Is America’s Decline and Fall Inevitable? A Pessimistic View. Part III: The Fall of Jerusalem: The Collapse of Traditional Christian Morality and the End of the Traditional Family

The biblical Judeo-Christian religious leg of Western Civilization had many aspects.  One of those aspects was its sexual moral code.  The sexual code varied to some degree between Catholics and Protestants, and there is some historical debate about how closely it was adhered to among the general population in different times and different places.  But until recently, it was never, in majority-Christian nations, completely rejected as at least the ideal.  At its essence, Christian sexual morality included, to a greater or lesser degree of strictness depending on the religion involved, some version of each of the following: (1) the principle that there should be no sex before or outside of marriage between a male husband and his female wife (only in the 21st Century has it become necessary to use gender adjectives for the meaning of these ancient words to be clear), which prohibition thereby excluded homosexual acts; (2) the ideal that marriage was indissoluble and divorce illegitimate, or, in its less strict form, the ideal that divorce was generally immoral, but allowed if based on a betrayal by the other party, such as through adultery, cruelty, or abuse; (3) restrictions on access to birth control, especially for the unmarried, and obviously including restrictions on the most morally dubious form of birth control, abortion.

Taken as a whole, if this code were an arch, its keystone would be conjugal marriage between a male husband and a female wife as the only appropriate context for sexual intercourse.  Thus, the entire code rests upon a proper understanding of "marriage" and the surest way to destroy the entire structure is to destroy marriage.  This is being accomplished in our day by treating marriage as such a malleable concept that it is essentially meaningless.  When people no longer agree on the meaning of a word, that word uses its usefulness.  This is a minor tragedy for effective communication when a minor word, toaster oven, say, begins to mean different things to different people.  But when the word in question is as fundamental to our understanding of life's expectations and societal ordering as marriage, it is a major tragedy.  Marriage is not just being redefined, but essentially defined out of existence, and abolished completely, as no longer being a word, or concept, let alone an institution, that has any common and universally understood meaning.

This marriage-centered sexual moral code was admittedly difficult for many people to live under.  It kept some people in unhappy or loveless marriages.  It prevented some people from having the kind of sex they wanted to have.  It could be oppressive to single adults and to women.  And so, one by one, especially over the course of the past 50 years, as society began to focus increasingly on the wants of the individual rather than the needs of the society, each of the components of this code was rejected.  See, Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God, a new theory of secularization (Templeton Press 2013). This rejection was generally argued for on the grounds of compassion for the individual whose needs did not conform to the options available under the code.  But, given the incomparable advantages which children who are born to and raised by their own two married parents enjoy, how much compassion do we truly have towards individuals if we create a society where more than ½ of individuals will not be raised, from childhood to adulthood, by their own two married parents, and where almost ½ of them may never know their father, let alone enjoy his daily provision and care?

Here’s how this happened:

Divorce.  The prohibition against divorce was the first to fray, and the no-fault divorce laws of the 1970s, allowing for unilateral divorce by a spouse who had not been betrayed by the other party to the marriage, including where the other party did not want a divorce, represented the final victory over this component of the code.  (This might have been foreseen: Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount that divorce had been suffered to enter into the law of Moses due to human weakness, but that Christ’s higher law required a return to God’s original ideal that a divorce could not be terminated save in the case of adultery.  Thus, the apparently historical Old Testament pattern of the law of indissoluble marriage eventually giving way to allowances for divorce, was refuted by a Christian theological position against no-fault divorce, which itself later fell out of favor, in a pattern which repeated and echoed earlier events.)  It doesn’t matter now that you have vowed to honor your spouse and provide your children with a stable home.  If you are unhappy in your marriage, or “unfulfilled,” you are allowed to move on, and seek and obtain a unilateral divorce, with no need to allege cruelty or unfaithfulness on the part of a spouse who wants to stay married, and the financial and emotional consequences to your spouse and children are nobody’s business.  This change has undoubtedly been a positive development in some people’s lives, even while targeting other groups (mainly unmarried women and their children) for increased risks and rates of poverty.

