Asbury’s fidelity to Christian sexual ethics and the response of the UMC represent the real struggle that lies behind the emotive rhetoric of the sexual revolution—a revolution that destroys humanity in the name of affirming it. These are interesting times when a Hegelian Marxist who died in 1973 offers sounder guidance to being human than a prominent Christian denomination in 2026.

The United Methodist Church (UMC) has removed Asbury Theological Seminary from its list of institutions approved to train its ministers. Hardly a bastion of right-wing Protestant fundamentalism, Asbury has nonetheless run afoul of the UMC. Why? The seminary has had the temerity to uphold the traditional Christian teaching on sex and marriage. Asbury’s conviction looks potentially costly, but what price should we place on such matters? Sexual morality isn’t just about behavior; it’s about the essence of human nature and society, involving the profoundest questions about personal relationships, social structures, and teleology—what human beings are for.  

Years before “swinging” meant anything beyond big band music, thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and J. D. Unwin pointed out that sexual codes are at the heart of culture. Dismantle them, and you dismantle the essence of those human relationships that define a civilization. The sexual revolution did just that, turning a lifelong human bond connected to procreation into mere recreation. It thereby turned sexual partners into instruments of worth only insofar as they meet one’s sexual needs. Sex today is not about self-giving; it is about selfish taking. And the fruit of this “liberation” has been the unprecedented objectification of women, pornography being only the most obvious example.

In recent years, feminists such as Louise Perry, Christine Emba, and Mary Harrington have highlighted the sexual revolution’s obvious problems. But despite these green shoots of sanity, progressive Christianity, true to form, still cheers for the wrong team.

Critical theorist Max Horkheimer, who co-authored Dialectic of Enlightenment with Theodor Adorno, would go on to repudiate the sexual revolution. In an interview in the late 1960s, he expressed support for the encyclical Humanae Vitae, arguing that contraception, and the sexual revolution it helped enable, destroyed love and thereby led to the objectification and instrumentalization of other people.

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