Sexual Morality and the Political Divide

Although he was not the first to notice it, it’s fair to credit E. Michael Jones with coining the phrase “sexual liberation is political control.” It was the main thesis and subtitle of his 1996 effort, Libido Dominandi, itself something of an elaboration of his earlier work found in Degenerate Moderns. As the introduction to Libido mentions, pornography was used during the Second Intifada to demoralize and pacify the occupied Palestinian civilians, which made them—presumably—much easier to conquer. Pornography played a front-and-center role in the French Revolution. It was also used to demoralize Germany after both World Wars.

We’re not here to discuss pornography as-such, but the issue serves as a proper introduction to how sexual liberation marks an ultimate division line between broad political worlds. Pornography isolates sexual behavior—misbehavior, if we’re being honest—but is effective because there’s a deeper disorder that has already taken root in cultural norms. Porn is an effective means of control only when people agree, interiorly, to expose themselves to it. Compare it to a drug, except one that acts immediately off of visual stimuli rather than requiring ingestion or injection; it’s much easier to get a population hooked on a drug they merely have to look at in order to feel its affects, after all.

But when we view something, we still have to assent to an interior choice. You could almost call this choice and agreement to be curious: “is what I’m viewing right now worth my attention?” It’s something most of us gloss over. Since we’re enlightened, curious individuals trained from birth to follow our hearts and explore the unknown, it’s only natural that we dismiss this interior consideration. “Of course what’s being viewed is worth my attention,” we think without even realizing it, “I’m viewing it; it must be good.” But then, as is so often the case for the grotesque, there comes an inward revulsion and the immediate, very conscious thought, “why did I do that?” Porn’s content, by its very nature, skirts by the typical response of revulsion only because most of us have been socially conditioned not to see what it is as fundamentally grotesque. This is the crucial disorder that has to be dealt with.

This not to suggest that pornography needs not be banned. While there’s certainly individual culpability involved in the crippling porn addictions that ravage the West, it’s impossible to speak on the subject without recognizing that porn itself is a modern aberration and shouldn’t exist in the first place, much less be so freely ubiquitous. Weak arguments to the contrary usually involve comparing profane graffiti on ancient roman walls, or a single tile fresco in a Pompeii bathhouse, to freely available, high definition video of trained actresses playing out extreme fetishes, and streamed to your phone at any hour of any day. The difference in availability is practically insignificant compared to the differences 4k video have to a few images on some pottery.

“Porn has always been with us,” say advocates who already consider sexual morality through the disordered modern lens. They argue, also, from half-truths; in a certain sense, erotic imagery has always been with us, but this isn’t the same, necessarily, as pornography. This is true especially when we take into consideration fertility cults of the ancient world; such erotic imagery existed for a completely different end than that illustrated by pornography. Pornography is certainly a form of erotic imagery, but all erotic imagery is not innately pornographic—though, to be fair, it should probably be avoided anyway.

This may seem like an exercise in splitting hairs, but consider how porn preys upon human weakness and toward what end a man engages with it. When a man consumes pornography, there’s no aesthetical content to it because it exists purely for his own self-debasement. He’s consuming it: he’s using it not for itself but for some purpose related or directly involving self abuse. It’s a sort of suicide by proxy. Speaking in terms of porn as media, it’s not difficult to see porn consumers as little more than the database animals of postmodernity, to borrow a term coined by Hiroki Azuma: the content itself blurs indistinctly into just a stream of endorphins, to be forgotten and ignored when the horrible action is over with. Pornography, especially as it has been so widely promoted and promulgated online, attacks what the very nature of sex is, what a human being is, what personhood is, and flattens all of these things into a corrupted mode of consumption for a disordered libido.

It attacks these things and yet, as mentioned above, it is not itself the main cause of the attack. Porn is a weapon, and while it’s wielded by real people, most of whom all share certain key characteristics, it’s worth remembering that it wouldn’t be an effective weapon had our culture not been conditioned to understand sexual relations in such a disordered way. This is what requires our attention.

Means Versus Ends

The divide between the right and left has commonly been misattributed to collectivism versus individualism. Actually consider the political analogues of this for even just a moment, however, and it ceases to be a relevant or even coherent set of definitions. Right and left are better understood as reactions to the notion of revolution—specifically, the overturning of a natural order, usually considered to be the Ancien Regime and all that it stood for. Revolution, after all, is not to be confused with mere revolt. It is not under the banners of ‘revolt’ that mobs waving red flags stormed palaces, murdered their inhabitants, and devised unheard-of forms of utopian political systems.

