Sexual Expression Is a Worldview Issue

I just came across this piece by Rod Dreher explaining why “gay marriage is not just a social revolution but a cosmological one” and had to post an excerpt. It explores the subject of marriage as a worldview issue—something I discussed in my post this morning:

Rieff, who died in 2006, was an unbeliever, but he understood that religion is the key to understanding any culture. For Rieff, the essence of any and every culture can be identified by what it forbids. Each imposes a series of moral demands on its members, for the sake of serving communal purposes, and helps them cope with these demands. A culture requires a cultus—a sense of sacred order, a cosmology that roots these moral demands within a metaphysical framework….

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.” 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 people do with their sexuality cannot be separated from what the human person is….

[A]s Rieff recognizes, Christianity did establish a way to harness the sexual instinct, embed it within a community, and direct it in positive ways.

What makes our own era different from the past, says Rieff, is that we have ceased to believe in the Christian cultural framework, yet we have made it impossible to believe in any other that does what culture must do: restrain individual passions and channel them creatively toward communal purposes.

Rather, in the modern era, we have inverted the role of culture. Instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a society that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions.

How this came to be is a complicated story involving the rise of humanism, the advent of the Enlightenment, and the coming of modernity. As philosopher Charles Taylor writes in his magisterial religious and cultural history A Secular Age, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).” To be modern is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition….

[F]reedom and authenticity were to be found not in sexual withholding (the Christian view) but in sexual expression and assertion. That is how the modern American claims his freedom.

To Rieff, ours is a particular kind of “revolutionary epoch” because the revolution cannot by its nature be institutionalized. Because it denies the possibility of communal knowledge of binding truths transcending the individual, the revolution cannot establish a stable social order….

Our post-Christian culture, then, is an “anti-culture.” We are compelled by the logic of modernity and the myth of individual freedom to continue tearing away the last vestiges of the old order, convinced that true happiness and harmony will be ours once all limits have been nullified.

His article is sobering. When our culture lost the Christian view of the human person and each person became his own authority, we started down a dangerous road—one that ultimately won’t be able to sustain culture itself. The important thing to note here is that we can’t patch this up by convincing people to accept a man/woman view of marriage. The problem is much, much deeper than that.

As apologists, we preach Christ to the world because He is worthy, and we love Him, and we hope to help others see Him clearly enough to love Him. Rod Dreher’s article is a reminder that we should never be tempted to think that working to effect social change is more important than calling people to Christ and helping them understand our place in His world. For where He who is the True, the Good, and the Beautiful goes, truth, goodness, and beauty follow.

We don’t realize how much Christianity changed our civilization. And we don’t realize how much we’ll lose once we walk away from it.

Comments

[Jakejordan]

Outstanding observations Amy.

I am having a pretty lengthy discussion over in a closed FB group about how to step into the homosexual community in really practical ways as a believer.

The part of this editorial that really rings true to that conversation for me is this

"The important thing to note here is that we can’t patch this up by convincing people to accept a man/woman view of marriage. The problem is much, much deeper than that."

Finding ways to love people in habitual sin is extremely tough as a sinner - and your observations remind me of the fact that convincing others that their sin is wrong, and not focusing on sharing the person of Christ can get lost.

Thanks for the insight and postin Dreher's article.

[Amy]

Thanks, Jake. Have the people in your group read The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert? I still haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I've read interviews with the author, and it sounds like you all might benefit from reading her story.