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You may not like author Mary Eberstadt's conclusions about the effects of the sexual revolution.
You may even vehemently disagree with them.
But the data is solid.
As she herself says, "I'm using perfectly secular sources. There is no theology in this book. I'm looking at what the evidence tells us about the way we are living now and what it's doing to the wider world around us."
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Eberstadt, a senior fellow at the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., took a look at the long-term effects of the movement of the ‘60s and ’70s that was supposed to liberate society from its religiously uptight and outdated beliefs about marriage and romance.
It was heralded as a good thing.
But something happened that few predicted.
Research done by author Mary Eberstadt shows that the sexual revolution was a Pandora's Box, unleashing many of the ills we see today in American culture, writes Lauren Green, chief religion correspondent for Fox News. (iStock)
Eberstadt's research shows that the sexual revolution was a Pandora's Box, unleashing so many of the ills we see today in our culture, including one of the largest — fatherlessness.
On "Lighthouse Faith" podcast, she talks about her book, "Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited" (Feb. 2023) in which she writes, "Some people, mainly on the political left, think there is nothing to see here. They are wrong. The vast majority of incarcerated juveniles have grown up in a fatherless home."
She goes on, "Teen and other mass murderers almost invariably have filial rupture in their biographies. Absent fathers predict higher rates of truancy, psychiatric problems, criminality, promiscuity, drug use, rape, domestic violence and other tragic outcomes."
‘Fierceness of these ills'
Eberstadt knows she has a fight on her hands with raising this kind of thesis.
"When you advance a counter-cultural theory like this, people often wag their fingers and say, 'Oh, you're saying that it all comes down to one thing.'"
"I am saying that this one thing, the sexual revolution, is the single least acknowledged causation of our social disarray."
But she says, "I am saying that this one thing, the sexual revolution, is the single least acknowledged causation of our social disarray."
The fierceness of these ills, she also says, caused the rise of what she describes as a "secular religion" that is challenging Christianity's moral foundations.
"Everybody believes something. And after the sexual revolution, what you see is this fierce desire on the part of many people to repudiate traditional moral teaching." (iStock)
She asserts, "It's not true that the battle out there is between faith and no faith, between people who believe things and people who believe nothing. Everybody believes something. And after the sexual revolution, what you see is this fierce desire on the part of many people to repudiate traditional moral teaching."
Eberstadt continues, "The traditional family and Christianity have always had enemies … That's what Marxism had in its sights. It wanted to destroy the family. And other utopians have always wanted to destroy the family. But this revolution, I think, was different because no one really intended that."
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She says that "when the birth control pill came into existence, many people embraced it because they thought it would be a good thing. The argument was made that it would strengthen families. The argument was made that it would reduce abortion."
The argument was made that children would be brought into loving homes, with families ready to give them all the nurturing they needed.
The conventional wisdom was that reliable contraception would give women the opportunity to better time their pregnancies, that it would make abortion obsolete and out-of-wedlock births a thing of the past.
Children would be brought into loving homes, with families ready to give them all the nurturing they needed.
But it turns out the opposite happened.
Her research shows that with the introduction of artificial contraception, abortion and out-of-wedlock births all increased exponentially. And Pandora is still on the move today.
Author Mary Eberstadt's research shows that with the introduction of artificial contraception, abortion and out-of-wedlock births all increased exponentially. (REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz/File Photo)
Eberstadt says, "The skyrocketing of non-marital births and the breakup of families on a scale never seen before all starts in the 1960s."
She goes on, "And the story that I'm telling … is multiplied again, not only in every town across the United States, but across the Western world. So that's one measure of how dramatic this revolution has been."
While Eberstadt makes no theological claims, it's obvious her findings are shouting them.
For instance, contraception.
The evil is not in the pill ... it is in us.
The fall from grace
To really understand this requires a trip back to the Garden of Eden, where our ancient ancestors had an unfortunate run-in with a snake, AKA the devil.
The fall from grace was more than a one-time deal. It's not whether Adam and Eve ate an apple, a grape or an orange.
The point is they disobeyed God.
And that one act allowed evil to plant a seed in them and in creation. The world became a broken place, as humanity's congenital defect of selfishness and self-absorption was passed down from generation to generation.
In his book "The Beginning of Wisdom," Leon Kass explored the Book of Genesis from a purely academic and social science point of view. His study is not whether Adam and Eve existed, or whether the story is only allegory.
In the Book of Genesis, God warns that eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil will bring death. (manusapon kasosod via Getty Images)
It's about what we learn about ourselves and about God. He says we should understand these seminal stories in Genesis as paradigmatic — meaning, it's not that it happened, but that this is what always happens absent the knowledge of and fealty to God.
He writes, "The fault lies not with the world or with God but in ourselves — and not only once upon a time. By serving as a mirror, the story enables us to discover this truth also about ourselves."
God warns that eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil will bring death. But just reading the story, we know that Adam and Eve didn't die immediately from some poisonous fruit.
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Kass writes, "God could be threatening to kill them directly if they disobey, but if so, it is a threat He later fails to carry out. More likely, 'Thou shalt surely die' could mean that they will become mortal, rather than potentially immortal beings; independence and loss of innocence are incompatible with immortality."