This is important to note because of one specific revolution that has done more to further the ends of ‘the left’ than any other: the sexual revolution. It is a revolution that is ongoing and forever, unending, as we see attempts to normalize what was previously unimaginable getting foisted on the unsuspecting American averageman on a yearly basis. The only thing that seems to interrupt this pattern is the revolution that the 1960s partnered with it: racial ideology and the Civil Rights narrative.

We’re pretty familiar, by now, with what the sexual revolution espouses. Its contemporary push started with nationally legalizing contraception, then sodomy, and then abortion, and then to overturn the millennia-old definition of marriage, declare that the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ have no material correlation, and push onward toward a brave new world of unspeakable horrors involving everything from corpses to animals. The sexual revolution is indeed a revolt against ‘traditional sexual morality’, but for most people living in the throes of its third or fourth generation, the term ‘traditional sexual morality’ is mysteriously undefined. It just carries the connotation ‘inflexible’, ‘bigoted’, or ‘close-minded’, each of which, thanks to the liberalization of language, just mean ‘bad’.

We can tell that the revolution has no coherent stated goal in mind because each element of the LGBT acronym has contradictory goals, at least if taken to their logical end-points—and the T segment, specifically, claims not to even agree with certain metaphysical presumptions that make the other three sensible in the first place. And yet, although the revolution seems not to have a goal outside of destroying the old order, it’s clear that there is some common element in what these various groups are looking to accomplish. They share, if loosely, a common theology.

Sexual morality, as understood under the revolution’s terms, is defined by two things: individual passion and individual consent. Notice how these rely wholly on the pleasure principle: maximize pleasure stimuli for all parties involved in some sort of consensual encounter. That consent is a flimsy concept to base any system of morality on is part of the revolution’s insidiousness; it preys on a general, intuitive sense that things like right or wrong actions must be decided upon, but then cuts off any understanding of how to orient such discernment around the proper ends of actions or consequences.

That’s where things get confused. The means become the ends. Sex becomes something to seek out in and of itself. Worse still, according to the sexual revolution’s ideology, sex becomes something by which individuals should be measured and judged. You hear this on both the left, in how sexual identity has become a framing device, and on the right, usually couched in terms like ‘sexual marketplace’. In both instances, venereal behavior is reduced to a solitary action, to be considered on an individual basis. It’s something one person does at a time. That this can be performed with another person is something of a curiosity, a fetish; default sexual behavior, ultimately, is atomized: there’s no greater image of the sexual revolution’s champion than the man with his trousers down sitting in front of a computer. Even when we consider hook-up culture, there’s no bond to be expected in the sharing of a private bed. The parties involved are only in it for themselves.

Family and Civilization

It comes across as ironic that the revolution which was propelled into victory by a movement dubbed ‘free love’ would annihilate the cohesiveness it sought to implement. ‘Free love’ turned out not to mean a utopian future populated by sexual communes and utter sexual deregulation, but rather rampant venereal disease, predatory perversion, and the seemingly intentional subversion of the term ‘love’ itself.

It’s somewhat old hat now, but a common conservative talking point used to position the family at the center of social, economic and political life. This was only used in certain contexts, however, and usually as a polemic against what center-right Con, Inc. types considered to be the left’s tendency toward radical collectivism. That said, there is truth to be found here; the family has historically been the smallest unit by which a functioning society can be understood. What more normie-Conservative types consistently fail to realize—or at least, fail to point out—is that the radical individualism of their libertarian-inspired beliefs naturally manifest a strong, unnatural sense of collectivism as a result. Another word for this framework is modernism, and it’s only brought about through revolution.

The old order, then, is one built not on individuals per se but on family cohesion. Your family indicated priorities and prerogatives; your broader clan, town, and localities indicated obligations and favors; and your nation indicated rights and privileges. Family was bound by blood, township by, for lack of a better term, common courtesy, and nation by law. It was a building upwards of systems increasing in complexity but imaging, fundamentally, the nexus of authority, justice, and morality found in a proper family.

