Defiance or Repentance? Making Sense of the Sexual Revolution

Every once in a while a prominent person writes a moving article about how he or she has awoken – albeit too late – to the false and tragic promise of the sexual revolution. Readers nod their heads in sober agreement, wondering to themselves if such public displays of repentance might have an effect on the broader culture. But then someone else, some diehard feminist, invariably writes a piece in which she defiantly affirms her liberated life trajectory, however filled that life might be with misery, emptiness, and regret.

This cycle has been replayed over the past few days. In the British Daily Mail A.N. Wilson admits that despite his warm embrace of the sexual revolution as a youth, he is now appalled at its consequences. The proliferation of abortion as birth control, divorce, family breakup, and sexually transmitted diseases belies any claim that western society’s great fifty year experiment has been a boon for the pursuit of happiness.

Back in the Fifties, GfK National Opinon Poll conducted a survey asking how happy people felt on a sliding scale — from very happy to very unhappy.

In 1957, 52 per cent said they were ‘very happy’. By 2005, the same set of questions found only 36 per cent were ‘very happy’, and the figures are falling.

More than half of those questioned in the GfK’s most recent survey said that it was a stable relationship which made them happy. Half those who were married said they were ‘very happy’, compared with only a quarter of singles.

The truth is that the Sexual Revolution had the power to alter our way of life, but it could not alter our essential nature; it could not alter the reality of who and what we are as human beings…. [A]s the opinion poll shows, most of us feel at a very deep level that what will make us very happy is not romping with a succession of lovers.

But in the New York Magazine Elizabeth Wurtzel offers a different perspective on all of this. It’s not that she disputes the facts. Her own life experience, though crowned with literary success, has largely been one of personal failure, misery, and loneliness, as she herself describes it.

I am committed to feminism and don’t understand why anyone would agree to be party to a relationship that is not absolutely equal. I believe women who are supported by men are prostitutes, that is that ….

For a while after my first book came out, I went home with a different man every night and did heroin every day—which showed my good sense, because the rest of the time I was completely out of control. Even now, I am always in love—or else I am getting over the last person or getting started with the next one. But I worry about growing old this way. Because of divorce, dating never ends for anybody … But I don’t think I really want to be going to the new P. T. Anderson movie and Mission Chinese with someone new when I’m 85. And I don’t think anyone will want to be doing that with me. I am lucky: I run, and Gyrotonic sessions three times a week have kept me in the same shape I have always been in. But age scares me….

Maybe I should have been wiser. But the only way I could have was to have been a completely different person, along the way probably becoming a different writer, most likely a lousy one. I am fortunate to have been well paid for an almost pathological honesty, and the only way I am able to write that way is by being that way. It has been worth it—of course it has been—because there is a higher price attached to rare attributes than common ones.

Still, I wonder if I ever will be okay after this last year. I don’t live anywhere, have not had a home for too long, and the physical estrangement is psychically debilitating. I used to be a happy person who had a lot of fun—even depression did not keep me from being a happy person who had a lot of fun… I feel sick. There is a gap between me and everyone, like a perforated box of polluted air is separating me from people: The space from me to anyone who might understand how lousy I feel seems vast. I am harsh and defeated, and I never thought I would describe myself in either way. The list of things I can’t be bothered with goes on forever. The list of things that bother me goes on forever.

“I have lost my life,” she admits. Still, she is defiant: “this story has the best possible ending, because I am telling it.” The pursuit of happiness may have landed her in the desert but at least her life is her own, her great self-expression.

At the Gospel Coalition Bart Gingerich warns in “The Millennial Generation’s Acceptable Sin” that the sexual revolution has become nearly as defining among young Evangelicals as it is among Americans at large, with anywhere from 44-80% of unmarried Evangelicals in the ages of 18-29 having engaged in what Russell Moore explains we should continue to call fornication – sex outside of marriage. Gingerich concludes with the warning that the church minimizes this problem to its own destruction.

