen, it is the means through which man’s erotic instinct is channeled and redirected in continuing relationship with God.

Unbridled erotic passion creates chaos and disintegration. Eros that submits to Christ bears fruit in the gift of children, stable families, and communities. The contemporary Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément says that the spiritual secret of Christianity is that the love of God comes through the human body and flows throughout the universe to which it is joined. In Christianity, the individual’s desire (eros) is purified and transformed into agape—unconditional, selfless love.

Dante’s Divine Comedy, the greatest literary creation of the Middle Ages, is a staggeringly powerful portrait of the manifold dimensions of love: the pilgrim Dante’s passion for Beatrice, and the glory transfiguring Creation when a man allows his desire for God to condition all his other loves. This is love as a glorious cosmic drama, transcending time and space, in which each individual joins with the eternal dance, sharing in “the love that moves the Sun and all the other stars.”

To reduce Christian teaching about sex and sexuality to bare, boring, thou-shalt-not moralism is a travesty and a failure of imagination. While one may credit the courage of certain conservative pastors who don’t shirk their duty to tell the truth about sex, those who jackhammer away at sexual immorality as if it were the only serious sin, or were somehow disconnected from a host of other sins of passion, distort the Gospel and undermine its credibility. This lamentable reductionism constitutes a failure to draw on the inexhaustible well of resources within the Christian theological and artistic tradition. In the end, it comes down to a matter of Christians having lost our own grand story about eros, cosmos, and theosis, the Greek word for “union with God,” the ultimate end of the Christian pilgrimage.

“All of life is now being ordered by narratives and images that don’t reflect the old boundaries,” says sociologist Christian Smith. “Churches have something to say about this. They should go back again and again to the drinking well of the Gospel and offer a true alternative transcendent story. If they can’t do that, if they remain saddled with moralism, then they better hang it up now.”

If Christianity is a true story, then the story the world tells about sexual freedom is a grand deception. It’s fake. As novelist Walker Percy advised, we have to attack the fake in the name of the real. Christians are going to have to become better tellers of our own story. Young people are not going to be argued into Christian chastity or browbeaten by moralistic maxims. Beauty and goodness, embodied in great art and fiction, and in the lives of ordinary Christians, married and single, is the only thing that stands a chance.

Parents Must Be Primary Sex Educators

If we don’t do it, the culture will do it for us. The pornification of the public square continues apace. To paraphrase the late, great media scholar Neil Postman, when children can access computers or smartphones and watch hardcore pornography, childhood is over.

Mothers and fathers have to be far more aggressive in governing their kids’ access to media and technology. But there is no way to keep them in a permanent bubble. When public schools in places like Washington state are teaching gender ideology in kindergarten, parents cannot take anything for granted. We have to start talking about sex and sexuality with our children, early and often.

Kids today grow up in a culture that seeks to obliterate the natural family: one man and one woman, bound exclusively to each other, and the children they have together. It is now considered bigoted to say that the natural family is superior to any other arrangement. In schools today, and certainly in popular culture, kids are even told that gender is not a fixed category connected to biological sex. Besides, the culture of hooking up, and of divorce and unwed childbearing, is so normative today that you can’t blame young people for their confusion. The new normal is that there is no normal.

“I worry all the time about my students, whether or not they will ever be able to sustain a family,” a professor at a conservative Evangelical college told me. “Most of them have never seen what a traditional family looks like.”

Along these lines, it’s imperative that we raise our kids to know that children are a blessing without qualification and that fertility is not a disease.

It’s hard to know how to start those conversations and where to take them. A terrific resource for families is The Humanum Series, six short movies, all available for free on YouTube, presenting the traditional Christian vision of sex, gender, marriage, and family.

Produced by the Vatican and featuring the participation of Christians and others from around the world, the Humanum videos explore the cosmic dimension of God’s plan for the family, in profound but easy-to-understand words and images. They explore the meaning of marriage and sexuality, the role of the family, masculinity and femininity, how marriage helps people endure hardship, marriage and society, and more. None of the six Humanum videos lasts more than twenty minutes. They are not the least bit preachy and in fact are surprising in their sophistication and how they convey the joy of the traditional vision of sex, marriage, and family.

