The Dead End of Modern Liberty
The phenomenon of “private” sexuality has deeply infiltrated the Western church. I recently read about a Christian leader who was mentoring a younger student in catechism. The leader had a girlfriend, and one day the student accidentally stumbled upon them having sex together. Deeply confused, the student later asked his mentor what was going on, whereupon he was told that it was “none of his business.” This story typifies the prevailing sense among contemporary Christians that we do not have any legitimate moral claims on each other’s lives, especially our sexual lives. This is private business.
The all-conquering narrative of modern freedom has driven a wedge of confusion into the sexual lives of Christians as they find themselves increasingly caught between two scripts: a cultural one and a Christian one. Regnerus and Uecker describe the moral ambiguity surrounding sex and relationships that is typical of many young Christians.
They’re selectively permissive: the moral rule remains right and good and in effect, yet it does not apply to them at present, for reasons too nuanced and difficult for them to adequately describe. It’s not that they’re hypocritical. Rather, they feel the powerful pull of competing moral claims upon them: the script about what boyfriends and girlfriends in love want or are supposed to do for and to each other, and the script about what unmarried Christian behavior should look like. They want to satisfy both but find themselves rationalizing.1
It is little wonder that confusion reigns. The right to be “free” has become our consummate cultural cliché, a banner under which we live our entire lives. Yet we give little attention to what it actually means, beyond the shallow, open-ended sense of being able to do whatever we want. The idea of freedom, though, has assumed some particular meanings in our time that are quite distinct from previous understandings and that pose profound challenges for Christian discipleship and sexual formation.
Three Ways to Be Free
Utilitarianism and Expressivism
Right at the heart of modern culture is the ideal of personal freedom: that we can live well and truly be ourselves only if we are free from outside influences. Where did this pervasive idea come from, and how has it become sacrosanct? In contrast with the Christian conviction that personal freedom is possible only by receiving God’s grace and living in step with his commandments, the Enlightenment split freedom into two very different visions of life that eventually morphed into two mainstream forms of individualism, utilitarian and expressive.
The utilitarian mode sees the world as a great field of competition, within which other people may be used to further our own pleasure and self-interest. Rather than living in open communion with each other, we learn rules by which to euphemistically “win friends and influence people.” We become masters of the universe, self-made people who express our freedom through control and manipulation. Things and people become pawns that we move on the strategic chessboard of our lives. When I worked in finance, my boss’s favorite book was Zen and the Art of Warfare, which shaped a philosophy that he applied to his clients, colleagues, and competitors alike. Within this worldview, everyone is a rival to be feared.
This utilitarian perspective is founded on basic human fears and desires. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes introduced the idea that essentially we all fear being controlled by others, and we in turn desire to exert power over them.2 Within this “war of all against all,” redemption is provided by the state and other social institutions, which act as referees and policemen, essentially protecting us from each other.3
This bleak conception of human life, later reinforced by the general acceptance of social Darwinism, has put modern relationships on shaky foundations, so that even within the church we fear making lasting and sacrificial commitments. The popular media powerfully reinforces the primacy of hostility and competition. Many of the most acclaimed miniseries on our TV screens paint a dark social vision that is compelling and pervasive. Violence, drugs, crime, terrorism, paranoia, political machinations, broken relationships, and the dog-eat-dog dynamics of the corporate world feed our imaginations with a bleak vision of relationships—a dystopian society rather than a utopian one. The binge-watching “box set” model of TV-series consumption encourages us to enter into and inhabit these worlds for hours at a time, further shaping our moral and social imaginations. This social imaginary has come to resemble the realpolitik of Vladimir Lenin’s assertion that in relationships “trust is good, but control is better.”
Modern expressivism, not surprisingly, reacted against this imbalanced view of personal identity by seeking a more genuine freedom, tuning into the voice within, especially emotions and sexuality. This formed the basis for the culture of authenticity that we explored in the previous chapter.
