Rod Dreher & Louise Perry • Christianity, the Sexual Revolution and the future of the West

looking at the gap between what I was experiencing during Frontline work and what I had been taught as feminist Theory shook my faith in feminist Theory it's not simply a Christian critique to say that the the sexual Revolution and the culture of the sexual Revolution is a bad thing we seem to have just abandoned any effort to control men and to constrain male sexuality which has to be constrained it's justified by contemporary liberal feminist as being something beneficial for women but in fact those who have benefited the most are the ones who have the most contempt for women want more from today's conversation register now and you'll receive the ebook of Douglas Murray and NT Wright discussing identity myth and miracles and tell us what you thought in our survey with today's show hello and welcome to the big conversation from Premier unbelievable brought to you in partnership with John Templeton Foundation I'm your host Justin Briley the big conversation is all about questions around science philosophy history and culture with big thinkers across the belief Spectrum today we're looking at Christianity the sexual Revolution and the future of the West rodrah is senior editor of the American conservative and a noted journalist and public commentator he's the author of best-selling books including the Benedict option and live not by lies he thinks the culture wars have already been lost by Christians but believes that the Benedict option is best building strong Christian communities as a bullock against secular culture Louise Perry is my other guest she's a journalist for the Daily Mail and unheard and a campaigner against sexual violence in her new book the case against the sexual Revolution she explains from a socio-evolutionary perspective why today's liberal hookup culture is actually bad for women and as a modern secular feminist herself she's come to some surprisingly traditional conclusions around marriage and relationships so today we'll be asking whether post Christendom is a Brave New World or a culture in collapse and whether maybe ancient wisdom still has answers to the modern maladies of life so welcome to the show rod and Louise hello it's great to have you thanks for having me um Bob we'll start with you um you're not the most optimistic of people when it comes to popular culture the modern world tell us what's LED you to the point where you are now basically saying Christians need to build Rock Solid defenses against a coming totalitarian state I mean it sounds quite alarmist at one level it does sound alarmist but there's a lot to be alarmed about uh I in my book The Benedict option I talked about how in the west today the post-christian West we have we no longer have a Transcendent story that unites us that tells us who we are that gives us a foundation for ethics and so uh unsurprisingly ever everything seems to be falling apart I mean you now actually have people wondering what is a man what is a woman and not being able to give answers that is indicative of a much deeper sort of decadence the more recent book live not by lies I talk about the coming totalitarianism I call it a soft totalitarianism it is a it's not stalinism 2.0 but I was tipped off to this by people who came to the West escaping the Soviet Bloc and now they're saying the things they see happening in the west today remind them of what they left behind what are they talking about they're talking about cancel culture they're talking about the way the ruling class in every society in the west has a single narrative that you must follow and it's always involves identity politics that's the sexual Revolution and so forth and if you don't agree with this they can come after you for your job in the UK they can come after you if you tweet out some something mean that offends against a sacred minority and so on and so forth I believe that the the root of all this unlike Orwell who came up with a totalitarianism that depends on fear and Terror to get people to conform this is much more like Aldous huxley's Brave New World where people are compelled to conform because they want to live in a more comfortable Society they want to have a sort of a therapeutic totalitarianism all of these things are social realities now a lot of Christians don't want to see them but we had better wake up so there may be a number of Christians who share some of your concerns but not necessarily Your solution the Benedict option in fact I when I told one person I was coming to speak with you he said oh the author of The Benedict opt out um was the way he called it you know this kind of idea of some people think of it as basically raising the drawbridge and saying we're just going to stay in our safe Christian huddles until the war and it's not about actually engaging the culture anymore I mean is that a fair critique no it's not and you usually the people who say that are people I can be sure have not read my book look I don't believe that any Christian has the option of heading for the hills some might do it but you have to be Amish to do that I'm not called to be Amish neither are you but that doesn't mean that we can just say all is well the Benedict option in the Benedict the Saint Benedict of Mercy the founder of Western monasticism the Benedict option is about how we can live as faithful Christians in the post-christian world and deal with these constant assaults on our faith to deal Faithfully without losing our hope and without losing our faith or compromising it out of existence um I like to tell people that the Benedict option is somewhere between Jeremiah 29 where God speaking to the prophet told the Israelites to settle in Babylon and pray for the Peace of the city but also their early books of the early chapters in Daniel where they tell the story of Shadrach Meshach and Abednego who were Hebrew slaves embedded well embedded in Babylon but who when they were put to the test never forgot who they were they were even willing to die before abandoning God and betraying God we Christians in this post-christian world have got to figure out ways to live and which we can not only ground ourselves firmly into Faith so when we go out into the post-christian world we can present the face of the true face of Christ and pass the faith on to the children we it can't be business as usual okay well thank you for joining us today it's going to be an interesting conversation I think and probably a lot of shared ground and um complementarity between uh you and Louise who joins me on the show as well Louise welcome along um tell us a little bit about your background because you've got a fascinating sort of backstory to what led up to you writing the case against the sexual Revolution working actually in a Rape Crisis Center um story I like to tell about my upbringing is that we used to get two copies of the Guardian delivered every day that's my because my dad would tell where the political leanings yeah that's why yeah that's why it's a useful shorthand for uh um from like yes secular liberal Urban upbringing to me completely boring basically everyone in journalism has the same background but but also informed my thinking um around sexual ethics in particular and and in general I just had the yes essentially and then um and yeah so I went to University I studied anthropology I studied women's studies I then worked in a rate crisis center afterwards um partly by accident I was volunteering there and a job became available and so on um but it was it was a real confrontation with reality um which is not to say that everyone who works in the women's sector ends up reaching my conclusions they definitely don't but for me looking at looking at the gap between what I was experiencing doing Frontline work and what I had been taught as feminist Theory shook my faith in feminist Theory um irreversibly as it turned out explain that because what what is the feminist Theory what's the the received wisdom if you like about sexuality and and relationships and so on and what did you see that seemed to push up against that so I'd say the well actually the first Domino to fall in terms of bringing me to the point where I wrote a book called the cases against the sexual Revolution was um to do with the Trans movements which I think Rod mentioned briefly already it was a very very hot button issue when I was at University it was very very difficult to express any public skepticism about the claims of trans