In my family, we watched them with our three children, ages sixteen, twelve, and nine. All the clips were appropriate for family viewing and served as a launch pad for discussions of their themes. There are few things more difficult for Christian parents than forming their children’s moral imaginations about sex, not least because it is difficult to know how to articulate biblical truth in a winsome and appealing way. The Humanum films are a true gift to families—and to churches.

The Humanum Series reinforces with admirable skill the natural family ecology. Kids today grow up in a culture that seeks to obliterate the natural family: one man and one woman, bound exclusively to each other, and the children they have together. Christian parents must never assume that their children understand that the natural family is God’s plan for humanity. We have to make this explicit in our teaching. We have to make it implicit too by modeling mutual respect, sacrifice, affection, and all the good things that come from a spiritually fruitful marriage.

Love and Support Unmarried People in the Community

Young Americans are waiting longer to marry, making it more likely that your church community has single Christians in it. As I said earlier, church can be a lonely place for singles. I didn’t marry until I was nearly thirty and felt invisible in the parishes I attended as a single man.

It is understandable that churches hold marriage and family up as ideal forms of the Christian life, but doing so often devalues the lives and witness of those who do not receive the call to marriage. Married Christians tend to pity the unmarried among them, if they think of them at all. And it’s all too easy for Christian singles, discouraged by the difficulty of their challenges, to slip into self-pity and bitterness.

A monastic life well lived exemplifies the spiritual fruits that can come from the unmarried state ordered to Christ.

“Everyone is searching for love. It’s the most basic human desire. Whether one seeks that love in carnal pleasures, in material possessions, or God, everyone is seeking,” says Brother Evagrius of Norcia. “The monastic life, in a nutshell, is giving up every other pleasure for the love of God. Everything in the monastic life is built around helping you to achieve that.”

A congregation cannot be a monastery, but there is no reason why it should not reach out to hold its single members closer, as members of the church family. As Brother Augustine told me, there are days when he feels exhausted by the rigors of the monastic life—and on those days, he relies on the charity of his brother monks to carry him. Why can’t we serve our unmarried community members in a similar way?

Moreover, if a parish community has the resources, it should consider establishing single-sex group houses for its unmarried members to live in prayerful fellowship as what you might call lay monastics. It is hard to live chastely in a culture as eroticized as ours, especially when there is so little respect for chastity. One expects this from the world, but the church must be different.

All unmarried Christians are called to live celibately, but at least heterosexuals have the possibility of marriage. Gay Christians do not, which makes their struggle even more intense.

Worse, too many gay Christians face rejection from the very people they should be able to count on: the church. The angry vehemence with which many gay activists condemn Christianity is rooted in large part in the cultural memory of rejection and hatred by the church. Christians need to own up to our past in this regard and to repent of it.

But that does not mean—and it cannot mean—that we should abandon clear, binding biblical teaching on homosexuality. Gay Christians, like all unmarried Christians, are called to a life of chastity. This is a heavy cross to bear, but one that cannot in obedience be refused.

Our gay brothers and sisters in Christ should not have to carry it alone. In recent years, several same-sex-attracted Christians living in fidelity to orthodox teaching have found their voice in the Spiritual Friendship movement. It is based on the writings of Saint Aelred of Rievaulx, a twelfth-century abbot.

“Aelred helped me to see that obedience to Christ offered more to me than just the denial of sex and romance,” writes Ron Belgau, one of the movement’s founders. “Christ-centered chaste friendships offered a positive and fulfilling—albeit at times challenging—path to holiness.”¹²

That’s an important point, for gay and single Christians alike. Too often chastity is presented only as saying no to sex. Though we can’t deny the real and painful sacrifice the Christian ethic requires of unmarried believers, we should not neglect to teach and explore the good that may come from surrendering one’s sexuality. Though monasticism had not yet developed when the New Testament was written, Jesus said that some are called by God to be chaste singles (“eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven”). This is a steep path to holiness, an especially treacherous one in our thoroughly eroticized culture, but a path to holiness it is for some. We have that on Christ’s authority.

