Rod Dreher, a Christian writer of the Orthodox persuasion,\u00a0 has written a provocative article for the American Conservative<\/em> that is getting a lot of attention entitled Sex after Christianity.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/a>He raises the question of whether Christianity can even survive once its assumptions about sexual morality are jettisoned.\u00a0 The short answer is, of course Christianity will survive.\u00a0 The gates of hell cannot prevail against it, let alone sexual transgressions.\u00a0 Missing in this discussion is that Christianity is about Christ, the Gospel, and the forgiveness of sins, not establishing a particular kind of cultural influence.\u00a0 Nevertheless, Dreher documents a \u201ccosmological\u201d shift that may well diminish the cultural presence of Christianity.\u00a0 Still, read this article.\u00a0 We\u2019ve got to talk about it.\u00a0 Read the whole article, but I\u2019ll post excerpts after the jump.\u00a0 (And see my thoughts at the end.)From The American Conservative<\/a>:<\/p>\n In a dinner conversation not long after the publication of American Grace<\/em>, Putnam told me that Christian churches would have to liberalize on sexual teaching if they hoped to retain the loyalty of younger generations. This seems at first like a reasonable conclusion, but the experience of America\u2019s liberal denominations belies that prescription. Mainline Protestant churches, which have been far more accepting of homosexuality and sexual liberation in general, have continued their stark membership decline.<\/p>\n It seems that when people decide that historically normative Christianity is wrong about sex, they typically don\u2019t find a church that endorses their liberal views. They quit going to church altogether.<\/p>\n This raises a critically important question: is sex the linchpin of Christian cultural order? Is it really the case that to cast off Christian teaching on sex and sexuality is to remove the factor that gives\u2014or gave\u2014Christianity its power as a social force?<\/p>\n Though he might not have put it quite that way, the eminent sociologist Philip Rieff would probably have said yes. Rieff\u2019s landmark 1966 book The Triumph Of the Therapeutic<\/em> analyzes what he calls the \u201cdeconversion\u201d of the West from Christianity. Nearly everyone recognizes that this process has been underway since the Enlightenment, but Rieff showed that it had reached a more advanced stage than most people\u2014least of all Christians\u2014recognized.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>\u2014a sense of sacred order, a cosmology that roots these moral demands within a metaphysical framework.<\/p>\n You don\u2019t behave this way and not that way because it\u2019s good for you; you do so because this moral vision is encoded in the nature of reality. This is the basis of natural-law theory, which has been at the heart of contemporary secular arguments against same-sex marriage (and which have persuaded no one).<\/p>\n Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the sexual revolution\u2014though he did not use that term\u2014as a leading indicator of Christianity\u2019s death as a culturally determinative force. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, \u201cthe rejection of sexual individualism\u201d was \u201cvery near the center of the symbolic that has not held.\u201d He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture was at the core of Christian culture\u2014a culture that, crucially, did not merely renounce but redirected the erotic instinct. That the West was rapidly re-paganizing around sensuality and sexual liberation was a powerful sign of Christianity\u2019s demise.<\/p>\n It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among The People<\/em>. Ruden contends that it\u2019s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.<\/p>\n In fact, Paul\u2019s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time\u2014exploitive 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\u2014and marital sexuality\u2014with love.<\/p>\n Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was \u201cas different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n It would be absurd to claim that Christian civilization ever achieved a golden age of social harmony and sexual bliss. It is easy to find eras in Christian history when church authorities were obsessed with sexual purity. But as Rieff recognizes, Christianity did establish a way to harness the sexual instinct, embed it within a community, and direct it in positive ways.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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. . . .<\/p>\n Our post-Christian culture, then, is an \u201canti-culture.