Two years ago, students and administrators successfully obstructed a debate about abortion at Oxford. Last year, Stanford students tried to cancel a campus conference on the sexual revolution. Mary Eberstadt argues that groups at each university, separated by an ocean and a continent, joined ranks against social-conservative student groups because both groups entertained questions about the sexual revolution. In her brief against political assaults on religious believers, she reports why Christian dissenters from progressive sexual ethics are, quite simply, not tolerated.
It’s old news that conservatives have lost cultural ground in America. But “in this profound and still-unfolding transvaluation,” Eberstadt writes, “yesterday’s ‘sinners’ have become the new secular saints; and yesterday’s ‘sins’ have become virtues, as positive expressions of freedom.” Likewise, Christian conservatives—far from instilling theocracy in America, as their critics like to suggest—are subject to witch hunts by an amplified minority of secular progressives.
These new beliefs form a new religion, Eberstadt argues, with their own “neo-puritans” possessing “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be a Christian exercising the right to free association with other Christians.” Whether it’s forcing Brendan Eich to resign from Mozilla or crushing small businesses and charities with fees and penalties, the “enemies of religious freedom are the enemies of liberalism itself.”
Whether secular progressivism is anything like a new religion or just ideology imitating religious feeling, Eberstadt’s analysis is revealing. Religious freedom is being redefined, along with family and gender, because this phase of the culture wars is part of a wider sexual revolution. The expressive individualism of the 1960s and ’70s is the faith of those who wield the levers of power; “traditional” morality is retained by “believers” who don’t share that faith. Their ongoing clash is fundamental: Do dissenters from the new sexual orthodoxy have a place in American society?
Mary Eberstadt’s previous works include How the West Really Lost God (2013) and Adam and Eve After the Pill (2012). The former suggested that the decline of marriage and family has hastened the decline of religion; the latter vindicates the warnings against the sexual revolution in Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae (1968). Now she extends this analysis to religious freedom and its class implications: Because Christian communities are primary resources of community and aid and material resources are limited, “to discredit and impede people who help the poor is to hurt the poor.” Secular progressive witch hunts are class warfare.
As it happens, Eberstadt has little to say about how conservative Christians can build up their own institutions. But strengthening distinct Christian institutions and culture is fundamental as nominal Christianity fades and the wider culture grows increasingly hostile. If there is to be civic renewal in American churches and families, as well as public-spiritedness and civility, religious Americans must be involved.
Eberstadt speaks in cataclysmic terms about the “soft despotism” Western Christians face—in contrast to the full despotism their brethren face in the Middle East and China—and here a broader perspective is helpful. Consider, for instance, the insights of church historian Christopher Dawson who argues that Christian life means continual spiritual warfare. Despite temporary successes, “the successive ages of the Church are successive campaigns in this unending war, and as soon as one enemy has been conquered a new one appears to take its place.” That is to say, soft threats to religious freedom need not mean the beginning of the end but the end of one age and the beginning of another—for a church already separated by oceans and continents.
Ryan Shinkel is a summer intern at the Philanthropy Roundtable.
