www.samueldjames.net

Samuel James #fundie samueldjames.net

What about Simeon and Anna? I’m afraid they were on the wrong side of history as well. Two elderly, devout Jews, seemingly ignoring the Roman centurions around them so they could keep babbling about some Messiah. It was like they had never heard of someone called the emperor. Anna the widow never left the Temple; “Don’t listen to her, she’s crazy,” they would say. “Too heavenly minded and no earthly good.” Simeon and Anna, praying to a God who had not stopped an exile and an overthrow, talking about a king whose ancestral line had long been broken. Simeon and Anna, two more religious nutjobs who wouldn’t accept reality.

Poor, mute Zechariah. Poor cuckolded Joseph, poor philandering Mary. Poor daydreaming shepherds. Poor deluded Simeon and Anna. If they could have just accepted the Way Things Are, maybe their lives could have been more. Maybe they could have served in Herod’s palace, or been a confidant of Caiaphas.

If they had just been on the right side of history, maybe the world would still be talking about them.

Just maybe.

Samuel James #fundie samueldjames.net

[Samuel James not only thinks the sexual revolution is not only still going on, but that it is intentionally hurting women, and the only way a woman can be satisfied is being in a loving Christian marriage.]

To which I say: Yes! Traister is exactly correct. The Sexual Revolution’s marketplace is indeed brazenly anti-women. When sex is a public commodity, women and children always have the worst, least valuable shares. This isn’t a wrinkle of sexual revolutionism; it’s a feature.

But Traister doesn’t want to challenge the reigning sexual nihilism of her time. In fact, she wants to make clear to anyone who might misinterpret her that casual sex and hookup culture are by all means beautiful and good. “This is not pearl-clutching over the moral or emotional hazards of “hookup culture,” she quickly clarifies. “This is not an objection to promiscuity or to the casual nature of some sexual encounters—Having humiliating sex with a man who treats you terribly at a frat party is bad but not inherently worse than being publicly shunned for having had sex with him, or being unable to obtain an abortion after getting pregnant by him, or being doomed to have disappointing sex with him for the next 50 years.”

If that isn’t a perfect summary of the self-deluded state of the modern secular self, I don’t know what is. You can see Traister’s thought process working towards the obvious truth: That maybe a culture of casual and irrelevant sex lends itself to an erotic Darwinism where the powerful and energetic will subdue others. You can hear the beginnings of a profound dissatisfaction with the terms of the Sexual Revolution. But in the end it is all stamped out by the glitz of modern accessories to our individual autonomy. Having humiliating sex becomes better than not having enough sex. Being taken advantage of is not as bad as carrying a child. Evil is bad, but at least it’s not boring.

But Traister’s honesty betrays her worldview. Her observations of the inequalities of casual sex are more durable than her rote progressivism. Traister begins the piece, after all, quoting a fellow feminist’s story about a drunken, unsatisfying sexual experience she once had with a group of frat boys. The fellow writer consented and everything happened seemingly according to the rules. The problems start when she wakes up. “But in the morning, she wrote, ‘I feel weird about what went down.'” There you go. When the alcohol stops coursing and the bodies stop moving, all that’s left is the throbbing of the soul, even if through cultural re-education and indulgence all that the mind can muster is, “That was weird.”

Rebecca Traister writes from the front lines of the Sexual Revolution’s civil war. It’s a civil war between nature and rhetoric. The rhetoric says, “We’re all equal and entitled!” The nature says, “I am stronger and more important than you.” Sex in which women “don’t matter” isn’t a rotting leftover from the Puritans; it’s the fresh du jour of the Darwinian world outside the world of transcendence, meaning, love, beauty, devotion, and God. The chains of marriage and monogamy are loathed by the same culture that excels in sex trafficking, campus rape, and human consumerism.

Samuel James #fundie samueldjames.net

[Samuel James is back, trying to win the "we're persecuted" game. By negatively comparing Jennifer Lawrence to her most famous film role.]

Perhaps she thinks Kentuckians who believe in traditional marriage should enjoy freedom of conscience only so long as that freedom does not offend the cultural consensus or disturb the quiet conformity of the public square. But if that’s what Lawerence really does believe, she should take some time out of her career to re-read carefully the books that have made her a millionaire.

The Hunger Games is a frightening narrative of people held in captivity to the elite brokers of power in culture (specifically, I might add, power over the media). Interestingly, the Capitol’s dictator, President Snow, forbids any mention of the rebel protagonist Katniss Everdeen in his empire. The world of the Capitol is a tightly controlled world of uniformity and unquestionable government authority.

There are many Americans at this moment who are facing tremendous cultural and legal pressure to jettison their religious beliefs, pressure that, in some cases, has driven businesses and families out of the public square. Meanwhile publications like the New York Times openly refer to them as “bigots” and modern-day segregationists. Is there any question who, in this scenario, are the truly powerful elites, demanding conformity, and who are the separatists insisting on liberty?

Of course, our current situation is nothing like the post-apocalyptic nightmare depicted in The Hunger Games, just as the West was not actually learning to love Big Brother in 1984. But that’s not the point. The point is that sometimes we need shocking images and warnings to remind us how precious freedoms like freedom of religion are. When they are taken away, even fictitiously, the world that results is nothing but horror.

I’m not sure what it is about exercising one’s sincerely held beliefs that is so offensive and embarrassing to Lawrence. But it sure sounds like the Katniss Everdeen we see on the screen bears little resemblance to the conformity-craving actress who wears her costumes and says her lines.

Samuel James #fundie samueldjames.net

What the architects of this New Morality miss is the irony of substituting one puritanism for another. The Sexual Revolution promised that all who trusted in its promises would experience perhaps discomfort at first but afterwards a generation of happy, autonomous individuals rid of the socially constricting irritants of religious morality or transcendent truth. It also warned that those who resisted its march would find themselves on “the wrong side of history,” rendered irrelevant to the culture at best and an obstacle to progress at worst. The promise of the Sexual Revolution has yet to be fulfilled, but the threat has fared better. Julian Hawthorne said the society depicted in his father’s novel desired to “trample you down” when you have “forfeited your claim to our protection.” If that is not an accurate description of what’s happening with Gordon College, than I don’t know what is.

The simple fact is that our grade-school literature classes were wrong. It was not American Puritanism that designed shame culture, it was Puritan Americanism. We no longer have the kind of national, tacit, civic Christianity that The Scarlet Letter depicted, yet we still have the shaming scaffolds (they’re called social media now) and we still have ineffable moral codes that must not be trespassed. These codes may not be Levitical but they are indeed legalistic: laws about privilege, sexual autonomy, “trigger warnings,” and much, much more. Violation of these laws can and do result not only in public shame but legal prosecution.

It surely must befuddle those on the inside track of our transforming culture—just as we seem to be learning what true progress is, we rebuild the shaming scaffolds of our Puritan forefathers. Can we not have a culture that embraces the moral equivalence of all forms of sexual expression, the existential (read: non-transcendent) nature of love, and the casting off of ancient beliefs about God and the universe, while simultaneously widening the margins of civic life to include all kinds of beliefs, even those that discomfort us? Cannot we live out the promises of the Sexual Revolution while saving a place in our midst for those who opt out?

No, we cannot. The reason is simple: A broken American conscience cannot be trusted. Compassion is a class that secularism doesn’t offer. Exchanging the Puritanism of Arthur Dimmesdale for the Puritanism of Alfred Kinsey is not progress. Cultural elites may say we are becoming a better people because we break with human history on the meaning of marriage or the dignity of human life, but a glance outside suggests otherwise.