Birth Control and Extramarital Sex.  Laws and religious prescriptions against birth control fell at roughly the same time as the advent of no-fault divorce.  Many factors contributed to this change. Since children have historically been seen as the ultimate form of social security, the rise of approval for birth control roughly corresponded, unsurprisingly, with the enactment of federal social security benefits.  No longer would the elderly count, as they had for millennia, on their children’s compliance with the Fifth Commandment (honor thy father and mother) to be taken care of in their elder years. Rather, a federal benefit, which you were eligible for whether it was being funded by the taxes of your own children, or somebody else’s children, replaced familial bonds of duty and severed some of the ties between the generations.  The consequences? Well, despite all the claims of Marxist theory to the contrary, human beings are not angels, but respond to incentives.  Why spend time and energy and money to raise a child who will take care of you in your old age, if someone else’s child, who someone else spent time and energy and money to raise, can be forced by the government to take care of you?  The rise of a non-agricultural economy had already weakened the incentive for having children.  Federal social security benefits, which led people to look to the government for something their children had previously provided, killed it off completely.  The larger the government, the smaller the family (both metaphorically and literally).  Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court case which overturned laws against access to birth control, then played its part.  And, of course, the technology of “the Pill” obviously accelerated this process even more.  Roe v. Wade, which legalized post-conception birth control, was the final nail in the coffin. Restrictions on birth control were ejected from the code, or, at least, this component of the old code was ejected from American life. Unmarried persons could now have sex purely for recreational pleasure, and, supposedly, without risk.

While I am personally gratified that married people can now better plan their families, it cannot be doubted that the main promises made by those who initially advocated loosening restrictions on birth control, namely, that it would lead to fewer unwanted births, have proven to be among the most completely and utterly bogus predictive claims made in all of human history.  Number of illegitimate births in 1960: less than 6%; Number of illegitimate births in 2013: approaching 50%.  (And yet, with every attempt to introduce planned parenthood as our children’s sex-ed teachers, and make condoms freely available to minors in the school nurse’s office, we keep hearing these same bogus arguments, as though the statistical evidence and actual experience of the past 40 years debunking these promises never happened.)

Why did the promise of birth control, a world of no more unwanted babies, fail?  The story is actually very simple.  Once birth control was legitimized, there was no longer any strong basis, it was argued, for requiring sexual abstinence outside of marriage.  The risk of an unwanted pregnancy could be avoided, so why not enjoy sex merely and purely for the pleasure it brought?  However, just as the heightened sense of security which was engendered by the advent of seat belts in automobiles actually led to riskier driving and higher vehicular death rates, the perception of reduced risk for extramarital sexual activity led, in reality, to a higher number of out-of-wedlock births.  Apparently all that birth control didn’t always work as advertised.  As the number of out-of-wedlock births increased, the stigma associated with the same decreased, and soon it became impolite and impolitic to criticize a single mother or a pregnant high-schooler.  Meanwhile, the government’s “war on poverty” by subsidizing illegitimacy, made things even worse. The era of the single-mother had arrived.  Sexual abstinence was jettisoned from the code.  Birth control for married couples has its benefits, and, among major Christian denominations, only the Catholic church, but no longer most of its members, still preaches against it.  But the concurrent rise in extramarital sexual promiscuity which accompanied access to birth control for singles has been a disaster for the notion that children deserve to be born within the bonds of matrimony, so they can, if at all possible, be raised by their own mother and their own father.

Redefining Marriage.  As western culture ceased speaking of homosexuality in terms of acts and behavior, and began instead to identify and label certain persons as "homosexuals" having a certain "sexual orientation" (both relatively recent ideas in western thought) rather than focusing on the morality of particular sexual acts, it was inevitable that a culture obsessed with ensuring that all minority subgroups within it (except people of faith) be provided with rights and protections against the tyranny of the majority, would come first to pity, then tolerate, then protect, and eventually to promote and celebrate homosexuality. It’s been a fascinating phenomenon to live through, having been born and raised to young adulthood in a time when virtually everyone, including the non-religious, were disgusted by the very idea of homosexual sex, and to have then lived through an additional 25 years as such attitudes have been so completely routed that it is now those who advocate against homosexual behavior who are stigmatized.  Nevertheless, based on the prior pattern, it should not have surprised anyone that this element of the so-called “culture wars” would also be lost by the traditionalists, and this element of the code also rejected.

Once a minority subgroup is created, it will inevitably seek and potentially be granted legal protections, which will inevitably involve a narrative of an oppressed minority being liberated against the forces of hateful bigotry.  Thus, the focus on homosexuals as a category of person, rather than as a type of conduct, led to the need to sort ourselves: are we a member of the morally superior class who loves our minority friends? Well of course.  Who wouldn't want to be so identified?  What to do to prove our membership?: rail against and stigmatize those who have not caught up with the times, which means attacking religion.  Each new victory leads to a new need for new sorting on some new issue.  So, finally, the enlightened secular liberals amongst us have now determined that marriage itself must be redefined as the union of any two persons, regardless of gender.