activists I privately began to have my doubts and I think that it was an important moment for me in the sense that once you once you think that one elements of your ideology is flawed it becomes much easier to think that other elements are as well so for instance one of the one of the dominant ideas in in feminist thinking around sexual violence from 1970s onwards is this phrase from Susan Brown um rape is not about sex it's about power so the idea is that sexual violence is used by by men as a tool to press women and that it has nothing to do with sexual desire it's all about dominating other people there clearly is a degree of truth to it for instance sexual harassment in the workplace is almost always perpetrated by someone more senior to their their victim you know clearly there is you don't see lots of Junior men sexually abusing their their female seniors so clearly there is a little bit of Truth to that but I think in a fundamental way it is wrong and one of the things that made me think that it was wrong was looking at the age profile of the victims that I was dealing with and the age profile of perpetrators the age profile of victims perfectly tracks the peak of female sexual attractiveness and the age profile of perpetrators perfectly tracks the peak of male sex drive you cannot explain that kind of data purely in power terms no and I suppose yeah once I started off on that more data-driven Road I ended up writing this book 10 years later and and just sketch out a little bit the sort of the nature of the the sexual culture that we're living in and why you think It ultimately favors male sexuality actually ultimately more than female sexuality so premise that I start with um which is a very controversial premise in feminist land but is um probably less so in the rest of the world is that men and women are fundamentally different in some very important ways and some of those differences are physical and some of those differences are psychological and the psychological differences are average ones and there are outliers but they are nevertheless real and they're important to the population level so for instance men are higher in a term that psychologists call sociosexuality which is one's desire for sexual variety essentially a drive towards having um multiple partners casuals and so on exactly and there is overlap but in terms of the the whole population of men and women men are further towards the unrestricted end of the sociosexuality spectrum which no one I think should be surprised to hear because that obviously should sort of hold true in in our experience of the world but it's just very very difficult to say in Progressive circles where the blank slate Doctrine dominates um but I start with that controversial premise and from there I say okay well what we've seen post-sectional Revolution has been a rejection of Christian sexual ethics and an Embrace of freedom per se as the ultimate good and the popular Progressive narrative around the sexual Revolution is that you um you shake free of these old oppressive Norms you inject more freedom into the system and expect people to arrive more harmonious sexual relationships I don't think that's what we've seen at all I think that what we what we have essentially seen is that the women have been encouraged not by conspiracy generally but by a new kind of culture a new kind of incentive structure to imitate male sexuality to imitate that that more unrestricted Society it sort of Sex in the City type yes Jessica Parker sort of stuff yes so so hook up so watching porn so experimenting with fetishes all these things which suit the interests of people who are naturally more sexually adventurous but don't I think suit the interests of the vast majority of women who are not naturally that way inclined but are encouraged I think to see that as aspirational because it's purportedly a liberating kind of form of sexuality there exactly and the only reason that you wouldn't want to do those things is because you still had Hang-Ups you know derived from so you've you've sort of noticed this and you've you've the book as I say comes to in a sense some surprisingly traditional conclusions in that sense essentially saying by the end chapter well perhaps we need to reconsider going back to what was we had before the sexual Revolution the idea of monogamous marriage um uh I mean that's a pretty Stark kind of conclusion to reach how's that been received by people um uh yeah so a common view among um feminist friends and colleagues who've read the book is they love it right up until the last chapter where I make the case for monogamous marriage but I I mean what I tried to do in that chapter it is the controversial chapter is to make that argument in entirely secular terms and to use as much data as yeah as well I think that's what I really appreciate about the book is is you're not writing it from a quote-unquote Christian perspective um it's very much about the data and about the culture and obviously the experiences that you've encountered as well among women um Rod you you reviewed the book what did you think oh I love the book I thought it was uh bang on all across on every chapter I in fact they even bought a copy for my 16 year old daughter who you know I'm a Christian I'm an Orthodox Christian we raised our children Christian but I wanted her to know that it's not simply a Christian critique to say that the the sexual Revolution and the culture of the sexual Revolution is a bad thing and um one of the things that really stood out Louise as I was reading the book is something that Philip Reef said Philip Reef he's been largely forgotten today but he was a really influential and insightful social critic he he wrote a book in the 1960s called Triumph the Triumph of the therapeutic and reef was not a Believer at all he was a non-believing Jew but he said that there was something about at the center of the Christian sexual ethic or the Christian social ethic that had to do with restraining and redirecting Sexual Energy he said this it was so close to the center of Christianity it came out in the early church and that said Reef has fallen he said Churchman again this was the mid-60s at the start of the sexual Revolution he said churchmen don't realize it yet but when the sexual uh for the Forbidden things that are forbidden Christian sexual morality falls apart so too will Christianity this man was prophetic and I I believe or I I don't believe rather that we can get back to the kind of sexual ethic that you think and you correctly think will be healthy I don't think we can get back there without a reconversion because as human sexual desire is so overwhelming that you need to ground any sort of resistance to it and uh an attempt to control it and contain it in some sort of transcendent morality I believe I mean to that extent a lot of people you know were who who the previous sexual Revolution were kind of had an inherited ethic they weren't necessarily because they were devout Christians themselves but it was what culture insisted upon and society and so on as those barriers got removed obviously a lot of people felt well now all the fuddy died in us and you know the shame and the everything else is being removed and we can be free at last um and what for you do you see that there was any advantages in that sense to the sexual Revolution that actually it did enable you know some of the the overreach if you like of that kind of morality to to I guess to be loosened um I suppose are fundamentally conservative Insight that I have come to accept is that everything has trade-offs and there are clearly trade-offs to a conservative system of Christian sexuality and similarly very much so to our post-christian sexual culture as well the question is which trade-offs you can stomach um which is a legitimately very difficult question and it depends as well on which particular groups you're talking about which individuals um it was very tough to be an unwed single mother in the era when you might see yourself consigned to imagine laundry say it's very tough now to be an onward single mother too it's never been it's never been easy in either system but there wasn't for different reasons but for different reasons but there was in a sense that great cultural cost to stepping outside of the the boundaries of you know of of what was considered proper sexual ethics nowadays those boundaries really don't exist in the same way um to that extent your book is in that sense just as Counter Culture as someone