Liberalism and the Anglican Church - in Memory of J. I. Packer

This essay is dedicated to the memory of the late Reverend Canon Dr. James Innell Packer who passed away on Friday at the age of 93. Dr. Packer was born and raised in England and ordained in the Church of England, but spent the latter half of his career here in Canada where he was Professor of Theology at Regent College in British Canada. I read his Fundamentalism And the Word of God and Knowing God when I was a high school student in the early 1990s. The former, which uses the word "fundamentalism" in the UK rather than the North American sense of the term, i.e., anyone who after 1850 still believed what the entire Church had believed about the inspiration and infallibility of the Bible for the previous eighteen centuries, is an excellent brief defence of Scriptural authority. The latter, which is likely the book that will be his lasting legacy, belongs to that genre that occupies the middle territory between works of serious theology and devotional material, combining elements of both. As a theologian, he will be remembered primarily as a champion of the aforementioned "fundamentalist" view of Scriptural authority with which I with only a single caveat (1) agreed with him wholeheartedly, and as a Calvinist who admired the Puritans, as I, who see in these historical figures the regicides who provided the model for the Jacobins of the French Revolution who in turn were the template for the Bolsheviks and all subsequent Communist movements and revolutions, most decidedly, do not. In Canada, he was a key figure in the Anglican Essentials movement, which began in the mid-1990s as a long-overdue response to creeping liberalism - theological liberalism, which starts from rejection of Scriptural authority and proceeds to reject or reinterpret the doctrines of Creedal orthodoxy - within the Anglican Church of Canada. The catalyst for the movement was the aggressive efforts of liberals to radically alter the Church's moral theology with regards to homosexuality in the direction of affirmation and later the blessing of same-sex partnerships and eventually the consecration of same-sex "marriages". Dr. Packer was situated in the Diocese of New Westminster, in which Michael Ingham was consecrated bishop in the same year Essentials was launched. At the time Ingham was noted for being very liberal in his theology - and everything else - and in 2002 he was the first bishop to authorize same-sex blessings, a decision which he followed up on with aggressive efforts to curb dissent. This eventually led the Essentials parish of St. John's Shaugnessy in Vancouver, the largest parish in the diocese and indeed the entire Anglican Church of Canada at the time, of which Dr. Packer was a member, to disassociate with the diocese and the national Church, and to join the Anglican Network in Canada under the episcopal oversight of the conservative Anglican Province of the Southern Cone.

With regards to the same-sex affirmation/blessing/marriage issue, I addressed it at length eight years ago in the "blessing" period of liberal activism immediately prior to their assault on the marriage canon in the last two General Synods. Since the same arguments apply to the other stages I will not repeat them here. I will note instead what is probably the most common charge levelled against those who oppose these changes by those determined to bring them about, which is that of a singular obsession with sex. While the answer to this charge, in the sense in which it was intended, is that the obsession is entirely on the part of those who wish to effect a revolution in moral theology and not on the part of those placed in a necessarily defensive position by their attacks on what is both the plain interpretation of the Scriptures and the Catholic, in the Vincentian meaning of the term, consensus as to their interpretation, it does, taken in a completely different sense, make a valid point that is related to what I said above about the Essentials response being long overdue. As I can attest, having grown up reading my paternal grandmother's issues of the Anglican Journal, the letters to the editor section, much larger then than it is today, were packed with this controversy in the decade prior to Essentials. My point, however, is not merely that an organized, conservative, response to liberal activism on this one issue should have begun at least a decade earlier, but that the ground the Essentials movement stood upon had been made considerably weaker because many for whom same-sex affirmation/blessing/marriage went too far had already imbibed and accepted many other elements of liberalism.

Theological liberals in the Anglican Church of Canada, as well as the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in the United States, like to maintain that they are the present day heirs of the spirit within the Anglican tradition which has allowed the Orthodox and Evangelical (2) to co-exist in the same Church, more or less peacefully, for centuries. This is obviously not true for two reasons. The first and least important is that the attitude they have displayed towards conservative Anglicans in the controversies of the last century can hardly be described as one of peaceful co-existence. The second and most important is that the changes in doctrine and practice that they have championed, are ones that break with both the plain interpretation of the authoritative Scriptures stressed by Evangelicals and the Vincentian Catholicism of the Orthodox. In other words, they go against what the Bible clearly teaches and what the Church has taught and believed, "everywhere, always, and by all" from the first century onward. This is true not only of the same-sex affirmation/blessing/marriage issue, but of the admission of women into the priesthood which took place in both the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church in 1976, the more permissive attitude towards divorce and remarriage which started around the same time, and even the acceptance of artificial contraception at the Lambeth Conference of 1930.(3)

I am not saying , of course, that the Essentials leaders accepted all of these other changes. The late Dr. Packer, notably opposed the ordination of women to the priesthood. (4) There was no such consensus among them, however, in favour of the Scriptural/Vincentian Catholic positions on these issues as there was on same-sex affirmation/blessing/marriage and this very much weakened the ground they stood upon with regards to the latter.

Now, you have probably noticed that all of these other issues pertain in one way or another to sex. At this point, we need to consider how this theological liberalism relates to the broader cultural/social/political liberalism. It was just last week that I made the observation that liberalism's loosening of social controls in the area of sex went hand-in-glove with a tightening of controls in almost every other area and how Aldous Huxley in Brave New World provided us with an illustration of what this, taken to the nth degree, would look like. Theological liberalism within the Church is a product of the liberalism in the broader culture and largely reflects it. This was true in the era of classical liberalism, which produced Latitudinarianism in the Church, and it is true in this era of hard left, progressive liberalism. If the Essentials leaders were divided among themselves on all of those other issues pertaining to sex in which the teachings of Scripture and the Catholic tradition were united on the one side and liberalism stood on the other, how many of them were willing to openly oppose hard left progressive liberalism wholesale?

How many, when the Anglican Church of Canada's House of Bishops came out with that disgusting letter last month about "systemic racism", were willing to stand up and say that "systemic racism" is itself a racist concept devised by New Left Critical Race Theorists (5) to demonize white people?

How many of those who opposed the attempt to change the marriage canon in the General Synod last year were willing to condemn the "apology" from former primate Fred Hiltz, approved at the same Synod, for the "spiritual harm" of evangelizing the Indians, which statement amounts to a denial that Jesus Christ is as He Himself declared "the Way, the Truth, and the Life"?

How many of them would have a bigger problem with the Archbishop's denial of the Gospel's exclusivity than with my non-pejorative use of the word "Indians" in the previous sentence?

How many of them, when the House of Bishops issued its call earlier this year, for a universal basic income, were willing to point out that the only concept difference between UBI and the social security net that was already in place prior to the pandemic is the elimination of even a nominal attempt at minimizing moral hazard and that if their idea is to make CERB permanent, as the Dominion government's "fiscal snapshot" of the week before last clearly demonstrates this will simply accelerate the country's rapid descent into insolvency, which will make things much worse rather than better for all the poor and underprivileged?

How many of them, when the bishops shut down the dioceses for the last four months in obedience to unnecessary and totalitarian public health orders, were willing to stand up and say that to obey these orders is to render unto Caesar that which belongs to God, that the Church is more essential than any business or all of them put together - especially so, in a time of crisis - and that the transitioning of all interaction into the virtual world of the internet is a trend the Church has a duty to oppose rather than jumping on board the bandwagon itself?

To oppose hard core left-liberalism only on sexual issues - or, for some, only on the single sexual issue of same-sex affirmation/blessing/marriage - while remaining silent or supporting them on all these other matters, is to take an unsustainable position. Or, to use a Scriptural metaphor, to build one's house on sinking sand.


(1) Packer held to B. B. Warfield's view of Scriptural authority, which held the Scriptures to be "inerrant", but limited this quality to the non-extant autographs. I am inclined to agree with the late Theodore P. Letis, that this departure from the consensus of the post-Tridentine Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican scholastic tradition that the Scriptures were "infallible" and that this quality applied to the text as canonized by ecclesiastical use down to the present, was a shift to a weaker rather than a stronger view of Scriptural authority.

(2) Orthodox or "High Church" Anglicans stress the importance of continuity with the early, undivided, Church in organic and organizational structure and identity (the three clerical orders led by the historical episcopacy in Apostolic Succession), doctrine (the three ecumenical Creeds), ministry (Word and Sacrament) and worship (ceremony, ritual, and liturgy). Evangelical or "Low Church" Anglicans stress the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation (the five Solas), the supreme authority of the Scriptures in matters of doctrine and practice, and the need for a personal faith in Jesus Christ.

(3) That the break from the universal consensus of the Church against contraception also violates the plain teaching of the Scriptures is most likely to be seen as the weakest link in this chain as the most obvious Scriptural example, that of Onan, is descriptive historical narrative rather than explicitly prescriptive, but see the late Lutheran Bible scholar Charles D. Provan's The Bible and Birth Control (Zimmer Printing, 1989). for a full treatment of this subject.

(4) J. I. Packer, "Let's Stop Making Women Presbyters", Christianity Today, February 11, 1991.

