To say that our understanding about sexuality is confused is an understatement. Think of any aspect of life – personal identity, interpersonal relationships, family life, community commitment, online habits, political policies, legal changes, and educational emphases – and you will find wildly different opinions about what is right and wrong with reference to our sexuality. This applies to both what we think and what we do.
This topic is thus very important, and big. In this short piece, I will choose to reflect on only a couple of thinkers who have commented on our sexuality. We will continue to use CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity, and also some very brief comments from Dr Carl Trueman’s two books on the topic. The first is textbook in size and scope - The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural amnesia, expressive individualism, and the road to sexual revolution, Crossway Books, 2020. The second was the subsequent more accessible and more slender volume, Strange New World: How thinkers and activists redefined identity and sparked the sexual revolution, Crossway Books, 2022. I recommend either of these books if you wish to have a very systematic think about how we arrived at our current state of confusion due to the collective hardening of our hearts and futility of our thinking.
Let’s firstly review some of Lewis’ comments. One of his observations is that there is a false anthropology being accepted in Western thought. That obfuscation is that if we treat our sexuality as a natural and good human trait, and if we give up trying to somehow tame it, all the so-called moral issues will dissipate. Of such teaching Lewis comments that:
We have been told, till one is sick of hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires and that if only we abandon this silly old Victorian idea of hushing it up, everything in the garden will be lovely. It is not true. (p. 88)
Historically, Lewis has been proven to be correct. We have become more obsessed with our sexual natures. In the 1960’s to the turn of the century, the obsession was with freedom of sexual expression. That is what increased, to the detriment of families, women and children, and their absent fathers / husbands. The author of The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer, once commented that she regretted forgetting to teach women that they had the freedom to say “No” as well as “Yes”.
As we moved into the 2000’s and particularly post 2010, the internet has enabled free pornographic fantasies and has encouraged the obsession that identity is integrally linked with sexuality. We can - sexually - call ourselves whatever we want, and in a new manifestation of a special knowledge belief typical of Gnosticism, we believe we can separate our thought life from our physical life. We deny we are embodied souls and defy attempts to live in a way that is truly holistic. Such holism insists on admitting physical and spiritual aspects of human reality. Such is the uniqueness of the Judeo-Christian anthropology, and it is only possible when recognising it does not start with us – it starts with acknowledging the reality of the Creator.
Trueman captures both dilemmas at the start of each book. In his Rise of the Modern Self, he places the changed role of God in our society in direct relationship with how we now view ourselves as sexual beings. These quotes explain it well:
[Quoting Rod Dreher quoting Solzhenitsyn] Because men have forgotten God, they have also forgotten man; that’s why all this has happened. … The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.” … In short, the sexual revolution is simply one manifestation of the larger revolution of the self that has taken place in the West. (pp. 11, 19, 20)
Indeed, not only is a statement about being a woman trapped in a man’s body now widely accepted, but disagreement with it can also end up with the questioner experiencing social and / or legal cancellation, where ‘cancellation’ means losing freedom to be involved in civic discourse. Therefore, how did we end up in such a way of thinking and living in such a relatively short space of time? Trueman’s start to his second book gives a precis of the shift:
I would summarise the arc of this book as an account of how the person became a self, the self became sexualised, and sex became politicised. … Authenticity to inner feelings, rather than adherence to transcendent truths, becomes the norm. … the modern therapeutic turn inward counsels [sic] people to be true to their inner sexual desires. … Affirmation of the sexualised self is the key to our new politics. And our new language. (p.12-14)
The major implications of such changes for schools are topics for another time. Here I want to emphasize that although these developments are profoundly disappointing, they perhaps should not be surprising. The Apostle Paul described this pattern of thinking and subsequent living in some detail in Romans 1:16-32. As he explained it, without God’s reality in the God-shaped hole of our souls, society will fill them with garbage (to use Jon Haidt’s term from his latest book). As Paul properly noted, the crescendo of such thinking and life-choices is not simply approval of the freedom to personally live this way, but it also comes with encouragement of others to do likewise (Romans 1:32).
Thus, dealing with sexuality is intensely spiritual. Sexuality is a gift from God, but like all gifts He has given us, what we do with it is a matter of the heart. That is why straight instruction (giving the ‘right information’) will never be enough to guide our young people through the morass of debased ideas that swirl around them. As Lewis observed:
Before we can be cured we must want to be cured. Those who really wish for help will get it; but for the many modern people even the wish is difficult. … Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. (pp. 89, 91)
Paul outlined the issue further in another letter. His invitation to the believers in Ephesus is that we are not to focus on futile thoughts – such wasteful thinking pretends that ignoring the Creator is not foolish, but it is. The foolishness can be seen in the move towards focussing on sensuality (feeling physically titillated) rather than movement towards marriage-enhanced intimacy, where two become one, before God. This movement away from living by animalistic, physical instinct and sensuality cannot be superficial. It must be involve intentionally putting off the desire of short-term sensuousness with an intentional movement towards living as God intends us to live. This resuscitation of the heart comes through the renewal in the spirit of our minds. Talk of proper cognition and competency of knowing about such things is good in itself, but not enough. If we cannot discern the heart of the matter for us, and our students, we will keep being swept back and forth by the winds of our time [i].
Another Christian brother reflected on these patterns of thought and life as he moved from the life of the clever and sensuous, to a life of redeemed faith. His comment about the addictive nature of the deceits of our hearts comes at a critical juncture in his autobiography, and can perhaps it can give us a frank starting point for prayer:
Of a stubborn will is a lust made. When a lust is served, a custom is made, and when a custom is not resisted a necessity is made. (St Augustine, Confessions, p.191)
Grace and peace,
Stephen
[i] This paragraph is based on Ephesians 4:11-24.