These contrasting visions of freedom, utilitarian and expressive, caused a head/heart split within modern identity that has created profound rifts in our social and sexual relationships. This duality is vividly symbolized by the stereotypical daily commute from the soft leafy suburbs, which represent the warmth of home, love, and family, into the hard efficient spaces of the city, which stand for the rational utilitarian way of surviving in the business world.
Postmodernism as a Vision of Total Freedom
In addition to these two modern pathways to freedom, a third route emerged toward the end of the twentieth century. Growing out of the other two, but also in reaction to them, postmodernism represents a yet more extreme form of freedom. Whereas expressivism seeks to be faithful to an inner core of personal identity, postmodernism focuses solely on the flow of human experience. Within postmodernism, the connection between what we do and who we are becomes less clear. The emphasis is on expressing freedom rather than on what that freedom expresses.
The most influential thinkers within postmodernism, shaping its basic ideas, are Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard. Foucault, for instance, embraced the negative side of Nietzsche’s philosophy, a rejection of any higher reality that might make sense of life. On this basis, Nietzsche had argued that all interpretations are arbitrary, so that power and the force of the human will inevitably fill the void. Within this vacuum, Foucault argued, the individual does not have a genuine core or self but is a product of the ideas and disciplines imposed upon him or her by those who hold power.4 In other words, each of us is like soft putty to be molded by politicians, spin doctors, advertisers, spiritual authorities, and therapists. For Foucault, since all these forms of control and authority are artificial, our goal should be to throw them off as oppressive restrictions on our right to be free.
Jacques Derrida pictured the individual as surrounded by language that he or she cannot control or escape. Derrida challenged traditional hierarchies between clarity and confusion, truth and falsehood, so that all interpretations of reality are misinterpretations or, at best, merely contextual and provisional. We never can say with any certainty that we have found “the truth.”
So both Foucault and Derrida rejected any comprehensive vision of reality, which led by default to a celebration of the completely unrestricted freedom of the self. Jean-François Lyotard especially came to see this form of total freedom as the essence of postmodernism. Yet as Tom Wolfe wryly observes, whenever these philosophers needed bypass surgery or a root canal, they were not in the habit of challenging the oppressive institutions of medical knowledge or dental accreditation but would put their trust in the authority of these “experts.”5
Laden with inconsistencies, the “free play” of postmodernism has caused confusion and havoc in the arena of modern sexuality. It emphasizes the importance of embodiment and sexual experience but at the same time takes away any coherent basis for choosing which experience. Whereas expressivism generally seeks authenticity and intimacy, so that sexual encounters are at least directed toward these goals, postmodernism seeks sexual experience merely for its own sake, serving no greater purpose. In his snapshot of American life at the dawn of the third millennium, Wolfe suggests that postmodernism, despite its obvious flaws, has become the dominant way of thinking, not because it makes sense of life, but because it affirms the highest modern priority: unconstrained liberty.
On the basis of his wide-ranging study of 18- to 23-year-olds, sociologist Christian Smith makes some important observations about this generation as it is caught up in the vortex of postmodern freedom. Smith ends his sociological narrative with a prophetic portrait of these emerging adults as “sovereign individuals lacking conviction or direction.”6 They value freedom but are confused about what to do with it. They value information but have no coherent lens through which to organize it, and so they find themselves overwhelmed by it. They value diversity but have no standard for evaluating differences, which become fuzzy and gray. They want to keep their options open, but openness easily becomes a void filled by default imperatives: the easy rush of pornography, consumerism, uncommitted relationships, the next big experience, and so on.
Critiquing Modern Freedom
Although these three contemporary visions of freedom are quite different and battle with each other, what gives them so much combined force is that they are built on a shared foundation. At their core, they agree that each of us should be free to define and pursue life as we see fit. This idea of unrestricted personal choice is positively encouraged through the ever-expanding options offered by the novelty-machine that is consumerism.