(5) "Systemic racism" "structural racism" or "institutional racism" are all expressions that mean that every institution in Western Civilization, from the rule of law to 2X2=4, are unfairly biased towards white people and against all others and so all white people and only white people are collectively guilty of an unconscious racism. On May 6th, the Anglican Compass published an essay by the Rev. Dr. Esau McCaulley, who is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, entitled Discerning Friends from Enemies: Critical Race Theory, Anglicans in North America, And the Real Crisis. He attempted to argue that systemic racism predates Marxist Critical Theory, having been part of black theology, orthodox as well as progressive. From the examples he gives he seems to mean something different by "systemic racism" - overt racism on the part of institutions rather than individuals. The Black Lives Matter movement uses the expression in the Marxist sense, and relies upon many people misunderstanding it in the latter sense to weaken opposition to their Cultural Maoist agenda.

The Mask of the Beast

Every civilized society has laws which prohibit its members, or anyone else for that matter who happens to be within its jurisdiction, from murdering, kidnapping and raping other people and stealing, damaging, or destroying their property. These laws are universally considered to be just. I do not mean that every single person who has ever lived has agreed with this consensus. I mean that every civilized society, considered as a collective entity, has agreed with the consensus. Uncivilized societies and the forces of barbarism within civilization, such as the Marxist Critical Theorists who regard civilization itself as being fundamentally unjust and who would disagree with the laws protecting property, are obviously outside that consensus.

What is it about these laws which makes them just?

The classical liberal answer is that they can all be derived from the harm principle. In classical liberalism, that is to say eighteenth - nineteenth century liberalism, the securing of the rights and freedoms of individuals was made to be the sole purpose for the existence of the state. From that perspective, laws which by their very nature restrict the rights and freedoms of individuals, must be justified by the necessity which arises out of the harm done to others by the violation of those laws. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is the classic exposition of this theme. Unlike many twentieth and twenty-first century progressive liberals, who often give the impression of agreeing with the Marxists and other socialists on this matter, the classical liberals saw harm done to property as being harm done to the property’s owner.

While the harm principle was not entirely an invention of Mill or even of liberalism in general – what is arguably an early form of it can be found in the writings of thirteenth century Scholastic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas – its spread in the Modern Age of liberalism is indicative of a shift away from the older paradigm of thinking. In the older tradition, laws of this sort were considered just because the actions which they forbade were regarded as wicked. This meant more than just that these actions were wrong, although that was obviously included. It meant that they were sufficiently wrong to warrant suppression by the force of law. The difference between wickedness and wrongness in general pertained to both degree and kind, but with regards to the latter difference, the older tradition perceived in these acts a threat to the peace and security of the society as a whole and emphasized this over the harm done to the individual.

It could be argued that in theory, the older tradition would have less of a problem than liberalism with other laws, and more specifically with laws which are against acts which are merely mala prohibita, that is to say, bad or wrong because they are against the law, rather than mala in se – bad or wrong in themselves, regardless of the law. If, in the older tradition, the wickedness of an act which justifies its suppression by law is to be found in the threat to the peace and security of the society more than in the harm to the individual, then any violation of the law could be said to qualify as wicked because by breaking any particular law, it breaks the law as a singular whole, and the law as a singular whole is what maintains peace and security within the society. Those who read history through the lens of the Whig Interpretation, in which the events of the past are perceived as progressively moving towards greater freedom today and in the future, would be particularly inclined to accept this argument.

The reality, however, does not bear out the Whig Interpretation. The transition into the Modern Age which had liberalism as its zeitgeist, made government a much larger and more intrusive presence in the lives of the governed rather than less of one. I am not referring only to the hard totalitarian aberrations that arose out of the radical and revolutionary branches of Modern continental thought in Germany and Russia in the early twentieth century. In the English-speaking liberal democracies, governments exert regulatory control over a far larger portion of people’s everyday lives today than they did prior to the English Civil War, much of the distinction between private and public spaces has been eliminated, and people have become accustomed to paying taxes at levels that are exponentially higher than what would have been considered unbearable tyranny prior to the Modern Age. In other words, by the standards with which the pre-liberal tradition measured freedom, we are much less free today than before liberalism.

In the last decades of the twentieth century those who attempted to argue against this conclusion pointed to areas in which they maintained there were far fewer restrictions on individual choice than ever before. Since this basically reduced to a single area – sexual behaviour and preferences – this argument had been rebutted before it was ever made by Aldous Huxley, in his 1932 novel Brave New World, which depicted a totalitarian world in which every individual’s life was planned out by the state from the moment of genetic engineering until death, and the state prevented people from rebelling against this total lack of freedom in all other areas of their lives – or even noticing it – by encouraging maximum sexual freedom – and providing them with ample amounts of a euphoria-inducing substance called soma. Today, we are less likely to hear this sort of argument, not so much because everybody has been persuaded by Huxley’s book as because sexual liberation has so obviously morphed into a form of totalitarianism that seeks to suppress all dissent from those who believe in more traditional mores.

I have often discussed how the noun in liberal democracy has contributed to this trend of maximizing government control and decreasing freedom. While small-r republicans like to blame kings like Henry VIII and Louis XIV for the omnipotent Modern state, and it is true that the centralization that these sovereigns introduced, by upsetting the more de-centralized feudal balance, contributed to the problem, this was made far worse when the elected assemblies usurped most of the royal powers. While Parliament as an institution that evolved in the pre-Modern era was a safeguard of freedom, the Modern abstract ideal of democracy is not, because the idea of popular government contradicts the idea of limited government. There can be no rational limits to government, when government of and by the people is made to be the ideal, for this eliminates the distinction between government and governed which is the very foundation upon which the idea of limiting government power rests. John Farthing was right and liberalism was wrong – freedom wears a crown.

Today, however, it is evident how the adjective in liberal democracy has contributed to the same trend. While Mill saw his harm principle as a protection of individual freedom against the encroachment of expanding government, it has become the very basis of a new totalitarianism.

I introduced this essay by talking about the type of laws against mala in se crimes such as murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery, etc. which have universally been considered to be just among civilized societies. Let us think about what the opposite of this type of law would look like. Obviously laws which are the opposite of those universally considered to be just, would be laws which, to paraphrase the Vincentian canon so as to apply it to a political rather than an ecclesiastical contest, would be considered unjust by all civilized societies in all places and all times. Such laws would not prohibit mala in se crimes, or even acts which might be considered morally neutral, but acts which are bona in se, that is good in themselves. What kind of laws might these be?

Laws against going to Church to worship God. Laws against shaking someone’s hand or cheering someone up with a hug. Laws against holding gatherings of your large extended family. Laws against meeting up with your friends in person rather than online. Laws against opening your business or going to your job so as to support yourself and your family rather relying upon the public purse. Laws, in other words, against normal, basic, everyday good human behaviour.

Laws which were almost universally imposed, even outside totalitarian hellholes like Red China and North Korea, over the past four months.

How did our governments justify these insane prohibitions of the good?

They used the harm principle, of course. Engaging in ordinary, decent, human social and economic activity, they claimed, would put people in danger of contracting a new coronavirus which had escaped from China and was rapidly spreading around the globe. While the dangers this virus posed were themselves grossly exaggerated, the very idea of prohibiting almost all ordinary, good, human behaviour in order to prevent harm from a virus is warped. The restrictions and regulations of these “public health orders” are, by the standards of civilization since time immemorial, fundamentally unjust. Indeed, there can be no word more appropriate to describe rules that prohibit the good than the word evil. Make that Evil with a capital E.

It is not over yet. After four months of this abominable universal house arrest which treats all law-abiding citizens as criminals, government health officials are finally considering letting people go back to Church again. Most businesses were allowed to re-open long before this. All sorts of restrictions are being imposed upon the re-opening Churches, and all of them are restrictions that any true believer in Jesus Christ will immediately recognize as vile obscenities that were thought up in the fiery pit of hell by the devil himself. Limiting attendance. Requiring people to register in advance. Prohibiting the Sacrament, in one or both kinds. (1) Prohibiting congregational singing. Prohibiting physical contact like the customary handshake or hug in the Pax. Requiring mask wearing as a condition of attendance. The specifics vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (2) but the evil spirit behind these restrictions is the same everywhere.

It was through liberalism, including and especially Mill’s harm principle, which is clearly not remotely as innocuous and benign as it seems, that this evil spirit has so pervaded the governments of what used to be Christendom. It was through the same ideology, wearing theological garb, that it has so pervaded the Churches that they are willingly submitting to these requirements, as they willingly submitted to the governments’ orders to close in the first place. This is not the obedience to the civil authority that is enjoined upon believers as individuals and as Churches in the New Testament, but a rendering unto Caesar of that which is God’s.

In the eighteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke, the Lord Jesus concludes the parable of the Unjust Judge by saying “And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily.” He then asks this question “Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?”

If He were to come back today, then judging by the behaviour of the Churches in this pandemic, the answer to His question is clearly no. If He were to come back tomorrow, He would likely find His Church wearing the mask of the Beast.