It is hard for single Christians to stay on that path, but again at least straight Christians have the prospect of marriage to comfort them. If we expect gay Christians to embrace celibacy, then in our churches, families, and individual lives we must give them love, respect, and friendship.

Moreover, gay Christians who reject traditional teaching must still be treated with love, because they too are image-bearers of Christ. Love wins, though not in the way the LGBT movement says. But it still wins. Christians don’t dare forget it.

Fight Pornography with Everything You’ve Got

I once asked a Catholic priest friend to tell me the most common problem he deals with in the confessional. “Pornography,” he said. “Nothing else is even close.”

I’ve heard the same thing for years from other priests and pastors. The problem is overwhelming—and the church is no refuge. In 2014, the Barna Group published research showing that Christians are by and large no different from the rest of the population when it comes to using porn.¹³

Though porn use is up across demographic groups—in part because the Internet makes it far more accessible—researchers see a tectonic shift when it comes to young adults. Among adults aged eighteen to twenty-four, 96 percent of those surveyed by Barna do not think porn is negative. Nine out of ten teenagers agree. And though porn use is overwhelmingly a male problem, nearly one in five young adult women admit to watching it.

The moral and spiritual damage from porn use should be obvious. Porn dehumanizes, and it destroys the image of God in the faces of its performers. In turn, it trains its users to see others as depersonalized objects for sexual pleasure. It destroys the connection between sex and love. This is not news.

Recently, though, neuroscientists have discovered that pornography use has potentially devastating effects on the brain. Watching porn floods the brain’s pleasure centers with dopamine. The more one uses porn, the more one has to use it, and more extreme versions of it, to get the same dopamine hit. Pornography literally rewires the brain, making it very difficult for longtime users to be aroused by actual human beings.

In 2015, a Time magazine cover story on the ubiquity of porn highlighted the experiences of young adult men who came of age after the smartphone was introduced in 2007 and who therefore had around-the-clock portable access to hardcore video porn. Said writer Belinda Luscombe:

Their generation has consumed explicit content in quantities and varieties never before possible, on devices designed to deliver content swiftly and privately, all at an age when their brains were more plastic—more prone to permanent change—than in later life. These young men feel like unwitting guinea pigs in a largely unmonitored decade-long experiment in sexual conditioning.¹⁴

Men in the prime of their youth, who ought to have been virile, now report impotence and an inability to form normal relationships with women. Thus does the possibility for bringing children into the world, and creating families, die.

Christians, especially Christian parents, don’t dare take this lightly. In addition to having the porn talk with their children early, parents should firmly resolve not to give kids smartphones with access to the Internet—or unmonitored Internet access, period. Parents have to watch the peer groups of their children closely and take strong, decisive action if porn enters the picture. If you discover that porn is part of your son’s social life, you can’t say, “Everybody does it.” You must act decisively.

Cutting off potential access to pornography is not a foolproof solution, though. We have to raise our children to understand the connection between sex and love in the whole economy of Creation. This is not the kind of thing you can do with one or two sit-down sessions with your kids. It requires years of patient work, and it needs the active support of the church.

A cosmological response to the Sexual Revolution requires that we educate ourselves (and our children) in sexuality’s social dimension. Not only is sex connected to the divine order, but it also binds individuals, families, and the community to each other.

“Sex, like any other necessary, precious, and volatile power that is commonly held, is everybody’s business,” says Wendell Berry.¹⁵

As with so many other things in contemporary society, we modern Americans see sex as wholly a private matter, one of individual rights. But this is false. The rules, rituals, and traditions of a community pertaining to sexuality, says Berry, intend “to preserve its energy, its beauty, and its pleasure; to preserve and clarify its power to join not just husband and wife to one another but parents to children, families to the community, the community to nature; to ensure, so far as possible, that the inheritors of sexuality, as they come of age, will be worthy of it.”

Berry goes on to say that “if the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing—and our time is proving it so.”

Indeed. Our job as Benedict Option Christians is to form communities of healthy chastity and fidelity that can protect the gift and pass it on to the next generations. To do so, we have to master one of the most culturally transformative technologies in human history: the Internet.