You cannot reduce a society, economy, or polity to a unit smaller than the family. The family is the organizing principle around which the rest of the system functions. It provides a context within which young men are able to graduate from sonhood into fatherhood, and likewise for young women to blossom from daughters into mothers. Of course, we’re speaking somewhat ideally here, but the baseline for having a functioning, properly-ordered family is thankfully not a very high one to achieve. Though, that can only be said for those willing to reject the sexual revolution in its entirety.

Rejection is more than simply holding to anti-abortion views, or turning away from contraception and a life of fornication. It requires a reorientation of an individual’s place in society; he isn’t the primary unit upon which the world functions. Far from it, in fact; in terms of the social, economic and political spheres, the individual remains woefully incomplete. Some modern thinkers stumble upon this almost by pure accident, but it’s only with humility—and the grace of God—that they turn away from their modernist inclinations to embrace the natural order.

Even those religious men and women, the priests, monks and nuns who have been called to such a vocation: they too find that it their autonomy is given life by both a supernatural element—their vocations—and the social organization of their parishes, monasteries, or convents. It’s worth noting that such people constitute an extreme minority, and their vocations can’t be compared to the false notions of atomization that run society. These people aren’t isolated individual units.

Perhaps this sounds a little counter-intuitive. Human beings, after all, are solitary in their thoughts and interior lives. We’ll be judged by God solely by our relationship with Him, according to our interior dispositions and what deeds have flowed from them. Even if we set aside our theology for a second, the self-evident reality of our physical uniqueness from one another is enough to warrant the individualist politic somewhat reasonable. It’s also why it’s enjoyed popularity for so long. And yet, it can’t answer simple questions like “why are there different sexes in the first place?” The fact that this complementarity provides the material for a unique bond totally escapes it.

But everything belongs in its proper place, and radical individualism has no place in dialogue about sexual morality or proper sexual behavior. Radical individualism inserts itself between the cement of the family bond in a way that undermines its first establishment. The ultimate end of sex is not mere pleasure for the sake of it; it’s the establishment of a family in a very literal sense. Kids aren’t always guaranteed from every engagement, but it’s natural and expected to conclude that they should be. Tampering with this process confuses the reasons for doing so in the first place.

Failure of Right vs Left

The left is consumed by the sexual revolution, and it seems that this is a natural development of the left’s origins in revolution. Continual and unending revolution is the foundation and substance of what can be called broadly left wing ideology, after all.

And yet, the left is not solely at fault for the continued support and perpetuation of the sexual revolution today. Half a century since contraception was nationally legalized, and for almost as long as officials decided that public schools were places appropriate to teach eleven-year-olds classes labeled “sexual education”, and it’s somewhat understandable that the revolution has become part of the American landscape. Although it is antithetical to some segments of the right, sex-framed ideology has its well-entrenched defenders here, as well.

In the interests of rehabilitating masculinity in the culture, e-right proponents embraced a less dated and only slightly less embarrassing form of PUA mindset when it comes to young single men dealing with women. On one hand, a general sense of reactionary misogyny is hard not to find at least sensible, in an age when more young women entering university have normalized prostituting themselves online for small change than not. This is a blind spot for many self-professed Trads: a complete lack of empathy for men who grew up recognizing that with increasingly fewer exception, every potential dating candidate (because courting doesn’t exist outside of a handful of religious circles) has been on the Pill since she was eleven or twelve, aware of pornography since she was thirteen, and sexually active at ages that are hard for any adult to stomach.

For the women, the results of this socially-mandated sexual abuse speak for themselves. Where the Boomer generation was plagued by rampant divorce rates, Millennials just don’t get married in the first place—and that’s to say nothing of the demographic cliff marked by its low fertility rate. Is this the fault of Millennial men? Somewhat, sure. It takes two to tango. And what of these women, whose hormones have been crippled by birth control since the very onset of puberty and whose emotional and mental stability is hamstrung by Tinder? And this, of course, is made worse by a corrosive, poisonous, hyperfeminized society that finds equivalence between gruesome sexual violations and mere dissatisfaction over drunken one night stands. If only it were possible to go back to the days when ‘boy crazy’ just meant admiring the Hollywood smile of a rugged actor whose poster adorned a wall someplace, and not what the term would instead mean today.

But what of the men? The memes about white women are, unfortunately, more often true than not. There are still enclaves around where a majority of the young women don’t fit this description, as Catholic converts can sometimes attest to. But these communities are relatively few and far between. Despite the growing trend against hookup culture and the right’s growing hostility to contemporary dating scenes, it’s going to be at least another generation or two—likely longer—before the broader culture sees a more positive return to form.