who maybe did floor flat those those laws in the past because you're asking people to return to something that's quite restrictive um to say actually maybe we shouldn't immediately be getting into bed with each other on first dates maybe actually there's some sense in actually waiting and and so on um is I guess my next question is is it a realistic I mean without some kind of moral spiritual kind of inward change can can we just say to culture hey we need to rethink this that's a big question I I mean I wrote the book with the knowledge that what I was really appealing to when I write about the virtue um and restraints and Fidelity and all these chivalry even at one point um I wrote that fully in the knowledge that I was appealing to cultural Christian ideas that I would expect my readers to be at least familiar with and to have some to have some emotional resonance for them but that many readers I mean my experience since it's been published is that lots of Christians have read the book lots of non-christians have read the book and everyone seems to be able to generally take something away from it that's positive on an individual level it does seem to be the case that people are capable of still holding to Christian virtues and will still find these kind of arguments persuasive without actually believing in the theology without there being anything upstairs the question is whether or not on a societal level we can continue to to maintain Christian ideas without anything upstairs and I don't know the answer to that well if I can jump in here I in my own case I became a Christian in my mid-20s and but I had become an apostate from the sexual Revolution just before my own conversion because I had lived it out you know as in in college and right after college and I kept digging myself into really deep holes there was a pregnancy Scare at one point Thank God it wasn't she wasn't pregnant but you know and there are broken hearts and I got so disgusted with myself for instrumentalizing sex and instrumentalizing these women just it was casual hookup culture I wasn't a cad really but I was ashamed of the way I was behaving because it was dehumanizing and when I became a Christian I became a Catholic at the age of 26 I thought I was entering a culture of the church where I would get help in living out Chastity before my marriage I didn't find it I I it's incredible to me how so many in the church church leaders are ashamed of the church's teaching for me it was so a building to learn how to be chased and learn how to surrender my own desire is the normal pattern then in your experience with perhaps in the Catholic church I suppose it varies from place to place but that a blind eye is turned to those kinds of moral issues that that you know it's accepted that well people are going to have oh sexual partners and so on when I was coming into the Catholic Church older Catholics said oh well you know what they're obsessed with sex no they aren't I have I was Catholic for 13 years I heard exactly three sermons about sex two of which were complaining about the homophobia of the Catholic church if you are a single person at least in my generation when I was younger maybe things have gotten better but if you were a single person trying to live out the Catholic Church's teachings you were on your own because most priests didn't want to have anything to do with it and I have to say I've been Orthodox for 16 years I've never heard one homily about Christian sexual teaching even though it is at the center of so much Despair and disorder today now that might not be true in more Evangelical circles where that might be more of a you know a willingness to talk and to to preach and so on on the sanctity of marriage or whatever it might be but what do you think do you think that that Louise the church should be more vocal I mean just to someone from outside the church do you think that there's there's a role there that is being missed well the impression I've got over the last several months since the book was published is the people are absolutely desperate to speak about this and people who have faith in those who don't equally so which I suppose does suggest that their they're not finding it in the usual places which historically would be the church and now I suppose I mean the problem is that now we basically just have a vacuum when it comes to sexual Guidance the the dominant messages prioritize your own Freedom your own pleasure and um and consent is there and consent yes well that's that's that's the only limiting factor that as long as you consent and the other person can sense and you're all adults Etc then it's all fine um I think that's a completely inadequate ethical system I think removing the social guard rails was dangerous there are some people who who I think are doing fairly well in the new sexual culture who don't have any need of guardrails um those people are unusual um they're almost entirely male and what works for them does not work for the culture as a whole it's interesting though because I can understand fully why a number of religious Christian people would would be very enthusiastic potentially of something coming from outside the church sort of essentially yes that's sympathetic to traditional Christian sexual ethics but even non-religious people you're saying they're saying I needed to hear this or allow someone saying what I've been maybe thinking or didn't have the words for it sounds like probably be the most common response I've had from readers I've been thinking this and it's so good to see someone writing it down and and which suggests that I don't know do you think we are due for a bit of a pushback you know you you talked about the fact that obviously the first issue that sort of brought this up for you was the trans issue and and it's interesting because you've seen that sort of Swing now of those JK Rowling obviously leading that that but but lots of these gender critical feminists sort of pushing back against that particular ideology do you do you think that maybe sex in general is the next sort of thing where people might start to rethink and say hey did we go too far do we need to kind of push the pendulum back again that is there does tend to be a little bit of a pendulum swing effect historically I mean what's unusual about our swing towards the permissive um post-1960s is that it was fixed by technology in a way that it couldn't be historically because if you maybe you know you maybe have periods and say the 1920s or Georgian Britain or whatever where you have slightly looser sexual reality but you still have the very hard stop of pregnancy um interceding and meaning that most respectable women are never going to participate in that kind of culture for very obvious practical reasons um which of course isn't true for us because we have the pill arriving in the 1950s and 60s and that's completely transformative I mean the my suspicion is that probably we do have a reaction against um the 1960s underway but I am skeptical about how successful it will be primarily for them for the material reasons for the fact that we the pill can't be uninvented now the genie is out of the bottle yeah I think so I think that our material circumstances are just now so different in really important ways from those of our ancestors that I am similarly the internet can't be uninvented exactly I am so grateful that I grew up and went through my teenage years before the internet because I'm reusing boys and the the things they have to deal with with the ubiquity of hardcore pornography it's just it has been to call it a game changer is to radically understate the the truth I remember going a few years ago to an Evangelical Christian College in the U.S and talking to the uh to some of the professors about what are this what are the things you're most concerned about with your students and they talked about pornography and uh pornography as destroying the ability of these young people to not only form stable relationships but in turn to form stable families and again this was back in 2014 so almost 10 years ago we we had some of these professors were talking about how troubling it was to them to see young women starting to watch hardcore porn because they were told that this is what you have to do and uh and where is the pushback coming from I think in this country in the UK you've been fortunate on the gender critical uh gender critical gender critical feminism which we don't have in the U.S at this point I think that uh one reason