\u201d 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.Gay marriage signifies the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because it denies the core concept of Christian anthropology. In classical Christian teaching, the divinely sanctioned union of male and female is an icon of the relationship of Christ to His church and ultimately of God to His creation. This is why gay marriage negates Christian cosmology, from which we derive our modern concept of human rights and other fundamental goods of modernity. Whether we can keep them in the post-Christian epoch remains to be seen.<\/p>\n It also remains to be seen whether we can keep Christianity without accepting Christian chastity. Sociologist Christian Smith\u2019s research on what he has termed \u201cmoralistic therapeutic deism\u201d\u2014the feelgood, pseudo-Christianity that has supplanted the normative version of the faith in contemporary America\u2014suggests that the task will be extremely difficult.<\/p>\n Conservative Christians have lost the fight over gay marriage and, as we have seen, did so decades before anyone even thought same-sex marriage was a possibility. Gay-marriage proponents succeeded so quickly because they showed the public that what they were fighting for was consonant with what most post-1960s Americans already believed about the meaning of sex and marriage. The question Western Christians face now is whether or not they are going to lose Christianity altogether in this new dispensation.<\/p>\n Too many of them think that same-sex marriage is merely a question of sexual ethics. They fail to see that gay marriage, and the concomitant collapse of marriage among poor and working-class heterosexuals, makes perfect sense given the autonomous individualism sacralized by modernity and embraced by contemporary culture\u2014indeed, by many who call themselves Christians. They don\u2019t grasp that Christianity, properly understood, is not a moralistic therapeutic adjunct to bourgeois individualism\u2014a common response among American Christians, one denounced by Rieff in 2005 as \u201csimply pathetic\u201d\u2014but is radically opposed to the cultural order (or disorder) that reigns today.<\/p>\n They are fighting the culture war moralistically, not cosmologically. They have not only lost the culture, but unless they understand the nature of the fight and change their strategy to fight cosmologically, within a few generations they may also lose their religion.<\/p>\n \u201cThe death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling,\u201d Rieff writes. By that standard, Christianity in America, if not American spirituality, is in mortal danger. The future is not foreordained: Taylor shares much of Rieff\u2019s historical analysis but is more hopeful about the potential for renewal. Still, if the faith does not recover, the historical autopsy will conclude that gay marriage was not a cause but a symptom, the sign that revealed the patient\u2019s terminal condition.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n HT:\u00a0 Stephen Baskerville<\/p>\n My thoughts:\u00a0 This argument would suggest not that Christianity will disappear but that culture will disappear.\u00a0 That is, if cultures are all systems that require the restraint of sexual and other kinds of passions (as even Freud believed) then, yes, we will lose any kind of cultural community and become a society of atomistic individuals.\u00a0 (Perhaps that has already largely happened.)<\/p>\n If Christianity becomes radically marginalized, having no cultural power at all, perhaps Christianity will have to return to its essence:\u00a0 Christ, the Gospel, the forgiveness of sins.\u00a0\u00a0 Because no matter how much people wish to erase anything that restricts them and makes them feel guilty, if Christianity is true (and it is), the moral reality remains.\u00a0 It\u2019s like thinking we can destroy nature; nature always destroys us.\u00a0 Sin kills.\u00a0 People in a society that give itself over to sin will feel those sins.\u00a0 The Gospel will become good news again.\u00a0 Christ will save them.\u00a0 And, ironically, once the Gospel predominates again in the Church, cultural influence\u2013including the Christian view of sexual morality\u2013may well come back as a byproduct.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rod Dreher, a Christian writer of the Orthodox persuasion,\u00a0 has written a provocative article for the American Conservative that is getting a lot of attention entitled Sex after Christianity.\u00a0\u00a0 He raises the question of whether Christianity can even survive once its assumptions about sexual morality are jettisoned.\u00a0 The short answer is, of course Christianity will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12,15,41],"tags":[444,456,891,2009],"class_list":["post-15300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church","category-culture","category-ethics","category-sex","tag-christian-influence","tag-christianity-and-culture","tag-gay-marriage","tag-sexual-attitudes"],"yoast_head":"\n