(1) Restricting the Sacrament to the one kind would be less of an issue for the Roman Communion, which broke with the universal practice of the Church from the first to the twelfth centuries almost a millennium ago. The Byzantine Communion has maintained the early Church practice all along, and the Anglican Communion, in returning to the practice in the Reformation, forbade the restriction in the Thirtieth of the Articles of Religion of the Elizabethan Settlement. Communion in both kinds is also the doctrine and practice of the other Churches of the Magisterial Reformation, as well as practically all of the sects.
(2) Some, but not all of the ones listed, have been put in place here in the province of Manitoba. For a much longer list, see Laurence M. Vance’s “CDC Churches.”

The Tory and Freedom

Democracy, which liberal and leftist alike consider to be the best form of government, is widely equated with freedom. As we have seen, however, democracy as conceived by the left is the pathway to totalitarianism, for when the distinction between governed and government is eliminated and the state is regarded as the voice of the people, it ceases to see the need for restrictions on the use of its power. Liberalism contained restraints on this tendency of democracy, in the form of protections of the rights of the individual, but as liberalism has moved away from its original individualism towards a realignment with the collectivist left over the course of the last century it has gradually ceased to be a roadblock to totalitarianism.

The Tory, the classical conservative who sees royal and ecclesiastical authority as being irrevocably called to cooperate for the common good of the whole society, accepts democracy, only as a part of a mixed government, under the monarchy and the upper house and deriving its legitimate authority from the same source as these institutions, tradition and prescription. He sees liberalism’s restraints on democracy as necessary and good, but insufficient, because only by making the power of democracy subordinate to the authority vested by prescription in monarchy and aristocracy – or in Canada, the substitute for aristocracy that is our Senate – in a mixed government, can democracy’s tendency to slide into demagoguery, mob rule, and totalitarianism be checked.

Liberalism, from its very beginning has claimed the freedom of the individual as its lodestar but as its ability to restrain democratic totalitarianism has waned it would seem to have lost its bearings and run adrift. As Tory journalist Sir Peregrine Worsthorne put it nine years ago “with remarkable rapidity, from being a doctrine designed to take government off the backs of the people, liberalism has become a doctrine designed to put it back again”. (1)

Toryism, by contrast with the neoconservatism of the last four decades which is actually a form of liberalism, does not march under the banner of freedom but seeks stability and continuity in order established in tradition. These, however, are not hostile to freedom, as liberalism so often has assumed they are, but are the very things which make freedom possible. The Tory, therefore, is, albeit in an indirect manner, the more consistent supporter of liberty.

In saying that freedom is made possible by a stable, order, established in tradition, the Tory expresses a different view of the nature of freedom, than that espoused by the liberal. The liberal sees freedom as the natural possession of man, but as belonging to him outside of society rather than inside society. This is because he regards man’s natural condition as being individual and society as an artificial construction of individuals. This concept of the individual as prior to society conflicts with what we know of actual individuals, however, who are born into social existence in their families, neighbourhoods, and nations. The Tory recognizes man’s social existence as his natural state, and the condition of an individual isolated from society, such as a hermit who has withdrawn into the desert, as being manifestly unnatural. Man possesses and enjoys freedom, he insists, in and through society, rather than outside of it.

Freedom, the Tory says, cannot exist outside of the context and boundaries of ordered society. While the liberal, who thinks of freedom in terms of the absence of context and boundary, finds this to be absurd, the folly of his position was well illustrated by G. K. Chesterton in the short story in which a professor who wrote a book about “the Psychology of Liberty” reveals himself to have gone dangerously mad by taking his doctrine to the extreme of “liberating” a goldfish from its bowl. (2)

Liberalism further mistakes the nature of freedom by conceiving of it as leading to the end of human happiness through the means of indulging human appetites. This element of liberal thought has grown stronger over the century in which liberalism has given up most of its ability to restrain the totalitarian impulse in democracy to protect the individual. Aldous Huxley saw this coming and in his Brave New World depicted a society in which everyone lives out a life that has been predetermined for him by the state but in which he is free to indulge his appetites for drugs and sex and encouraged by the state to do so.

This view of liberalism is a fundamental contradiction of the wisdom of the ancients and the teachings of Christianity the sources of the tradition to which the Tory looks for light. Plato and Aristotle taught that to achieve true happiness, man must form good habits of behaviour, virtues, in which he masters his appetites and passions – his internal desires and drives for such things as food, sex, wealth, and power – and keeps them in submission to his reason and will, for if he does not these will enslave him. Orthodox Christian theology teaches that man was given freedom in Creation, but lost it when he enslaved himself to sin in the Fall. God redeemed man – the literal meaning of redemption is the purchase for the purpose of emancipation of a slave – from slavery to sin, through the Incarnation, Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. In his restored freedom, man is no longer chained to the fallen, Adamic, nature that remains with him in this life, but is to walk in his freedom through faith.

There is a harmony between the classical and Christian teachings here. In both, true happiness is to be found in the mastery of internal forces that seek to master us - our natural appetites and passions in classical thought, our sinful flesh in the Christian. In both, an established institution exists to help us in this struggle - the state in the classical teaching of the ancients, the church in Christian theology. Both would see the unfettered indulgence of human desire as slavery rather than freedom. In classical thought virtue is the prerequisite for true freedom, which is part of happiness. In Christian thought freedom is the prerequisite for virtue, both in the sense that the redemption of Christ is necessary to free man from slavery to sin that he might be virtuous and that good behaviour is not virtuous unless it is freely chosen. If Huxley’s novel illustrates the classical point of view, the much misunderstood A Clockwork Orange by polymath, novelist, and High Tory Anthony Burgess, is an illustration of the Christian. (3) These are two ways of saying the same thing, that both freedom and virtue require the other, and that to pursue either separately and at the expense of the other is a road that leads to neither.

Freedom, therefore, is an absolutely essential part of the common good of society that the Tory sees as the end of royal and ecclesiastical authority and neither church nor state can assist man in the pursuit of virtue if they do not also seek to secure his liberty. The church proclaims the redemption of man from sin by Christ through her ministry of Word and Sacrament, so that people may follow righteousness through faith in the liberty Christ has purchased for them. Laws, Christianity teaches us, can help us recognize virtue by defining right and wrong, but are powerless to make us virtuous, (4) and so should be kept as few in number as is consistent with order and the common good. The laws of the state, rightly ordered, however, secure our lives and property. As the Tory’s patron saint, King Charles the Martyr, put it in his final speech before he was killed by the Puritans in 1649, the people’s “liberty and freedom consists in having of government those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own.” (5) Thus, do church and state, in the traditional order of society, create the context in which freedom can flourish.

(1) http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/21/comment.politics2

(2) “The Yellow Bird” from G. K. Chesterton’s The Poet and the Lunatics.

(3) In the novel, the state uses a form of brainwashing, “the Ludovico Method”, to reform the narrator Alex, a violent young hooligan, but the process does not make him good, it merely takes away his freedom. That it cannot make him good because it takes away his freedom is an objection raised by a priest who serves as chaplain, and in raising this objection, the priest vocalizes the entire point the author, who is falling back upon the Catholicism in which he was raised, is seeking to make.

(4) This is a major theme of St. Paul’s epistles to the Roman and Galatian churches.

(5) He wisely contrasted this with the people’s having a “share in government”, for democracy, by making the government and the people one, leads to the opposite of freedom, total control, for any and every law can be excused when it is a law the people make for themselves.

Original Sin and Free Will

Novelist, poet, screenwriter and composer Anthony Burgess in his second volume of memoirs explained the reason why he rejected the doctrines of the left and held to a form of conservatism “If I was a kind of Jacobite Tory, like John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, this was because socialism was positivist and denied original sin.” (1) His reasoning is both excellent and sound. The doctrine of original sin is an essential component of both orthodox Christian faith, such as the Roman Catholicism in which Burgess had been raised, (2) and philosophical and political conservatism. (3) Early twentieth century critic T. E. Hulme identified it with classicism in the arts. (4) It is also empirically verifiable, an unusual trait among religious and political doctrines. People do not have to be taught to do wrong, it comes naturally to them. Nor do they ever cease doing wrong and become morally perfect – at least in this life.

Original sin is not a popular doctrine. It is, as Burgess wrote, denied by socialists and others on the left. It is also rejected by classical liberals, who are often perceived as being on the right in North America. One author, whose writings are quite popular among classical liberal republicans, made the dogma the focus of the attack of the 1070 page polemical novel for which she is most remembered. In this novel, the creative, industrious, elite of a United States saddled with oppressive socialism, take up the prerogative assumed to belong to manual labour, and quietly go on strike. In their absence everything falls apart. Towards the end, the leader of the strike, John Galt, goes on the air with a tedious broadcast in which he lectures the world about the evils of selfless altruism and the virtues of selfish individualism and humanism. In this harangue he condemns what he calls “the Morality of Death”, a code which “begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice.” “The name of this monstrous absurdity” according to John Galt “is Original Sin”. (5)

These words placed by Ayn Rand in the mouth of her implausible hero describe how the doctrine of original sin looks to those who hold to her set of beliefs – that there is no God, that the human spirit is noble and pure and contained entirely within the individual, that collectives like the nation, community, and even the family are parasitical, and that human reason is an all-sufficient guide to truth and virtue. In the absence of God and His grace, the idea that mankind is fallen, fundamentally flawed, and incapable of perfecting himself, must make any demand for goodness, justice, and virtue seem horribly unfair. This, however, merely raises the question of whether the problem is with the dogma of original sin or with the humanistic and materialistic presuppositions that strip the dogma of its necessary context.