Although this context has become our unquestioned horizon, theologian Stanley Hauerwas argues that it has hopelessly distorted our vision of who we are and how we relate to one another. This liberal/capitalist matrix permeates every part of our lives, he says, imposing its own comprehensive vision of the “good life” and making it difficult to appreciate any alternative to this way of living. Indeed, this vision is so pervasive that even most Christian thinking about ethics, including sexual ethics, operates unquestioningly within it. The church’s first task, then, is to recognize and name the rival gods.7
Hauerwas develops his critique of modern freedom by pointing to the common moral discussion of “values.” In particular, liberal social contexts form people within the perspective of “normal nihilism,” meaning a shared acknowledgment that our moral values can only ever be contingent.8 Regardless of how strongly we hold these values, in the end they stand only on the strength of our personal convictions and not on any external truth. It is fine to have strong beliefs, of course, as long as we do not claim any special authority for our way of life or try to impose it on anyone else.
This perspective is rooted in the modern project itself, which cuts people off from any overarching story, such as God’s creation, redemption, and progressive restoration of his creation as described in Scripture. The denial of any sort of metanarrative encourages the illusion that we can create our own story and personal identity out of thin air, simply through our personal choices.9
One member of the US Supreme Court described this vision of modern freedom succinctly: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”10 We would be hard pressed to find many within mainstream culture who disagree with this vision. Yet this story is deceptive. Although it masquerades as the neutrality of free choice, it actually promotes its own vision of life and so seeks to manipulate the choices we make.
The Modern Vision of Sexuality: Two Myths but One Illusion to Live By
In the realm of sexuality and relationships, the modern vision of freedom is expressed under two myths, the “romanticist” and the “realist,” both of which have become pervasive in our culture. Romanticism describes the freedom of the expressive individual. It says we should freely express with our bodies what we feel in our hearts; how we feel about someone should determine how far we go with him or her sexually. This is encouraged by the recent creation of “sexuality” as a type of distinct and core part of our identity that we must actively express to become a whole self. Sexual expression becomes an issue of personal integrity, of being true to the inner testimony of our desires, especially the sexual ones.
Realism, in contrast to romanticism, represents the freedom of the utilitarian individual. Realism tries to “demystify” sex by reducing it to a sort of “happiness technology” that offers fulfillment in the most immediate sense.11 Sex becomes an important pursuit within the utilitarian priority of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Realism further demystifies sex by acknowledging that premarital sex is happening whether we like it or not, and so claims that the best we can do is to limit the potential damage, in the narrow terms of preventing pregnancy or disease.
Although romanticism and realism appear to be opposites, Hauerwas says that these expressive and utilitarian paths to “freedom” both spring from the same underlying philosophy. Despite claiming to be morally neutral, realists accept the modern moral imperative that each person should do what seems best to him or her. Meanwhile, romanticism says that “love”—in the limited sense of passionate or affectionate feeling—is the necessary condition for both sex and marriage. Realism and romanticism also both insist that we should respect sex as a “private” matter. They both assert the basic moral premise that sex should be merely consensual.12
Although accepted as permanent features on the sexual landscape, romanticism and realism fail to go to the heart of the issue; they do not establish any solid ground on which to build their own visions of “authentic” relationships. In other words, they refuse to make the connection between personal character and authentic sexuality. Indeed, lurking beneath modern notions of what we should do in our sexual lives is the more fundamental question of who we should be. The key weakness of romanticism is that it seeks intimacy but refuses to encourage the habits that form people who are able to enter into and sustain genuinely intimate relationships. This is because real intimacy requires giving ourselves faithfully and permanently to another person in vulnerable trust. It is only in this context of safety that genuine intimacy, as opposed to just a powerful romantic or sexual attraction, can develop.
