This post is partially inspired by the photo I’m posting here. The photo was taken at the SLC airport and is part of Delta’s “shared humanity” marketing campaign. This particular ad is striking because it speaks to the normalization of that which is unnatural and abnormal, something that in literature is symbolized by using the grotesque.
In my doctoral dissertation, I argue that even though C. S. Lewis died before witnessing the sexual revolution of the 1960s in its full swing (Lewis died the same day as JFK, November 22, 1963), he certainly saw it coming.
Like a prophet, a prognosticator almost, he anticipated the consequences the philosophy of the Romantics would have on the world. In his lecture and essay, “Learning in Wartime,” he notably states,“Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”
Like most revolutions, the sexual revolution of the 1960s is still revolving. It is as if Newton’s first Law of Motion applies not only to objects but to ideologies as well: the ideology will continue to move at a constant velocity, unless it is acted upon by an external force.
This was true of the French Revolution as historians are apt to recall. It took the strong man, Napoleon, to act upon the reign of terror and by use of his own bloody force, stop the revolution from its constant revolving.
So, here we are, more than two hundred years after the Romantic period and some sixty years after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, at a time when believing in traditional sexual mores will get you ridiculed. More importantly, it is a time in history when speaking of or promoting such “ridiculous and archaic nonsense” can actually get you cancelled, de-platformed, fired, or sued.
But it’s imperative we understand, as Carl Trueman rightly notes, “no individual historical phenomenon is its own cause” (i.e., the sexual revolution did not start the sexual revolution).
In his book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Trueman asserts, “the fact that they are now a deep seated and intuitive part of life” should not surprise us. He explains that the broader, underlying social and cultural conditions that made issues like gay marriage and then transgender ideology first plausible and then normative have been developing over hundreds of years.
He further states, “Acceptance of gay marriage and transgenderism are simply the latest outworking, the most recent symptoms, of deep and long-established pathologies.”
I would add that we not only have the philosophers of the Romantic period (e.g., Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin) to thank for the culture’s modern understanding of the self, but I am arguing here that Christians too have been complicit.
Instead of modeling and faithfully discipling the nations to understand and adopt a biblical cosmology (understanding and view of the cosmos and the human beings who occupy it), we have instead reduced Christianity to either escapism (fundamentalism) or a humanistic ideology (liberalism). We have further exchanged lifelong, monogamous marriage for “our individual right to be happy,” and have fostered a divorce rate that comes close to matching the divorce rate of those outside the church. And, most tangible and immediate, we have outsourced the education of our children to the Leviathan (the secular state).
This is not what “having dominion” looks like (Genesis 1:26 Cf. Matthew 28:18-20); it’s what abdication looks like.
We’ve forfeited cosmos and acquired chaos.
To be clear, I’m not here clamoring for utopia; no such thing exists this side of the consummation of Christ’s kingdom.
But we must acknowledge, there is a huge difference between “routine transgressions” or even “a modest expansion of the boundaries” of what is morally acceptable and the complete abolition of what have traditionally been recognized as normal codes of morality.
I also want to suggest here that the solution is not in politics. We are not going to recover what has been historically called natural law, or what Lewis called the Tao, by “voting in a good Republican.” That is foolish, short-sighted, and way too far down the cultural stream to accomplish anything meaningful.
What would be meaningful would be to first recover the Christian Humanist vision of the human being and the cosmos. Then we can apply to our understanding of the self, family, culture, education, art, literature, church life, and even politics, the Christian Humanist imagination advocated by great thinkers like Lewis, O’Connor, and Tolkien.
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