No longer did men feel obligated to wed the women they might impregnate. And no longer did women feel the need to force them.
Kass's understanding has a real-life example in Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's quote about evil from "The Gulag Archipelago." The Russian dissident lost his faith in Christianity when he was young and became an atheist. He embraced Marxism.
While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, he was arrested and thrown in the Gulag prison. There he witnessed and was subject to unspeakable evils.
After his experiences, he turned back to faith with a new understanding of the disease of sin and evil.
He writes in his famous quote, "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart."
"After his experiences, he turned back to faith with a new understanding of the disease of sin and evil." (iStock)
There are two juggernauts that the sexual revolution introduced. First, "it flooded the zone with potentially available sexual partners, and this reduced the incentive for any man to settle down with any given woman."
Sex could be recreational. The hook-up culture on college campuses is a sure example.
The second, says Eberhardt, is the "destigmatization of non-marital sex. In other words, the disappearance of the so-called shotgun wedding."
No longer did men feel obligated to wed the women they might impregnate. And no longer did women feel the need to force them. Men evolved, or devolved, into the belief that it's the woman's responsibility to take the appropriate measures to prevent pregnancy.
In unmooring sex from marriage and the bond of whole-life oneness, the sexual revolution unwittingly disconnected it from love.
If she didn't, government would step in and play the role of daddy.
This brings up what the sexual revolution really did. In unmooring sex from marriage and the bond of whole-life oneness, it unwittingly disconnected it from love.
If sex is severed from love or the act of giving life and procreation, pregnancy becomes a problem to be solved, at best — or, at worst, to be treated like a disease to be healed from.
Abortion then becomes health care. Instead of being rare and safe, abortion is on demand for any reason.
Now we can see the cavalcade of effects start to take shape. What happens to the economy? The crime rate? Divisiveness in politics? And the Church?
Economically speaking, one of the biggest indications that a child will live in poverty is if there's no father in the home. (iStock)
Economically speaking, one of the biggest indications that a child will live in poverty is if there's no father in the home. The stats show 65% — some say over 70% — of African American children live in a single-parent household.
Now look at the crime rate. Stats show 85% of inmates in prisons today grew up without fathers in their lives.
In today's society, sexual identity has become the sacred cow of politics.
The weakening of the family has given rise to identity politics.
As family ties grow weaker, people still look for ways to find close communities of equal strength. And in today's society, sexual identity has become the sacred cow of politics.
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From a biblical perspective, though, it has become a Golden Calf, the idol the Israelites created and worshipped instead of God.
Hence, Eberstadt's "secular religion."
What the critics say
Eberstadt's critics accuse her of wanting to go back to the 1950s of having this utopian view of the "barefoot and pregnant" housewife tied down with a husband she doesn't love or children they can't afford. And the statistic trotted out shows that back then, 20% of women were pregnant while walking down the aisle.
Her point is that while 20% were pregnant before marriage, back then marriage was expected. And men were expected to take responsibility for the children they fathered.
That's not the case today.
Nearly every denomination of Christianity, says Eberstadt, is being divided on the issue of what constitutes morality in sexual relations.
Eberstadt gives an example of how attitudes have changed. In a village in upstate New York in the 1970s, there was a scandal when a 17-year-old high school girl became pregnant by her boyfriend.
The scandal ensued not because she was pregnant, but because the boyfriend refused to marry her. The young woman dropped out of school, had her baby and returned to school.
Twenty years later in that same school, a third of the girls in the graduating class were pregnant. And there were certainly more pregnancies than that because abortion was fully legal then.
Why the difference?
Pastor Tommy Nelson of Denton Bible Church in Denton, Texas, speaks often about God's plan for dating and marriage using the Song of Solomon, the short book in the Bible that is a sort of snapshot of a romantic relationship.
One pastor speaks often about God's plan for dating and marriage using the Song of Solomon, the short book in the Bible — a sort of snapshot of a romantic relationship. (iStock)
He says one of the problems is that men and women need and want unconditional love in romance regardless of what century they were born in.
One of the complications with the sexual revolution is that men and women see sex differently.
He says, "Men use romance to get sex, and women use sex to get romance."
She admits that our problems today could have many causes ... and could have many corresponding solutions.
The sexual revolution created men and women who are in a battle using arsenal that creates many heartbroken losers ... and few winners.
And finally, what about the effects of the sexual revolution on the Church?
Eberstadt says it has wounded her from within, as nearly every denomination of Christianity is being divided on the issue of what constitutes morality in sexual relations.
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Divorce, adultery, homosexuality, transgenderism — these are the fault lines on which churches are being torn apart.
Both Mainline Protestantism and Catholicism are having this debate, and it's likely to only increase.
Eberstadt contends that most people on the Left, and some on the Right, have denounced her take on how the sexual revolution reconfigured the world.
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And she admits that our problems today could have many causes ... and could have many corresponding solutions.
But for a moment, take a good look at what she's found — and see if anything else could create so much chaos in the world.
Listen to Lauren Green's interview with author Mary Eberstadt in the link below.
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