Why Secularism Can't Understand Sex
The true story of the Sexual Revolution
Secular analysis of the Sexual Revolution can only go so far. Because human beings are spiritual, human sex has a spiritual component that differentiates it from the coupling of the brute animals. Bulls and lions don’t write love poetry. But precisely because we are not angels but rational animals, sex still involves our animal physicality. Just as we desire food and drink to preserve our individual lives, we desire sex to preserve the life of the species.
This is a very powerful drive, and it presents dangers that have always been well understood throughout human history. As the medieval theologians said, the corruption of the best becomes the worst. Human sexuality, being higher than animal sexuality, has further to fall. Bulls and lions might not write love poetry, but they don’t create or consume porn either.
Accordingly, the Mahanirvana-tantra warns that, in the Kali Yuga (Dark Age), ‘men become the subjects of women and slaves of pleasure and oppressors of their friends, teachers, and anyone who deserves respect.’ The demon Kali, said to rule during this time, is the goddess of not only destruction but also desire and sex, and her “warrior poses” are incorporated into the yoga routines of millions of women today.
That’s how feminism works: to attack patriarchy, the radicals promoted promiscuity. Nothing affects society more than sex does, and “free love” came at the cost of civilisation. Men are now ‘the subjects of women’ because being ‘slaves of pleasure’ means they’re simps willing to sacrifice honour for selfish satisfaction.
Not only their honour, in fact, but also their freedom: as E. Michael Jones has shown at length, sexual liberation is political control — an insight that develops Chesterton’s remark that ‘free love is the direct enemy of freedom’ and ‘the most obvious of all the bribes that can be offered by slavery.’
Ultimately, simping is Satanic, and the commentary of the Church Fathers on Romans 1 about the dangers of lust provides essential insight into our times. It’s the best analysis of the Sexual Revolution — the only one that does its spiritual significance justice — yet it’s almost never mentioned. Before I explain what I’ve learnt from studying the detailed analysis that Aquinas and Chrysostom give, however, let me briefly recap Romans 1 for you with some of the commentary from the other Church Fathers.
Romans 1: The Darkening of the Heart
The people who didn’t glorify God, we are told, ‘became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish hearts were darkened.’ (Romans 1:21) The darkening of the heart means that, as Augustine comments, ‘by the blinding of the heart because of the abandonment by the light of wisdom, they fell into more and more serious sins.’ After the initial errors of the Sexual Revolution, our culture is now so darkened that the mainstream distribution of porn is tolerated, even to children.
Thus ‘professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.’ (Romans 1:22) Pride comes before a fall, and 'not enduring to go the way which God had commanded them, they were plunged into the reasonings of senselessness’ (Chrysostom). Flouting the rules for long enough leads to forgetting why they ever existed in the first place. Sin makes people stupid.
Idolatry then follows. They ‘changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.’ (Romans 1:23) Man never escapes worship, and ‘one who has problems with the big things will not be wise in the little things either.’ (Abrosiaster) As Unwin pointed out, in all societies, tolerating unmarried sex leads to irrationality, including nature worship and witchcraft.
Sin then becomes its own punishment. ‘Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves.’ (Romans 1:24) By this, says Ambrosiaster, ‘they were given over to illusions’ and ‘helped by the devil to carry out in practice the things which they conceived in their lusts.’ Things bad begun, as Macbeth knew, make strong themselves by ill.
Man has to learn the hard way. God allows suffering to befall those ‘who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever’ (Romans 1:25). Although God deserves our worship, He doesn’t need it. But we do, and ‘when the evil will receives power to accomplish its purpose, this comes from the judgment of God’ (Augustine).
Thus ‘God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature.’ (Romans 1:26) As Oecumenius comments, ‘God gave them up because that is what they wanted.’ The men, too, ‘leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is shameful, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was fitting.’ (Romans 1:27).
