Here is the same message The Nation seems to have just discovered on one of their sociological safaris to the American Heartland. Christians think sex belongs in marriage and that all life, even unborn life, should be protected and celebrated. News at eleven. For students of history, this is as surprising as it is new. Regarding chastity, Jesus himself taught that God’s design in the beginning—“he who created them from the beginning made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4)—defines what is both permissible and advisable regarding human sexuality: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Matthew 19:5; cf. Genesis 1:27; 2:24).

In C. S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress, John the protagonist finds himself in Eschropolis (“Ugly City” in Greek), where the boys look like girls and the girls look like boys, and everyone acts obscenely in their avantgarde rejection of puritanism. Scandalized by what he encounters, John objects, only to be shouted down by one of the residents: “We have got over humanitarianism!” “And prudery!” shouts another. Funny, these impulses. Two peas in a pod.

In his allegory, Lewis exposes modern progressive morality, which is in such ugly disarray that progressives regularly call good evil and evil good and cannot fathom moral principles when they encounter them. Instead, they convulse in protest.

I thought of Lewis’s passage recently when I came across this article from The Nation, a leftist groupthink organization that shared the following deep thought on social media: “The church in heartland America promotes a harsh sexual morality. But it sends a mixed message: Premarital sex is sinful, but teens who have babies are revered as mothers.”

Where to begin? For starters, upholding chastity and revering motherhood are hardly unique to the church in the American Midwest. In actual fact, these tenets of Christian sexual morality are as old as Christianity itself.

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