the whole trans thing has has continues in the U.S to go uh largely unchallenged is because opposition to it is tied to Christianity uh and you have didn't have that in the UK and I think that's why you've done it but we don't have a religious right to speak of in the UK so it's been interesting that to me that there's been interesting bedfellows made between you know certain secular gender critical feminists and so on and potentially more conservative Christian perspectives and and it feels like as the culture moves and shifts you know suddenly the alliances change and I've seen this just in you know I posted a lot of Christian atheist discussions over the years and and it used to be you could sort of tell who was on which side but actually increasingly I meet atheists who are saying well now I'm more concerned about the direction of cancel culture whatever and I'm I'm allowing myself with Christians more than my my secular Brethren so there's there's a bit of a changing landscape isn't there Louise is that something you you welcome is that something that you feel is you know that it could actually help women ultimately that that people are now starting to I guess question a lot of the I guess uh normal sort of liberal perspectives on on sexuality and everything yeah so I agree with Rod that I think that I think the part of the reason that the gender critical movement here has been so successful is because we don't have a Christian right and because you had lots of women like say JK Rowling who could participate in this without fearing association with Christian rights which of course to the secular left is social death um I do think that at least in this country and I hope at some point in America um feminism is unmooring from the left and I think that actually it has often I mean I I think that it is much more instructive to use the word feminist in a very loose sense um just to mean any sort of campaign on behalf of women and if you look at in those terms you can suddenly reveal a much richer feminist history you know Temperance was a feminist movement I would argue for instance it was an anti-domestic violence movement dressed up as a anti-alcohol movement um the first um female MP in this country was a conservative conservative the conservative party has often enacted what I would say is feminist legislation the the the it has never been a very clearly partisan project certainly in this country there is also a tradition of pro-life feminism which has been largely forgotten you know um so I think it's perfectly plausible that mainstream feminism in this country could move rightwards and I think probably is moving rightwards and I think the reason for that is partly to do with the internet um that it has suddenly become possible for women who previously could not really participate in public life because they had children right to participate in public life the the I think it was um Oscar Wilde said that the problem with socialism it takes up too many evenings and feminism has always had the same problem that you have to go to street corners and rallies and you know um political meetings and that's been this democratization of the internet in that sense yeah one of the I mean I think the internet comes with a huge amount of evil but it but it but there are upsides too and one of them is now that that mothers can participate in public life on their smartphones you know whether they can previously and that has been the thing in China critical activism success successfully pushing back against trans activism I think Louise that there's an even deeper question that we're all going to have to deal with which is what how do we think about sex and the sexual Revolution and feminism after liberalism that is to say after Classical liberalism which seems to be dying uh Patrick Dineen the American academic wrote a really good book called um why liberalism failed and his thesis is that liberalism failed because it succeeded so well in separating the choosing individual from any unchosen obligations and limits well when that happens it turns out you can't have a liberal Society it's a paradox and and and we have we have acculturated generate several generations of people in the west to believe that that there that freedom is the absence of limits well that doesn't actually work as as we're discovering so I think it's going to be fascinating to see what happens in the coming decades as the sort of um the sort of foundational beliefs of Classical liberalism no longer have a hold on the minds of young people who are trying to find some stable and meaningful way to live uh when uh live in finding out that Classical liberalism only really seems to work within a generally Christian Society this is something Tom Holland the historian found out in his book Dominion yeah we're going to go to a quick break and uh we'll come back I want to talk about pornography again because you devote a chapter to that as well Louise and Rod's already raised that issue but we're talking today on the show about um Christianity the sexual Revolution and the future of the West this is the big conversation my guess today are Louise Perry and Rodriguez enjoying the conversation tell us what you think in our survey plus register now and you'll receive the ebook of Douglas Murray and anti-wright discussing identity myth and miracles foreign back to the big conversation we're talking about Christianity the sexual Revolution and the future of the West my guest today are Louise Perry and Rod draher just in that last segment Louise Rod raised the issue of porn again something that many people of a certain age didn't have to deal with growing up but which young people are exposed to from a very early age now how much is that shaped sexuality in relationships would you say in the present culture ongoing arguments between Defenders of online porn and critics of it is is to do with empirical evidence of its effects it's just very very difficult to study these things in really rigorous scientific ways because you don't have you have to rely on natural experiments you can't really do um controlled experiments but I think that there is very good evidence to suggest that this is affecting the sexual culture as you would expect it to I mean if we if we the the average man in Britain watches 70 minutes of porn a week and two percent of men watch seven hours of porn a week there are men who don't watch porn like a surprisingly large proportion but in terms of the impact on on the population at large how could that not be having an effect given that it's not just this isn't just um you know beamed into our eyeballs in the way that all online culture is it's also reinforced by orgasm you have this particularly aggressive dopamine feedback loop um which of course the porn industry extent that it's creating medical issues for people who are unable to sustain normal sexual relationships because they've somehow become dependent on on that kind of a an input and men in their 20s early 20s who are impotent that's has that ever happened in human history not to my knowledge no and also becoming so I think that there is a very dominant model of sexuality which I suppose probably comes from Freud in some way which sees us as having this this fixed sexual energy that is fixed in both quantity and quality and what you have to do is just periodically vent it and the pawn is one way of doing this prostitution is another way of doing this hookups Etc and you sort of return to a happy equilibrium but that actually doesn't describe the truth of sexuality because there is there is there is feedback you know that what what the what the use of online porn does for instance is it is it suggests new things it channels users towards more and more specific forms of content more more extreme forms of content too and then it rewards that exploration and it embeds certain patterns of arousal for instance violent aggressive patterns of arousal which are now I mean disturbing examples of the sorts of types of sexual behavior that it's now normalizing in a sense and that many women and young girls feel like they have to do this because it's what is expected because that's the culture they're surrounded by that's the pornography that they're exposed to yeah and young men can't have normal relationships sexual or an emotional with women because they their their brains have been rewired by constant exposure to pornography I mean it's it is uh it's killing the the capacity for for romantic love between men and