This puts young women, in particular, in a “double bind.” Emerging adults today are expected to want to be in traditional committed relationships, but they are also encouraged to want sex “without strings attached.” Marrying in their early twenties is no longer attractive to many young women with potential careers ahead of them, and so they are taught to avoid getting too emotionally attached. They don’t want to be “tied down” to one person for the long run, but they want to enjoy companionship and sex in the meantime.13
This creates a difficult scenario for both men and women, generating cognitive and relational dissonance. It is also questionable whether this sort of relational formation can suddenly be set aside at some point in the distant future. Our society’s approach to sexual formation within emerging adulthood has wildly underestimated what is required to enter into and sustain these sorts of durable partnerships.
In a nationwide survey of American men, 62 percent of unmarried 25- to 29-year-olds and 51 percent of unmarried 30- to 34-year-olds said they were “not interested in getting married anytime soon.” Eighty-one percent of the younger group and 74 percent of the older one agreed that “at this stage of your life, you want to have fun and freedom.”14 It is stunning to think that in previous generations most of these men would already be married fathers of multiple children.
To sum up, romanticism and realism agree that our sexual lives should be founded upon personal freedom, but they each fail to perceive that we are not as free as we think.
An Argument from the Outer Limits: Consensual Degradation
The problem with consent as the basic moral premise for sexuality is highlighted at the extreme end of the spectrum in the area of hard-core pornography. An essay highlighting the challenges of this philosophy caused a storm in the blogosphere.15 The writer described going to a basement studio in San Francisco to watch, in the company of a small participating crowd, the filming of an explicit film. The choreographed narrative involved scenes with particularly extreme levels of degradation, abuse, and even mild levels of torture, such as electrocution.
The author describes a regular-looking crowd primarily made up of couples having a night out. She also notes that the lead actress had signed a detailed consent form and left the studio feeling upbeat and reportedly keen to repeat the experience. Obviously, this incident raises some important questions. On the basis of the modern principle that consent is king, it is difficult to challenge this filming on moral grounds because everyone involved was a willing participant and left feeling “happy.” Yet the incident demonstrates the deep inadequacies of our cultural vision of freedom and sexuality.
Rod Dreher commented, in the ensuing debate, that there is nothing new about people seeking degrading sexual experiences. The problem is that this is becoming increasingly acceptable and even mainstream because our society now lacks a coherent moral framework within which these desires can be identified as deviant. In the modern moral void, “You can have whatever you desire,” writes Dreher. “If you choose hell, then we will call it good, because it is freely chosen, and brings you pleasure.”16
Yet this is not a “morally neutral” principle. It actively degrades and undermines the dignity of human sexuality while spreading this vision through the internet. In fact, the sex industry’s evangelistic zeal is such that most explicit online content—fully 90 percent—is consumed free of charge. So, far from being a private consensual transaction, pornography is publicly and formatively shaping modern sexuality. That basement in San Francisco seems a long way from the church’s vision of sexuality. Yet as Christians we too have been wooed by the idea of sexuality as a private matter, purely a concern between consenting adults behind closed doors. Increasingly, then, the church has no place in the bedrooms of believers.
The Private Self in Our Midst
Church leaders have often failed to understand how distinctive the Christian vision of sexuality really is and to articulate this vision as a convincing alternative to secular norms. As a result, Christian sexual ethics also appear to be operating out of the same romantic/realist fallacy as the secular perspective.17
In the epilogue to his book Sex God, former pastor Rob Bell describes a marriage he blessed in an unconventional wedding ceremony that lasted only seven minutes.18 At one point in the service the couple released a cluster of helium balloons as symbols of their previous failed marriages, terminated pregnancies, affairs, and unsuccessful relationships. They made this gesture as a picture of starting afresh together. Bell observes that they walked into an adjoining field, “just the two of them, holding hands, standing in knee-high grass, exchanging words that only they could hear,” before letting go of the balloons. Unfortunately, the marriage ended acrimoniously a few years later. This haunting story simply shows, Bell tells us, that “life is messy” but that God’s grace and healing are endless.