But here is the problem: if you "expand" the definition of a triangle so that it may now refer to both three-sided and four-sided polygons, what you have really done is abolish the concept of a triangle from your vocabulary all together, and, with it, the ability to teach certain mathematical truths and theorems.  The same is true of marriage: by "expanding" the definition, we merely prove that the word is meaningless, as meaning whatever anyone wants it to mean.  Marriage as an institution geared toward procreation and family life, and designed to ensure and promote the ideal that every child deserves to be taken care of by the biological mother and father who brought them into this world, with exceptions based solely upon the child's (not any adult's) best interests, passes from the scene. As it does, so too does the idea that a child needs a father, or that a man needs to step up to being a father, and all the other theorems which once flowed from the idea of marriage as previously defined, which we can no longer teach.   Based on the outcomes we have already lived through as earlier elements of the Christian sexual code have been rejected, it should be obvious that, once again, we will learn that rejecting yet another element of the code will come at a cost.  But this time it's even more serious: As stated, the institution of marriage formed the crux of the entire Christian sexual moral code, in terms of defining the context for socially approved sexual relations: namely sexual relations within the bonds of an institution which ensured that every child has a father and a mother. This function is the institution’s most vital point for existing in the first place. Surely there are other reasons for the institution of marriage in addition to its relationship to procreation and child-rearing.  But no one who has seriously thought about the issue can doubt that the institution’s rise and maintenance, in virtually every society on earth, across virtually all times and all cultures, is due to the fundamental facts of human existence: that we come in two genders, that only a combination of those genders can create a new baby, that human babies do not arrive ready to face the world, but take years of often arduous care to raise to a healthy and self-sufficient adulthood, which care requires both full time nurturing of the child for the first years of its life, as well as financial and material sustenance, which dual needs can generally only be provided either in large extended families, or, in smaller families, if one parent leaves the nurturing to the other and goes into the world to hunt, sow, or gather.  If any of these elements of human nature were different, if we reproduced asexually, or if our newborn babies took only weeks to walk and talk and function independently, it is highly doubtful that marriage would have ever developed among human beings, let alone been so ubiquitous throughout the generations and for virtually every culture on earth.

As the communists discovered when they tried to ignore the basic characteristics of humans (that they are selfish and respond to incentives), it is inevitable that a society which tries to ignore human reality in favor of ideology will reap unintended adverse consequences.  So also, we will inevitably learn that redefining marriage in a manner which has no relationship to the basic facts of human existence will cause harm.  That harm comes in the form of denying children of their natural, prima facie, prepolitical right, to be raised by their own mother and father.  Any-two-persons marriage deprives children of a mother and a father.  It does this in two ways: directly, as when a same sex female couple have a child through artificial insemination from a sperm donor, or a same-sex male couple in the adoption market insist that they must be treated as absolutely equivalent to a male-female couple seeking to adopt a child, with no preference for the male-female couple being allowed; and indirectly, by promoting the societal belief that children do not need fathers, and that sex, marriage, procreation, and child-rearing may properly be treated as disparate, atomized, and unrelated, rather than as integrated concepts.

Marriage defined as the union of any two persons sends a message that children do not obtain any benefit from a father that they could not receive from a second female parent. (It also sends the opposite message, with respect to mothers not being necessary, but does so far less frequently, and with far less impact, given the biological facts which bond a child and his or her mother together, such that the concept of motherhood is far less reliant on social values, laws, and religious customs, for its support, than is the concept of fatherhood.)  This official rejection of marriage as an institution whose purpose is to tie children to their own mother and father, in favor of the proposition that children are adaptable, and should be required to adapt to benefit adult desires, inevitably spills over into heterosexual relationships as well, teaching young men that children do not need a father, so there is no reason for them to commit to any higher purpose than their own pleasure when they engage in sexual activity.  This, in turn, leads to fatherless children.

It is no statistical accident or mere coincidence that, for the first time in our nation’s history, over 50% of children born to mothers under thirty are born to an unwed mother, and that those members of society who are under 30 are also the most likely to support redefining marriage as the union of any two persons.  Rather, each of these statistics are strongly related, as they each represent the values of a generation which has turned its back on the idea that a child needs both a mother and a father, if providing a child with that benefit will get in the way of the pleasures adults can obtain from sex, or the pleasures their neighbors can obtain from designating themselves as morally superior to any one who has not caught up with the times. Both of these statistics for those under-30 represent the values of a generation which does not believe that sex, marriage, procreation, and child-rearing are integrated concepts, but see them instead as separate and distinct, alien to each other, and having nothing to do with each other.  Of course, none of these attitudes are their fault: They learned these lessons from their elders.