As an element of orthodox Christian theology, the doctrine of original sin comes from the Holy Scriptures, the writings accepted by the Christian Church as being God’s direct revelation to the community of faith, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. In the Scriptures the doctrine is formulated by St. Paul in the fifth chapter of his epistle to the Roman Church in a passage that makes reference to the account of the Fall of Man in the third chapter of the book of Genesis. In the twelfth verse the Apostle states the doctrine succinctly:

Wherefore , as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.

Liberal individualism is a stumbling block to both the understanding and the acceptance of this doctrine. If you start with the liberal premise that man is fundamentally an individual and that all social collectives are artificial constructions that are secondary to human nature, St. Paul’s words will not make sense. It will sound like the Apostle is asserting that all individuals must suffer for the crime of one individual. From a liberal individualistic perspective this would appear to be either a gross injustice or an invitation to export one’s personal guilt onto another – “it’s not my fault I robbed that bank, I did it because Adam ate the forbidden fruit”.

The liberal individualist’s premise is observably wrong, however. Human beings do not start out as individuals and later join groups. They are born into families, communities, and nations, social collectives which existed before they did. It is their identity as individuals that is a later development. Liberal assumptions about individuality do not match up with the reality of the world we see around us. They are also completely foreign to the worldview of someone like St. Paul. The doctrine of original sin, as he stated it in the epistle to the Romans, is an assertion about collective man.

This is suggested by the very name given to the first man by the book of Genesis. In English we use the word man in different ways. Sometimes we use it to refer to an adult male human being as opposed to a female. Other times we use it as a collective term to encompass the entire human species, male and female. Used in this sense, it is interchangeable with “mankind”. Other languages often have at least two words that can be translated man, one which has the same range of meaning as the English word, another that can only ever refer to males and which often has the connotation of “husband”. In ancient Greek anthropos meant “man, mankind”, whereas aner meant “man, husband”, in Latin the equivalents were homo and vir respectively. In ancient Hebrew, the word that meant “man, mankind”, corresponding to anthropos and homo in Greek and Latin, was adam. (6) It is no coincidence that this is also the name given to the first man. When Genesis speaks of the creation of Adam, it is not speaking only of the creation of an individual, but of the race known in Hebrew as adam and in English as man. Likewise, the account of the Fall speaks of more than just the personal transgression of our first parents. The fall of Adam is the fall of adam – of collective man or mankind.

Therefore, the idea that you or I as individuals are unfairly suffering the consequences of the sin of another individual, Adam, or the idea that you or I can export the guilt for our personal sins back onto Adam, is foreign to the concept of original sin as it is presented in Scriptures. Adam is not just a specific individual but a collective to which we all belong and as members of that collective we all participate in Adam’s sin.

Although it is not spelled out, the idea of Adam as a collective embracing all mankind is very much present in the fifth chapter of Romans. St. Paul makes reference to the fall of man here for a specific purpose. It is not to establish the universality of human wickedness. He had already done that earlier in the epistle in order to demonstrate the impossibility of justification by works and the need for justification by grace. At this point in the epistle he introduces the concept of original sin in order to build a contrast between Adam and Christ. He declares the former to be a figure, i.e., a type or illustration, of the latter (v. 14). In this comparison, Adam and Christ each represent collective man. In Adam’s case, he represents the collective that bears his name, the race of which he is the progenitor, mankind. In Christ’s case, He represents the body of which He is the head, in which all believers are united with Him and each other, by the Holy Spirit through baptism, i.e., the church. The point of the comparison is to show that as far reaching as the impact of Adam’s sin, which brought sin and death upon all men, was, the impact of Christ’s obedience and righteousness, bringing grace, the free gift of justification, and everlasting life, will be even greater. (vv. 17-18)

This, by the way, is the answer to those who charge the doctrine of original sin with being a dreary and pessimistic doctrine. It is pessimistic only towards man’s efforts to achieve salvation and justification for himself. Towards these it goes beyond pessimism, outright declaring the impossibility of man redeeming himself. “Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight:” St. Paul declared, “for by the law is the knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:20) The Apostle was speaking of justification in the theological sense of being declared righteous by God, now and ultimately at the final judgement. Translated from the theological into the political, this denial of the possibility of justification by the works of the law becomes a denial of the possibility of progress, not in the neutral sense of improvement but in the loaded sense of our achieving a kind of salvation on earth through social, economic, technological and political reform. For what is the doctrine of progress, with which liberals, progressives, socialists, communists, and leftists in general are enamoured other than the idea that man, set free from the shackles of tradition and religion and “enlightened” by the unleashing of reason and science, can build for himself Paradise on earth? Towards this idea cynicism, scepticism, and pessimism are appropriate responses. (7)

Towards the idea that there is hope for man, however, the doctrine of original sin as presented in its original context is anything but pessimistic. St. Paul’s entire point was that Christ is greater than Adam, that Christ’s obedience is greater than Adam’s sin, that the grace, the free justification, the everlasting life which Christ brings to man far surpasses the sin, guilt, and death which is Adam’s legacy. In orthodox Christian doctrine, Christ through His death, burial, and resurrection, broke the power of sin, death, and hell, triumphing over these ancient enemies of man once and for all. The Christian gospel does not just promise that this victory will come at some unspecified point in the future – it proclaims that it has already taken place. That the blessings of grace, which Christ came to bring to man, far exceed the curse of sin and death that has been upon man since Adam, has time and time again found wonderful expression in the lyrics of Christian hymnody. Think, for example, of the words “He comes to make His blessings flow/Far as the curse is found” in Isaac Watts’ “Joy to the World” or of Julia H. Johnston’s hymn which speaks of “grace that is greater than all our sin”.

Ayn Rand, speaking through her character John Galt, opposed the idea of free will to the doctrine of original sin. Most opposition to the idea of original sin has come from the belief that it is incompatible with free will and therefore moral responsibility. Pelagius, the fifth century monk whose name has become synonymous with the denial of original sin, believed the doctrine to be both fatalistic and harmful to moral character. He taught that by sinning, Adam set a bad example which his descendants voluntarily follow, although retaining the ability not to do so.

Others have held that the doctrines of original sin and the necessity for salvation by grace do not contradict the idea that man has free will and is thus morally responsible for his actions. St.Augustine of Hippo, for example, was the primary opponent of Pelagius, yet he also wrote to Valentius defending the idea of free will. (8) The Augustinian position of affirming original sin and salvation by grace on the one hand and the moral necessity of free will on the other has been regarded, by the western church at least, as being the orthodox position.

A great deal depends here on what we mean by free will. If we define free will in such a way that any constraint upon our freedom to choose nullifies free will then of course it is incompatible with original sin – and a host of other things including the sovereignty of God, the rule of law, and respect for other people. This kind of absolute free will is desired only by madmen. On the other hand, it is apparent that opposite that Scylla is the Charybdis of defining free will so loosely that it is devoid of any real meaning.

A simple definition of free will is the ability to make choices for which we can be held morally accountable. From this definition it is apparent why there is perceived to be tension if not contradiction between free will and original sin. If our being held responsible for our choices, so as to be justly rewarded for our right actions and punished for our wrong actions, requires that we have the ability to choose between right and wrong, how can we be said to have free will if we are in a fallen condition due to original sin so as to no longer be able to not be sinners?

One possible answer to this is to follow St. Augustine in pointing out that original sin is not an external coercion of the will but an internal corruption. It is not that some force outside our will prevents us from making right choices and forces us to make wrong ones, it is that our internal inclination has been bent by original sin towards making wrong choices and away from God and the good. To expand upon this we could add the observation that we are creatures of habit, that once we have made a decision, whether good or bad, we are more likely to make the same decision again and that this likelihood increases the more often we make the decision. We ordinarily recognize that this does not nullify our responsibility. We would consider the judge who accepted “I did it once, now I’m hooked, I can’t stop” as a legitimate excuse and let the offender off to be an incompetent fool. Original sin operates in a somewhat similar way. Our race’s initial choice to rebel against God, generated in each of us an inclination to continue to do so.

The Apostle Paul would appear to have a different answer to this question however. If we continue to read in the epistle to the Romans from where he introduced the concept of original sin in the fifth chapter, we find that in the sixth he describes our relationship to the sin that indwells us as one of slavery or bondage. This would seem to be an acknowledgement that original sin has indeed damaged our free will. God, however, through His grace and mercy given to us in Jesus Christ, has set out to undo the damage done by man’s sin. This includes the damage done to the freedom of our will. Those of us who have been baptized into Jesus Christ, he declares, have been baptized into His death and resurrection. What this means for us, St. Paul explains, is that we are to consider Christ’s death to be our own death to sin, breaking its slavery over us, and setting us free to submit to God and serve righteousness rather than sin. The grace of God brings the restoration of free will to fallen man. (9)

This might raise the question of why the restoration of free will is considered to be a good thing. Was not free will the source of the problem in the first place? Man was given the choice between obedience to God and immortality on the one hand and sin and death on the other and chose the latter, bringing all sorts of misery upon himself, enslaving himself to sin and death. If God, motivated by His love, mercy, and grace, decided to redeem mankind from the mess he had gotten himself into, why return him to a state of free will and the choice between following the sinful inclinations from which he has been liberated and obeying God in righteousness?

