By Carl Trueman, First Things.
The advent of Pride Month, albeit in recent years a slightly more muted affair than in the past, is an annual reminder of one of the central aspects of our modern culture. Ours is a culture not merely characterized by the death of old moral values but their intentional and exultant destruction. Anyone who has witnessed a Pride parade can be in no doubt about this. Twice I have unintentionally been in London as the parade takes place; twice my shock at the explicit nature of some of the floats has only been exceeded by my incomprehension at the parents who have brought their tiny children out to watch and cheer. Today, we apparently celebrate neither sexual modesty nor childhood.
Such exultant destruction of things once deemed sacred is a constitutive part of a Western culture that has transformed the rebel into a hero. Rebels need sacred rules to transgress, and as rebellion began to emerge as a heroic ideal in the nineteenth century—at least among the artistic classes—so the religion that upheld those sacred rules was bound to suffer. Matthew Arnold may have captured something of the death of religion with his image of the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the ebbing sea of faith, but it does not capture the ecstatic frenzy and deicide of the sexual revolution. Transgression is fun, exhilarating fun, as thinkers as diverse as Augustine, Nietzsche, and Freud knew only too well. And the glorification of the transgressor is a hallmark of our moment.