Generally speaking, a good poem is not primarily about its apparent subject matter: e.g., love, hate, birds, flowers, death, war, peace, cars, trucks, airplanes, etc. No, it is primarily about words and combinations of words. It is only secondarily about its subject matter.
Likewise with the sexual revolution. It is not primarily about its apparent subject matter: pornography, premarital sex, unmarried cohabitation, easy divorce, promiscuity, abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, polyamory, transgenderism, etc. It is only secondarily about these things. It is primarily about the destruction of Christianity.
When I speak of Christianity here, I have in mind certain classical forms of Christianity – Catholicism, Orthodoxy Christianity, and Evangelical Protestantism. I am not thinking of liberal or modernistic Christianity, which has so thoroughly succumbed to the sexual revolution and the anti-Christianity forces that lie behind this revolution that it no longer truly counts as Christianity.
Liberal Christianity is found chiefly in the mainline Protestant churches, which are rapidly withering away. But in recent times this weird perversion of Christianity has shown its head among Catholics; and if it continues to flourish among Catholics, most notably among certain northern European bishops, Catholicism too will wither away.
If Christianity is a true religion, then the sexual revolution has been a very bad thing, introducing toxic ideas and practices into the life of the modern world. Eventually, the revolution may destroy this modern world by destroying the minds and morals of everybody who lives in it. If, on the other hand, the sexual revolution is a good thing, then Christianity is a bad thing, a very bad thing. And for people who believe that, the sooner the Faith disappears from the world, the better off we’ll all be.
There is a contradiction between Christianity and the sexual revolution. If one is right, the other is wrong. Since most Americans today, especially Americans under the age of 40 or 50, approve of the sexual revolution, it follows that they disapprove of Christianity. But not all of those who disapprove of Christianity realize that they disapprove.
Many people, including many American Catholics, have a capacity for embracing two contradictory ideas at the same time. They give their approval, or at least their semi-approval, to the sexual revolution while continuing to imagine that they still believe in the teachings of the Catholic Church.
Once upon a time American colleges, both Catholic and non-Catholic, required their students to take an elementary logic course, in which the student learns, among other things, that two contradictory propositions cannot be true at the same time. Too bad colleges no longer require this.
The modern war against Christianity began in England in the late 17th century, and it took the form of Deism, which was an anti-Christian reaction to the excesses of the Puritanism that had plagued England and Scotland in the first half of that century. Many were converted or half-converted to Deism, which allowed them to decide that Christianity no longer needed to be taken seriously.
And this led an Anglican bishop, Joseph Butler (author of the once-famous book, The Analogy of Religion), to remark:
It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is now, at length, discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among all people of discernment; and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as were by way of reprisals, for having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.
From reading this, you would think Bishop Butler had been watching some of our late-night TV entertainment programs.
In some movies, the bad guy, though apparently killed, is not yet dead; and so he picks up his gun and resumes shooting at the good guy. In “Fatal Attraction” (in my opinion, one of the best movies ever made), crazy and murderous Glenn Close, apparently drowned, hence no longer a threat, rises from the bathtub wielding a knife. In Martin Scorsese movies, murderers commonly shoot their dead victims three or four extra times, just to make sure.
Sexual revolutionaries are like the Scorsese-type killers; they empty their guns into the victim, Christianity. You might think they had delivered a mortal wound to Christianity when they won widespread acceptance of abortion, for isn’t it obvious that if the killing of unborn babies is right, then Christianity is wrong? But no, just to make sure the damage done to Christianity is mortal, the sexual revolutionaries fire a multitude of insurance shots – homosexuality, same-sex marriage, threesomes, etc.
I am told that approval of transgenderism is the most recent stage of the sexual revolution. But I may be wrong about this. It may be that, even as I’ve been writing this essay, the sexual revolutionaries have moved on to approval of incest. (But only among consenting adults.) And sometime in 2025 (I think they will postpone this new development till after the presidential election of 2024), we may be told that only narrow-minded bigots object to adult men having sex with middle-school girls – provided, of course, that there is not only mutual consent but a genuine feeling of love between the partners.
My guess is that it won’t be until the 2030s that we’ll be told that everybody except a fascist approves of sex with animals – but only when the animals give clear indications of their consent, e.g., by wagging their tails.
If you are a Catholic, you have to be (in my humble opinion) something like an absolute moron to hope that the upcoming Synod on Synodality will deal with LGBTQA+ issues in such a way that a great variety of sexual perverts will no longer feel “excluded” from the Church. Oh, the hurt feelings of sexual perverts! And oh! the compassionate feelings of those Catholics who, in order that such perverts might feel “included,” will consent to the destruction of their religion.
*Image: The Flight of Lot and His Family from Sodom by Peter Paul Rubens,1613-15 [The Ringling Museum, Sarasota, Florida]
You may also enjoy some of our most popular columns from the last dozen years:
Anonymous An Open Letter to the American Catholic Bishops
Fr. Gerald E. Murray’s The Crisis We Are Living