This story truly is a tragedy; it points to the desperate quality of so many relationships today, even within the church. But there is a far greater tragedy underlying the tale. Christian marriages should be built on a fundamentally different vision of personal identity and relationships than their secular counterparts. Rather than representing a contract between two ultimately independent people, Christian marriage is a covenant entered into sacrificially, within and for the benefit of the church. It is only within a committed community of faith that our intimate relationships can be properly supported and find their ultimate purpose.
Given the couple’s messy history of relational failure, one wonders whether the marriage’s sad end was anything but inevitable without greater support from the church community, both before and after their wedding. Yet there is no mention of the role of their church community. The book consistently emphasizes the private dynamics within marriage as being the critical determinant of success. For Bell, the priority of Christian marriage is the pursuit of sexual and emotional intimacy, exclusivity, and trust. At one point in the book he says, “A marriage is between those two people, not us. It’s not ours, it’s theirs.”19
Although its overall intention is to tie Christian sexuality into the greater story of God’s redemption and reconciliation of all creation, the book ironically depicts marriage and sexuality as private matters to be protected from outside influence or inquiry. But framing Christian relationships in the terms of modern romanticism, isolated from the corporate life of the church, actually is a reflection of cultural conformity—not of the transformation that Bell is aiming for.
If the radically free modern self is also sitting in the sanctuary, then the question is, how did this vision of freedom become so pervasive among the very people who are called to live according to a different vision?
The Evolution of Radical Individualism
In the 1830s, French social philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville made some insightful observations about what he called the “habits of the heart” of the American people, which gave them and their country its specific character.20 He focused on the American emphases on family life, religious traditions, and participation in local politics as practices that would create the sort of person who could sustain committed relationships and a connection to the wider community. But he also worried that American “individualism” (he was one of the first to use the term) was a force that could eventually isolate people from each other and undermine the very freedom they prized so highly.
With this warning in mind, a group of sociologists from the University of California at Berkeley undertook a comprehensive survey of American identity and relationships, interviewing people from all walks of life. Reflecting on their findings, they observed that the earlier forms of individualism observed by Tocqueville had, indeed, morphed into a radical individualism that saw the individual as the a priori reality of life—a self-sufficient atomic particle amid a cloud of other atoms.21 Psychologist Paul Vitz calls this outlook “selfism,” which he says is supported by modern psychology’s vision of personal identity.22 Rather than seeing the self as necessarily connected to other people, so that we can become our full selves only within relationships, “selfism” views each person as an autonomous being and often locates the source of our problems in formative relationships with our parents and siblings. Within this model, true freedom involves becoming self-sufficient and freeing ourselves from the control and dysfunction of other people.
Picking up on Tocqueville’s prediction, the Berkeley sociologists observe that today’s radical individualism has become cancerous, undermining the very significance we seek by cutting us off from meaningful relationships and broader social commitments. It is, they say, an influential cultural illusion that implies we can—and must—come to our deepest beliefs in the isolation of our private selves.23 This has led to the endemic notion that love and marriage primarily have to do with personal gratification, a notion that has stripped relationships of their traditional social function of providing people with stable, committed contexts that tie them into the larger society.24
Creating Private Space
The modern conviction that our private lives are entirely our own, to be lived as we see fit, has a specific and quite recent history. The Enlightenment created a separation between “public” and “private” spaces, so that public spaces such as universities, legislatures, and courts could become places of reasoned debate, free from the prejudices of religion and the vagaries of emotion. The private realm—especially the home and the local church—was the place where love and faith, the things of the heart, could be freely expressed according to personal taste.
