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.