(This post is the second in a four part series on Secularization and the Sexual Revolution.)
The new sexual morality did not emerge from a vacuum. Massive
intellectual changes at the worldview level over the last 200 years set
the stage for the revolution in which we currently find ourselves. We
are living in times rightly, if rather awkwardly, described as the Late Modern Age. Just a decade ago, we spoke of the Postmodern Age,
as if modernity had given way to something fundamentally new. Like
every new and self-declared epoch, the Postmodern Age was declared to be
a form of liberation. Whereas the Modern Age announced itself as a
secular liberation from a Christian authority that operated on claims of
divine revelation, the Postmodern Age was proposed as a liberation from
the great secular authorities of reason and rationality. The Postmodern
Age, it was claimed, would liberate humanity by operating with an
official “incredulity toward all metanarratives.” In other words,
postmodernity denied all of the big narratives that had previously
shaped the culture and specifically put an end to the Christian
narrative.
And yet, postmodern thought eventuated, as all intellectual movements
must, in its own metanarrative. Then it just passed away. We still speak
of postmodern thinking, even as we speak rightly of postmodern
architecture and postmodern art, but we are speaking, for the most part,
of a movement that has given way and given up. In retrospect, the
Postmodern Age was not a new age at all; it was only the alarm that
announced the end of Modernity and the beginning of the Late Modern Age.
Modernity has not disappeared. It has only grown stronger, if also more
complex.
The claim that humanity can only come into its own and overcome various
invidious forms of discrimination by secular liberation is not new, but
it is now mainstream. It is now so common to the cultures of Western
societies that it need not be announced, and often is not noticed. Those
born into the cultures of late modernity simply breathe these
assumptions as they breathe the atmosphere, and their worldviews are
radically realigned, even if their language retains elements of the old
worldview.
The background to this great intellectual shift is the secularization
of Western societies. Modernity has brought many cultural goods, but it
has also, as predicted, brought a radical change in the way citizens of
Western societies think, feel, relate, and reason. The Enlightenment’s
liberation of reason at the expense of revelation was followed by a
radical anti-supernaturalism that can scarcely be exaggerated. Looking
at Europe and Great Britain, it is clear that the Modern Age has
alienated an entire civilization from its Christian roots, along with
Christian moral and intellectual commitments. This did not happen all at
once, of course, though the change came very quickly in nations such as
France and Germany. Scandinavian nations now register almost
imperceptible levels of Christian belief. Increasingly, the same is also
true of Great Britain. Sociologists now speak openly of the death of
Christian Britain—and the evidence of Christian decline is abundant.
Some prophetic voices recognized the scale and scope of the
intellectual changes taking place in the West. Just over thirty years
ago, Francis Schaeffer wrote of a shift in worldview away from one that
was at least vaguely Christian in the memory of society towards a
completely different way of looking at the world. This new worldview was
based on the idea that final reality was impersonal matter or energy
shaped into its present form by impersonal chance. Significantly,
Schaeffer observed that Christians in his time did not see this new
worldview as taking the place of the Christian worldview that had
previously dominated northern European and American cultures, either by
personal conviction or cultural impression. These two worldviews, one
generally Christian and the other barely deistic stood in complete
antithesis to each other in content and also in moral results. These
contrary ways of seeing the world would lead to very different
sociological and governmental results, including the conception and
implementation of law.
In 1983, writing just a few years after Francis Schaeffer made that
contribution, Carl F. H. Henry described the situation and future
possibilities in terms of a strict dichotomy:
“If modern culture is to escape the oblivion that has engulfed the
earlier civilizations of man, the recovery of the will of the
self-revealed God in the realm of justice and law is crucially
imperative. Return to pagan misconceptions of divinized rulers, or a
divinized cosmos, or a quasi-Christian conception of natural law or
natural justice will bring inevitable disillusionment. Not all pleas for
transcendent authority will truly serve God or man. By aggrandizing law
and human rights and welfare to their sovereignty, all manner of
earthly leaders eagerly preempt the role of the divine and obscure the
living God of Scriptural revelation. The alternatives are clear: we
return to the God of the Bible or we perish in the pit of
lawlessness.”[1]
Writing even earlier, Carl Henry had already identified the single
greatest intellectual obstacle to a cultural return to the God of the
Bible. Released in 1976, Henry’s first volume of his six-volume magnum
opus, God, Revelation, and Authority, began with this first
line: “No fact of contemporary Western life is more evident than the
growing distrust of final truth and its implacable questioning of any
sure word.”[2] This obstacle to the return to the authority of a
Christian worldview is really part of a vicious circle that begins with
the departure from at least a cultural impression of God’s revealed
authority. Leaving a Christian worldview leads to a distrust of final
truth and a rejection of universal authority, which then blockades the
way back to the God of the Bible.
ARTICLE CITATIONS
[1] Carl F.H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 6, God Who Stands and Says Part 2 (Wheaton: Crossway, 1999), 454.
[2] Carl F.H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1, God Who Speaks and Shows, Preliminary Considerations (Wheaton: Crossway, 1999), 1.
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