What was critical for Enlightenment thinkers was the idea that these spaces needed to be kept separate so as not to encroach upon each other. The utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill implanted the then controversial but now unquestioned idea that our private lives are nobody else’s business, unless we directly hurt someone else. This became known as the “harm principle,” meaning that no one has a right to interfere with me for my benefit, but only to prevent direct harm to others.25
Although there has always been a tension between the individual and social aspects of personal identity, the Enlightenment decisively created the concept of “private life” that has become so sacrosanct in our culture. But this separation is clearly illusory, because our so-called private lives are already deeply formed by social and cultural practices that shape us in every way. But this is a two-way dynamic. What goes on in our bedrooms—or on our computer screens, for that matter—will also ultimately influence our collective vision and approach to sexuality and relationships.
During my time in ministry in London, one of my pastoral responsibilities was to recruit, mentor, and oversee small-group leaders in the church. On more than one occasion, some of the seemingly mature Christian leaders approached us to let us know that they were living together, although they were not yet married. What was most surprising in each case was that they came forward not in order to resign their positions as leaders or to seek counsel but just “to put us in the picture.”
Similarly, over the years, a number of Christian couples confided in us that they had made private marriage vows before God or been married legally in secret sometime before their “public” wedding. This idea that our sexual lives are purely private spaces has become a cardinal conviction among many modern Christians, as well as within the broader culture. Indeed, there often now appears to be no sense of connection between our personal relationships and the greater purposes of the wider church community.
Drowning Narcissus: The Narrowing of Self-Identity and Relationships
An ironic consequence of the emergence of this radically free self is that instead of making us more rounded individuals by exposing us to a more diverse range of people and influences, it has actually narrowed our social horizons and led to what Francis Fukuyama calls our “moral miniaturization.”26 As we have abandoned extended families and larger social organizations such as the church as our primary communities, we have simultaneously replaced them with smaller affinity groups, such as the gym, work colleagues, wine clubs, niche or single-generation churches, and even marriages. These can all become “lifestyle enclaves.”27
These small voluntary associations enable us to pick and choose our own values, allowing us to reconcile the contradictory desires for autonomy and community. In other words, we choose to be with people we like, people we are comfortable with . . . people like us. This is intensified by the transition to “virtual” relationships—via social media, chat rooms, and online pornography—that encourage us to further fragment ourselves as we select different virtual sources to meet our desires and personal needs. We can even create multiple avatars of ourselves to inhabit infinite virtual contexts.
In Greek mythology, the youth Narcissus became so captivated by his own reflection in the water that he eventually fell into the image and drowned. This ancient insight helps describe what is happening within modern relationships. The narrowing of our social horizons reflects a similar tendency toward self-absorption as we seek out those in our own image. We are told that this path leads toward personal freedom, but it is creating a society made up of individuals who are drowning in their own personas.
The enduring appeal and fascination of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is the mystery of love, which could cross even the watertight boundaries of the nineteenth-century English class system. The subversive power of romantic love is that it calls us to move beyond ourselves, to put ourselves at risk for the sake of something broader than our personal horizons. Despite the modern imperative to be radically free, we still yearn for intimacy that draws us beyond the confines of ourselves. This is in step with the trajectory of the gospel, which calls us into sacrificial relationships within a community of people who are not like us. Paul’s churches were complex because they were diverse, including Jews and gentiles, slaves and their owners, rich and poor. This unity in diversity, which was operating within and resisting a highly stratified society, was the miracle of the gospel and was only possible through the Spirit.
“Going Solo”
In his challenging book Going Solo, sociologist Eric Klinenberg says that although we have tracked the growing numbers of single, cohabiting, and unmarried people in America, one of the most important trends over the last fifty years has gone largely unnoticed: the growing number of people who are choosing to live alone.28 The change has been dramatic.
In 1950, there were about four million Americans living alone, a little less than 10 percent of all households. Today there are more than thirty-two million “singletons,” as Klinenberg calls them, accounting for about 28 percent of all American households.29 The fastest growing age group of people living alone is those under thirty-five, and this trend is even more pronounced in big cities, where singletons are closer to one-half of all households. It seems that we are increasingly willing to pay a premium for the privilege of living alone, which is becoming the quintessential modern expression of personal freedom.