Depravity snowballed: ‘as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not proper’ (Romans 1:28). Sin means you can’t see sense. Lust blinds the mind. As Ambrosiaster explains, ‘they were more and more reduced to idiocy and became ever readier to tolerate all kinds of evils.’
A society that tolerates contraception, for example, will progress to abortion: preventing a human life from coming into existence is only one step away, as Aquinas pointed out, from ending a human life already in existence. Men become ‘without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful.’ (Romans 1:31) As Christ Himself said, ‘Because wickedness is multiplied, most men’s love will grow cold’ — colder even than that of the brute animals, who at least retain their natural affection.
But worst of all are those ‘who knowing the judgment of God, that they who commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.’ (Romans 1:32) The parents and teachers, for example, who corrupt children’s minds fail in their most important duties. And thus ‘perverted human tradition is the source of great evil for us’ (Basil the Great).
Sundering the sexes
Romans 1, then, explains the way sex has a unique power to darken the mind, making men slaves of pleasure. And it’s precisely because of this power that the devil weaponised it. In an astonishing analysis of Romans 1:26, Chrysostom and Aquinas explain in detail how this attack works on both the natural and supernatural levels.
Describing the sodomities, Chrysostom notes that ‘having dishonored that which was natural, they ran after that which was contrary to nature.’ And this meant that they lost the pleasure of sex because ‘genuine pleasure is that which is according to nature.’ When sex is severed from its purpose of procreation, the pleasure secondary to that purpose also suffers.
Porn addicts, for example, describe how they actually hate porn, and promiscuity increases the risk of depression. Don Juan always wants one more woman because he hopes quantity will make for the lack of quality. Indeed, sixty years after the Sexual Revolution, depression is now the world’s leading cause of disability.
‘When God has left one,’ Chrysostom continues, ‘then all things are turned upside down. And thus not only was their doctrine Satanical, but their life too was diabolical.’ He notes in particular the corruption of the women because they ‘ought to have more sense of shame than men.’ As Fulton Sheen said, the history of civilisation could be written in terms of the level of its women.
But ‘the last degree of corruptness’ comes ‘when both sexes are abandoned, and both he that was ordained to be the instructor of the woman, and she who was bid to become an helpmate to the man, work the deeds of enemies against one another.’ That describes our situation today. Men blaming women for feminism are in fact feminists.
This pathetic state of affairs results from ‘an exorbitancy which endures not to abide within its proper limits,’ and ‘intensity of lust’ that comes ‘from the desertion of God’. After man ‘transgresses the laws by God appointed,’ he ‘lusts after monstrous things,’ including ‘men with men working that which is unseemly.’ This is especially apparent on the godless pagan right today, which has a strong contingent of sodomites.
Although ‘the greater part of it came of their luxuriousness’ — no surprise given Sir John Glubb’s observation that decadence always precedes degeneracy — Chrysostom aptly notes that Paul describes them as ‘working’ at lust. ‘They made a business of the sin,’ he comments, ‘and not only a business, but even one zealously followed up.’ The radicals promised, with Marcuse, a utopia of ‘polymorphous perversity’ and have assiduously infiltrated and taken over the major cultural and educational institutions to advance it.
The upshot of this is that men and women have become ‘enemies to themselves and to one another, bringing in a pernicious kind of strife, and one even more lawless than any civil war.’ It is worse than civil war because nothing affects society more than the family does, and nothing affects the family more than sex does. As Wilhelm Reich pointed out, ‘the sexual process has always been the core of the cultural process.’
Being a mastermind, the devil understands this well. The desire of intercourse aims at the one-flesh union of man and wife, and the devil, wanting to turn ‘the course thereof into another fashion…thus sundered the sexes from one another, and made one to become two parts in opposition to the law of God.’
The sexes were then at ‘war both against themselves and against one another’ but also against God and against nature itself. The devil was ‘bent on cutting through the tie’ between the sexes ‘to destroy the race, not only by their not copulating lawfully, but also by their being stirred up to war, and in sedition against one another.’ Secularism correctly calls this the battle of sexes but doesn’t understand the devil’s role in it.