women and for the production of the Next Generation I mean you know historically you know the Mary white houses and so on Christians of the past have railed against pornography because of its you know it the more as a moral issue you know saying and that's more about sort of saying it's bad in and of itself but it feels to me it's not so much that that you're railing against of not railing against but critiquing it's that it's the social effects of it it's actually the fact that it is damaging people ultimately regardless of what you think of the moral status of creating pornography I think I mean I certainly object to the social effects and I think it's fairly easy to persuasive case that those social effects are negative um I do think that there is also something fundamental about instrumentalizing people and um the nature of porn is that it it trains the mind to regards sex as a spectator sport um and I think that that is I think that's dysfunctional in a really fundamental way if you quote someone saying that they who was I think involved in the porn industry that it kind of reduced people to body parts essentially as yeah in the way that they by Design think about people yeah um it's interesting you mentioned Mary Whitehouse there's a um I've obviously been compared to Marywood house a modern Barry White House is that Monica you're happy to wear well I mean I I make a partial defense of Mary Whitehouse in the book because she was she was prescient about all sorts of things including um she was one of the very few people in the 1970s who cared about child sexual abuse for instance at a period and we know that it was rampant and uh largely ignored by people in positions of power so I think she's been Vindicated on all sorts of things um there's this video that I saw recently of her um speaking at Cambridge Union and I think the 1980s about pornography and making arguments that I am entirely in agreement on at least you know the argument that she's given that speech I think she was completely completely right and the students are jeering her you know pandemonium in the in the union just this old bigoted fatty Daddy yeah they're just not hearing it right and then I spoke on essentially the same motion at the Oxford Union at the beginning of this year and um I very unexpectedly won and got and got no cheering right I got I got some quite tough questions from the floor but I didn't the the mood was completely different and I don't think that's because I'm many more persuasive than Mary Whitehouse I think that's because the the moon among young people has shifted and I think that this generation who have now grown up with much much more extreme material available to them and in a different medium I think it's the difference between Mary what pornography and Mary whitehouse's generation you still had to go into a shop reach up to something you know buy something it's a completely different Playboy and Penthouse in the U.S which is incredibly mild comparison yeah yeah I mean in that sense it it it's interesting though you won that motion is there any sense among and that's students a younger generation um the the perhaps there is a kind of change of thought on actually what makes sense when it comes to sexuality do you think that we might be seeing a little bit of a Tiding turning the tide there there's definitely a turn again um the nature of the diagnosis though is still up for debate and therefore the prescription is Up For Debate as well so that so the a view that I've had um expressed to me quite often from liberal feminists is that the problem the problem with the sexual Revolution is that we never finished it we never fully accomplished it that the the project was all about liberating ourselves and we are not yet liberated and that's why people are in pain and so we need to just sort of continue the project right to the very end of the long Dusty Road and and that any and that any attempts to roll back that freedom project would be a mistake I mean so so where I differ on that is I think that actually the project was fundamentally misconceived from the beginning and we are seeing the inevitable consequences of throwing throwing throwing Freedom at a society that it's in denial about the nature of sexual difference well you know there's a line in dostoyevsky's novel The possessed where one of the characters says starting from a position of absolute freedom you end with absolute despotism and I would say the sexual revolution has or is in its despotic phase now when you can't question any of it or you can question very little of it without being attacked and maybe things are changing in the UK but in the U.S now this is the thing that you can't touch the idea that uh Liberation that that the sexual Revolution was all about Liberation and if you are not quote unquote sex positive to be sex positive means that you have to endorse every single thing that the progressive left wants and if not you're seen as sex negative in fact one of the things I like most about your book was you talking about sexual disenchantment that we have disenchanted the sexual act and and romantic love I'm working on a book right now about re re-enchantment about generally the disenchantment in the west one of the things I learned was from this German sociologist named Hartman Rosa and his the word he uses for enchantment is called resonance I mean he's not writing from a religious point of view but he said that in a resonant world we feel at home we feel that things have meaning around us well the way he says to disenchant the world is to try to control everything to bring everything into our field to bound it and to instrumentalize it totally for ourselves when I read that I said that's what Louise is talking about with sexual disenchantment the idea that we we believe that we can take this great and deep mystery that is human sexuality and bring it completely under our control into with technology with by passing laws by changing the way we speak about things so we can denature it well if that's what you do then you get pornography where people or human beings are turned into body parts and and to that extent are you in a in some way in the book almost asking people to look at each other as if they have a soul that they are not simply a kind of you know a set of body parts and as long as there's consent you know are you asking people to change the way that they think about themselves in even in just material terms I don't use the word soul but yes essentially yes treating people as a and this is where I suppose it borders on a sort of almost religious kind of Nature and you you know I think you say towards the end as you say in that final chapter you say well it turns out there has been a solution to the way uh you know in its the the best of all the worst Alternatives if you like judeo Chris the Judo Christian conception of marriage monogamous marriage has been something that has put the guard rails in place and has been able to bring out the best ultimately in culture of both men and women and their sexuality but can you put that Junior back in the bottle I suppose it can you sort of do can you just at a social level encourage people to do that or is it about their soul ultimately is is do we have to go to that religious level in the end what do you think well I think one way of life individuals still have an enormous amount of decision-making power it is completely possible for any reader of my book to just decide to live um in decide to live differently and decide that we know the institution of marriage Maybe pretty much dead but people can still get married people can still be monogamous people can still um forgo premarital sex and she's not watching pornography yeah all of these things um the the issue of course is that none of this is mandated in society and we don't have the cultural infrastructure that would reinforce those individual those individuals in making that decision I mean I find it very hard to imagine us going back to a more sort of Theocratic way of doing things that was the word that left to my mind are we saying I mean are you saying that we would need a theocracy to kind of get back to something like have we ever had that in the west we're a rule by clerics I I mean I think that religion certainly has to have more Authority and that's not to say political Authority I think you know there's a reason a good very good reason why the American Founders separated church and state and I don't question that at all but I think that we