It is hardly possible to overstate the effect of the Sexual Revolution on contemporary culture. While many celebrate its triumphs, others lament its consequences. Regardless, all agree it is one of the most significant events of the twentieth century and continues to shape nearly every aspect of our society in one way or another.
Christians are no exception. It may be because of our beliefs about sex and gender that we feel the pressures of the Sexual Revolution more than anyone. What began as a liberationist movement for some has created a new sexual standard for all, so zealously enforced that religious conservatives–Christians, in particular–are already unwelcome in some sectors of society.1 Intolerance in the name of tolerance is the new rallying cry. How will Christians respond?
The unfortunate history of the Christian church in America since the 1960’s suggests the possibility of capitulating. Nearly every mainline Protestant denomination has enthusiastically affirmed the fruits of the Sexual Revolution and, in the process, suffered heavy attrition. Most of the conservatives, exiled into new denominations, have retained the biblical doctrines about sex, gender, marriage, and family, but remain a significant minority of the population. Even so, they are vulnerable to encroachment.2
Any meaningful public theology for the twenty-first century requires a cogent analysis of the Sexual Revolution, the goals which it aspired to and achieved, as well as a sober admission of how it failed. Only then will Christians silence its pernicious lies and treat the wounds of its victims, many of whom include the revolutionaries themselves.
What kind of revolution?
The best place to start is answering the fundamental question: What kind of revolution was the Sexual Revolution? We could begin by comparing it to any other revolution–the American Revolution for Independence, for example.
The latter was a political revolution whereby the individual colonies declared independence from Britain. Of course, one need not be well-versed in classical and Enlightenment texts to recognize that revolutionary documents like the Declaration of Independence were at least partly inspired by an earlier philosophical revolution. One also cannot ignore the socio-economic conditions between the colonies and the British Empire that fueled animosity between the two. The point is not so much to identify a single origin point which explains the whole, but to recognize revolutions are usually complex and multifaceted.
Therefore, simply calling the Sexual Revolution a cultural revolution won’t do. It is partly that, but we will miss too much if that is all we say. For Mary Eberstadt, one cannot begin to comprehend the sexual revolution without understanding “the technological revolution that occasioned it.”3 That, of course, was the arrival of modern contraception, “rendering fertile women infertile with nearly 100 percent accuracy.”4 But as social critic Louis Perry cogently argues, the pill actually led to something completely original. The fertile woman artificially made infertile was an invention to herself. She was “an entirely new creature” who changed everything.5
But cutting edge technology almost always needs legal sanction. Thus, the sexual revolution also included a revolution of jurisprudence. At first, the Supreme Court said only married couples had the right to use contraceptives in the landmark 1965 decision Griswold v. Connecticut. But soon, unmarried couples had the same right (1972) followed by every woman over fourteen (1977). The Court’s sudden expansionary view of one’s right to privacy was finally and most audaciously applied in the case of Roe v. Wade (1973). By determining one had a right to access a nearly perfect contraceptive with legal abortion in case it failed, America’s legal infrastructure also radically altered sex in America.
Finally, it is impossible to ignore the ideological underpinnings of the Sexual Revolution. It was, and remains, a battle of ideas including those about the self and how to realize it in one’s life. Perry identifies ideas nascent in liberalism as the root of the Sexual Revolution. By liberalism, she does not mean “left-wing” but the more comprehensive combination of “economic liberalism and social liberalism.”6 The former is actually more concomitant of the post-war Right and evidenced by the Republican Party’s affinity for free-market absolutism. By combining both forces, small-l liberalism encourages “a consumerist mentality in which choice is paramount.”7
Maximizing choice in conception logically extends to liberalizing marriage laws. When pleasure replaced procreation as the primary purpose of sex and marriage, the state lost its only real interest in regulating it. As long as both parties consent, why prohibit any sexual encounter at all? As Eberstadt has said, “once heterosexuals started claiming the right to act as homsexuals, it would not be long before homosexuals started claiming the rights of heterosexuals.”8
Identity and the sexual revolution
It is not obvious why a movement which was largely organized around the issue of female reproductivity would morph into a liberationist movement for the most niche of sexual minorities. What does the pill have to do with Pride? The answer, as alluded to above, is ideological and philosophical assumptions which were introduced long before the time of revolutionaries like Margaret Sanger or Betty Friedan.
In his highly praised book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman helpfully dissects the intellectual foundations of the sexual revolution. In Trueman’s analysis, what caused the Sexual Revolution was a complete reorientation in what Western society believed about human identity and what constituted the good life in one’s relation to the self, others, and the world.
Trueman traces that reorientation to the Enlightenment. With the utterance “I think, therefore I am,” Rene Descartes initiated an inward turn on the individual self as the ultimate meaning maker. But “I’s” do not exist on their own but with others. This has been true from the beginning. In Genesis 2:18, God says “It is not good that man should be alone” and fashions Eve as Adam’s ideal partner. Later, the first natural human birth is recorded in Genesis 4. Nowhere do we see the isolated individual on his own, but embedded in a network of relationships. As hard as culture may try, we cannot escape the fact that human life is dialogical.
Drawing largely on the thought of German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, Trueman describes what he calls the “politics of recognition,” a society structured on the underlying assumption that “a human being is most self-conscious when she knows that other people are acknowledging her as a self-conscious being.”9 Thus, having one’s inner truth actualized and affirmed by others becomes the chief end of society.