The problem we’re considering here, however, is that efforts to encourage a sense of youthful masculinity indulge in a pragmatism that’s little more than a concession, if not outright surrender, to the revolution. It’s far better to simply abandon the notion of romantic intrigue altogether and embrace lay celibacy than to pretend like some of the advice spewed by the secular-right concerning women is at all worthwhile. Lacking any kind of sensible moral theology, most of these grifters senselessly confuse the errors of sin brought on by the Fall with a fundamental notion of womanhood. Conflation of the two just reinforces the hyper individualist alienation that the right should be trying to fix.

And this touches on the deeper issue. It’s not just in sense of flawed pragmatics that makes the right’s reaction to the revolution a problem. The divide on the right between the secular or neo-pagan right and its religious counterpart, the Christians and especially the reactionary Catholics, makes all the difference. It’s deeper than pragmatics. It affects fundamental morality, philosophy, and even aesthetics.

Consider this: under the auspices of aesthetics, too-online internet denizens will indulge in pornographic or erotic imagery. Blondes in wheat fields, even from its conception, began with attractive young models wearing fewer and fewer articles of clothing and basking in golden waves of grain—call it a meme as much as you want, but the underlying thrust at an ideal is there. Worse, the painful lack of awareness to call, often seriously, pornography ‘aesthetic’ or ‘beautiful’ simply because it lacks the amateurish dressings of overfunded LA lighting or under-produced Omegle webcams, betrays the true intentions of such accounts.

The sexual revolution has poisoned their sense of beauty, often so deeply that one wonders if it can be gotten back. It can, of course, but the way porn and normalized hypersexuality has ‘rewired’ so many senses of aesthetics is nothing to take lightly. Most men, in particular, were conditioned and brainwashed into this way of viewing the world by regular pornography consumption from very young ages. First the habit has to be broken, and although an appreciation of real beauty will start to foster on its own, it takes more for it to come to fruition. It takes actual study. It even takes repentance.

We can see pretty clearly how the sexual revolution is not specifically a right or left issue. Denying it doesn’t make one part of the right wing any more than embracing it makes one a leftist, although it seems somewhat difficult to believe there are any leftists who reject it wholesale. It is, after all, a revolution.

Theological Component

It is not strictly necessary to be a believing, practicing Catholic in order to properly understand the family’s place in the political sphere. Complex civilization is impossible without families, both in terms of development and sustainability. And as Carle Zimmerman points out in Family and Civilization, the instability caused by what he called a ‘pluralistic’ definition of the family was both a mark and a precipitator of a civilization’s decline.

That said, we all behave and contextualize information according to some general theology, even if many of us wouldn’t phrase or parse it as such. What we can know and believe of God immediately defines or excludes certain moral precepts, which then go on to define or exclude certain modes of social and political behavior. Those of us who believe that God doesn’t really care about us will reason differently than those of us who believe in an immediate, Incarnate God that we go to receive in body and soul every Sunday. And those of us who believe that there is no God, but rather a pantheon of superhuman personified ideals, or a personless force, or simply the illusion of order, likewise reason differently still.

Wrapped up in this is how sexual behavior can be understood, and for this, we must turn first to the Incarnation itself. Starting with what we know to be true, we can then work towards how the perfect model of familial relations collapse into erroneous notions of sexual misbehavior, and how this occurs the further away one deviates from this model.

So we must begin with the calling out to a young girl by an angel about two thousand years ago. Her wholehearted acquiescence to the will of God marked her spiritual betrothal to the Holy Spirit, such that she would become the Mother of God.

Our Lady, we can remember, has a triune relationship with the triune God; she is the Holy Mother, the Blessed Spouse, and the daughter of the Father, effectively fulfilling the three stations of a woman’s place in the family to utmost perfection. Keep in mind who Our Lady is, too; she was predestined and specially selected from before the implementation of time itself to be the greatest of God’s creatures, something she revealed herself to be by her bottomless humility. Just as men are called to emulate her Son, so too are women called to emulate her. Our model for the family, before even that of the Holy family, is that of the Blessed Virgin’s relation to the Trinity.

The doctrine of the Absolute Primacy of Christ indicates that Our Lady was, in effect, the first creature planned in creation after the very initial divine plan. For God to have the most intimate union with His creation possible, He devised the Incarnation —and for that, He needed a mother. All other things from creation spread out, like a vast, beautiful tapestry, from this first-ordered intention.