The problem with this question is that free will was part of the original creation and is therefore something that is good in itself. It is not free will but the abuse of free will that is the origin of sin. Free will is not just the ability to choose evil, but the ability to choose good. The latter cannot exist without the former.

This brings us back to Anthony Burgess, with whom we began this essay. The writer who grounded his rejection of progressive politics on its inherent rejection of original sin, in his most well known novel offered a defense of free will, a belief in which was also the result of his Catholic upbringing, on precisely the grounds that removing the possibility of choosing evil also eliminates the possibility of choosing good. In A Clockwork Orange, the main character and narrator, Alex, the leader of a gang of “ultraviolent” teenage hooligans, imprisoned after an evening of rape and murder, becomes a test subject of a progressive government experiment in which an aversion to sex and violence is created with pain inducing drugs. If you have read the novel or seen Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation you are undoubtedly aware of how the process works. The point is that Alex is turned into a model citizen by the removal of his free will. This turns out to have major drawbacks.

Once Kubrick’s film had made the novel famous, Burgess was besieged with requests for explanations of the story, its violence, its title, and the weird lingo, a combination of rhyming slang and Russian, that many of the characters use. In his response he would always point to the theme that had inevitably been overlooked – that free will is an essential component of any real choice of the good. (10)

(1) Anthony Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time: Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess, (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1990), p. 140.

(2) John Anthony Burgess Wilson, who wrote under his two middle names, records his Catholic upbringing in his first volume of memoirs entitled Little Wilson and Big God. As an adult he would describe himself as a “lapsed Catholic”. The influence of the doctrines and ideas of the Church in which he was raised is evident in his books, especially his later ones.

(3) One major traditionalist conservative thinker who contested the idea that original sin is essential to political conservatism was Michael Oakeshott in his essay “On Being Conservative”, published in Rationalism and Politics and Other Essays. This is because in this essay, Oakeshott took a minimalist approach to the definition of conservatism, describing it as an attitude rather than a body of belief, and not because Oakeshott saw man or his society as perfectable.

(4) Indeed, Hulme made the doctrine the essence of the distinction between classicism and romanticism. He wrote “Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstances; and the other than he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.” T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism” in Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1924), p. 117. In the next paragraph he wrote “One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin.”

(5) Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Signet Classic, 1957, 1996), p. 938.

(6) The Hebrew word meaning “man, husband”, corresponding to aner and vir, is iysh.

(7) A couple of conservative authors have recently written books espousing the value of such pessimism. These are John Derbyshire in We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism ( New York: Crown Forum, 2009) and Roger Scruton in The Uses of Pessimism and the Dangers of False Hope (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

(8) http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf105.xix.iv.html

(9) This, in Christian ethics, is the highest and truest freedom available to man on earth – liberation from the sin that enslaves him from within. In the classical ethics of Plato and Aristotle, vices are habits that are formed when man allows his reason and will to be enslaved by his appetites and passions. Instead, the philosophers declared, man should strive for virtue by ruling over these instinctual drives. To facilitate this is the end for which government and its laws are established. Both Christian and classical thought clash at this point with modern, progressive thought. To the modern, progressive, way of thinking, human freedom is threatened most, not by some internal enslaving factor, be it Adamic sin or animal passion, but by the external restraints of custom, tradition and authority. Freedom, the modern progressive insists, lies in the unshackling of human desires and what the church calls “sin”, from the repressive bonds of religion and law. That the “freedom” valued by the modern progressive, might be most likely to be found within a society that is the exact opposite of “free”, one in which the lives of its members are planned by the state from birth to the grave, was a theme brilliantly explored by Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World, a novel that seems today to have been almost prophetic.

(10) If it be objected that the perfected saints in glory do not sin, it should be noted that what has been removed in glorification is not free will, the power to choose evil, but the internal desire to do so – the exact opposite of what the Ludovico Technique did to Alex in Burgess’s novel.

The Facts of Life (and Death)

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
– Rudyard Kipling, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”, (1919)

On June 24th, 2011 the legislative assembly of the State of New York voted to allow so-called “same-sex marriages”. This decision that will come into effect later this month. Once again we are reminded that we live in a post-Sexual Revolution world.

Progressives are predictably and boringly proclaiming this to be the latest victory in the cause of liberty, tolerance, and human rights. In reality it is the latest triumph of ideological blindness over reality.

The ideas of classical liberalism are notoriously out of touch with the real world. Individuals are not prior to societies but are born into families which are the simplest, most basic, form of society, from which more complex societies are built. Societies are not fundamentally voluntary-contractual nor is it desirable that they be reorganized on a voluntary-contractual basis. The most important relationships in any society are relationships of blood, love, and friendship, none of which are contractual and the most important activities and events in the life of a society occur not in the marketplace or the halls of government, but in the home. The purpose of government is not solely or even primarily to protect the “natural rights” of the individual. Indeed, the entire concept of universal natural rights that are not prescriptive, i.e., rooted in the customs of a particular society, is philosophical nonsense unless one makes the claim that God is the source of those rights, yet the theory of natural rights is most loudly asserted by deists, agnostics, atheists, religious apostates, and others who support the complete secularization of society. Democratically elected governments are not more conducive to justice and personal liberty than dynastical monarchies –the exact opposite is far closer to the truth.

As wrong-headed as the founders of liberalism were, none of them believed that the practical unfolding of their ideas would mean that democratic-bureaucratic governments would have to fundamentally redefine a basic social institution like “marriage” so that homosexuals could be considered “equal” with heterosexuals. Most of them would probably be very shocked to hear that such a decision was being hailed as a triumph of their ideas. John Stuart Mill, if he had been able to peer into the future and see this day, would undoubtedly have jumped up and down in anger, pulled out his hair, and burned his manuscripts rather than publish them.

How then did we arrive at where we are today?

In the early 20th Century intellectuals from various fields attacked traditional Western sexual morality. The father of psychoanalysis, Dr. Sigmund Freud, argued that neuroses are caused by too severe repression of basic instinctual drives such as the sexual libido, on the part of the individual super-ego shaped by parental authority and the cultural super-ego’s ethical system. (1) Dr. Margaret Mead, one of the first cultural anthropologists, in her first book Coming of Age in Samoa, claimed to have found a culture in which virtually complete sexual tolerance and freedom led to an easy adolescent transition to well-adjusted adulthood and a peaceful, non-violent society.(2)

In the second half of the 20th Century, the Sexual Revolution took place. The intellectual leaders of the revolution, were men like Herbert Marcuse, the author of Eros and Civilization. (3) Marcuse, an intellectual of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, took Freud’s theories and added a Marxist dimension of class conflict to them (sexual repression was a tool of the oppressors to keep the working class in subjection).

The Sexual Revolution demanded “liberation” from the “oppressive” sexual morality of the past (Christian sexual ethics). Sex, the argument went, was there to be enjoyed, if you don’t like it don’t do it, but don’t try to tell others what to do because it is none of your business, it is a completely private, personal matter.

That refrain is still being sung today.

A Caricature of the Past

For most of the people who joined the sexual liberation movement it was not about psychology or class struggle, however, but about “having fun”. Sex was fun, and traditional rules unnecessarily got in the way of that fun.

Thus, to the young people looking for “free love” in the 1960’s – and the decades after – the Roman Catholic Church, the Puritans, the Victorians, and everyone else associated with traditional, middle-class, sexual morality were all party-poopers, whose sole purpose and enjoyment in life, was preventing other people from having fun.

The sexual revolutionaries seldom took the time to examine what traditional sexual morality actually said or what the reasoning behind it was. Even today, one still hears the traditional Christian view of sex summed up by its opponents as “sex is sinful”, or, if the sexual libertarian is somewhat more informed “sex is a necessary evil, justifiable only for procreation, the enjoyment of it is sinful”.

No orthodox Christian Church ever taught any such rot.

That is, however, how one would expect the Christian doctrine to look to someone who has embraced the dangerous view of sex which traditional morality warns against. That is the view that sex is primarily, or solely, a matter of personal enjoyment, and that its procreative aspects are at best secondary.

To deliberately separate procreation from sex and to make the latter the servant of one’s personal enjoyment, orthodox Christianity teaches, is to embrace death over life.

That orthodox Christianity is right about this is empirically verifiable.

Birds and Bees 101

What is sex?

The word “sex” is often used in reference to the physical expression of erotic love. In this usage “sex” is shorthand for “sexual intercourse”. It is more proper to speak of sex as a characteristic or trait of a species of living beings. Some species are sexual, others are not. A sexual species is divided into two sexes, male and female, which produce distinct gametes (sex cells) which unite to produce a new member of the species. In some species this takes place outside the body. In other species it occurs within the body of one of the sexes. In human beings it occurs inside the body of the female.

