Are evangelicals better than traditional Catholics on sex and marriage?

This is an important analysis by a leading traditional Catholic intellectual (whose book Debating Gay Marriage is terrific) of an important new survey of religion in America.

Maggie Gallagher shows that traditional Catholics do not have orthodox beliefs on sex and marriage with as high frequency as evangelicals do.

I have written in various places about the significant slippage occurring in evangelical theology.  Just as in every other Christian and Jewish community, there is a sharp divide between the orthodox and progressives among evangelicals.

So while Maggie Gallagher’s article below might make some think that evangelicals are doing better in these respects, evangelicals should not think more highly of themselves than they ought.

The evangelicals who are responsible for these (relatively only) better numbers come pred0minantly from those evangelical groups that are subscribed to tightly defined confessions of faith and theological traditions.

Those evangelicals who are primarily devoted to the evangelical principle of private interpretation (I can decide for myself what the Bible means despite what my Church’s statement of faith and theological tradition teach) are doomed to go the way of all flesh, eventually following a religion of culture that mainline Protestantism is celebrating.

Gallagher asks why traditional Catholics are  (relatively) bad at sticking to orthodox belief and practice on sex and marriage.

May I suggest a reason?  I am not a Catholic.  But I grew up as a Catholic, and have great appreciation for the Great Tradition of Catholic and Orthodox theology (n0t to say that Catholics don’t need to learn, as Pope Benedict clearly did, from the Reformers).  And I have many Catholic friends, among them priests and parishioners and Catholic intellectuals, with whom I enjoy wonderful fellowship and intellectual stimulation.

I think the reason for this slippage among even traditional Catholics is false shame.  Traditional Catholic priests have been so impressed by the Long Lent (Richard Neuhaus’ term) of the Catholic clerical sexual scandals that they think their people don’t want to hear anything from unmarried clerics about sex and marriage.  As a result they preach about everything but–even though they (the vast majority) had no part in the scandals.  And when sex and marriage are the principal points at which western culture attacks the gospel, it is huge but.

Now more than  ever Catholics need to hear the distinctively Catholic view, which is really the classical Christian view, of sex and marriage.

And this is not ancillary but central to the gospel.  For marriage is the principal metaphor for God’s relationship to his people, in both the Old and New Testament.

So it seems to this Anglican that the reason why Catholics, even traditional Catholics, are disturbingly thinking like the pagan culture, is because that is all they have been given to hear.  We pastors should not be shocked if our people think like the culture if we have not given a vigorous alternative to the culture from the pulpit.  Which is the only time most Christians get to hear anything distinctly different.