Still, what is true for one person may not be the case for another. In fact, truth is not really the proper name for what we are describing. More accurately, “speaking my truth” is really a shallow attempt at giving one’s personal feelings and preferences a veneer of objectivity–a hangover from a previous epistemological age. After all, one cannot point to any organic or biological data to prove one is gay, or lesbian, or a woman trapped in a man’s body. The evidence is how one feels at the present time.
But again, what does this have to do with the so-called “right” to abortion and the genesis of the Sexual Revolution which began this essay? The connection is the shared rejection of any transcendent authority or sacred order and, thus, the obligation on societies to permit individuals to actualize their inner selves. Extrinsic sources of authority like nature or Scripture cannot lay claim to one’s conscience in this therapeutic age of expressive individualism. So if two adult males believe marriage will make them happy, or a sex-change operation will make one’s inner truth an actualized reality, why stop them? Similarly, who is to say when a life begins? If parents do not believe the fetus inside the mother is alive, and that caring for a child would actually harm one of the other’s self-identity, then abortion is no longer simply permissible but a moral imperative!
Christians and the sexual revolution
By now it should be apparent why Christians are held in such low esteem in today’s post-Sexual Revolution culture. When Christians acknowledge God’s sacred order over creation, they are denying individuals the opportunity to realize their deepest desires. In effect, we are denying them as people. Thus, Christians are often accused of trying to “erase” or “deny the existence” of sexual minorities. So how should we respond?
Trueman is somewhat pessimistic. In fact, he sees meaningful debate impossible between those who accept a transcendent order and those who do not because they lack any common ground. They cannot even “agree to the terms of the debate in order to determine exactly what it is they are debating.”10 Still, some Christians entrenched in deeply secular environments have found creative ways to appeal to those enculturated to maximize their personal happiness.11
While the idea of turning back the tide of the Sexual Revolution appears grim, Christians should not ignore the real opportunities to do so within the body of Christ. That doesn’t mean it won’t be offensive. Christians in Reformed and Presbyterian denominations especially place a huge premium on the doctrine of Christian liberty–and rightly so! But a sober assessment of the Sexual Revolution’s legacy requires us to ask difficult questions; questions like, “What worldly practices have been smuggled into the church under the guise of Christian liberty?”
Contraception, for example, is largely unopposed in Protestant churches and considered an issue of adiaphora. But this was not always the case. In fact, as late as 1930 and the Lambeth conference, Protestants associated contraception with Onan’s sin in Genesis 38:9-10. Both Luther and Calvin see the avoidance of procreation as an atrocious sin against God, the latter going so far as to say, “It is a horrible thing to deliberately avoid childbirth in this way. For this means that one quenches the hope of his family and kills the son that could be expected, even before he is born.”12 That Protestants have largely dismissed an issue which the Bible condemns as a form of murder remains a sad legacy of the Sexual Revolution within our ranks.13
Is it any wonder then that conservative Protestant denominations are now grappling with internal controversies on issues like sexual and gender identity? The fox is already in the hen house. When Christians acquiesced on contraception, they inadvertently sanctioned a consumerist attitude toward all sexual matters. If Christians are serious about preserving biblical notions of gender and sexuality, they should interrogate their positions on procreation.
The opinions expressed above are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Ministry to State.
For one example, see Grant Atkinson, “U.K. Stifles Prayer with Public Spaces Protection Orders,” Alliance Defending Freedom, March 14, 2023, https://adflegal.org/article/uk-stifles-prayer-public-spaces-protection-orders.
The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), for example, is now in its fifth year of controversy after the infamous 2108 Revoice Conference in St. Louis. The conference, hosted by a PCA church, proposed an innovative syncretism of same-sex attraction with traditional sexual ethics called “Side-B” Christianity. Months later, the pastor of the host church wrote an article for Christianity Today coming out and identifying as same-sex attracted. See Greg Johnson, “I Used to Hide My Shame. Now I Take Shelter Under the Gospel,” Christianity Today, May 20, 2019, https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/may-web-only/greg-johnson-hide-shame-shelter-gospel-gay-teenager.html.
Mary Eberstadt, Adam and Eve after the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press: 2012), 12.
Eberstadt, Adam and Eve after the Pill, 11.
Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022), 7.
Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, 8.
Patrick Deneen, “The Power Elite,” First Things, June 2015, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/06/the-power-elite.
Eberstadt, Adam and Eve after the Pill, 150.
Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 60.
Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 81.
For example, pastor and evangelist, Tim Keller, defended biblical sexual ethics in secular Manhattan using data that demonstrates a correlation between sexual purity and long-term happiness. Taking their aspirations for happiness at face value, Keller worked backwards to show unbelievers how biblical ethics leads to human flourishing. For example, and contrary to popular belief, cohabitation before marriage has found to be associated with higher rates of divorce: Michael J. Rosenfeld and Katharina Roesler, “Cohabitation Experience and Cohabitation’s Association with Marital Dissolution,” Journal of Marriage and Family 81, no. 1 (February 2019): 42-58. Sociologist Nicholas Wolfinger has also presented data suggesting those who have only ever slept with their spouse report higher rates of marriage satisfaction than those with longer sexual histories. See Olga Khazan, “Fewer Sex Partners Means a Happier Marriage,” The Atlantic, October 22, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/10/sexual-partners-and-marital-happiness/573493/.
John Calvin, Genesis, ed. Alister McGrath and J.I. Packer, The Crossway Classic Commentaries (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2001), 304.
For more on Protestantism’s acquiescence on contraception, see Matthew Lee Anderson, “Procreation and Children” in Protestant Social Teaching: An Introduction (The Davenant Press, 2022), 91-101.