Beware your acceptable sins—they are the ones that will kill you. When a society caves in to one particular sin and twists the gospel to defend it (e.g. the antebellum South with slavery) that vice will become a canker on the soul and will eventually bring it to ruin.

We are called to purity by virtue of the gospel’s claim on our lives. We also owe it as a service of charity and truth to demonstrate to a society lost in its revolutionary liberty that there is indeed another way. If Wurtzel’s defiant despair tracks the unrepentant life of Judas, Wilson’s repentant hope points us to the restoration of Peter.

The old American cliche is that you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube; and it is usually a metaphor used to suggest that it is impossible to turn the clock back in matters of public behaviour and morality. Actually, you know, I think that is wrong.

Wilson detects a backlash among the younger generation, a refreshing desire among some young people to do better than their parents, perhaps even to rediscover the wisdom of the past.

Our generation … got it all so horribly wrong. We ignored the obvious fact that moral conventions develop in human societies for a reason. We may have thought it was ‘hypocritical’ to condemn any form of sexual behaviour, and we may have dismissed the undoubted happiness felt by married people as stuffy, repressed and old hat.

But we were wrong, wrong, wrong.

Two generations have grown up — comprising children of selfish grown-ups who put their own momentary emotional needs and impulses before family stability and the needs of their children. However, I don’t think this behaviour can last much longer. The price we all pay for the fragmentation of society, caused by the break-up of so many homes, will surely lead to a massive rethink.

At least, let’s hope so.

If the NAE represents the church, it is treading in dangerous waters

I am loath to comment on the criticisms World Magazine has been heaping upon the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) for taking money from the pro-contraception National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, but there are a few points of contention here that are worth your attention.

For those of you not following the story, World editor Marvin Olasky, a leading Evangelical in the (compassionate) conservative movement, summarizes the story as he sees it here. Olasky writes,

The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, founded in 1996, is devoted to promoting contraceptive use by the unmarried. CEO Sarah Brown clearly enunciates its mission: “Whatever the proposition on a given day, ask yourself one simple question: Does it increase women’s access to good contraceptive care? If the answer is no, oppose it!”

The annual budget of the NAE, of which several confessional Reformed denominations are a part, is approximately $1 million. That the National Campaign has given the NAE a $1 million grant is therefore as significant for the functioning of the NAE as it is noteworthy in bringing together what Olasky calls “strange bedfellows.”

The Campaign’s website describes the benefits of its NAE investment: “Through a series of papers, projects, and meetings, the NAE seeks to spark productive conversation, deliberation, and action among evangelicals regarding sexuality, healthy family formation, and abortion reduction.”

So what happened? You should really read Olasky’s entire piece, but here are the most important parts:

In April, the Relevate Group, headed by Gabe Lyons, held its Q Gathering in Washington, D.C. Young evangelicals gathered to hear speakers and panels address numerous topics, including abortion reduction. The speaker who dominated that panel was none other than the Campaign’s Sarah Brown. It turns out that the NAE paid $10,000 to Q and pushed to include Brown. Brown argued that churches should promote contraceptive use by their unmarried singles….

As the one-sided panel concluded, 372 audience members had the opportunity to answer electronically this question, “Do you believe churches should advocate contraception for their single 20-somethings?” Almost two-thirds voted yes….

News reports noted that result as evidence that the debate over contraceptive use by the unmarried is over, since even evangelicals favor it.

On the website of the NAE one finds the following statement:

Several sources have mistakenly claimed that the National Association of Evangelicals endorses or promotes the use of contraception by unmarried Christian young adults. No. NAE has never done so. NAE promotes, endorses and teaches the biblical standard of God’s gift of sex only within marriage between one man and one woman.

At the same time, in another article Olasky presents the following as part of the response of NAE President Leith Anderson to Olasky’s concerns:

“We never want to promote or condone sexual immorality,” NAE President Leith Anderson wrote in response to my questions: “But, we are told that contraceptives can reduce abortions and we want to stop abortions.” (Olasky provides a link  to this article where one can find the fuller conversation.)

