Long ago, historians Will and Ariel Durant noted that sex is “a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints.” The primary restraint has always been the institution of marriage itself, an institution that is inescapably heterosexual and based in the monogamous union of a man and a woman as husband and wife. In our times, the fires of sex and sexuality are increasingly unbanked and uncooled.
Similarly, Pitirim Sorokin, the founder of sociology at Harvard University, pointed to the regulation of sexuality as the essential first mark of civilization. According to Sorokin, civilization is possible only when marriage is normative and sexual conduct is censured outside of the marital relationship. Furthermore, Sorokin traced the rise and fall of civilizations and concluded that the weakening of marriage was a first sign of civilizational collapse.
We should note carefully that Sorokin made these arguments long before anything like homosexual marriage had been openly discussed, much less legislated. Sorokin’s insight was the realization that civilization requires men to take responsibility for their offspring. This was possible, he was convinced, only when marriage was held to be the unconditional expectation for sexual activity and procreation. Once individuals—especially males—are freed for sexual behavior outside of marriage, civilizational collapse becomes an inevitability. The weakening of marriage—even on heterosexual terms—has already brought a harvest of disaster to mothers and children abandoned in the name of sexual liberation.
We must note with honesty and candor that this moral revolution and the disestablishment of marriage did not begin with the demand of same-sex couples to marry. The subversion of marriage began within the context of the great intellectual shift of modernity. Marriage was redefined in terms of personal fulfillment rather than covenant obligation. Duty disappeared in the fog of demands for authenticity and the romanticized ideal of personal fulfillment. Marriage became merely a choice and then a personal expression. Companionate marriage was secularized and redefined solely in terms of erotic and romantic appeal—for so long as these might last.
In an important new book, Has Marriage for Love Failed?, French intellectual Pascal Bruckner ponders the secularly imponderable: has the romantic revolution of secular modernity led to human happiness? He thinks not. He does clearly understand what modernity hath wrought: “Since the Enlightenment, marriage reforms have focused on three points: giving priority to feelings over obligation, doing away with the requirement of virginity, and making it easy for badly matched spouses to separate.”
Bruckner is right—devastatingly right. Note carefully that all three of these points require the secularization of the moral order and the marital contract. Feelings now rule, defined and projected at will. Virginity is, as Bruckner notes, an embarrassment for most moderns. Cohabitation is now the order of the day for young moderns, and for an astonishingly large percentage of their parents and grandparents. The young are indoctrinated into the morality of expressive sexuality and erotic fulfillment, with children hardly able to read force-fed the curriculum of “safe sex” and erotic experimentation. And, sadly, the divorce revolution has not only made marriage a tentative, if not temporary, condition, it has redefined marriage as nothing more than a public celebration of an essentially and non-negotiably individual act of self-expression.
As Barbara Defoe Whitehead has observed, expressive marriage was followed almost instantly by expressive divorce. Divorce, like marriage, now becomes an expected act of self-expression for moderns, complete with greeting cards, celebrations, and public announcements of new erotic and romantic availability.
Lecture by Albert Mohler at Brigham University. Oct 2013 |