Sexual intercourse is the way this takes place. Like many other species, the human sexes are equipped with complementary genitals. Two things are complements of each other when they form a whole when brought together. Male and female genitals are functional complements. The human male has an external, tube shaped, sex organ, the penis, which is connected to the testicles which produce the male gamete. The corresponding organ in the human female is an internal cavity in which the penis is placed. The cavity is called the vagina – which is the Latin word for “sheath” if the way the two organs are complementary to each other is still unclear to anyone.

Human sexual intercourse occurs when a man places his penis inside a woman’s vagina. When the two sex organs rub against each other it produces sexual pleasure, which causes the male to ejaculate sperm into the vagina, which then swim into the uterus and up the Fallopian tubes in search of an egg. If the timing is right – for the ovaries release eggs according to a set cycle, not whenever coitus leads to an orgasm – the sperm will fertilize an egg, and the combined gametes will becomes a zygote, then an embryo, which will attach itself to the uterus and develop into a foetus.

I have given you this refresher in basic reproductive biology because there are two obvious conclusions which must be drawn from all of this which the dominant political ideology of the day forbids us to draw.

The first, is that the reason human beings are sexual, and thus capable of entering into and enjoying sexual intercourse, is not the personal sensual gratification of individuals, but the reproduction of the species.

The second, is that while the pleasure of sexual intercourse can be simulated by placing the penis in some other orifice not intended for that purpose or by sticking something other than a penis in a vagina, these activities are not sexual intercourse (for that expression requires the bringing together of male and female to possess any meaning) and are not equal to sexual intercourse, but are rather inferior imitations of it.

An Important Distinction


I said that the purpose of sex (the distinction between male and female) and sexual intercourse is reproduction and not the personal sensual gratification of individuals. This is not the same thing as saying that it is wrong to enjoy sex (the aforementioned way in which the traditional position is caricatured by sexual libertarians).
It does, however, say a tremendous amount about contemporary thinking on sex.

If our being sexual beings who possess the capacity for sexual intercourse is for the purpose of the reproduction of our species and not for our personal gratification then it is obviously wrong to say “sex is a private matter and none of your business”. The exact opposite, as a matter of fact, is the case.

If our sexuality exists to serve the reproductive needs of our species – and it does – then the say of the species, society, and family are all more important than that of the individual when it comes to sex. For their survival depends upon sex – the survival of the individual does not. The individual person sustains his existence through a separate process of cell division and replacement that occurs entirely within his own body. The family, however, survives through sexually reproducing a new generation, and the same is true of all higher forms of social organization, and ultimately of the human species itself.

This is why parents put pressure on their grown children to marry and produce grandchildren. The survival of the family is at stake. We would see this more clearly if we had not, unfortunately, reduced the concept of the family to its nuclear minimum.

The sexual revolution took place alongside the development of efficient contraceptives. It would be a pointless “chicken-and-egg” argument to debate which produced which as the two occurrences mutually influenced each other. In developing contraception mankind used technology to artificially make sexual intercourse into what the sexual libertarians wanted it to be – something which is all about personal gratification, or “having fun”. The development of contraception was at best a highly morally questionable use of technology. At worst is was a purely evil pact with death on the part of our societies.

When Eros = Thanatos

Everything seems to have happened at once. The development of effective contraception, the sexual liberation movement demanding that traditional, middle-class, Western, sexual morality be replaced with something closer to “free love”, the feminist attack on motherhood, and the general attack on fatherhood. All of these things were inseparable from one another.

They all took place immediately after the spike in Western fertility that occurred after World War II. The “Baby Boom” began in the late 1940’s, a year or two after Germany and Japan were defeated, and extended into the middle of the 1960’s. The exact years vary from country to country. The explanation for the rise in fertility is fairly straightforward. Great Britain, Canada, the United States, and the other Western countries needed to replenish their populations after the global conflict had severely depleted them.

The Baby Boom ended, however, in the midst of the sexual revolution. Fertility rates dropped in Western countries – generally to below population replacement level – and have for the most part remained low ever since.

The populations of Western societies are aging rapidly and the ruling classes of those societies, instead of promoting natalism to encourage reproduction, have opted to replace their people with immigrants instead.

Western societies, in other words, are dying.

Traditional Christian morality is vindicated. To deliberately eliminate procreation from sex and lower it to the level of personal gratification, is to turn your back on life and embrace a culture of death.

Matters have only gotten worse since the 1960s. The invention of effective contraception was followed by the demand for legal abortion, and where legislatures were slow to act, that demand was met by courts of law. Now we have the demand that societies grant acceptance, recognition, and status to same-sex couples equal to that given to couples consisting of a potential father and mother with those making the demand inanely insisting that it would be “unjust” to deny this to same-sex couples because it is their “right”.

Our societies are dying, and the same progressive nincompoops who have insisted against observable and obvious fact, that society should have no say in sex, the means by which a society sustains its existence, are demanding that our societies treat as “equal” to procreative, heterosexual, marriage, a sterile imitation of such, which drastically lowers the average life expectation of those who engage in it (a fact ignored by the progressive health freaks who have crusaded to drive tobacco smoking from every public building and in some cases the outdoors).

What about Overpopulation?

At this point someone is likely to bring up the question of overpopulation.

Is it not irresponsible to condemn contraception and non-procreative sex when there is a risk of exceeding the carrying capacity of our ecosystem thus condemning large numbers of people to the sickness, war, and starvation that overpopulation brings on?

It is tempting to easily dismiss this concern as nonsensical scaremongering. In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, (4) Paul R. Ehrlich predicted that all sorts of disasters would occur in the next two decades as a result of overpopulation, and the prediction turned out to be about as accurate as those made by Harold Camping. We should, however, resist this temptation. Deplorable as Ehrlich’s irresponsible, eco-fearmongering was, the fundamental concept of ecological limits is sound. Human beings are not infinite beings and we do not live in an infinite world. We are limited beings living in a limited world.

Traditional Christian sexual ethics, however, will not produce overpopulation. Far better than any artificial, state program of population control drawn up by soulless bureaucrats, traditional ethics guides people between the Scylla of overpopulation and the Charybdis of underpopulation. Christian moral restraint was, in fact, the solution proposed by the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, the Anglican priest whose 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population written in response to the progressive optimism of William Godwin predicted an overpopulation crisis. (5) As is the case with Ehrlich a century and a half later, Malthus’ forecast of famine, disease, and war brought on by overpopulation had failed to materialize. This is because his calculations were based upon extrapolations from the then current rate of population growth and rate of growth in agricultural production which failed to take into account advancements in agricultural production which Malthus had not foreseen. Malthus’ basic theory, however, that once a population grows beyond the capacity of its resources to feed it, its numbers will be reduced in extremely unpleasant ways, is sound. The naïve notion that advancements in science and technology will always be able to ward off the consequences of population growth in excess of available resources involves a foolish faith in mankind’s limited abilities – especially foolish in that at science and technology “progress” the economy is transformed along with them so that what were once luxuries, become “needs”, which increases our overall consumption of resources.

This is yet one more reason why the idea that sex is an entirely “personal” matter in which society should have no say is wrong.

20th and 21st Century prophets of an apocalyptic doom by overpopulation have generally not followed Malthus in recommending moral, sexual, responsibility. Instead they have embraced the culture of death – contraception, abortion, in some cases infanticide, and euthanasia. These things, however, are no solution. They create the opposite problem – shrinking and aging populations in dying societies.

The tendency, in the 20th and 21st centuries has been to think of population size and ecology in global terms and to regard immigration as a partial solution to both the problems of societies who are not adequately reproducing themselves, such as post-Baby Boom Western societies, and the problems of societies that are poor and crowded, such as Third World countries. This is not a solution to either problem, however. When a society adopts replacing its people as a long-term alternative to reproducing them it accelerates its march towards its own death. (6) Furthermore, when a society sees emigration as the solution to crowding, that reduces the incentive to reproduce responsibly.

Dr. Garrett Hardin, who was Professor of Human Ecology at the University of California in Santa Barbara recognized that immigration was no solution and that “thinking globally” was part of the problem. He recommended that societies look upon themselves as lifeboats, with limited resources, adrift on the sea, arguing that population problems could only be solved on a local scale rather than a global one. (7)

Dr. Virginia Deane Abernethy, Professor of Psychiatry and Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, in her book Population Politics demonstrated that foreign aid and immigration add to, rather than solve the problem of overpopulation in poor countries, by refuting the Demographic Transition Model which argues that as fertility rates decrease after a society transitions to a modern standard of living. She demonstrates, to the contrary, that the historical pattern throughout the world is for fertility rates to rise with the standard of living. The experience of Western countries in the 20th Century would seem to conflict with this, but Dr. Abernethy argues that the deciding factor is optimism/pessimism about what the future holds for prospective children. The long period of below population replacement level fertility in Western countries, she attributes to pessimism in the middle classes. If this seems questionable, remember that the rising levels of consumption in recent decades have not been brought upon by an equivalent rising level of income (real wages were in fact in decline for the middle classes for much of this same period) but by easy credit and debt. (8)

Dr. Abernathy also shows, interestingly, how traditional ways of life, Western and otherwise, include cultural brakes on population growth that help prevent overpopulation. Where the Demographic Transition Model predicts lower fertility as a result of the transition to modernism, Dr. Abernethy shows that modernism, by removing such brakes, tends rather to have the opposite effect, contributing to overpopulation. (9)

Which brings us back to Rev. Malthus. Why did he argue that traditional Christian moral restraint was the best way of maintaining a balanced population level?