do have to have some sort of authority outside of ourselves to appeal to and to ground our own desires and and crucially we have to have meaning to suffering we were talking earlier in our conversation about how in the pre-sexual revolution days a lot of men and women especially women suffered in bad marriages even abusive marriages and I think the sexual Revolution was in part especially on the divorce front to uh to make that less likely to give men and women who are miserable and suffering a way out and I think that this was well-meaning certainly but I think we have developed a culture now a general culture that is very therapeutic and that sees any suffering even the most minute anxiety as somehow bad and something to be completely avoided I write and live not by lies about a young woman in Budapest she's in her mid-30s she was my translator when I was in Hungary doing research and we were riding the tram through the city and she said you know Rod I really struggle as a Catholic to talk to my friends especially my Catholic friends about the struggles I have as a wife and mother of a young boy I'm like what do you mean she said well as soon as I tell them that you know my husband and I haven't been getting along lately or our little boy hasn't been sleeping well they cut me off and say well get a divorce put your son in daycare you've got to be happy she said I tell them wait a minute I am happy I'm happy being a wife I'm happy being a mom but a happy life doesn't mean a life with no anxieties and no struggles but she said they can't understand that life can be good if there's any suffering in it I looked at her and said Anna it sounds like you're fighting for your right to be unhappy she's said that's it where did you get that I pulled out my phone went to chapter 17 of huxley's Brave New World that is the the basis for the totalitarianism there the the world controller tells John The Savage the dissident he says why don't you want to join us we offer you Christianity without tears and he says that there's something John says there's something about human nature a fulfilled human nature that requires tension that requires suffering so he does fight for his right to be unhappy I think Louise that ultimately this is why we're going to have to have some sort of recovery true recovery of Christianity and not just a sort of therapeutic moralistic therapeutic deism that constitutes so much popular Christianity today because in the end if we're going to find a way to to uh restrain our sexual desires and to sacrifice them to a greater good the greater good which is love not deny them but to purify them and raise them up it's going to have to happen within a theological context that gives meaning to suffering what do you think of that because you give some advice and you say this these are things people can do but we are fight I think for anyone to do that who has been raised in the the sexual revolutionary culture that we have it is going to be incredibly hard and and without a whole Community around you helping you to do that at some level I can imagine that you'll feel very much like you're sticking out in a culture that is all around you is doing the opposite yeah because I mean I um yes we we uh Rod is completely right we talk so often about um the orwellian dystopia that threatens us but we never really talk about huxilarian dystopia but actually Huxley was far more brassier than all and all sorts of things and yes we do essentially live in a culture in which um which values the short term in every possible way and there are certain things like for instance Parenthood which you cannot do in a short time way I mean particularly from a from a female perspective um you really front load the pain of having children um I mean in in a literal sense in terms of childbirth you can't do cost benefit analysis either no because the the the the the costs are immediate and obvious and the benefits are delayed and amorphous and that is exactly the sort of bargain that no one wants to make in a short term a sculpture and people are delaying increasingly childbirth anyway I mean you you actually uh were pregnant while you wrote the book and and you know made it that much harder I'm sure to to get that book out there um and probably very difficult to do anything once you have a young child but but but in a sense that you know we're living in a culture where you know childbirth rates in most Western countries are dropping and people are postponing that and probably not realizing actually how difficult it is actually to have children when you do reach a certain age especially in female terms so so I mean I what are you asking for are you asking for sort of a whole scale kind of reconsideration of of not just sexual relationships but having children you know do you feel like that is under threat as well with the the sexual Revolution I mean yeah it's not just it's not just in the handful of Western countries it's everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa is saying birth rates plummet and there is lots of debate over what exactly is causing that I think that I think it has to come back to the pill we we invented for the first time in the history of humanity a means of suspending fertility and it turns out that people are very motivated to have sex and they're not necessarily very motivated to have children and we didn't know that before we revealed it through technology I mean I think the medical technology is just so much at the heart of modernity for good and ill I mean with the but surely as a feminist you're not saying let's roll back the pill I mean that surely is one of those things where most women would say that gave women the freedom it freed them from a particular biological kind of form of you know a cost that that allowed them actually to go into the world and and to have a kind of equality ultimately with with men I I the pillars brought innumerable benefits to women I actually did my um my alternative life course was doing a PhD on the history of the C-section which I almost did and uh my I did my Master's thesis on the history of the C-section and um reading accounts of women in the era before safe cesarean was available who could not possibly give birth to a baby because of things like um pelvic injuries or disabilities which meant that they just that the birth canal was completely obstructed and who and who were having terrible procedures performed on them um in their pregnancies and they can and their husbands kept knocking them up you know accounts of women who died on their 10th pregnancy and they just think and I mean the problem is you look at a situation like that and the the the the the modern um pro-choice feminist position which I on the whole hole to with some reservations is that you have to give these women the option of the pill because it's the only way in these most really most extreme circumstances that women can survive but I also look at that kind of situation and I think what a terrible thing for those men to be continuing to impregnate women for whom it was a death sentence and a death sentence for the baby to be made pregnant and I think the the risk is of just using technology to solve our problems or seeming to is that it really takes the onus of human beings to to do the right thing and then we seem to have just abandoned any effort to control men basically and to constrain male sexuality which has to be constrained so powerfully in this book that um the whole sexual revolution has been a boon for kaddish men for the Hugh Hefner types you know and so what but it was it's justified by contemporary liberal feminist as being something beneficial for women but in fact those who have benefited the most are the ones who have the most contempt for women yeah yeah yeah and we and I think that there is a sort of defeatism in thinking that we can't possibly constrain those men we just have to try and ameliorate the effects of their behavior and I think that's a that's a very sad move in feminism going back to the birth rates issue Rod what what's what's your perspective on this um there you know some some people claim say that that Islam actually is one area in the UK for instance where there are more children being born and and some people say well if if the rates continue then Islam may come to print on that just on the basis of purely uh reproduction um uh I mean you talk about this sort of Benedict option Christians um need to as it were have strong communities where they that particular