This is a fascinating story. We have a conservative Evangelical journal going after a quasi-ecclesiastical organization (i.e., an organization that represents denominations) for compromising its fidelity to biblical teaching on sexual morality in the name of a prudential effort to reduce abortion. Now for the purposes of this blog post let’s set aside all questions of whether or not handing out free contraceptives is the wisest way to reduce the prevalence of abortion. I would submit that the NAE has brought this trouble upon itself by failing to see that the purpose of an ecclesiastical organization (even a quasi- one like the NAE) is to speak the revealed truths of the word while abstaining from involvement in politics or in civic campaigns that involve prudential judgments about the application of biblical teachings in the effort to achieve particular goals of justice. Political and civic organizations may rightly reason that particular ideal ends (i.e., reducing abortion) sometimes justify unideal means (i.e., handing out contraceptives to singles), but churches have no business diluting their presentation of the word by making these sort of judgments. At the very least, asWorldpoints out, NAE ought to be providing moral clarity on this point. Given the response of the media to what NAE has been doing, whatever the NAE may claim, this clarity is not getting through.

The fact is, the best thing the church can contribute to the cultural crisis of abortion and sexual promiscuity is to speak clearly to what Scripture says about these matters, both in terms of law and of gospel. To be sure, the church sometimes needs to make public statements regarding issues of broader cultural concern. But the content of those statements still needs to be that of the word, nothing more and nothing less.

What is the nature of the crisis at hand? It’s not just about abortion. Olasky writes,

Contraception among the unmarried, sold as liberating, has created a new slavery: Many young women feel pushed into sexual activity because guys want them to do what “everyone else” is doing, purportedly risk-free. Many young evangelicals understand that contraceptive use by unmarried individuals enables sinful behavior.

In a book review in Christianity Today Sharon Hodde Miller makes a strong case for the devastation that has been brought by the sexual revolution, and the decisive role the birth control pill has played in that process.

As [Mary] Eberstadt sees it [in her book, Adam and Eve After the Pill], the contraceptive pill has launched us into a new age in which responsibility has been divorced from sex. And while it is easy to point fingers at the secular world for embracing this reproductive technology, Christians are complicit in its hold on our culture. Most Christians do not want to be told what to do with their bodies any more than non-Christians, and the Pill has made that freedom possible….

Using contraception is not a private act, nor is it a neutral one. Eberstadt’s book is Exhibit A of this reality.

Knowing this, pastors cannot address the widespread sexual brokenness in our culture simply by encouraging married sex. They must also address the ideology and theology behind the brokenness, and contraception is Ground Zero for those discussions.

If the church is to have anything at all to say to the broader cultural crisis it is to proclaim the whole truth of Scripture regarding sexuality, marriage, and care for children. To be sure, the broader society will not be able to uphold this moral standard, particularly not through government coercion. But simply hearing the truth about human beings and sexuality, loud and clear, is absolutely crucial in a world in which people are being bombarded continually with a completely contrary (and deceiving) message. Sex is not an arena of private morality. It matters for the basic health and prosperity of human society as well as for individuals, and the church needs to demonstrate why that is the case.

There is a place for governmental and civic organizations to ask the questions about what we should do when people do not live as they should, what prudential steps we should take to eliminate the worst evils, and so forth. In fact, this fits nicely into the mission of an institution like World Magazine. But it is not the job of the church. Indeed, if there was ever an illustration for the need for the two kingdoms doctrine this is it. The task of the church is to proclaim the whole counsel of God and to exhibit that counsel in the love of its members (whom it lovingly trains and disciplines). That task should never, ever be confused with the need to work out ways of restraining evil or alleviating its tragic consequences through coercive or otherwise prudential civic endeavors. The clarity of the gospel depends on it.