The basic Christian sexual ethic is that sexual intercourse is reserved for married couples. In traditional Christian societies, marriage was not something two individuals just decided to do on a whim. It was customary for a man to seek permission from his prospective bride’s father to marry her. To obtain that permission the man generally had to prove that he was capable of supporting her and their future offspring.

When it is considered sinful and shameful to have sexual intercourse outside of marriage and when marriage requires paternal consent that is ordinarily conditioned upon evidence of ability to provide it is highly unlikely that a population will grow beyond the carrying capacity of its territory. It is true that there was never a time when these rules were kept perfectly, and that individuals will always trying to find ways to get around the rules and beat the system. That is not a good argument for getting rid of the system, however. Just because it may not work perfectly does not mean it doesn’t work at all.

Christianity’s rules about keeping sexual intercourse within marriage and its support for the patriarchal family and paternal authority, work to prevent overpopulation in societies that adopt these rules. Christianity’s rules against deliberately removing the potential for reproduction in sex via contraception, abortion, or homosexuality, work to prevent underpopulation in societies that adopt these rules.

The Attack on Fathers

Wyndham Lewis wrote that “The male, the Father, is in all these revolutions, the enemy.” (10) Neo-Marxist revolutionary thinker Herbert Marcuse would seem to agree: “The primal father, as the archetype of domination, initiates the chain reaction of enslavement, rebellion, and reinforced domination which marks the history of civilization”. (11) This is as true of the Sexual Revolution as any other, and perhaps more so than of others. An attack upon traditional Christian rules regarding sexual behavior will inevitably be connected with attacks upon motherhood and fatherhood.

We have seen above how closely paternal authority and the Christian sexual ethic are connected in producing reproductive responsibility. We have seen how the abandonment of traditional Christian ethics leads to either underpopulation or overpopulation. What does the abandonment of paternal authority produce?

In North America today, the segments of our societies which have high percentages of mother-led, father-absent households tend to be characterized by multi-generational extreme poverty, dependence upon government assistance, illiteracy, violence, and crime. These are the characteristics of what we might call an “underclass” as opposed to merely a lower class. This is not to say that every family headed by a single-mother is going to exhibit these symptoms. It greatly depends upon whether this kind of situation is the exception or the norm within the community to which the family belongs. It does show, that the presence and leadership of a father is important.

Among black Americans, for example, the level of absentee fatherhood is one of the key distinctions between those living in poverty, in crime-ridden sections of the inner-city on the one hand, and the black middle class, previous generations of poor blacks, and rural blacks on the other. That this is a major contributing factor to the social problems these people face is difficult to deny, and comedian Bill Cosby and politician Barack Obama have both spoken out about it.

What does that have to do with Sex?

If it seems that absentee-fathers is a topic rather far removed from the one we started with, remember what I said about sex at the beginning. Sex is more than just the activity we call sexual intercourse – it is a basic character trait of our (and other) species. The traditional view of sex that we have been defending is not just a set of rules about copulation. Our society has traditional expectations of the members of each sex. Motherhood is part of what is expected from women, and fatherhood is part of what is expected from men. The revolution demands, in the name of the “freedom” of the sexless, generic, individual, both release from traditional moral expectations with regards to sexual behavior and release from gender role expectations for males and females alike. The revolution insisted that these things were all matters to be experimented with and tampered with and that no negative consequences to such experimenting and tampering would ever occur.

The state of New York’s recent decision is simply the latest in a set of triumphs for that revolutionary way of thinking. Progressives mock at the idea that there could be any detrimental effects upon society from pretending that an erotic relationship between a man and a man (or between a woman and a woman) is a marriage worthy of being treated as equal to a true marriage by the state and society. There is a sense in which they are partially right – this sort of thing is more a symptom than a disease, an indicator of damage that has already been done. (12)

The progressives, however, in their moment of triumph remain blind to the basic facts of reality.

Every human being is born to a mother after having been sired by a father. Human beings are not born capable of fending for themselves but require years of raising which is best done by a mother and a father in cooperation. The primary purpose of sex, both the activity and the trait, is the reproduction of the species. Since the species, society, and family depend upon sex for their continued existence whereas “individuals” do not, the species, society, and family all have a stake in sex which sis greater than that of individual persons, particularly individual persons who wish to reduce it to being an instrument for their personal sensual gratification. The use of technology and medical science to make sex purely about “having fun” is an abuse of technology that leads to death for families and societies. The natural sexual use of a penis is to place it inside a vagina and the natural sexual use of a vagina is to be penetrated by a penis. These two organs are clearly designed to function together in this way – it is their nature, and it is in this sense that we say this is natural. While the sensual effect of this can be simulated in other ways by two members of the same sex, this is not natural. It is a fallacious and dishonest counter-argument to point to examples of same-sex coitus observable among non-moral animal species because this is a completely different meaning of the word “natural”, i.e., “in nature”. Human beings are the moral animal species, meaning that we are supposed to be guided in our behavior by something higher than instinct and what other animals may or may not do, and preferably higher than the pursuit of personal pleasure. It is foolish therefore to argue that those who prefer, for whatever reason, to copulate with members of their own sex, are engaging in an activity/relationship that is equal to the natural relationship of a man and woman.

The purpose of this essay has been to show just how ridiculous, absurd, and nonsensical is the progressive claim that sex is a “private matter” that does not concern anyone other than the copulating couple themselves. What is absurd about the idea of sex as a purely “private matter” is the idea that it has no effects on or consequences for anyone other than the couple themselves. This notion is absurd, because sex and reproduction, is a matter of life or death, for the family, the society and the species, although it is not a matter of life or death for the couple themselves. Describing sex as a “private matter” can also simply mean that it is to take place in private away from the eyes of other people. It would be foolish to argue with this. Saying that the species, society, and family have a greater interest in sex than the particular couple does not, therefore, translate into the idea that the species, society, or family should have an agent in the bedroom to ensure the groups’ interests are represented.

Resurrecting the Christian sexual ethic, outside of the subculture to which modernism and liberalism have reduced the Western Church (and it needs resurrection in large areas of that subculture as well) can not be accomplished by anything short of a miracle. A widespread revival of religion may be the only practical hope our society has of returning to sanity. This cannot be accomplished by political efforts and the actions of the state.

This does not mean there are no political steps which traditionalists can take to partially alleviate the problem. Take the matter of education for example. Our opponents accuse us of wanting to commandeer the schools to try and force our moral agenda on the students. To refer to Dr. Freud again, they are projecting, for this is exactly what the progressives have done. They hide this fact in plain sight, by using terms like “rational” and “scientific” to cloak their agenda. It is, however, no secret that progressives have turned the public education system against the authority of parents and the Church, the traditional moral authorities most likely to wish to and try to instill in their children the ethics we have been defending. This is the point of what is misleadingly called “sex education” in the schools. It is also the point of the current form of public education itself in which schools are less seen as local institutions answerable to the parents of the community than as education branches of centralized, bureaucratic, states. Insisting upon the devolution of educational authority back to local communities and to parents would be an appropriate and helpful political step we can take, as alternative forms of education are not affordable to everyone who does not want their children brainwashed by the progressives and their ally the democratic/bureaucratic mass state.

With regards to laws and morality, the efforts of most social conservatives have been seriously misguided in the last three or four decades, because they have allowed their efforts to be shaped by a belief in popular democracy and in the existence of a silent “moral majority”. Popular democracy, in the sense of referring all issues to plebiscites, and insisting upon “majority rule”, is no friend of the civilized order and liberty, conservatives claim to believe in.

As with the educational system, so with public legislation, traditionalists and other social conservatives should concentrate their efforts on breaking the monopoly on power held by the central state. Abstract ethics are fairly useless apart from a social order that embodies and transmits those ethics, and a social order that embodies and transmits the ethics we want, is one in which real authority is diffused throughout society, and embodied in such traditional authority figures as fathers in the family, clergy in the Church, teachers acting in loco parentis in locally controlled local schools, elders in the community, etc. The authority of such figures has declined as the central state has become increasingly democratic and bureaucratic and in the process of becoming such has sought to concentrate all power in itself.