spiritual life and prayer life and everything is Manifest so that it can hold out against what you see as this sort of coming soft totalitarianism and so on uh is part of that encouraging children uh encouraging Christians to you know be fruitful and multiply as well absolutely absolutely it is it has been part of Christianity since the very beginning I mean we didn't even con contraception was considered something uh taboo for Christians up until the 1930s I think the Anglican Church was the first one to permit contraception but I think that we need to establish communities of Faith within which familism the idea that the family is something good in children are something they're a primary good they're not a good that's justified by you know by by materialistic terms but that supports the the the raising of the Next Generation but this is something that is so counter-cultural and can only be done I think within small communities that's one of the things that I really learned in my own Christian Journey when I I converted to Christianity to Catholicism at the age of 26 I was living in Washington DC and I knew that for me the greatest dying to self that I had to do was dying to sexual activity I knew I had to be chased until I married and I didn't know if I would ever marry that was so difficult to do because I couldn't find any priest who wanted to help me help me walk the straight and arrow I didn't need to be told what the right thing to do was I just needed help they were embarrassed by the church's teaching I found four years later when I did get married that I had grown so much spiritually and emotionally by those four years of Chastity in ways that I would not have done had I not uh not realized that if Jesus is going to be the Lord of my life he has to be the Lord of all my life including my sex life but I have some bitterness that I had to do this almost entirely on my own because there was no help in my church or my churches and so is that part of the the Benedict option in a sense is being full and Frank about the challenges and what it means to live a chaste life as far as your concerned absolutely the church needs to have those you know awkward conversations it does seem to have the awkward conversations and not be apologetic for what it teaches now I my wife grew up in a fundamentalist Protestant church where she said sex was talked about very negatively if it was talked about it all now that's wrong too sex in traditional Christian teaching sex is a good thing but it it it has to be channeled in a way that is life-giving and holy the church knows how to do this it just needs to quit uh being so afraid of the guardian and the New York Times and actually stand openly and unapologetically for what for the wisdom of the ages and the wisdom of scripture but very often you know most people will think especially here in the UK but I'm sure in parts of the US as well well the problem with the church is it's always seem to have been you know anti this anti-that you know pruditioned and reactionary and so on and and to hear Rod saying well we need to actually embrace the distinctives of the Christian sexual ethic a lot of churches and Christians might run a mile from that and say that's not the way to engage the culture saying we stand against this we should Thou shalt not and so on and what I don't know whether you feel like that's that's something actually in a counterintuitive way young people today's generation might Embrace being given the challenge of a quite traditional Christian sexual ethic or whether actually it is gonna you know if people weren't likely to darken the door of a church they never will if that's what's being kind of put on offer Louise what do you think the Assumption from um many British Christians and from the church of England in general is that yes the church has to come to meet the progressive culture and that liberalizing church teachings is the way to get people through the door I suppose maybe in some circumstances that might be working but you know I know a surprising number of young Catholic converts people who have um felt so dispirited by mainstream culture and actually are our longing for a more um something clearer and more deliberately rigid something that doesn't just look like the culture around them yes and it seems to offer um access to the wisdom of the past to kind of confidence themselves yes so that I mean whether or not that's going to appeal to everyone it probably not but that I I think that what's making those people you don't have to obviously name any names but but what is it coming from a dissatisfaction with the like their life as it stands and what what is it that they're seeing in those quite traditional forms of Christianity that that is obviously turning them towards it with their lives a satisfaction with this with the culture in general I mean I think that we have We have basically run an experiment of 60 odd years on the sexual Revolution and I think that there were it was probably more enjoyable at the beginning this is the one I've read I mean clearly some of the the you know the the most uh enthusiastic revolutionaries of the 60s and 70s had a ball or some of them did um but we've we've seen it we've seen it play out now and and you know many of these people will be will be the children of broken homes will be have been exposed to online porn from the age of 10 11 um we'll have I mean the paradoxical thing that we're seeing now among gen Z is on the one hand hyperportified public life astonishing exposure to sexual content that you will expect to see hundreds of thousands of adults having sex before you've even kissed another person is now just the standard childhood template and then on the other hand we have people having less sex delaying sex relationships into one's twenties or 30s not getting married um this withdrawing of the Sexes actually and people having much more um unhappily chaste lives because not chased for any positive purpose but Chase just because they can't form meaningful relationships the received wisdom is always that you know in culture you need to as it were experiment and find who you're compatible with and and the idea of not having a sexual relationship before you marry just just seeing the mind-bogglingly bizarre and primitive to many people today so I I mean is there anything you can do to kind of push back on that on that narrative if you honestly think that actually people have got that the wrong way around there's an episode of Sex in the City I've watched all the sex and CC for my sins and it comes up in the book because it's such a cultural lodestone for all of this stuff and there's a there's a plot line where one of the characters um decides not to have sex with a boyfriend who she think becomes engaged to as a sort of experiment she's obviously not a virgin but you know and then it comes to their their the night before their wedding and she discovers that he's impotent and it ends up destroying the marriage it doesn't last very long and this is you know such a um this is the this is the the nightmare scenario presented to presented to people for whom the idea of not having parental sex is bizarrely old-fashioned I mean I fundamentally disagree with the idea that sex is a skill that one ought to practice on people I don't think it's something that you do to another person in something you do with another person I think the idea of say quite a common article that you'll see in women's mags is um sex tips from sex workers because the idea being that just having had a lot of sex and having had a lot of Partners puts you in the best possible position to advise on technique and if you don't understand it it's basically being a matter of technique then that makes sense this is the sexual disenchantment for you that that sex is basically like playing tennis in which case I suppose sex workers are professional tennis players and we could you know but but that clearly just doesn't it no one actually lives as a secretary's enchantment was true no one actually believes that sexual disenchantment is really true I think it's I think it's a rhetorical device which has become very widely used but but people don't behave in that way people still do clearly feel that sex is different from playing tennis they care deeply if their partners are Unfaithful they they feel Joy and distress in relation to their sexual experiences that they don't find in any other part of life I think that I mean in some sense it's a sexual re-enchantment process