Recently, Rod Dreher of The American Conservative, Damon Linker of The Week, and Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic have been talking about Christians talking about sex. While I hate to run against Michael Hannon, I will plead the academic’s defense here: I wrote my thesis on the topic, so bear with me. So let’s get meta: a Catholic talking about journalists talking about Christians talking about sex.

Taking a cue from both Aristotle and The Sound of Music, let’s begin at the beginning. The conversation started with Twitter, as all the best do now, and led Dreher to write a response piece claiming that when we talk about “traditional Christianity”:

What I’m thinking about—what we are all thinking about—is this: what separates “traditional Christians” from “modern Christians” (or “progressive Christians”) in our common discourse is their beliefs about sex. Nothing else, or at least nothing else meaningful. Think about it—for purposes of general discussion these days, what would you say separates those you would call “traditional Christians” from other kinds of Christians? Take sex out of the picture, and what do you have? If we’re not talking about sex, what are we talking about?

A quick flip through Patheos and Google News suggests that Dreher is correct in this assesment. Though we can argue about Thomist Catholics vs. Molinist Catholics, the infamous filioque, Lutherans vs. Unitarians, and any number of other dogmatic issues, when the modern media denotes someone as a “conservative” or “traditional” Christian, they aren’t talking about chapel veils, and this is in contrast to more, shall we say “modern,” denominations. In fact, in all of those articles from the past few weeks, the topic are either gay marriage or birth control, which both are variations on the theme of sex.

Linker responds to Dreher’s question, writing:

The answer is: nothing. We are talking—and fighting, and slinging mud, and spewing bile—about nothing but sex. And in particular, about two competing, largely incompatible visions of the proper place of sex in a good human life.

On one side—the losing side—stand the traditionalists, the last (or nearly last) links in a chain stretching back decades, centuries, even millennia. Yes, their side's outlook has changed, shifted, evolved in various ways over the years, but it has also been marked by considerable continuity, at least since Christianity triumphed over paganism during the centuries following the death of Jesus Christ.

From that time, in the fourth century, down to roughly my grandparents' generation, the vast majority of people in the Western world believed without question that masturbation, pre-marital sex, and promiscuity were wrong, that out-of-wedlock pregnancy was shameful, that adultery was a serious sin, that divorce should either be banned or allowed only in the rarest of situations, and that homosexual desires were gravely disordered and worthy of severe (often violent) punishment.


Linker offers a decent summary of the now culturally antiquated mores once applied to sex and sexuality, though he describes these norms in a somewhat negative manner. Ultimately, those former assumptions about behavior can now be easily broken without raising our collective eyebrows. As Linker's article continues:
Welcome to sexual modernity—a world in which the dense web of moral judgments and expectations that used to surround and hem in our sex lives has been almost completely dissolved, replaced by a single moral judgment or consideration: individual consent.

After Linker notes that he has no idea how to answer the questions that our new liberation brings up—questions he believes we should be trying to answer—Friedersdorf enters the conversation. Early on he quotes Andrew Sullivan’s claim that sexual activity isn’t the dividing line between traditional and modern Christianity. Rather, Sullivan claims,
The actual dividing line between modern and traditional Christians in the public square is that I do not regard sexual matters to be that important in the context of what Christianity teaches about our obligations as human beings in the polity and the world. The difference between moderns and trads is that the trads see sex as the critical issue, and we moderns see a whole host of other issues.

Friedersdorf adds the caveat to Sullivan’s above statement, suggesting that because religion is concerned with the daily life of the individual, who deals with sex and sexuality, then religion must be concerned with sex and sexuality. What Friedersdorf is ultimately hoping for is a shift in the conversations that traditional Christians have about sex: less focus on the sin aspect that comes when sexuality is approached as a moral issue in itself, and more focus on “do unto others” as a method of doing what is right. Below is an excerpt from a hypothetical speech that Friedersdorf suggests a pastor could give at a once traditionally Christian but now ever more secular university during orientation, from the “be good to others” perspective:
If you really try to be good to one another, if you earnestly question what that moral code demands and grapple your way toward answers, you may not always like what your reason and conscience tell you. It may tell you to stop slowly taking that person's clothing off even though they haven't said to stop. It may tell you that you need to stay in the room with a friend who'd clearly rather be alone with an intoxicated date. Students are at greater risk of sexual assault at parties where there's drinking going on. Does that mean anything for your behavior if you're obligated to be good to your fellow students? Do you stay sober, or drink less and keep an eye on those who drink more, or serve only beer, not hard alcohol, when you host, or throw a substance-free party?

I don’t think that Friedersdorf is entirely off base in the speech he provides. The fact of the matter is, simply replacing “will die” with “go to hell” in the Mean Girls quote “don’t have sex or you will get pregnant and you will die” is ineffective in promoting morality. I don’t think that most traditionalists whom I have met use that line, but it is a point worth noting. Moreover, it is hard to talk about natural law to a world in which, even of those who have heard the phrase, few believe such a thing exists.

Our cultural conversation about sex and sexuality is one deeply rooted in the notion of consent. Consent justifies all, while evil shifts from doing something in the wrong way, at the wrong time, with the wrong person to violating a denial of consent. A moral tradition that requires the subjugation of the sexual urge to an assessment of in the right way, at the right time, with the right person simply doesn’t translate well when the widespread cultural position on sexual activities has become “my body, my choice,” and when that assumption has been enabled by various theological strains along the way.

In a sense, we have to shift the entire conversation surrounding sex away from sex. To talk about sex from the traditional perspective makes little sense to our thoroughly modern mores except considered within the overarching reality of Christ. Sex abstracted from any person, viewed in a material reductionist manner as a means of transferring genetic material, would be a morally neutral activity. However, as every sexual encounter among humans involves individuals with unique circumstances, wills, passions, emotions, and intentions, it is never a mere transfer of genetic material. It is a human activity, which is why the traditional position can analyze the actions under the notion of morality, specifically, how those actions accord with or fall short of the virtue of chastity. But the entire moral life as understood by the traditional Christian perspective is subordinated to and contingent upon the life of faith. Ultimately, that faith is founded on our relation to Christ, and enlivened by the Holy Spirit acting within us.

In fact, to claim that traditional Christianity reduces to a discussion about sex (which is the position modern culture has assumed) is incredibly wrong. Traditional Christianity is fundamentally about love; precisely the point that Friedersdorf makes. The point of departure with modern Christianity is on what our proper response to that love should be. Where we diverge is that love cannot be fully expressed in “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Traditional Christianity claims that love goes beyond that boundary: This love, agape, does unto others what you could neither request nor even ask that they do unto you, because God first loved us. Agape compares to the moral love of the Golden Rule as the sublime to the beautiful: It adds the notion of awe. St. Paul expresses the gratuity of love when he observes of how God loves us:"while we were still sinners, Christ died for us."

Contrary to Sullivan's opinion, for all I talk about sex and marriage, I don't see it as the single critical issue. I do see much of our modern approach to sexuality as rooted in other, far more critical issues that hinge on a divergence of fundamental principles and subsequent ideological and intellectual customs arising between traditional Christians, progressive Christians, and the secular culture at large. Will this play out practically by a continued conversation about sex and sexuality? Probably, as that is an important conversation happening in culture regardless of our involvement. But ultimately, we should not neglect to proclaim along with the moral virtues the theological virtues: faith, hope, and love, “but the greatest of these is love.”