Klinenberg discovered that these singletons, although living alone, did not for the most part feel isolated or lonely. In fact, he says, they tended to be more socially engaged than married peers. Only a small minority found themselves locked in a downward spiral of isolation and depression.
Although Klinenberg puts a positive spin on these social developments, we can also see this trend from a different angle. The Christian invitation into self-giving relationships stretches us beyond the narrow concerns of our personal preferences and reflects Jesus’s pouring himself out for the sake of others. The gospel beckons us beyond the detached safety of personal sovereignty and relationships on our own terms, into the demands and rewards of genuine community.
My concern is not that “going solo” removes us from relationships but that it changes the nature of our relationships. As Klinenberg says, the main impulse for choosing to live alone is that it offers us freedom to do what we want, when we want to, without concern about someone else’s eyes looking over us and passing judgment.30 Lying at the heart of this important “solo” trend is the modern desire to be in control of our lives, especially our relationships. Although Klinenberg sees this trend as a positive social development, it is hard to see how it fosters the sort of character and rhythms that enable us to form and sustain lasting relationships. Rather than enhancing our relationships, surely the narrowing of our social and moral horizons impoverishes them in the long run.
In a similar vein, Christian Smith makes some interesting observations about emerging adults and their view of personal freedom. Smith observes that this 18–23 age group includes the least religious adults in the United States today, with only about 20 percent attending a religious service weekly.31 It is not that they are much less spiritually or religiously engaged than previous generations; traditionally, this stage of life is one in which religious commitments are loosened, when young people explore the freedom that comes after leaving home and before the responsibilities of marriage and family. What is of more concern is that this open-ended, freewheeling stage of life is becoming longer.32 There are even signs that, for some, this stage can morph into a prolonged adolescence that lasts well into their forties and beyond. What used to be a brief transitional phase is becoming a permanent lifestyle choice.
This trend has important implications for pastors. People are delaying or avoiding any greater commitment to their faith or to the demands of committed relationships such as marriage and family. Within the dazzling array of choices available, our consumerist mentality tempts us to keep our options open for as long as possible.
This “Peter Pan” syndrome is most enticing in big cities, where the possibilities appear endless. We can find a kindred group to suit any stage of life and make us feel at home. What is tragic about this social phenomenon, something that my wife and I observed at close quarters among our predominantly young congregation in London, is that most people did not consciously choose to remain in this stage of life. Many people found themselves trapped in a cycle that they seemed unable to understand or break out of. For instance, their romantic relationships would break down for similar reasons at similar stages. One of our key challenges as pastors of this generation is to help people progress through this stage of life into more mature stages of development.
Freedom at the Altar: The Crisis in Christian Relationships
Within the church, the tragedy of the “freedom trap” has dramatically affected our approach to both marriage and singleness. Along with the secular world, the church has fallen into the snare of sanctifying personal autonomy as a virtue. We are, for instance, becoming accustomed to watching the breakup of Christian marriages with genuine but resigned sadness. Yet within the church we seek to resist and rise above modern fatalism. Jesus’s work of atonement involved reconciling, or putting back together, what had been fractured—our relationships with God, ourselves, each other, and creation. We seek to embody this thoroughgoing reconciliation within the community of faith as the “firstfruits” of the kingdom of God. If Thomas Hobbes’s bleak vision represents the social fragmentation of Babel, the Christian vision seeks the social reconciliation of Pentecost.
It is perhaps in our marriages that we can most clearly witness to the gospel of peace and reconciliation. Paul expresses the stunning conviction that Christian marriage should stand as a living metaphor for the self-giving love between Christ and his church.33 This is the profound mystery of Christian sexuality. We are called to walk a radical middle path, resisting both the saccharine fantasy of modern romanticism and the grim fatalism of Hobbes’s realism.