is pushing on an open door because it's what people feel the issue is just how to frame it in an ideological way that that that that de-christianized people could accept I I'm gonna go to a final break and we'll be concluding the conversation it's been a fascinating one so far but thank you so much Louise and Rod for being with me we'll be back in just a moment's time with the final part of today's show looking at Christianity the sexual Revolution and the future of the West enjoying the conversation tell us what you think in our survey plus register now and you'll receive the ebook of Douglas Murray and anti-wright discussing identity myth and miracles foreign we've been talking about Christianity the sexual Revolution and the future of the West here on the big conversation today it's been so good to be joined by Louise Perry and Rod drah we just got a few more minutes just for some final thoughts really so Rod you know we've talked about can we put this Genie back in the bottle um what you know if if we do say that culture is going in an alarming Direction what's the solution um it doesn't feel like necessarily everyone becoming Christians is necessarily an obvious kind of thing that will happen barring some great miracle um is but is Louise and and her concerns coming at it more in even from just a secular point of view do you think that that might suggest there's a changing of the tide in the way people are now thinking about sexuality and culture and so on yeah well I'm certainly quite encouraged to see Louise Mary Harrington and other women of their generation actually coming out and saying the things they're saying because I think it gives hope to a lot of people uh especially younger people who believe that we are in some sense living a false narrative but they're afraid because there's so much intimidation out there in the media by The Gatekeepers and the media entertainment media and in the government and in Academia that keep people from asking these questions uh that Louise and Mary Harrington and others are doing it is a hopeful sign in the long term though I don't think that there's any way to pull back fully without some sort of religious revival and I don't see that coming at any any mass weight this is why I talk about the Benedict option about forming these small traditional rooted communities that can be like arcs to keep the church and the tradition of the West the long tradition alive throughout this flood of liquid modernity and that will be able in the future to to settle down and and re-evangelize the world I don't think I'll live to see it but I think that's the only hope for us what do you think the the way the future holds or what I mean do you think it's going to get worse firstly before it gets better maybe Louise if it does get better I think that the said the fault line that is emerging already in culture and politics and I think is going to become more and more marked as time goes by is between people who want to embrace technology and people who are cautious about technology I think that is I mean technology in the broadest possible term I don't just mean computers I mean things like the pill um all sorts of medical technology sex reassignment surgeries are one really radical example of trying to remove this biological hard limits which have until so recently entirely determined human life and I think do entirely still determine human life because actually we still essentially have Stone Age brains we still we have not on a fundamental level changed as a species we have just had very very rapid changes in our material circumstances which are likely to change still further I mean it's the pill was this radical transformation which I don't think we've ever really come to terms with anything that we've properly grappled with it on a social level at all the nature of modern technological changes that it the change becomes more and more rapid as time goes by and I think it is extremely likely that we will have new technology shocks so we will have new um transformations of Society I mean covert was one little taste of what might come from a world in which we are vulnerable to disease in ways that we have got used to not being vulnerable to you know if we have say a world without antibiotic out with if we enter a post-antibiotic world which is a very serious threat and actually a lot more serious than something like climate change in many ways um that will have complete transformative social effects there wouldn't be no more sex parties and prostitution and you know in in a world where we have antibiotic resistant gonorrhea which we already have you know this is just one example of ways in which our material circumstances could change very suddenly and I think in those circumstances it is plausible that we might return to some of the most durable ideologies available to us which is patriarchy that's what some people well yeah some people say this uh Philip Longman who's a demographer and a liberal in Washington has said that the future belongs to those who show up for it and you know like it or not and I don't think he necessarily does patriarchy came out of somewhere it's a way of dealing with the world that's more dangerous in a world of of great limits and I I think that the the liberalism that we all like and we all even those who of us who vote conservative we like living in a liberal Society but reality may come back to to force us whether it's antibiotic resistance whether it's economic loss we're talking now at the beginning of the winter uh By the time this comes out we will have gotten through the winter but I've been told I live in Eastern Europe that governments could fall all around Europe because of the energy shortage because of the Ukraine war now I mean this is the sort of thing that none of us would have seen coming but I think we're all lot more perilous than than we realize and our ability to control the limits uh is an illusion yeah and this received abundance that came out of the post-war period I think is almost certainly over and a anapheminism and more broadly a politics that was the result of that sense of abundance is going to have to change as well do you think that might ultimately push people back towards God sometimes it is the the hard things that ultimately I mean I don't think that any sociologist is settled on the cause of de-christianization I've always thought as the mother of a toddler that dropping infant mortality must have been part of it people must have been desperate to believe in heaven um when they could expect half of their children to die before they reached adulthood I'm obviously not wishing for that by any means but it's just an example I think of the way in which people find Social means to cope with adversity one quick thing before we go I I was told uh this past summer in Oxford by an Anglican ordinand that new atheism is dead in his generation he's 27 years old he worked in advertising in London before he went to Seminary and he said that he was the only Christian in his office he said but there were no atheists everybody else in the office was involved in one degree or another with the occult and there were even two active Satanist open satanists in the office this is as a Christian that's horrifying to hear but he said he actually found some hope in it in that there were people of his generation who are desperate for some kind of transcendence desperate to connect with Transcendence he thinks and certainly I do that they've taken a wrong turn but the fact that they're not satisfied with materialism and consumerism is to him a sign of potential rebirth interesting well who knows what the future might hold but um for now it's been fascinating talking about culture post Christendom and Christianity with you Louise and Rod thank you so much for being my guests on the big conversation thank you thank you for watching do you want more from today's conversation register now and you'll receive the ebook of Douglas Murray and anti-wright discussing identity myth and miracles and tell us what you thought in our survey with today's show [Music]

Channel: Premier Unbelievable?

Views: 199,339

Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate, science, evidence, Bible, big conversation, sexual revolution, feminism, the pill, Rod Dreher, Louise Perry, sex, feminist, pill, Benedict Option, Live Not by Lies, The Case Against The Sexual Revolution

Id: MYf7aHe_GT0

Length: 72min 9sec (4329 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 27 2023