True, Our Lady was immaculately conceived, and thus preserved from that original sin that the rest of us were born into. And true, this, coupled with her status as the Mother of God, affected her earthly life in a way that made her different from the rest of humanity. But let us not consider her to have had an easier life because of it; on the contrary, her utmost devotion to the Son, her perfect union with Him, insofar as her limited, created nature could partake of Him, meant that His sufferings were felt as well by her. Consider briefly just the Seven Dolors of Mary: seven swords of agony that pierced her immaculate heart, each dealing intimately with the life and then Passion of Christ. If anything, Christ, being true God and true man, and her being united to Him so perfectly, makes her suffering a purer experience of post-Lapsarian humanity than we could even try to comprehend. It’s the experience of His creatures’ suffering according to God, as experienced by those creatures. We, mercifully, are shielded from such a thing.

Our interests here involve this unique bond between mother and son. If the doctrine of Absolute Primacy is true, then this bond, in addition to the lesser-emphasized but nonetheless crucial bonds that Our Lady has with the other two persons of the Trinity, forms the foundational first-instance template upon which all other notions of family are based according to the divine plan.

You might wonder, then, how sexuality even enters the picture, considering Our Lady’s perfect chastity. It’s well established that both she and St. Joseph refrained from marital relations both before and after the birth of Christ, and likewise is it true that the Holy Spirit granted the conception of Christ by His command alone—depicted in artwork usually by a ray of light. The birth of the Savior was itself a miraculous event, as it preserved the perpetual virginity of the Holy Queen, with some, such as Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, going so far as to claim that Christ simply appeared without pain or opening, having come into the world in a flash of light. How could the relationship Our Lady shares with the Trinity, then, be considered the highest model of family relations here on Earth?

We can chock that up to the Fall. The contortion of man’s interior disposition, and how that affected exterior relationships, began with his disobedience against God’s command. St. Augustine writes extensively on this event, and in Civitate Dei remarks upon the degree to which concupiscence infected relations between man and woman, following Scripture. According to him, and I see no reason to doubt this, our procreative faculties originally followed our wills perfectly, not unlike how our hands or feet are prompted into motion by the very same will. We would not be overtaken with passions that moved our flesh against our wills because of the domination our spirits had over our flesh, by the grace of God. The retreat of that dominion is one of the scars carved into human nature by the Fall.

Keep in mind, too, that what prompts these reactions, lust, is itself a disordered and contorted elaboration of romantic love’s physical expression. It’s reasonable to have an attraction toward what is good, true, and beautiful; the transcendentals, after all, are emanations from God that make reality knowable in the first place. The more things have of them, the more we should be naturally attracted to them. The disorder that is lust, however, culminates when this attraction gets contorted into an abusive, poisonous inclination that runs contrary to God’s intended order, in part because it is rooted wholly in the flesh and then, when it becomes outright sinful, acted upon by the will. The will does not have to be subservient to the flesh, but in too many cases, we surrender it over with barely even a fight.

We can translate this seeming conundrum into our ordinary lives with relative ease. Pragmatically speaking, the love between husband and wife should be enjoyed and consummated toward its intended and particular ends, of which there are two. With the family is trusted progeny, which is something of a secondary end. Its primary end, as with all expressions of love, is for those within the family to better see the light of the Godhead through the love expressed between one another. Love, properly ordered, is an image sustained by the eternal, supernatural love of God. All that is true, good, and beautiful to be found in one’s spouse is so illuminated by God’s indwelling thanks to grace; the truer, better, and more beautiful she is, the greater she has bent her will toward that of God’s so that this light illuminates her more. The love a man has for his wife is the means by which he can see this, communicate with her, reciprocate it. It’s a much a matter of the will as it is of clarity of thought.

It is by engaging with the love within the family bond that the family is able to endure, that it is able to reproduce itself, and that the people experiencing the bond are able to better know God, at least in an intuitive sense. The family itself images the predestined relationship between God and man that was planned at the root of creation itself. It is not by individuals that society is forged, made, and maintained, but by love, by love within the family, and also by love between families and persons as neighbors in communities.