Although marriage offers many wonderful benefits, we also need to teach the essential crisis that lies at the heart of marriage. The task of weaving together two different stories, personalities, and family backgrounds is costly work that we cannot take lightly. Children, although a blessing and gift, provide even stiffer challenges. If marriage is like an earthquake that shakes our world, then the demands of young children are more like a city-leveling tsunami. We need to stand firmly on both feet, then, in our approach to and teaching about marriage. Marriage is a gift, but it’s also a crisis.
Ties That Loose: Getting Caught in the “Freedom Trap”
The modern vision of freedom encourages us to keep our options “in play” and to be skeptical about entering into ties that bind us. Today independence is dressed up as the ultimate form of maturity, so that living alone is becoming de rigueur for sophisticated urbanites who can afford it. Although we still crave intimacy and connection, self-sufficiency is lauded as the cardinal modern virtue.
This has made it difficult for men, in particular, to take the ultimate risk of entering a committed relationship. There may be many different reasons for this, depending on the person and his specific circumstances. Young men who have not had constructive male exemplars—usually a father—and who have not been positively initiated into adulthood often face real challenges. They can become confused about how to make the bold step into a permanent relationship. This pathway to maturity is a journey in which we need guidance from those who can most deeply affirm our identity. The modern myth is that we can become whole and mature on our own.
Yet every known civilization throughout history has placed enormous significance on the rites and rituals that affirm boys and usher them into adult maturity and responsibility, as well as those that initiate girls into womanhood. Sadly, our culture’s vision of personal freedom and its adoration of youth are prolonging adolescence, creating significant challenges in nurturing mature relationships within the church.
Concluding Thoughts: Liberty at What Cost?
The second part of this book will discuss how we might address the complex matrix that has been created by the “freedom trap.” At this stage, I want to highlight the extent to which the modern self, with its focus on being free in the negative sense of being free from other people, has seeped into the Christian imagination and distorted our vision of sexuality and relationships. The “freedom trap” is one of the major challenges facing the church and its formation of mature disciples today.
1. Regnerus and Uecker, Premarital Sex, 35.
2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin Classics, 1985), xiii.
3. Stanley Hauerwas, A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2000), 13–14.
4. As Charles Taylor describes, Foucault presented the individual as “constructed through relations of power and modes of discipline.” See Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 488.
5. Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), 13.
6. Smith, Souls in Transition, 292–94.
7. Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 12.
8. Stanley Hauerwas, “Preaching as though We Had Enemies,” First Things 53 (May 1, 1995): 45–49.
9. Ibid., 48.
10. See the plurality opinion of Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992).
11. Stanley Hauerwas and Allen Verhey, “From Conduct to Character: A Guide to Sexual Adventure,” Reformed Journal 36, no. 11 (November 1, 1986): 12–16.
12. In a wide-ranging survey of American college women, for instance, nearly 90 percent agreed with the statement “I should not judge anyone’s sexual conduct except my own.” See Norval Glenn and Elizabeth Marquardt, Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right: College Women on Dating and Mating Today (New York: Institute for American Values, 2001).
13. Regnerus and Uecker, Premarital Sex, 149.
14. Ibid., 171.
15. Emily Witt, “What Do You Desire?,” n+1 16 (Spring 2013).
16. Rod Dreher, “Slouching towards Googletopia,” The American Conservative, May 13, 2013, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/slouching-towards-googletopia/.
17. Stanley Hauerwas, “Sex in Public: How Adventurous Christians Are Doing It,” The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 481–504.
18. Rob Bell, Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections between Sexuality and Spirituality (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 174–75.
19. Ibid., 138.
20. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Doubleday, 1969).
21. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, vii.
22. Vitz, Psychology as Religion, 57–58.
23. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 65.
24. Ibid., 83.
25. Taylor, Secular Age, 484.
26. See Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 49, 243, 281–82.
27. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 71–75.
28. Eric Klinenberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).
29. Ibid., 5–6.
30. Ibid., 17, 89.
31. Smith, Souls in Transition, 94–95.
32. Ibid., 6, 56.
33. Eph. 5:31–33.