None of this is intended as a claim against the inherent dignity and rights of those with a minority sexual orientation.  It should of course be noted that homosexuals are entitled to be treated with fairness and dignity in our law and in our culture; that they are entitled to have their deepest relationships respected and preserved and afforded the same inheritance and similar rights as other couples (all of which could have been done, however, without revising the definition of our society's most ancient and stabilizing institution).  It should also of course be clearly stated that homosexuals are not primarily to blame for the impending world of even more single-parent children which is now on our doorstep.  The vast majority of children who will be deprived of either a mother or (almost always) a father in the coming generations will be so deprived as a result of selfish and irresponsible choices by heterosexuals. And it is the past selfishness of heterosexuals, in their enthusiasm for extramarital promiscuity, no-fault unilateral divorce, universally accessible birth control, abortion, and all the rest, which created the circumstances which homosexual activists were smart enough to exploit to ask for a change in the law which would have been unthinkable without these prior, heterosexual, attacks on marriage.  If marriage had not already been so degraded as to lose its meaning almost entirely anyway, the any-two-persons marriage movement would have made no sense, because people would have remembered what marriage really was.  Heterosexuals have already severed the tie between marriage and sex and procreation and child-rearing, and therefore have had no moral leg to stand on in resisting demands for redefined marriage.  Nevertheless, marriage as the union of any two persons, will forever alter the understood definition of the institution which has always heretofore stood at the heart of Christian sexual morality, and will thereby prove to be not only the final nail in the coffin of Christian sexual morality, but the irrevocable nail which prevents us from ever again reviving that code, as its keystone concept (the institution of marriage as the only appropriate context for sexual relations, so as to ensure that every child has a mother and a father) will have been abolished from the entire arch

The Price We Have Paid.  The rejection of each element of the Christian sexual code has been seen by liberals as cause for celebration: as individual liberties and freedoms increase, as old-fashioned social mores fall, we have been told, time and time again, that we are heading towards a new age of Aquarius.  However, what has actually happened, time and time again, is just the opposite: a new age of selfishness and nihilism. The idea that the rejection of each element of “archaic and repressive” Christian sexual morality represented an unqualified and unmitigated, cost-free advance for human happiness, and that a sexually amoral world could be enjoyed without any negative offsetting consequences, or price, has, time and again, proven simplistic in the extreme.  The old sexual code stood for the proposition that sex, marriage, procreation, and child-rearing should be integrated and whole and unified processes, so as to ensure that most children would be raised by their own mother and father, which in turn is the least restrictive means (requiring the least amount of governmental involvement) to raise children to responsible, law-abiding, self-sustainable adulthood.  The rejection of each element of the code stood for the proposition that adult desires should preempt these claims, even if children were thereby rendered less likely to have their wants and needs fulfilled, by a mother and a father, and therefore more likely to require the assistance of the State. It takes a lot of provender to raise a human child, both emotional and material, and a mom and a dad, preferably one’s own mom and dad, simply provides humans with their best possible chance at a successful and happy life. (This is what is so bizarre about so-called libertarians' support for any-two-persons marriage.  This is a group that claims to want smaller government, but is blind to the fact that a morally permissive society can NEVER hope to enjoy a small government. The two concepts are simply incompatible.) Therefore, the old code ensured that a child would not be denied of its prima facie right to a relationship with his or her own mother and father, except and unless when in the best interests of the child, and never merely to gratify adult desires. The old code stood for the proposition that the needs of society’s most vulnerable class (newborn children) should have priority over the wants of society’s most powerful class (adults).  The new code stands for the opposite proposition, that the wants of the most powerful should preempt the needs of the most vulnerable, including the need of a child to have both a father and a mother.

The future?  More children will emerge from childhood with psychological trauma scars instead of psychological strength.  More families will be unable to provide for their children, so that the State will have to become increasingly large, to provide for them instead: acting as caregiver to the young unmarried mother and her children, and, eventually, as disciplinarian to her sons.  But there will be fewer and fewer adults who have the psychological capability to keep a job to pay the tax burden which will be required for the State to provide this intervention.  And round and round the vicious cycle goes, like all vicious cycles, in the direction of a flushing toilet.