Paganism’s Transition into Modernity

The competing view to this one is found in the commonalities found across most if not all ancient pagan religions. While some exception can be found, the various strings of civilized paganism—particularly across northern Africa and the Near East—each placed some emphasis on fertility and fertility cults. Where there was no special or direct emphasis on a fertility cult per se, the temple complex remained one populated by priestesses that, as we know from Greece, lived a life utterly alien to the sense of chastity we would recognize in our own priestly class.

Pagans did have a sense of family that was more rooted in the natural order than contemporary moderns do. That much can’t be denied. But unlike the categorical difference in definition between modern families and Christian or Catholic ones, the difference here is merely one of degree. At heart, pagan notions of love, family, and their understanding of how sex fits into the picture are all precursors to modernity’s takes on the same subjects.

True, pagans did have gods that they referred back to, and true, they kept in mind a sense of a supernatural order that pervaded the world, even if their understanding of it was skewed. Unlike moderns, whose interest in the paranormal and the esoteric is more fractured, piecemeal, and absurd than the somewhat ordered systems of liturgy and mythology of the ancient world, pagans had not yet lost sight of their being creations of some higher power.

This is crucial to recognize, and it explains why pagan societies could last as long as they did despite owing to a deeply flawed theology of the family. Although sex had taken the place of love, as their own pagan mythologies usually involved some sort of sexual practice at the root of their gods’ existences, their societies did not become atomized to the same degree that ours has. The general sense of a family structure remained in tact, even in cultures that allowed divorce or concubinage.

Fringe movements, of course, were a little different. The sex cults that plagued Christian outliers throughout the existence of Christianity are like this. Many of them come across as exact prototypes of the contemporary sexual revolution that won its greatest victories last century. The Adamites, for example, existed in various gnostic-adjacent spheres as far back as the second century, with particular influence—Taborites—waxing during the Hussite revolt in Bohemia circa the 1420s. They might have shared some relative popularity compared to other ‘religiously’ extremist cults, but they remained fringe, nonetheless.

Consider the height of the hippie communes in America during the 1970s; widespread appeal of their sexual mores did not become normalized until decades after their radical predecessors had more or less fizzled out or died of venereal diseases. Ironically, the same pattern would be seen played out with the gay rights lobby. It took thirty years and a gradual deescalation of fringe rhetoric to go from the 1980s, when homosexuality first saw normalization and the AIDS epidemic, and the 2015 Obergefell decision, which effectively declared self-identified homosexuals as a totally separate group of people.

Today, however, with divorce rates where they’re at, the normalization of “free love” ideology, Only Fans, expected porn addiction and socially-mandated self-abuse, it’s hard not to think that the sex cults have taken over. The complete package is no longer a fringe ideology; it’s the default one for the secular west, so much so that even transsexualism is a protected belief set whose adherents are a protected class. The fact that abortion factors so easily into this equation should make it all the more obvious.

Modernity’s twist on the sex cult, however, is quite expectedly hollow. If modernity has a defining characteristic, it would be this: that it consists of veneers of flattened efforts at meaning, but beneath the veneer is an emptiness into which its adherents fruitlessly try dump their egos. The last two centuries witnessed the transformation of sexuality from the banal yet intuitively supernatural into the cruelly and openly self-abasing, humiliating collection of abhorrent rituals it is in contemporary society. Perhaps paganism was a LARP, even at the time, but it’s hard to consider pagan societies on the whole as less fundamentally disordered and self-loathing as our own.

Conclusion

If anyone on the right seeks to properly reorder the culture, the sexual revolution has to be addressed head-on. You need the proper theology to do this, even if you can’t totally express it. Recognizing a family-first approach to the evils of sexual promiscuity is tantamount to discerning whether a right wing thrust will succeed or fail. A generation of radicals is certainly enough to spark change, but radicalism unsupported by a network of families and blood ties simply devolves into just another revolutionary movement.

This is written not in the interests of trying to ‘make a difference’ in some internet e-right culture war. As far as I’m concerned, the culture war is over and we lost it pretty hard. This is written in the interests of orienting us pragmatically in an extremely hostile culture. Many of us likely go about our days in deep blue territories where the errors of modernity are deeply entrenched and enforced. Building a general method that maintains its purity is possible only with religious zeal, and those that reject Christ naturally pour their zeal into some revolutionary movement—even if it’s one that seems well-intentioned or seemingly friendly. It’s worth agreeing with these people when we can, but hard stances have to be maintained on key issues. This is one of them.

On the matter of the sexual revolution, however, there can be no room for disagreement.