The Thread That Unraveled the West

Did artificial birth control bludgeon Christendom into oblivion?

It’s autopsy week at Christendom Reborn, in which we call a range of witnesses to testify as to who killed Christendom? Today we have two witnesses: Louise Perry and Mary Eberstadt. Their culprit is the sexual revolution. At the risk of getting too cute, you might say that this is the “blunt force trauma” account of the death of Christendom.

Perry makes an interesting witness. She started as a critic of the sexual revolution, then came to see Christianity as the primary bulwark against the evils she was describing, then started going to church, initially as a “cultural Christian.” She now calls herself a Christian, full stop. But that’s a recent development. In a way, Perry has backed into the mantle of Mary Eberstadt, who spent years exploring the consequences of the sexual revolution. Eberstadt’s How the West Lost God (2013) was particularly significant for our purposes, advancing the controversial thesis that secularization was actually downstream from the sexual revolution, not the other way round.

No doubt they’d still have disagreements, but Perry’s recent Wall Street Journal piece, “Christendom Is No More,” certainly made me think of Eberstadt. They approached from different directions, but ultimately converged on similar ground.

On this view, “Christendom” clearly doesn’t mean the same thing that it did for Greengrass: the pre-modern, European world in which faith, social life, and geopolitics dovetailed in a mutually reinforcing matrix. His account of the collapse ends at Westphalia, in 1648. Both Perry and Eberstadt are fixated on a 20th-century turning point. Even so, there may be a sense in which this “Christendom” is derivative on Greengrass’. The geopolitical reality may have crumbled long before the Summer of Love, but perhaps Christianity’s moral consensus outlived it, maintaining its inertia among ordinary people who ignored the crazed intellectuals, weathered the political transitions, and continued marrying and raising families for several more centuries. Then came the sexual revolution. And the jig was up.

To understand how this happened, it’s useful to reference what religious conservatives like to call the “Iron Triangle.” (This is not to be confused with the political “iron triangle” involving committees, bureaucrats, and lobbyists.) In a traditional Christian society, sex, marriage, and babies are understood to go together. They’re a package deal. Having sex outside of marriage is discouraged and socially stigmatized; marriage itself is understood to entail fidelity and permanence; and married people are expected to be open to nurturing children, the natural fruit of a sexual relationship. When these three things are firmly bound together, that creates an internally stable matrix that gives women needed support and protection, children intact families, and men powerful incentives to channel their energies in constructive directions (instead of being predators or antisocial loners).

What happens when we break the triangle, hoping to disassemble and recombine? Well, it’s unstable. Things fall apart. Eberstadt essentially sees artificial birth control as the bomb that blew up this salutary arrangement, tricking people into thinking that because fertility was now voluntary, it would be fine to start thinking of the three defining elements of the Iron Triangle as a pick-a-mix, not a set package. That went very badly, much worse in fact than anyone expected. It set off a disastrous chain reaction, destabilizing marriage, which destabilized family life, which destabilized Christianity, which destabilized the West. That, in a nutshell, is how the West lost God.

Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, the book that put her on the map, was not written from a Christian perspective, so she doesn’t use the term “Iron Triangle,” but her concerns easily fit into the model. She argues that changes in sexual mores have been specially disadvantageous to women, tossing them into a callous, depersonalized meat market where they are easily reduced to sex objects. She too sees artificial birth control as the main thing that “tricked” us into jettisoning a time-honored set of assumptions and practices that we needed far more than we realized. For her as well, the pill ends up becoming the malevolent thread that unraveled the West.

Perry spent years working in a rape crisis center. She’s very attuned to women’s sex-specific vulnerabilities, which stem from the fact that their bodies are ordered towards pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding. Men don’t have those challenges, but they do have robust sexual appetites, which means that sex is grossly inegalitarian by nature, not merely by social convention. When young people are habituated to see “consent” as the only requirement for licit sex, it is women who suffer the most; they don’t have enough leverage to secure the support they need from men, who often prefer to satisfy their sexual appetites with undemanding, low-commitment relationships. In short: without the protections of the Triangle, women easily get exploited and victimized. So do children. And the men often end up as predators or disaffected losers, doing drugs or playing video games all day.

