Facing the Adversary World of the Sexual Revolution
by Rick Plasterer, Juicy Ecumenism:
Earlier articles two years ago reviewed church historian and Grove City College professor Carl Trueman’s discussion of his incisive and popular book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. His most recent book, published earlier this year, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, covers the same ground, but in a more concise form.
The new book is focused on how traditional sexual morality, and the freedoms of religion and speech which protect it, have come to be understood by opinion leaders and much of society not only as mistaken, but as intolerable, and properly, illegal.
The Inward Directed Self
Key to explaining this, Trueman believes, is the changed notion of the self. While until the mid-twentieth century an individual was to be defined in a way that was outwardly directed, toward family, church, nation, and ultimately, God, a confluence of increasingly influential ideas has led to individuals being defined by their inner feelings and desires. Chief among these ideas is the replacement of a transcendent orientation, which explains life by reference to a sacred order – in Christian society, by reference to God and his ordering of creation – with an imminent frame of reference, which understands the world, at least as far as can be publicly known, as purposeless “stuff,” with no particular way things ought to be ordered. Since sexual desire is among our strongest impulses, securing its satisfaction has become for many the chief moral imperative.
See also: America’s Way Forward on Marriage, from Public Discourse:
“…developed nations are finding themselves unable to accomplish the great, simple task of every human society: bringing young men and women together to marry and raise the next generation together.”
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