The diffusion of authority throughout society, in such traditional authority figures, would both strengthen the traditional social order that the democratic/bureaucratic central state of mass society seems determined to kill, and promote and safeguard real personal liberty, as opposed to the kind of “personal liberty” the sexual revolutionaries have demanded, the true character of which, Aldous Huxley warned us about decades ago. (13)

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more. - Kipling

(1) Dr. Freud had a great deal to say about sexuality. In his Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie which was first published in 1905 and heavily revised throughout Freud’s life, his most sensationalist and controversial theories on the subject can be found. The standard English version of this work is the translation by James Strachey entitled Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. This book would be controversial, if it came out for the first time today, for completely different reasons than when it was first published (the author would be in danger of prosecution for hate crimes over the first essay). Tempting as it is to discuss at great length Dr. Freud’s theories as to how the development of our sexual identity since early infancy shapes our behavior as adults, I refer to this book only because of its statement of the libido theory. Of greater interest is Freud’s Das Unbehagen In Der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents) first published, in German and in English, in 1930. By the time this book came out, late in Dr. Freud’s career, Dr. Freud had moved from the conscious/subconscious model of the mind which features strongly in his early theories to the structural model of id-ego-superego. In this model the id consists of basic natural instincts that are guided by the pleasure principle. Ego, which gradually develops, is the part of the mind which analyzes its surroundings and makes decisions based upon rational self-interest, repressing the demands of the id in accordance with the reality principle. The superego, is the moral part of the mind, which suppresses both the instinctual demands of the id and at times the rational self-interest of the ego in accordance with a set of rules regarding right and wrong behavior instilled in the mind by parents, teachers, and society in general. In Civilization and its Discontents Dr. Freud draws an “analogy between the process of civilization and the path of individual development” and asserts “that the community, too, evolves a super-ego under whose influence cultural development proceeds” (p. 88). He identifies ethics as a set of demands, the cultural super-ego has set up, concerning “the relations of human beings to one another”. (p. 89). Dr. Freud criticizes the super-ego, both individual and cultural, for being too severe in its demands, producing a revolt in the form of neurosis. Interestingly, the command he choses to highlight as an example of this is “love thy neighbor as thyself”, which he argues is the cultural super-egos answer to the problem of aggression, but which “causes as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself” (p. 9) because it is a standard impossible to fulfil. Dr. Freud deliberately refuses to answer the question he has raised of whether civilization, which he argues cannot exist apart from this process, is worth it. The editions of both of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Civilization and its Discontents consulted are the James Strachey translations of both, the former in the 1965 Avon Library edition, the latter in the 1961 W. W. Norton & Co. edition.

(2) Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, (Dell Publishing: New York, 1968). The first edition was published by William Morrow and Company in 1928. The focus of Dr. Mead’s study was the adolescent girl in a tribal society on the island of Ta’u in the Samoan archipelago. The chapter that is most relevant is chapter seven entitled “Formal Sex Relations”. It reads like an attempt to evade the obvious in order to bolster an ideological point. Only a paragraph before she asserts the Samoans “complete skepticism” towards Christianity’s “moral premium on chastity” she has already stated that virginity is a “legal requirement” for the taupo, the ceremonial princess of a village (pp. 81-82). Dr. Mead says this is an exception to the “free and easy experimentation” she claims is the norm in these villages. “These girls of noble birth are carefully guarded; not for them are the secret trysts at night or stolen meetings in the day time. Where parents of lower rank complacently ignore their daughters' experiments, the high chief guards his daughter’s virginity as he guards the honour of his name, his precedence in the kava ceremony or any other prerogative of his high degree.” (p. 83). If ideology is behind the way in which Dr. Mead presented her findings, however, there is a question of what that ideology is. A comparison of the last paragraph of her introduction and that of the foreword contributed by her mentor Franz Boas, would suggest two different possibilities. Dr. Mead wrote “And from this contrast we may be able to turn, made newly and vividly self-conscious and self-critical, to judge anew and perhaps fashion differently the education we give our children” (p. 25). By this she meant that we should lighten up on our strict rules against sexual experimentation. Dr. Boas, however, wrote “The results of her painstaking investigation confirm the suspicion long held by anthropologists, that much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our civilization” (p. 10). By “long held by anthropologists”, Dr. Boas meant long held by himself. Boas was himself the founder of the school of anthropology that thought that way. Trained as a physicist in Germany, he worked as a geologist before moving to the United States, where he became professor of anthropology at Columbia University. Physical anthropology was already well established as a discipline at the time, in the United States, but physical anthropologists tended to take the nature side, in the “nature vs. nurture” debate. At that time, the nature side was prevailing due to the influence of Charles Darwin and his cousin Sir Francis Galton. Dr. Boaz was a life-long opponent of this view. Dr. Mead’s book helped him to establish the environmental/cultural alternative within his new discipline of cultural anthropology at about the same time that the behaviorism of John Watson and B. F. Skinner, which promoted a similar view of human nature, was taking over the discipline of psychology. The environmentalist view would dominate the social sciences until seriously challenged by Noam Chomsky, Edward O. Wilson, and others in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. In 1983 Margaret Mead in Samoa: the Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth by New Zealand anthrpologist Derek Freeman was published by Harvard University Press. This book demonstrated how the society Dr. Mead wrote about, simply didn’t resemble her depiction of it in many important aspects. Dr. Freeman would later record an interview with a woman who had been one of the Samoan girls who had given Dr. Mead much of her information.. She admitted to making much of the stuff up. This became the basis of Dr. Freeman’s follow up book entitled The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research published by Basic Books in 1999.

(3) Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), originally published by the Beacon Press in 1955. Of Freud, Marcuse writes “The concept of man that emerges from Freudian theory is the most irrefutable indictment of Western civilization—and at the same time the most unshakable defense of this civilization.” (p,. 11) Dr. Freud, as we have seen (note 1) deliberately left the question of whether civilization was worth the repression he claims is essential to it, open. Marcuse, on the other hand, was openly a revolutionary. He was a member of the so-called “Frankfurt School”, i.e. the Institute for Social Research, a neo-Marxist thinktank founded at the University of Frankfurt in 1923, which relocated to Columbia University in the United States for a few decades beginning in the 1930’s. Marcuse became an American citizen and did not return to Germany when the Institute moved back to Frankfurt in 1951. The Frankfurt School specialized in what they called “Critical Theory”, which was an attempt to further the cause of Marxist revolution by undermining the legitimacy of the culture which held bourgeois society together. To do so it incorporated ideas from a broad spectrum of intellectual disciplines, including Freudian psychoanalysis. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse borrowed ideas from Freud, while challenging Freud’s basic viewpoint that civilization can only be achieved through the repression of the basic instincts of the id. He believed in a "non-repressive culture" which "aims at a new relation between instincts and reason" (p. 180) His answer to Freud's position that "the lasting interpersonal relations on which civilization depends presuppose that the sex instinct is inhibited in its aim" (p. 183) is that his "non-repressive instinctual order" will involve "not simply a release but a transformation of the libido: from sexuality constrained under genital supremacy to erotization of the entire personality" (p. 184). This is just the same old progressive belief that human nature is malleable putty for the social engineer to play with. The phrase "erotization of the entire personality" does seem to describe, however, a change which the Sexual Revolution has brought about. The beneficial results of this, which Marcuse so confidently predicted, have not appeared, although negative consequences are apparant all around us.

(4) Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).

(5) Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. Johnson, 1798). The first edition was published anonymously. It would be later expanded and revised a number of times. It can be read online at: http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPlong.html.

(6) Gerry T. Neal, “The Suicide Cult”, February 5, 2011, http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/02/suicide-cult.html

(7) Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor”, Psychology Today, September, 1974. http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_lifeboat_ethics_case_against_helping_poor.html

(8) Virginia D. Abernethy, Population Politics, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000), first published by Plenum Press in 1993. See chapter 3 “Belief as Part of the Problem” for the refutation of the Demographic Transition Model. See chapter 15 “History Does Not Stop” for her analysis of post-WWII fertility trends. In this chapter she demonstrates both how the post-WWII Baby Boom contradicts the predictions of the Demographic Transition Model and how the decline in fertility after the Baby Boom can be explained by economic pessimism. For the latter, see especially the section titled “Fertility and Moderating Expectations” on pages 201-202. Dr. Abernethy writes “Family-size preferences fell when upward mobility stalled, schools got overcrowded so that new ones had to be built, and taxes rose to pay for new schools and other infrastructure. Women saw themselves as victimized and infantalized by constant childcare, but nursemaids were beyond most budgets. Most people in the 1960s saw their standard of living rising at a slower rate. They sensed that children cost a lot relative to their present and future value. Soon, middle-class couples concluded that two children were about right.” She then goes on in the next section to show how welfare-state social programs have created a “very marked biomodal distribution” in fertility rates – “low in the middle class and substantially higher among the poor.”

(9) Ibid. See chapter 4 “Cultural Brakes” and chapter 5 “Where to look for balance”.

(10) Wyndham Lewis, The Doom of Youth, (New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1932) p. 48.

(11) Marcuse, op. cit., p. 15. See also chapter five "The Origin of Repressive Civilization (Phylogenesis), particularly page 55 and following.

(12) Gerry T. Neal, “Love and Marriage”, August 19, 2010, http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2010/08/love-and-marriage.html

(13) I am referring to Huxley’s Brave New World. One of the major themes of this novel, stated directly in the author’s preface to the 1948 edition, is that “As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase.”