After her first breakout book, Perry began exploring the “sexual revolution” ethos more expansively, considering the ways in which it was catalyzing a brutal process of “repaganizing.” She’s thinking about Tom Holland and the terrors of a post-Christian world. She worries about other vulnerable people, such as the elderly, who are casually tossed to the side. Her Wall Street Journal piece brings this all back to a very Ebestadtian place: Christendom is over. The chain reaction initiated by the pill has leveled Christ’s realm here on Earth.

I find much to admire in both Perry and Eberstadt, and I think it’s clear that the sexual revolution has indeed factored heavily in the West’s (and the world’s) present malaise. It’s also central to Christianity’s present struggles. Both of these writers have helped me to think more deeply about those connections. I do think they may be a little too focused on artificial birth control as the weapon that bludgeoned the West into decrepitude, and I worry that this can obscure some other crucial pieces of the story.

Most of all, I worry that that oversimplification trends very easily into despair, perhaps more despair than the real situation warrants. If a revitalized culture requires us to “roll back the sexual revolution,” the prospects seem quite bleak. Thus far, religious conservatives’ efforts to do that have been spectacularly unsuccessful. We’re nowhere close to banning artificial contraceptives or ending no-fault divorce. Apparently we can’t even ban mail-order abortion pills (or at least that’s been an uphill battle).

I myself, to be clear, fully embrace the traditional Christian view of sexual morals. Including the condemnation of artificial birth control. And this is not merely an academic position for me. Have I mentioned that I have five children? Enough said.

Except, perhaps it is not enough said, because my own experience, living in the Iron Triangle for twenty years, suggests a couple of things. Committed marriage is a very good thing. It supplies a sound foundation for a well-lived life. But, it doesn’t really resolve all the difficult social questions that perplex us today. It doesn’t tell us what roles men and women should play, in the household or society at large. It doesn’t yield a rich anthropology of gender, or a delightfully harmonious theory of sexual complementarity. Traditionalists love to try to build elaborate theories of gender on that basic framework, but those theories tend to range from “somewhat true but lacking nuance” to “clownish and absurd.” And here’s the thing about bad and clownish theories: they don’t win converts. Only the already-converted will take them seriously.

I myself tend to see the formality of the Iron Triangle as a feature more than a bug. Its logic doesn’t demand that we accept any hackneyed stereotypes about women. It doesn’t dictate any clear division of labor, within the home or outside it. It leaves plenty of space for us to continue to learn new things, about men and women, what they’re capable of and how they best thrive. That’s potentially very good for cultural adaptation. But the bad news is that the Iron Triangle can’t be viewed as a magic bullet solution to the confusion and social chaos of our time. It helps! But this era would have required a lot of adaptation and re-negotiation of roles, with or without the pill. And if we want to lead people back to that arrangement, we need to fill out our anthropology

An expanded anthropology is all the more crucial because artificial birth control was just one of many technological and cultural shocks that rocked the world in the 20th century. There were many other changes too, including:

– Massive increases in material wealth

– A huge upswing in mass education

– Tremendous expansion of both global markets and communication technology

– An information-based economy in which (among other things) women were in a much stronger position to compete

– A more rarified and diversified labor market, which spread opportunity more widely

Work and education in the 20th century became a source of status, identity, and opportunity for more than just the elite. In what imaginable world were women not going to want some share in that? But as women’s horizons changed, that was also going to change their relationship to men, their children, each other, the world. Ties that once bound, often ceased to bind. And of course, this is just one of many ways in which tectonic social, political, and technological changes have transformed our planet over the past century. So let’s be realistic here. This was never going to be easy.

The “blunt force trauma” narrative captures some important truths. The sexual revolution was indeed hugely consequential, and in some ways traumatic. We’ve learned some new things over the past century about women, men, sex, and family, but some we might reasonably prefer not to know.

I won’t ask anyone to celebrate the sexual revolution, as though decades of previously-unimaginable social breakdown are a worthwhile price to pay so that women can be aerospace engineers. My appeal would simply be this. Don’t give up too soon. Give Christianity time to formulate better and more complete answers to the hard social questions of our time. The underlying principles of Christian sexual ethics are still very sound, and the world clearly still needs them, but application is difficult in rapidly-changing circumstances. Also, it’s just reality that under conditions of general chaos, good insights will inevitably get intermixed with unsightly reactionary currents. We’re seeing a lot of that now. But that’s part of the process too! You can’t figure this stuff out in a day.

Christendom took a hard hit from the sexual revolution. It’s been painful, but I don’t think the blow was terminal. The process of recovery might even validate the old adage, “Whatever doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger.”