The positing of original sexless origins and the primitive androgynous emergence of humankind, as well as a denial of the even more fundamental creator-creature distinction itself, is basic to pagan, humanistic thought. As Peter Jones warns, “once the male-female distinction falls, other creational categories also become irrelevant.”[13] If you can destroy the creational norm of marriage and family then you are destroying the image of the eternal holy family, Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and this, it seems, lies at the root of today’s idolatrous war on creation.

Revolutionary sexuality: Where are we?

It is surely beyond all dispute that we live in an age of revolution. This revolutionary upheaval is revealed most dramatically in the area of human sexuality. On all sides in our culture we are witness to the separating of what God has joined and a joining of what he has separated (Mark 10:9). Thus in the first instance we have no-fault divorce, the celebration of sex outside of marriage and abortion as contraception – with not even a pretended desire for holding together, in a moral union, love, sex and child-rearing in the permanent bond of the creational family. In the latter case, we have the promotion and celebration of homosexuality and even the denial of real, normative distinctions between male and female.

This ‘gender mainstreaming’ regards male and female sex as ‘fictive’ and seeks to reinvent humanity in terms of a gender-blending abstraction. The demagogues of revolution go about this subversion of creational norms in the name of liberation and empowerment, but as G. K. Chesterton warned, end up destroying what they claim to set free:

You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.[1]

The speed with which the demagogues armed with their pagan ideologies have captured our culture, liberating man of his mannishness, is staggering; and it can only be accounted for by the fact that Western society has been rendered morally weak and impotent by its sexual guilt – our resistance to subversion broken down by the sexualisation and pornification of most cultural life. Consequently, speaking of Christian sexual ethics today is not for the faint of heart. To point out the tragic and ruinous dismantling of creational norms in our society is to place yourself at risk of ostracism and exclusion – even among professing Christians.

The contemporary revolution is openly directed against God, and indeed creation itself, which is sustained and upheld by the Word of God. Scripture republishes and explicates that creation Word and is therefore vehemently opposed by the artisans of the new sexual order.

Architects of Revolution: How did we get here?

The rallying cry of Voltaire during the French Revolution was ‘crush the infamy’ – by which he meant the Christian church and the moral order it stood for. The sexual revolutionaries of the twentieth century find the root of their revolutionary spirit in the self-creating illusions of Marxism, with its visceral hatred of both God and the family. As Marx keenly observed, “The secret to the Holy Family is the earthly family. To make the former disappear, the latter must be destroyed, in theory and in practice.”[2]

The past hundred years or so have given us the interrelated evolutionary, existential, technological, revolutionary, Freudian, behaviourist and gender-fluid views of the human person. As Gordon Spykman has pointed out, “The contemporary quests for self-identity degenerate into the many faces of modern man’s self-deception. He re-creates himself into the likeness of his own multi-masked image.”[3] Or in the words of Scripture, those who make idols become like them (Ps. 115:8). The cultural implications of this truth are all around us.

As a result of the many decades of theoretical, social and political assault on Christian sexual ethics, the norms which are part of any society’s operating system are being radically altered. This is doubly troubling for Christians because as this alteration occurs, new social and legal penalties are introduced to protect the new norms – for every society protects sexual norms with penalties.

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