Nor should we be surprised, says Chrysostom, that those who have fallen for the trick do not ‘think the thing shameful, but as being a grand privilege.’ LGBTQ and red pill degeneracy are both pride parades of lust. But ‘even if there were no hell, and no punishment had been threatened, this were worse than any punishment’ because not only the body but also the soul so treated is disgraced.
Thus there is ‘a semblance of hell’ even in this life because of the ruinous consequences of any so-called “lifestyle” contrary to natural law. Elderly homosexuals, for example, often have to wear diapers, and STDs, mental illness abortion and poverty are more common among fornicators. ‘Let us keep clear before our eyes the fear of God,’ Chrysostom concludes, ‘for in no case will the Devil attack us when so conditioned.’
Natural Law
Aquinas develops Chrysostom’s idea of man being at war with his own nature further. In brief, natural law simply refers to the fact our nature determines what is objectively good for us. Aquinas defined natural law as ‘the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law.’ Since the eternal law is the full mind of God, man cannot know it entirely, but he alone of all creatures can rationally understand the eternal law as God’s ordering of the universe.
From this eternal law, Aquinas wrote, all things derive their ‘inclinations to their proper acts and ends.’ Natural law, then, is man participating in eternal law ‘proportionately to the capacity of human nature.’ Man, the rational animal, can understand what is good for him and cooperate with God in achieving it. ‘The subject’s good and the glory of the Lord finally coincide,’ philosopher Joseph Rickaby wrote, because ‘God wills to bind His creatures to certain lines of action, not arbitrary lines, but the natural lines of each creature’s being.’
That, ultimately, is why “free love” is harmful: it runs contrary to human nature because sex is ordered towards children, necessarily requiring a woman and man, and raising children requires that they be married to ensure the stability and longevity of the union for the sake of the children. By contrast, the Sexual Revolution was built on the twin pillars of contraception and fornication. Abortion then followed rapidly. Life became death, and children became an unwanted byproduct.
Aquinas notes that these ‘dishonorable passions’ Paul describes are sins against nature ‘in the sense that a passion implies that a thing is drawn outside the order of its own nature.’ He references Romans 7:5: ‘The passions of sins.’ Whereas the ‘sins of the flesh’ are shameful because they lower man to the level of the beasts, ‘much more so are sins against nature, through which man sinks below the bestial. "I will change his glory into shame" (Hos 4:7).’
It is contrary to man’s nature as the rational animal in two ways. First, because man is rational, ‘it is against right reason.’ Children, unlike brute animals, need to be educated, and this requires a mother and father to be done properly. But it is also ‘against man’s nature by reason of his general class, which is animal.’ This is because ‘every form of union from which generation cannot follow is against the nature of animal as animal.’
By severing the connection between sex and procreation, in fact, contraception was the slippery slope to “gay marriage.” And if the potential for fatherhood is no longer recognised as the essence of manhood, then transgenderism also follows — and likewise for the potential for motherhood and the essence of womanhood.
Aquinas stresses that Paul ‘considers vices against nature, which are the worst carnal sins, as punishments for idolatry, because they seem to have begun as idolatry.’ Thus they were first punished at Sodom (Gen 19). As the idolatry spread, so did the vices. 2 Macc (4:12) records that that Jason ‘founded a gymnasium right under the citadel, and he induced the noblest of the young men to wear the Greek hat,’ i.e., put them in brothel houses. This, says Aquinas, was ‘not the beginning, but an increase and progression of the heathenish and foreign manners.’ It begins, says Aquinas, when a people says to God: ‘Depart from us. We do not desire knowledge of your ways.’ (Jb 21:14).
That, ultimately, is what the West said loudly during the Sexual Revolution, but the truth is that it had already dethroned Christ from His Social Kingship long before. It just took a while for feminism, always the harbinger of the death of civilisations, to manifest itself clearly as what Gertrud von Le Fort wisely described as ‘the true expression of modern godlessness.’